brief A History of Anthropology
Since the dawn of recorded history, and amongst nonliterate peoples, there has been an awareness of "others" in the world
Fantastic stories of impossible humans were mixed with actual accounts of intercultural interaction
At the end of the 15th Century Europe began the age of discovery or exploration. They increasingly came into contact with peoples profoundly different from themselves.
Some of the most significant encounters that Europeans had were with Native Americans
Europeans were fascinated by the differences between themselves and the new people they were encountering
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Often, the first encounters between Europeans and the people they encountered were friendly
Much of America's national mythology comes from these encounters
Europeans brought "natives" to Europe to be "civilized" and/or exhibited as curiosities
Many of the people the Europeans met were, technologically, less sophisticated
Pocahontas
Saartjie Baartman, the "Hottentot Venus"
But Europeans did encounter some very sophisticated societies
China had a civilization older the Europe's
Aztecs
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In many early encounters with non-European societies, Europeans took a favorable, or even Idealistic,view of the "others"
Even when the others possessed far less sophisticated technology, Europeans stressed their friendliness, health, and intelligence
Europeans also borrowed extensively from the people they encountered, including plants and animals
Europeans also borrowed institutions, such as the civil service, and inventions from some of the societies they encountered
Printing
Gunpowder and firearms
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Paper Money
Yet as European technology advanced, Europeans took an increasingly negative view of the people they encountered.
Europeans increasingly stressed the savagery and lack of civilization of the people they encountered.
Yet Europeans also inflicted unimaginable cruelty on the people they colonized and invaded
They treated colonial people in ways that they would never have tolerated in their own countries
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They routinely employed the machinery of genocide in ways that are condemned today
Regardless of how they viewed the people they encountered in their outward migration, Europeans were confronted with an amazing range of human diversity
There was a wide range of opinion on how to explain the diversity they observed
Polygenetic theory of human diversity
Decadence theory of human diversity
Each race was created (by God) independently
There was only one creation, non-Europeans had degenerated
This view changed with the publication of Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species" which introduced the idea of evolution by means of natural selection. This produced a revolution not just in biology, but many other disciplines as well, including anthropology.
Although Darwin's theory of Natural Selection was one of the most important ideas of all time, it has been consistently misunderstood up to the present. Evolution is consistently viewed as a unilineal process leading to humans whom represent the highest form of evolved life.
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A unilineal, progressivist view of evolution is pervasive in our society And turnabout is fair play
A more accurate, yet silly, view of evolution natural and selection
At the same time, the true antiquity of humanity was discovered. Fossils of other human species, previously inexplicable, were recognized as ancient human species that had become extinct thousands of years earlier.
This idea also was applied to contemporary human populations: Europeans placed themselves at the top of the "evolutionary ladder", and ranked non-Europeans below them. This provided the framework for early anthropology and archaeology. Non-European societies represented the "evolutionary stages" that Europeans had gone through in the distant past.
Savagery
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Barbarism
Civilization
European and American Anthropology
In Europe, Anthropology or Social Anthropology, was it's own discipline In the United States, Anthropology or Cultural Anthropology, was one field in a larger discipline
The difference between the two is largely historic, and much less significant today James Frazer Henry Lewis Morgan
In Europe, anthropology was closely tied to colonialism
Colonial administration offered both the opportunity and rationale for conducting research on culture
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Colonialism and "Verandah Anthropology"
In the United States, Anthropology was more closely tied to the study of Native American peoples.
As Europeans came to dominate North America, they began to realize that they were impacting, often destroying, Native American culture. To document the cultures that they were eroding, European Americans established the American Bureau of Ethnology. The bureau was organized into four fields: Cultural Anthropology Physical/Biological Anthropology Linguistic Anthropology Archaeology
Linguistic Anthropology: documenting, preserving, and learning new languages
Today linguistic anthropology is more closely aligned to linguistics and is more interested in issues such as language acquisition and the social contexts of language use
Archaeology was a means to study the Native American pastwhich was seen by Europeans as being without history
Physical/Biological anthropology sought to demonstrate that Native Americans and other non-Europeans were biologically inferior to Europeans. They were especially interested in brain size differences. Ultimately, they found that there were no differences.
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Techniques varied from actually measuring the physical size of brains to measuring skulls and cranial capacities. They found that variation within groups (races) was greater than variation between groups.
Today physical anthropology is still interested in human diversity, but more in terms of genetics and health than in gross anatomy
The Illusion of Progress The Fallacy of Unilineal Evolution
Counter-evolutionary Reaction
Throwing the baby out with the bath water?
James Frazer
Lewis Henry Morgan
Synthesis of written reports, Arm Chair Anthropology
Evolutionary Stages, interviewing informants
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Franz Boas
Bronislaw Malinowski
Rejection of evolutionary stages model, Historical particularism, the importance of environmental factors
Participant Observation
Ruth Benedict Margaret Mead
Biology is not destiny National Character
Marvin Harris
Claude Lvi-Strauss
Cultural Materialism
Structuralism
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Julian Steward
The Postmodern Critique
Neo-evolutionary Theory
Michel Foucault
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