Anthropological Theory An Introductory History

So you picked up a history of anthropological theory and now you're trying to make sense of it

I bought "Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History" by Michael J. Stearn probably around 2008 when I was still in grad school and expected it to hand me a clear roadmap. It didn't. That's not really its fault, but it took me another three years before I understood what the book was actually good for.

The book covers the major theoretical shifts in the discipline roughly from the 1800s through the late 1990s or early 2000s depending on which edition you get. It walks through functionalism, structural-functionalism, symbolism, structuralism, political economy, and the postmodern turn. That part is standard. What most people miss is that this is primarily a survey text, not a guide to actually doing theory. If you're using this to prepare for comprehensive exams or just need to map the terrain quickly, it works fine. The chronological framing means you can see how Malinowski's functionalism set up the conversation that Radcliffe-Brown extended, which then prompted the symbolic anthropologists to push back in the 1960s. That lineage matters because later theorists are always reacting to earlier ones. Reading them in isolation will cost you about half the meaning. The book's real strength is how it handles the British-American divide. Most intro texts flatten that out and make it sound like everyone was doing the same thing with slightly different labels. Stearn at least points out that "functionalism" meant something different in London than it did in American universities, and that distinction actually explains a lot of the friction in mid-century debates.

How I actually used this book in practice

I was working on a literature review for a dissertation chapter on kinship theory when I hit a wall. I had parsed Geertz, Schneider, and a few of the later critics, but I kept getting tripped up on why the structural-functionalist approach to kinship had held such dominance for so long. The chapter-by-chapter summaries in Stearn weren't giving me enough to trace that intellectual genealogy. My workaround was to stop reading it cover to cover and instead use the index aggressively. I looked up the specific theorists I was struggling with, found their sections, and then read backward through the preceding chapters to see how the framework had evolved. For example, reading the section on Fortes and Evans-Pritchard in conjunction with the earlier chapters on Frazer and Tylor gave me the actual argument about why structural-functionalism insisted on studying actual social relations rather than mythical ones. That context changed how I read the later critiques. This also applies to the later chapters on practice theory and the reflexive turn. The book covers Bourdieu and Ortner but doesn't always make explicit why their work matters for someone doing fieldwork in a contemporary setting. I found it more useful to read those chapters alongside primary sources rather than treating Stearn's summaries as sufficient.

What beginners get wrong about this material

The biggest mistake I see is treating each theoretical school as a self-contained package. People will read the functionalism chapter, check a box, and move on to symbolism as if it replaced the earlier framework. That's not how theory works in this field. Functionalism didn't die. It got absorbed, adapted, and revived under different names. You'll see functionalist reasoning in ecological anthropology, in some strands of cognitive anthropology, and even in contemporary organizational ethnography. The framework keeps getting repurposed. A second common error is assuming the chronology in this book represents intellectual progress. It doesn't. The structure suggests a narrative of advancing understanding, but the field has spent decades unlearning things that earlier theorists "discovered." The postmodern critique of the 1980s and 1990s wasn't the final word either. Many of the questions it raised about representation and authority are now being reconsidered again through new materialist and post-humanist lenses. Here's a nuance that rarely gets emphasized in introductory courses: the book's coverage has a significant blind spot regarding non-Western theoretical contributions. The canon it traces is overwhelmingly Euro-American. If your research involves Southeast Asian, African, or Latin American intellectual traditions, this text will mislead you into thinking those theoretical conversations didn't happen or didn't matter. That's a deliberate editorial choice in most survey texts, but it's worth noting before you rely on it for anything beyond a basic orientation.

Where the book falls apart

The later editions struggle with the globalization turn. Depending on which version you have, coverage of transnationalism, migration theory, and digital anthropology is either thin or absent. If you're writing about anything contemporary, you'll need to supplement this with more recent secondary sources. A 2010 onward journal article on theory in applied or medical anthropology will do more for your actual research than the last three chapters of most editions of this book. The coverage of feminist anthropology is also uneven. It gets mentioned, usually in connection with the broader critique of objectivity, but the depth isn't there compared to what you'd get from a dedicated reader like Nancy Naples or Laura Nader. For anyone whose work touches gender, this gap will show up quickly. And honestly, if you're looking for a practical how-to guide on applying theory to fieldwork, this isn't it. The book explains what theorists argued. It doesn't teach you how to think theoretically while you're collecting data. That comes from doing the work, not from reading a survey of what other people said about the work.

What to use alongside it

I paired this with "Approaches to Anthropology" by Richard Fardon and Nigel Purcell for the earlier classical period, and with "A Century of Anthropology" edited by Margaret Mead for historical perspective that the Stearn text skips. For contemporary debates, journal articles from Annual Review of Anthropology and Current Anthropology fill in whatever gaps the book leaves. Download links for this kind of academic text are usually through your university library or legitimate booksellers. I wouldn't recommend scanning it yourself if you're not in an academic institution, but most library systems have at least one copy available for interlibrary loan. The bottom line is that this is a reference text, not a narrative. You read it when you need to orient yourself, not when you need to be converted into a committed structural-functionalist or a thoroughgoing postmodernist. It does exactly what it claims to do, which is introduce you to the history without demanding that you pick a side.