John Linton Myres
John Linton Myers (1869-1954) was an extraordinary man, one whose contribution came just before social anthropology took its professional shape, but who deserves to be better known. A classicist by training, he eventually became the founding Wykeham chair in Oxford, having departed from Oxford to Liverpool temporarily where he was professor of classics from 1907-10. He was active at a time when classics was widening its remit beyond that of classical texts, and therefore should be counted as one of those (such as Jane Harrison, and then Frederick Hasluck and Margaret Hasluck, and still later Peter Brown, Moses Findlay, and the late Keith Hopwood) who did so much to develop ideas that have preoccupied social anthropology but drew upon their knowledge of ancient societies in order to do so.
This phenomenon deserves much greater treatment than it has hitherto been given. Suffice it to say that J L Myers seems, right from the outset, to have been interested in people, and in the cultures of Greece and Rome. In 1908, he helped Marett with an edited collection called Anthropology and the Classics, which was aimed to show the university what could be done through a conjunction of the two subjects. He also credits himself with turning R R Marett’s attention to anthropology, and their subsequent careers in the subject developed in parallel at the university.
Whereas Marett’s contribution was mainly through his dedication to building up capacity in anthropology within the university, Myers devoted much of his life to learned societies; amongst them the Royal Geographical Society, the British School at Athens, the Folklore Society, the British Academy, and to the Royal Anthropological Institute, of which he became president from 1928-1931. In that role, he was instrumental in creating the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, which first met at UCL in 1934, overcoming considerable obstacles in order to do so. The Congress in due course became the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, or the IUAES, which recently merged with the World Council of Anthropological Associations to form the World Anthropological Union.
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Myers vision of anthropology was that as much as is possible, it should remain a four-field discipline, much as was taught at the Oxford Diploma which he helped to set up. However, there was considerable momentum toward a fission already in the 1930s, which he was unable to stem. Accepting this split philosophically, he arranged for a Congress of Prehistory (the ‘International Congress of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaeology) to take place before the 1934 Congress, which retained nevertheless a unified vision of biological and social anthropology. The Congress of Prehistory eventually became the International Union, to be overshadowed in turn by the World Archaeological Congress that was organised by a splinter group headed by Peter Ucko at Southampton in 1986, and which once more brought ideas common within social anthropology back into archaeological perspective.
Through examining Myers’ life and activities , then, we can see many of the currents that were active within anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century, both in this country and overseas. His unified vision remains an important perspective within anthropology today. Equally it is a source of continual fascination to look at anthropology and archaeology in conjunction with one another, the way that they may seem to separate both methodologically and conceptionally, and come together again at unexpected junctures.
References
Marett, R. R. (Ed). 1908 Anthropology and the classics: six lectures delivered before the University of Oxford, by Arthur J. Evans, Andrew Lang, Gilbert Murray, F.B. Jevons, J.L. Myres, W. Warde Fowler, ed. by R.R. Marett. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.​​
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Shankland, D. 2012 (ed) Archaeology and Anthropology past, present and future, ASA Monograph. Oxford: Berg. Includes my chapter: ‘Archaeology and Anthropology: Divorce and Partial Reconciliation’; 1-18.
Shankland, D. 2014 ‘The roots of international co-operation in anthropology and the founding of the IUAES’, in Colloquia Anthropologica, edited by Michal Buchowski and Arkadiusz Bentowski, Poznan: Polski Instytut Antropologii, pages 347-370.