Imitation and society: How Boasian anthropology reassembled the social

Abstract

A growing body of research defends the contemporary relevance of 19th-century sociologist Gabriel Tarde’s theory of the social. Bruno Latour, in particular, reads Tarde’s emphasis on imitation, innovation, and opposition as a relationist alternative to Émile Durkheim’s ostensible determinism. Scholars aligned with Latour’s reconstruction have maintained that sociology and anthropology decisively abandoned Tarde’s social epistemology in favor of a Durkheimian emphasis on collective consciousness. However, such research has paid little attention to the impact of Tarde’s ideas on the early US anthropological tradition institutionalized by Franz Boas. This essay reconstructs the pervasive influence of Tarde on Boas and the early Boasian anthropologists. I maintain that Boasian engagements with the French sociologist’s work normalized Tardian imitation as a key element of early theorizations of cultural process. In so doing, I suggest that efforts to ‘reassemble the social’ (e.g. Latour, 2005) effectively rehash a fundamental 20th-century US innovation in social theory that reconciled Durkheim’s and Tarde’s respective ideas through attention to the emerging ethnographic record.