Abstract

KORSBAEK, Leif. Arthur Maurice Hocart: the Boasian Ethnographer as Frazerian Diffusionist. Cuicuilco. Rev. cienc. antropol. [online]. 2022, vol.29, n.84, pp.255-285.  Epub Feb 10, 2023. ISSN 2448-8488.

Arthur Maurice Hocart was a British anthropologist. He was born in Belgium, and he spent most of his life in the periphery of the British empire. Only in the last years of his life did he obtain a university chair in Cairo, where he died in 1939. After a life outside the anthropological limelight, he enjoys a kind of renaissance in British and American anthropology, many of his texts being republished.

This paper starts with a general profile of the very original anti-positivist anthropology he managed to develop in a British positivist landscape. The principal object of the text is, however, to explore Hocart´s contribution to the methodological revolution that was caused by the publication of Malinowski´s Argonauts of the Western Pacific in 1922, for which Malinowski alone is given credit, in spite of the manifest participation of almost a dozen of other British anthropologists, of which Hocart was one.

Keywords : A M. Hocart; British anthropology; ethnography; structural-functionalism; diffusionism.

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