Alan Macfarlane

Alan Donald James Macfarlane (born 20 December 1941) is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of 19 books [1] and numerous articles on the anthropology and history of England, Nepal, Japan and China. He has focused on a comparative study of the origins and nature of the modern world. In recent years he has become increasingly interested in the use of visual material in teaching and research.

Career

Alan Macfarlane has done extensive work in both anthropology and history. He has spent much of his career teaching at Cambridge University.

Anthropological interests

Macfarlane first came into prominence with a landmark historical study of witchcraft, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (1970). Taking up the line of Evans-Pritchard and Lucy Mair, Macfarlane goes in depth as to the conditions that gave rise to witchcraft beliefs in England, employing an anthropological perspective informed by functionalism. That same year, Macfarlane published The Family Life of Ralph Josselin, a study of the diary of a famous Seventeenth Century clergyman. Not unlike the Annales School, Macfarlane attempted to provide a historical vision of private life in XVII. Cent. England, researching the emotions, fears, and relationships of this particular man.

Over the last thirty five years, Macfarlane has been engaged with anthropological fieldwork. His first area of ethnographic research was Nepal, living among the Gurungs. In 1976 Macfarlane wrote Resources and Population, a work inspired by Malthusian theory, researching the way the Gurungs from Nepal meet up the challenge of administering scarce resources in an expanding population. Following Malthus' demographic principles, Macfarlane warned that the Gurung might go through some ‘population check’ in the next few decades.

Historical interests

Macfarlane has been deeply interested in the history of his country. He defends the idea that many of the traits of so-called ‘modern society’ appeared in England long before the period accepted by conventional historians of modernity, such as Lawrence Stone. Thus, Macfarlane has written two books, The Origins of English Individualism (1978) and Marriage and Love in England (1986), exploring the way English family institutions and social life witnessed a separation from continental institutions and experiences.

Over the last twenty years Macfarlane has dedicated his work to a major issue in European historiography: the birth of modernity. Loosely inspired in the work of Max Weber, Macfarlane has written at length to study the defining characteristics of modern society vis-avis traditional society. Refusing to accept an overtly deterministic definition of modernity and capitalism, he has written The Culture of Capitalism (1987), studying the great economic, social and psychological transformations that Capitalism brought about in Western Europe.

After many years of writing on the dichotomy between modern and traditional society, Macfarlane was invited to lecture in Japan, and became increasingly interested in the history and culture of that country. What interested him the most was the way Japan had achieved modernity by going through a different path from England and the rest of Europe. Going back to his early interest in demographic theory and Malthus in particular, Macfarlane wrote The Savage Wars of Peace (1997), a comparison of the modernity experiences of England and Japan. Macfarlane dedicates special attention to the fact that both countries, being relatively large islands, could afford to develop an autonomous culture, yet at the same time not being too isolated, in order to profit from continental influence. Through different means, both Japan and England managed to overcome the Malthusian trap, keeping birth and mortality rates under control, thus providing a demographic back up for the rise of capitalism and prosperity.

Literary works and collaborations

Having become a theorist of modernity, Macfarlane is fully aware of his Enlightenment roots, and has paid due tribute to other theorists of modernity. He has written The Riddle of the Modern World (2000) and The Making of the Modern World (2001), important contributions to the field of history of ideas, addressing the work of Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Tocqueville, Ernest Gellner, Yukichi Fukuzawa and Frederic Maitland.

He has also been interested in the way particular inventions have amounted major transformations in the outcome of History. The Glass Bathscaphe: How Glass Changed the World (2002), co-authored with Gerry Martin, addresses the way the invention and use of glass facilitated Western dominion overseas. Along with his mother Iris, Macfarlane also wrote Green Gold: The Empire of Tea (2003), presenting the thesis that tea contributed to English prosperity, as it prevented epidemics because of its need to be boiled, and also because of its natural anti-biotic composition.

After a life of research, Macfarlane has summed up his views in a collection of letters addressed to his daughter granddaughter Lily, for her to read when she reaches the age of seventeen, Letters to Lily (2005), making himself known in wider, non-scholar audiences. Macfarlane has once again taken interest in the Japanese case, and currently prepares a book on it.

Macfarlane’s work is widely admired and oft referenced among English scholars. The criticisms usually labeled at him address the dubious anticipation of English institutions in the conformation of modernity, and more recently, his relativism, as he applauds modernity while at the same time affirming the validity of non-Western institutions.

External links

• Alan Macfarlane's homepage