History of anthropology in this article refers
primarily to the 18th- and 19th-century precursors
of modern anthropology. The term anthropology
itself, innovated as a New Latin scientific
word during the Renaissance, has always meant
"the study (or science) of man". The topics
to be included and the terminology have varied
historically. At present they are more elaborate
than they were during the development of anthropology.
For a presentation of modern social and cultural
anthropology as they have developed in Britain,
France, and North America since approximately
1900, see the relevant sections under Anthropology.
== Etymology ==
The term anthropology ostensibly is a produced
compound of Greek ἄνθρωπος anthrōpos,
"human being" (understood to mean "humankind"
or "humanity"), and a supposed -λογία
-logia, "study". The compound, however, is
unknown in ancient Greek or Latin, whether
classical or mediaeval. It first appears sporadically
in the scholarly Latin anthropologia of Renaissance
France, where it spawns the French word anthropologie,
transferred into English as anthropology.
It does belong to a class of words produced
with the -logy suffix, such as archeo-logy,
bio-logy, etc., "the study (or science) of".
The mixed character of Greek anthropos and
Latin -logia marks it as New Latin. There
is no independent noun, logia, however, of
that meaning in classical Greek. The word
λόγος (logos) has that meaning. James
Hunt attempted to rescue the etymology in
his first address to the Anthropological Society
of London as president and founder, 1863.
He did find an anthropologos from Aristotle
in the standard ancient Greek Lexicon, which
he says defines the word as "speaking or treating
of man". This view is entirely wishful thinking,
as Liddell and Scott go on to explain the
meaning: "i.e. fond of personal conversation".
If Aristotle, the very philosopher of the
logos, could produce such a word without serious
intent, there probably was at that time no
anthropology identifiable under that name.
The lack of any ancient denotation of anthropology,
however, is not an etymological problem. Liddell
and Scott list 170 Greek compounds ending
in –logia, enough to justify its later use
as a productive suffix. The ancient Greeks
often used suffixes in forming compounds that
had no independent variant. The etymological
dictionaries are united in attributing –logia
to logos, from legein, "to collect". The thing
collected is primarily ideas, especially in
speech. The American Heritage Dictionary says:
"(It is one of) derivatives independently
built to logos." Its morphological type is
that of an abstract noun: log-os > log-ia
(a "qualitative abstract")The Renaissance
origin of the name of anthropology does not
exclude the possibility that ancient authors
presented anthropogical material under another
name (see below). Such an identification is
speculative, depending on the theorist's view
of anthropology; nevertheless, speculations
have been formulated by credible anthropologists,
especially those that consider themselves
functionalists and others in history so classified
now.
== The science of history ==
Marvin Harris, a historian of anthropology,
begins The Rise of Anthropological Theory
with the statement that anthropology is "the
science of history". He is not suggesting
that history be renamed to anthropology, or
that there is no distinction between history
and prehistory, or that anthropology excludes
current social practices, as the general meaning
of history, which it has in "history of anthropology",
would seem to imply. He is using "history"
in a special sense, as the founders of cultural
anthropology used it: "the natural history
of society", in the words of Herbert Spencer,
or the "universal history of mankind", the
18th-century Age of Enlightenment objective.
Just as natural history comprises the characteristics
of organisms past and present, so cultural
or social history comprises the characteristics
of society past and present. It includes both
documented history and prehistory, but its
slant is toward institutional development
rather than particular non-repeatable historical
events.
According to Harris, the 19th-century anthropologists
were theorizing under the presumption that
the development of society followed some sort
of laws. He decries the loss of that view
in the 20th century by the denial that any
laws are discernable or that current institutions
have any bearing on ancient. He coins the
term ideographic for them. The 19th-century
views, on the other hand, are nomothetic;
that is, they provide laws. He intends "to
reassert the methodological priority of the
search for the laws of history in the science
of man". He is looking for "a general theory
of history". His perception of the laws: "I
believe that the analogue of the Darwinian
strategy in the realm of sociocultural phenomena
is the principle of techno-environmental and
techno-economic determinism", he calls cultural
materialism, which he also details in Cultural
Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of
Culture.
Elsewhere he refers to "my theories of historical
determinism", defining the latter: "By a deterministic
relationship among cultural phenomena, I mean
merely that similar variables under similar
conditions tend to give rise to similar consequences."
The use of "tends to" implies some degree
of freedom to happen or not happen, but in
strict determinism, given certain causes,
the result and only that result must occur.
Different philosophers, however, use determinism
in different senses. The deterministic element
that Harris sees is lack of human social engineering:
"free will and moral choice have had virtually
no significant effect upon the direction taken
thus far by evolving systems of social life."Harris
agrees with the 19th-century view that laws
are abstractions from empirical evidence:
"...sociocultural entities are constructed
from the direct or indirect observation of
the behavior and thought of specific individuals
...." Institutions are not a physical reality;
only people are. When they act in society,
they do so according to the laws of history,
of which they are not aware; hence, there
is no historical element of free will. Like
the 20th-century anthropologists in general,
Harris places a high value on the empiricism,
or collection of data. This function must
be performed by trained observers.
He borrows terms from linguistics: just as
a phon-etic system is a description of sounds
developed without regard to the meaning and
structure of the language, while a phon-emic
system describes the meaningful sounds actually
used within the language, so anthropological
data can be emic and etic. Only trained observers
can avoid eticism, or description without
regard to the meaning in the culture: "... etics
are in part observers' emics incorrectly applied
to a foreign system...." He makes a further
distinction between synchronic and diachronic.
Synchronic ("same time") with reference to
anthropological data is contemporaneous and
cross-cultural. Diachronic ("through time")
data shows the development of lines through
time. Cultural materialism, being a "processually
holistic and globally comparative scientific
research strategy" must depend for accuracy
on all four types of data. Cultural materialism
differs from the others by the insertion of
culture as the effect. Different material
factors produce different cultures.
Harris, like many other anthropologists, in
looking for anthropological method and data
before the use of the term anthropology, had
little difficulty finding them among the ancient
authors. The ancients tended to see players
on the stage of history as ethnic groups characterized
by the same or similar languages and customs:
the Persians, the Germans, the Scythians,
etc. Thus the term history meant to a large
degree the "story" of the fortunes of these
players through time. The ancient authors
never formulated laws. Apart from a rudimentary
three-age system, the stages of history, such
as are found in Lubbock, Tylor, Morgan, Marx
and others, are yet unformulated.
== Proto-anthropology ==
Eriksen and Nielsen use the term proto-anthropology
to refer to near-anthropological writings,
which contain some of the criteria for being
anthropology, but not all. They classify proto-anthropology
as being "travel writing or social philosophy",
going on to assert "It is only when these
aspects ... are fused, that is, when data
and theory are brought together, that anthropology
appears." This process began to occur in the
18th century of the Age of Enlightenment.
=== Classical Age ===
Many anthropological writers find anthropological-quality
theorizing in the works of Classical Greece
and Classical Rome; for example, John Myres
in Herodotus and Anthropology (1908); E. E.
Sikes in The Anthropology of the Greeks (1914);
Clyde Kluckhohn in Anthropology and the Classics
(1961), and many others. An equally long list
may be found in French and German as well
as other languages.
==== Herodotus ====
Herodotus was a 5th-century BC Greek historian
who set about to chronicle and explain the
Greco-Persian Wars that transpired early in
that century. He did so in a surviving work
conventionally termed the History or the Histories.
His first line begins: "These are the researches
of Herodotus of Halicarnassus ...."
The Achaemenid Empire, deciding to bring Greece
into its domain, conducted a massive invasion
across the Bosphorus using multi-cultural
troops raised from many different locations.
They were decisively defeated by the Greek
city-states. Herodotus was far from interested
in only the non-repeatable events. He provides
ethnic details and histories of the peoples
within the empire and to the north of it,
in most cases being the first to do so. His
methods were reading accounts, interviewing
witnesses, and in some cases taking notes
for himself.
These "researches" have been considered anthropological
since at least as early as the late 19th century.
The title, "Father of History" (pater historiae),
had been conferred on him probably by Cicero.
Pointing out that John Myres in 1908 had believed
that Herodotus was an anthropologist on a
par with those of his own day, James M. Redfield
asserts: "Herodotus, as we know, was both
Father of History and Father of Anthropology."
Herodotus calls his method of travelling around
taking notes "theorizing". Redfield translates
it as "tourism" with a scientific intent.
He identifies three terms of Herodotus as
overlapping on culture: diaitia, material
goods such as houses and consumables; ethea,
the mores or customs; and nomoi, the authoritative
precedents or laws.
==== Tacitus ====
The Roman historian, Tacitus, wrote many of
our only surviving contemporary accounts of
several ancient Celtic and Germanic peoples.
=== Middle Ages ===
Another candidate for one of the first scholars
to carry out comparative ethnographic-type
studies in person was the medieval Persian
scholar Abū Rayhān Bīrūnī in the eleventh
century, who wrote about the peoples, customs,
and religions of the Indian subcontinent.
According to Akbar S. Ahmed, like modern anthropologists,
he engaged in extensive participant observation
with a given group of people, learnt their
language and studied their primary texts,
and presented his findings with objectivity
and neutrality using cross-cultural comparisons.
Others argue, however, that he hardly can
be considered an anthropologist in the conventional
sense. He wrote detailed comparative studies
on the religions and cultures in the Middle
East, Mediterranean, and especially South
Asia. Biruni's tradition of comparative cross-cultural
study continued in the Muslim world through
to Ibn Khaldun's work in the fourteenth century.Medieval
scholars may be considered forerunners of
modern anthropology as well, insofar as they
conducted or wrote detailed studies of the
customs of peoples considered "different"
from themselves in terms of geography. John
of Plano Carpini reported of his stay among
the Mongols. His report was unusual in its
detailed depiction of a non-European culture.Marco
Polo's systematic observations of nature,
anthropology, and geography are another example
of studying human variation across space.
Polo's travels took him across such a diverse
human landscape and his accounts of the peoples
he met as he journeyed were so detailed that
they earned for Polo the name "the father
of modern anthropology".
=== Renaissance ===
The first use of the term "anthropology" in
English to refer to a natural science of humanity
was apparently in Richard Harvey's 1593 Philadelphus,
a defense of the legend of Brutus in British
history, which, includes the passage: "Genealogy
or issue which they had, Artes which they
studied, Actes which they did. This part of
History is named Anthropology."
== The Enlightenment roots of the discipline
==
Many scholars consider modern anthropology
as an outgrowth of the Age of Enlightenment
(1715–89), a period when Europeans attempted
to study human behavior systematically, the
known varieties of which had been increasing
since the fifteenth century as a result of
the first European colonization wave. The
traditions of jurisprudence, history, philology,
and sociology then evolved into something
more closely resembling the modern views of
these disciplines and informed the development
of the social sciences, of which anthropology
was a part.
It took Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) 25 years
to write one of the first major treatises
on anthropology, Anthropology from a Pragmatic
Point of View (1798), which treats it as a
branch of philosophy. Kant is not generally
considered to be a modern anthropologist,
as he never left his region of Germany, nor
did he study any cultures besides his own.
He did, however, begin teaching an annual
course in anthropology in 1772.
Developments in the systematic study of ancient
civilizations through the disciplines of Classics
and Egyptology informed both archaeology and
eventually social anthropology, as did the
study of East and South Asian languages and
cultures. At the same time, the Romantic reaction
to the Enlightenment produced thinkers, such
as Johann Gottfried Herder and later Wilhelm
Dilthey, whose work formed the basis for the
"culture concept", which is central to the
discipline.Institutionally, anthropology emerged
from the development of natural history (expounded
by authors such as Buffon) that occurred during
the European colonization of the seventeenth,
eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Programs of ethnographic study originated
in this era as the study of the "human primitives"
overseen by colonial administrations.
There was a tendency in late eighteenth century
Enlightenment thought to understand human
society as natural phenomena that behaved
according to certain principles and that could
be observed empirically. In some ways, studying
the language, culture, physiology, and artifacts
of European colonies was not unlike studying
the flora and fauna of those places.
Early anthropology was divided between proponents
of unilinealism, who argued that all societies
passed through a single evolutionary process,
from the most primitive to the most advanced,
and various forms of non-lineal theorists,
who tended to subscribe to ideas such as diffusionism.
Most nineteenth-century social theorists,
including anthropologists, viewed non-European
societies as windows onto the pre-industrial
human past.
== Overview of the modern discipline ==
Marxist anthropologist Eric Wolf once characterized
anthropology as "the most scientific of the
humanities, and the most humanistic of the
social sciences". Understanding how anthropology
developed contributes to understanding how
it fits into other academic disciplines.
Scholarly traditions of jurisprudence, history,
philology and sociology developed during this
time and informed the development of the social
sciences of which anthropology was a part.
At the same time, the Romantic reaction to
the Enlightenment produced thinkers such as
Herder and later Wilhelm Dilthey whose work
formed the basis for the culture concept which
is central to the discipline.
These intellectual movements in part grappled
with one of the greatest paradoxes of modernity:
as the world is becoming smaller and more
integrated, people's experience of the world
is increasingly atomized and dispersed. As
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels observed in
the 1840s:
All old-established national industries have
been destroyed or are daily being destroyed.
They are dislodged by new industries, whose
introduction becomes a life and death question
for all civilized nations, by industries that
no longer work up indigenous raw material
but raw material drawn from the remotest zones;
industries whose products are consumed, not
only at home, but in every quarter of the
globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied
by the production of the country, we find
new wants, requiring for their satisfaction
the products of distant lands and climes.
In place of the old local and national seclusion
and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse
in every direction, universal interdependence
of nations.
Ironically, this universal interdependence,
rather than leading to greater human solidarity,
has coincided with increasing racial, ethnic,
religious, and class divisions, and new—and
to some confusing or disturbing—cultural
expressions. These are the conditions of life
with which people today must contend, but
they have their origins in processes that
began in the 16th century and accelerated
in the 19th century.
Institutionally anthropology emerged from
natural history (expounded by authors such
as Buffon). This was the study of human beings—typically
people living in European colonies. Thus studying
the language, culture, physiology, and artifacts
of European colonies was more or less equivalent
to studying the flora and fauna of those places.
It was for this reason, for instance, that
Lewis Henry Morgan could write monographs
on both The League of the Iroquois and The
American Beaver and His Works. This is also
why the material culture of 'civilized' nations
such as China have historically been displayed
in fine arts museums alongside European art
while artifacts from Africa or Native North
American cultures were displayed in natural
history museums with dinosaur bones and nature
dioramas. Curatorial practice has changed
dramatically in recent years, and it would
be wrong to see anthropology as merely an
extension of colonial rule and European chauvinism,
since its relationship to imperialism was
and is complex.Drawing on the methods of the
natural sciences as well as developing new
techniques involving not only structured interviews
but unstructured "participant-observation"—and
drawing on the new theory of evolution through
natural selection, they proposed the scientific
study of a new object: "humankind", conceived
of as a whole. Crucial to this study is the
concept "culture", which anthropologists defined
both as a universal capacity and propensity
for social learning, thinking, and acting
(which they see as a product of human evolution
and something that distinguishes Homo sapiens—and
perhaps all species of genus Homo—from other
species), and as a particular adaptation to
local conditions that takes the form of highly
variable beliefs and practices. Thus, "culture"
not only transcends the opposition between
nature and nurture; it transcends and absorbs
the peculiarly European distinction between
politics, religion, kinship, and the economy
as autonomous domains. Anthropology thus transcends
the divisions between the natural sciences,
social sciences, and humanities to explore
the biological, linguistic, material, and
symbolic dimensions of humankind in all forms.
== National anthropological traditions ==
As academic disciplines began to differentiate
over the course of the nineteenth century,
anthropology grew increasingly distinct from
the biological approach of natural history,
on the one hand, and from purely historical
or literary fields such as Classics, on the
other. A common criticism was that many social
sciences (such as economists, sociologists,
and psychologists) in Western countries focused
disproportionately on Western subjects, while
anthropology focuseed disproportionately on
the "other".
=== Britain ===
Museums such as the British Museum weren't
the only site of anthropological studies:
with the New Imperialism period, starting
in the 1870s, zoos became unattended "laboratories",
especially the so-called "ethnological exhibitions"
or "Negro villages". Thus, "savages" from
the colonies were displayed, often nudes,
in cages, in what has been called "human zoos".
For example, in 1906, Congolese pygmy Ota
Benga was put by anthropologist Madison Grant
in a cage in the Bronx Zoo, labelled "the
missing link" between an orangutan and the
"white race"—Grant, a renowned eugenicist,
was also the author of The Passing of the
Great Race (1916). Such exhibitions were attempts
to illustrate and prove in the same movement
the validity of scientific racism, which first
formulation may be found in Arthur de Gobineau's
An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races
(1853–55). In 1931, the Colonial Exhibition
in Paris still displayed Kanaks from New Caledonia
in the "indigenous village"; it received 24
million visitors in six months, thus demonstrating
the popularity of such "human zoos".
Anthropology grew increasingly distinct from
natural history and by the end of the nineteenth
century the discipline began to crystallize
into its modern form—by 1935, for example,
it was possible for T.K. Penniman to write
a history of the discipline entitled A Hundred
Years of Anthropology. At the time, the field
was dominated by 'the comparative method'.
It was assumed that all societies passed through
a single evolutionary process from the most
primitive to most advanced. Non-European societies
were thus seen as evolutionary 'living fossils'
that could be studied in order to understand
the European past. Scholars wrote histories
of prehistoric migrations which were sometimes
valuable but often also fanciful. It was during
this time that Europeans first accurately
traced Polynesian migrations across the Pacific
Ocean for instance—although some of them
believed it originated in Egypt. Finally,
the concept of race was actively discussed
as a way to classify—and rank—human beings
based on difference.
==== E.B. Tylor and James Frazer ====
Edward Burnett Tylor (2 October 1832 – 2
January 1917) and James George Frazer (1 January
1854 – 7 May 1941) are generally considered
the antecedents to modern social anthropology
in Britain. Although Tylor undertook a field
trip to Mexico, both he and Frazer derived
most of the material for their comparative
studies through extensive reading, not fieldwork,
mainly the Classics (literature and history
of Greece and Rome), the work of the early
European folklorists, and reports from missionaries,
travelers, and contemporaneous ethnologists.
Tylor advocated strongly for unilinealism
and a form of "uniformity of mankind". Tylor
in particular laid the groundwork for theories
of cultural diffusionism, stating that there
are three ways that different groups can have
similar cultural forms or technologies: "independent
invention, inheritance from ancestors in a
distant region, transmission from one race
[sic] to another".Tylor formulated one of
the early and influential anthropological
conceptions of culture as "that complex whole,
which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals,
law, custom, and any other capabilities and
habits acquired by [humans] as [members] of
society". However, as Stocking notes, Tylor
mainly concerned himself with describing and
mapping the distribution of particular elements
of culture, rather than with the larger function,
and he generally seemed to assume a Victorian
idea of progress rather than the idea of non-directional,
multilineal cultural development proposed
by later anthropologists.
Tylor also theorized about the origins of
religious beliefs in human beings, proposing
a theory of animism as the earliest stage,
and noting that "religion" has many components,
of which he believed the most important to
be belief in supernatural beings (as opposed
to moral systems, cosmology, etc.). Frazer,
a Scottish scholar with a broad knowledge
of Classics, also concerned himself with religion,
myth, and magic. His comparative studies,
most influentially in the numerous editions
of The Golden Bough, analyzed similarities
in religious belief and symbolism globally.
Neither Tylor nor Frazer, however, was particularly
interested in fieldwork, nor were they interested
in examining how the cultural elements and
institutions fit together. The Golden Bough
was abridged drastically in subsequent editions
after his first.
==== Bronislaw Malinowski and the British
School ====
Toward the turn of the twentieth century,
a number of anthropologists became dissatisfied
with this categorization of cultural elements;
historical reconstructions also came to seem
increasingly speculative to them. Under the
influence of several younger scholars, a new
approach came to predominate among British
anthropologists, concerned with analyzing
how societies held together in the present
(synchronic analysis, rather than diachronic
or historical analysis), and emphasizing long-term
(one to several years) immersion fieldwork.
Cambridge University financed a multidisciplinary
expedition to the Torres Strait Islands in
1898, organized by Alfred Cort Haddon and
including a physician-anthropologist, William
Rivers, as well as a linguist, a botanist,
and other specialists. The findings of the
expedition set new standards for ethnographic
description.
A decade and a half later, Polish anthropology
student Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942)
was beginning what he expected to be a brief
period of fieldwork in the old model, collecting
lists of cultural items, when the outbreak
of the First World War stranded him in New
Guinea. As a subject of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire resident on a British colonial possession,
he was effectively confined to New Guinea
for several years.He made use of the time
by undertaking far more intensive fieldwork
than had been done by British anthropologists,
and his classic ethnography, Argonauts of
the Western Pacific (1922) advocated an approach
to fieldwork that became standard in the field:
getting "the native's point of view" through
participant observation. Theoretically, he
advocated a functionalist interpretation,
which examined how social institutions functioned
to satisfy individual needs.
British social anthropology had an expansive
moment in the Interwar period, with key contributions
coming from the Polish-British Bronisław
Malinowski and Meyer FortesA. R. Radcliffe-Brown
also published a seminal work in 1922. He
had carried out his initial fieldwork in the
Andaman Islands in the old style of historical
reconstruction. However, after reading the
work of French sociologists Émile Durkheim
and Marcel Mauss, Radcliffe-Brown published
an account of his research (entitled simply
The Andaman Islanders) that paid close attention
to the meaning and purpose of rituals and
myths. Over time, he developed an approach
known as structural functionalism, which focused
on how institutions in societies worked to
balance out or create an equilibrium in the
social system to keep it functioning harmoniously.
(This contrasted with Malinowski's functionalism,
and was quite different from the later French
structuralism, which examined the conceptual
structures in language and symbolism.)
Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown's influence
stemmed from the fact that they, like Boas,
actively trained students and aggressively
built up institutions that furthered their
programmatic ambitions. This was particularly
the case with Radcliffe-Brown, who spread
his agenda for "Social Anthropology" by teaching
at universities across the British Commonwealth.
From the late 1930s until the postwar period
appeared a string of monographs and edited
volumes that cemented the paradigm of British
Social Anthropology (BSA). Famous ethnographies
include The Nuer, by Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard,
and The Dynamics of Clanship Among the Tallensi,
by Meyer Fortes; well-known edited volumes
include African Systems of Kinship and Marriage
and African Political Systems.
==== Post WW II trends ====
Max Gluckman, together with many of his colleagues
at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and students
at Manchester University, collectively known
as the Manchester School, took BSA in new
directions through their introduction of explicitly
Marxist-informed theory, their emphasis on
conflicts and conflict resolution, and their
attention to the ways in which individuals
negotiate and make use of the social structural
possibilities.
In Britain, anthropology had a great intellectual
impact, it "contributed to the erosion of
Christianity, the growth of cultural relativism,
an awareness of the survival of the primitive
in modern life, and the replacement of diachronic
modes of analysis with synchronic, all of
which are central to modern culture."Later
in the 1960s and 1970s, Edmund Leach and his
students Mary Douglas and Nur Yalman, among
others, introduced French structuralism in
the style of Lévi-Strauss; while British
anthropology has continued to emphasize social
organization and economics over purely symbolic
or literary topics, differences among British,
French, and American sociocultural anthropologies
have diminished with increasing dialogue and
borrowing of both theory and methods. Today,
social anthropology in Britain engages internationally
with many other social theories and has branched
in many directions.
In countries of the British Commonwealth,
social anthropology has often been institutionally
separate from physical anthropology and primatology,
which may be connected with departments of
biology or zoology; and from archaeology,
which may be connected with departments of
Classics, Egyptology, and the like. In other
countries (and in some, particularly smaller,
British and North American universities),
anthropologists have also found themselves
institutionally linked with scholars of folklore,
museum studies, human geography, sociology,
social relations, ethnic studies, cultural
studies, and social work.
Anthropology has been used in Britain to provide
an alternative explanation for the Financial
crisis of 2007–2010 to the technical explanations
rooted in economic and political theory. Dr.
Gillian Tett, a Cambridge University trained
anthropologist who went on to become a senior
editor at the Financial Times is one of the
leaders in this use of anthropology.
=== Canada ===
Canadian anthropology began, as in other parts
of the Colonial world, as ethnological data
in the records of travellers and missionaries.
In Canada, Jesuit missionaries such as Fathers
LeClercq, Le Jeune and Sagard, in the 17th
century, provide the oldest ethnographic records
of native tribes in what was then the Dominion
of Canada. The academic discipline has drawn
strongly on both the British Social Anthropology
and the American Cultural Anthropology traditions,
producing a hybrid "Socio-cultural" anthropology.
==== George Mercer Dawson ====
True anthropology began with a Government
department: the Geological Survey of Canada,
and George Mercer Dawson (director in 1895).
Dawson's support for anthropology created
impetus for the profession in Canada. This
was expanded upon by Prime Minister Wilfrid
Laurier, who established a Division of Anthropology
within the Geological Survey in 1910.
==== Edward Sapir ====
Anthropologists were recruited from England
and the USA, setting the foundation for the
unique Canadian style of anthropology. Scholars
include the linguist and Boasian Edward Sapir.
=== France ===
Anthropology in France has a less clear genealogy
than the British and American traditions,
in part because many French writers influential
in anthropology have been trained or held
faculty positions in sociology, philosophy,
or other fields rather than in anthropology.
==== Marcel Mauss ====
Most commentators consider Marcel Mauss (1872–1950),
nephew of the influential sociologist Émile
Durkheim, to be the founder of the French
anthropological tradition. Mauss belonged
to Durkheim's Année Sociologique group. While
Durkheim and others examined the state of
modern societies, Mauss and his collaborators
(such as Henri Hubert and Robert Hertz) drew
on ethnography and philology to analyze societies
that were not as 'differentiated' as European
nation states.
Two works by Mauss in particular proved to
have enduring relevance: Essay on the Gift,
a seminal analysis of exchange and reciprocity,
and his Huxley lecture on the notion of the
person, the first comparative study of notions
of person and selfhood cross-culturally.Throughout
the interwar years, French interest in anthropology
often dovetailed with wider cultural movements
such as surrealism and primitivism, which
drew on ethnography for inspiration. Marcel
Griaule and Michel Leiris are examples of
people who combined anthropology with the
French avant-garde. During this time most
of what is known as ethnologie was restricted
to museums, such as the Musée de l'Homme
founded by Paul Rivet, and anthropology had
a close relationship with studies of folklore.
==== Claude Lévi-Strauss ====
Above all, Claude Lévi-Strauss helped institutionalize
anthropology in France. Along with the enormous
influence that his theory of structuralism
exerted across multiple disciplines, Lévi-Strauss
established ties with American and British
anthropologists. At the same time, he established
centers and laboratories within France to
provide an institutional context within anthropology,
while training influential students such as
Maurice Godelier and Françoise Héritier.
They proved influential in the world of French
anthropology. Much of the distinct character
of France's anthropology today is a result
of the fact that most anthropology is carried
out in nationally funded research laboratories
(CNRS) rather than academic departments in
universities
Other influential writers in the 1970s include
Pierre Clastres, who explains in his books
on the Guayaki tribe in Paraguay that "primitive
societies" actively oppose the institution
of the state. These stateless societies are
not less evolved than societies with states,
but chose to conjure the institution of authority
as a separate function from society. The leader
is only a spokesperson for the group when
it has to deal with other groups ("international
relations") but has no inside authority, and
may be violently removed if he attempts to
abuse this position.The most important French
social theorist since Foucault and Lévi-Strauss
is Pierre Bourdieu, who trained formally in
philosophy and sociology and eventually held
the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de
France. Like Mauss and others before him,
he worked on topics both in sociology and
anthropology. His fieldwork among the Kabyle
of Algeria places him solidly in anthropology,
while his analysis of the function and reproduction
of fashion and cultural capital in European
societies places him as solidly in sociology.
=== United States ===
From its beginnings in the early 19th century
through the early 20th century, anthropology
in the United States was influenced by the
presence of Native American societies.
Cultural anthropology in the United States
was influenced greatly by the ready availability
of Native American societies as ethnographic
subjects. The field was pioneered by staff
of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Smithsonian
Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology,
men such as John Wesley Powell and Frank Hamilton
Cushing.
Late-eighteenth-century ethnology established
the scientific foundation for the field, which
began to mature in the United States during
the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829–1837).
Jackson was responsible for implementing the
Indian Removal Act, the coerced and forced
removal of an estimated 100,000 American Indians
during the 1830s to Indian Territory in present-day
Oklahoma; for insuring that the franchise
was extended to all white men, irrespective
of financial means while denying virtually
all black men the right to vote; and, for
suppressing abolitionists' efforts to end
slavery while vigorously defending that institution.
Finally, he was responsible for appointing
Chief Justice Roger B. Taney who would decide,
in Scott v. Sandford (1857), that Negroes
were "beings of an inferior order, and altogether
unfit to associate with the white race ... and
so far inferior that they had no rights which
the white man was bound to respect". As a
result of this decision, black people, whether
free or enslaved, could never become citizens
of the United States.
It was in this context that the so-called
American School of Anthropology thrived as
the champion of polygenism or the doctrine
of multiple origins—sparking a debate between
those influenced by the Bible who believed
in the unity of humanity and those who argued
from a scientific standpoint for the plurality
of origins and the antiquity of distinct types.
Like the monogenists, these theories were
not monolithic and often used words like races,
species, hybrid, and mongrel interchangeably.
A scientific consensus began to emerge during
this period "that there exists a Genus Homo,
embracing many primordial types of 'species'".
Charles Caldwell, Samuel George Morton, Samuel
A. Cartwright, George Gliddon, Josiah C. Nott,
and Louis Agassiz, and even South Carolina
Governor James Henry Hammond were all influential
proponents of this school. While some were
disinterested scientists, others were passionate
advocates who used science to promote slavery
in a period of increasing sectional strife.
All were complicit in establishing the putative
science that justified slavery, informed the
Dred Scott decision, underpinned miscegenation
laws, and eventually fueled Jim Crow. Samuel
G. Morton, for example, claimed to be just
a scientist but he did not hesitate to provide
evidence of Negro inferiority to John C. Calhoun,
the prominent pro-slavery Secretary of State
to help him negotiate the annexation of Texas
as a slave state.
The high-water mark of polygenic theories
was Josiah Nott and Gliddon's voluminous eight-hundred
page tome titled Types of Mankind, published
in 1854. Reproducing the work of Louis Agassiz
and Samuel Morton, the authors spread the
virulent and explicitly racist views to a
wider, more popular audience. The first printing
sold out quickly and by the end of the century
it had undergone nine editions. Although many
Southerners felt that all the justification
for slavery they needed was found in the Bible,
others used the new science to defend slavery
and the repression of American Indians. Abolitionists,
however, felt they had to take this science
on its own terms. And for the first time,
African American intellectuals waded into
the contentious debate. In the immediate wake
of Types of Mankind and during the pitched
political battles that led to Civil War, Frederick
Douglass (1818–1895), the statesman and
persuasive abolitionist, directly attacked
the leading theorists of the American School
of Anthropology. In an 1854 address, entitled
"The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered",
Douglass argued that "by making the enslaved
a character fit only for slavery, [slaveowners]
excuse themselves for refusing to make the
slave a freeman.... For let it be once granted
that the human race are of multitudinous origin,
naturally different in their moral, physical,
and intellectual capacities ... a chance is
left for slavery, as a necessary institution....
There is no doubt that Messrs. Nott, Glidden,
Morton, Smith and Agassiz were duly consulted
by our slavery propagating statesmen" (p.
287).
==== Lewis Henry Morgan in the United States
====
Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881), a lawyer
from Rochester, New York, became an advocate
for and ethnological scholar of the Iroquois.
His comparative analyses of religion, government,
material culture, and especially kinship patterns
proved to be influential contributions to
the field of anthropology. Like other scholars
of his day (such as Edward Tylor), Morgan
argued that human societies could be classified
into categories of cultural evolution on a
scale of progression that ranged from savagery,
to barbarism, to civilization. He focused
on understanding how cultures integrated and
systematized, and how the various features
of one culture indicate an evolutionary status
in comparison with other cultures. Generally,
Morgan used technology (such as bowmaking
or pottery) as an indicator of position on
this scale.
==== Franz Boas ====
Franz Boas established academic anthropology
in the United States in opposition to this
sort of evolutionary perspective. His approach
was empirical, skeptical of overgeneralizations,
and eschewed attempts to establish universal
laws. For example, Boas studied immigrant
children to demonstrate that biological race
was not immutable, and that human conduct
and behavior resulted from nurture, rather
than nature.
Influenced by the German tradition, Boas argued
that the world was full of distinct cultures,
rather than societies whose evolution could
be measured by how much or how little "civilization"
they had. He believed that each culture has
to be studied in its particularity, and argued
that cross-cultural generalizations, like
those made in the natural sciences, were not
possible.
In doing so, he fought discrimination against
immigrants, blacks, and indigenous peoples
of the Americas. Many American anthropologists
adopted his agenda for social reform, and
theories of race continue to be popular subjects
for anthropologists today. The so-called "Four
Field Approach" has its origins in Boasian
Anthropology, dividing the discipline in the
four crucial and interrelated fields of sociocultural,
biological, linguistic, and archaic anthropology
(e.g. archaeology). Anthropology in the United
States continues to be deeply influenced by
the Boasian tradition, especially its emphasis
on culture.
Boas used his positions at Columbia University
and the American Museum of Natural History
to train and develop multiple generations
of students. His first generation of students
included Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Edward
Sapir and Ruth Benedict, who each produced
richly detailed studies of indigenous North
American cultures. They provided a wealth
of details used to attack the theory of a
single evolutionary process. Kroeber and Sapir's
focus on Native American languages helped
establish linguistics as a truly general science
and free it from its historical focus on Indo-European
languages.
The publication of Alfred Kroeber's textbook,
Anthropology, marked a turning point in American
anthropology. After three decades of amassing
material, Boasians felt a growing urge to
generalize. This was most obvious in the 'Culture
and Personality' studies carried out by younger
Boasians such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict.
Influenced by psychoanalytic psychologists
including Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, these
authors sought to understand the way that
individual personalities were shaped by the
wider cultural and social forces in which
they grew up.
Though such works as Coming of Age in Samoa
and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword remain
popular with the American public, Mead and
Benedict never had the impact on the discipline
of anthropology that some expected. Boas had
planned for Ruth Benedict to succeed him as
chair of Columbia's anthropology department,
but she was sidelined by Ralph Linton, and
Mead was limited to her offices at the AMNH.
=== Other countries ===
Anthropology as it emerged amongst the Western
colonial powers (mentioned above) has generally
taken a different path than that in the countries
of southern and central Europe (Italy, Greece,
and the successors to the Austro-Hungarian
and Ottoman empires). In the former, the encounter
with multiple, distinct cultures, often very
different in organization and language from
those of Europe, has led to a continuing emphasis
on cross-cultural comparison and a receptiveness
to certain kinds of cultural relativism.In
the successor states of continental Europe,
on the other hand, anthropologists often joined
with folklorists and linguists in building
cultural perspectives on nationalism. Ethnologists
in these countries tended to focus on differentiating
among local ethnolinguistic groups, documenting
local folk culture, and representing the prehistory
of what has become a nation through various
forms of public education (e.g., museums of
several kinds).In this scheme, Russia occupied
a middle position. On the one hand, it had
a large region (largely east of the Urals)
of highly distinct, pre-industrial, often
non-literate peoples, similar to the situation
in the Americas. On the other hand, Russia
also participated to some degree in the nationalist
(cultural and political) movements of Central
and Eastern Europe. After the Revolution of
1917, views expressed by anthropologists in
the USSR, and later the Soviet Bloc countries,
were highly shaped by the requirement to conform
to Marxist theories of social evolution.In
Greece, there was since the 19th century a
science of the folklore called laographia
(laography), in the form of "a science of
the interior", although theoretically weak;
but the connotation of the field deeply changed
after World War II, when a wave of Anglo-American
anthropologists introduced a science "of the
outside".In Italy, the development of ethnology
and related studies did not receive as much
attention as other branches of learning, but
nonetheless included important researchers
and thinkers like Ernesto De Martino.Germany
and Norway are the countries that showed the
most division and conflict between scholars
focusing on domestic socio-cultural issues
and scholars focusing on "other" societies..
Some German and Austrian scholars have increased
cultural anthropology as both legal anthropology
regarding "other" societies and anthropology
of Western civilization.The development of
world anthropologies has followed different
trajectories.
== 20th-century developments ==
In the mid-20th century, American anthropology
began to study its own history more systematically.
In 1967 Marvin Harris published his The Rise
of Anthropological Theory, presenting argumentative
examinations of anthropology's historical
developments, and George W. Stocking, Jr.,
established the historicist school, examining
the historical contexts of anthropological
movements.
== See also ==
List of anthropologists
Musée de l'Homme founded by Paul Rivet
