George Stocking, Delimiting Anthropology: Occasional Inquiries and Reflections, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001,406 pages.This is a collection of assorted essays by George Stocking, composed various points over the course of his career. All but two of these essays were previously published. In his general introduction to this volume, Stocking describes all these essays as at the time of writing tangential to his main research concerns (2001: x) although they significantly resonate with the larger body of his work. They thus largely focus on key figures and institutions in the historical development of the Anglo-American traditions of anthropology. However, with one exception, the original impetus for these writings did not come from Stocking himself. They were developed in response to invitations variously to deliver lectures or conference papers or to contribute to edited volumes.The occasional nature of these essays imposes a decided challenge to the integration and coherence of this volume. Stocking has attempted to address this challenge in two primary ways. Firstly, he has organized the essays into four general thematic sections: Boasian culturalism, British evolutionaries, Institutions in National Traditions as well as Mesocosmic Reflections, a thematic division which gradually expands the vista of analysis by moving from representative figures to national institutions and finally onto broader disciplinary issues. Each of the sections includes four chapters. The section on Boasian culturalism thus includes a chapter discussing the late 19th-century racial thought and discourse that were subsequently subjected to trenchant critique by Franz Boas. A second essay outlines the basic assumptions of the Boasian orientation in anthropology. The third and fourth essays in this section remind us of the happenstance origins of much of this volume since, in response to conference invitations respectively from the Societies for Psychological and Humanistic Anthropology, they take up more peripheral aspects of Boas' work, specifically his writings on psychology which were largely restricted to the earliest of his publications and the nascent traces of much later anthropological concerns with textuality and reflexivity.The second section focusses attention on the field that has engaged Stocking throughout much of his career, the history of British anthropology. In it, Stocking focusses on three early figures in British sociocultural evolutionism: two of them are Edward Burnett Tylor and James G. Frazer who are regarded as canonical figures by anthropologists; the third is an earlier Scottish precursor, Lord Kames. not generally regarded by anthropologists as a significant disciplinary ancestor. Stocking however draws attention to the contribution of Lord Kames-if primarily as provocation for disagreementto a succeeding early 19th-century anthropological debate about the unity or plurality of the human species. An essay on Tylor provides an overview of his life and work, in particular his establishment of the principle of cultural evolution. Another reproduces lengthy excerpts from Tylor's diary that detail his investigation of the spiritualist movement, inquiries which appear to have significantly shaped Tylor's theory of animism. A fourth chapter reviews Frazer's prominence among the few anthropologists who have spoken directly to a large nonanthropological audience, his eclipse by the growing preeminence of a fieldwork-based functionalist anthropology and the more recent reconsideration of his work in the light of reorientations in anthropology towards science and literature.The third section turns towards scholarly institutions that are conceived as mediating the relationship between individual anthropologists, their discipline and in turn the larger social world. One chapter in this section probes the history of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Britain through a review of changing emphases in the six editions of the Notes and Queries on Anthropology edited by members of the Institute. …
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