This chapter concerns primarily with the literature on the history of sociocultural anthropology, which is by far the largest of anthropology's subfields. It emphasizes the anglophone anthropology, which dominated the entire discipline until relatively recently. The chapter indicates how the literature reflects and has often been intended to shape a particular disciplinary structure. Historians of science have their own subculture of inquiry. In the recent past, the most notable change affecting anthropologists' historical understanding was, of course, the era of decolonization, which stimulated a variety of intellectual responses. It examines what George Stocking termed "presentist" and "historicist" approaches, the diverse styles and viewpoints of scholars who have contributed to the literature, as well as the tendency to represent anthropologists as heroes and to rely on oral communications as much as on diverse sorts of written records.

This chapter outlines the general convergence of theoretical sensibilities between linguistic anthropology and sociocultural anthropology over the last four decades. It explores some reasons for the fields' separateness, including imaginative limitations to the ideas of representation held by sociocultural anthropologists, and limitations on linguistic anthropologists' valuing of the ethnographic monograph. The chapter opens up one important question at the heart of these two fields' relation, namely the issue of distinctions and interconnections between linguistic and more-than-linguistic layers of human worlds. It surveys a few ways anthropologists today join together linguistic and more-than-linguistic materials theoretically. The chapter supports greater recognition of unity of figurational processes across human lifeworlds. It suggest this unity can be productively articulated at least in an initial way by extending the concepts of indexicality and iconicity more widely than is commonly done.