Anthropologists Flashcards
Bronislaw Malinowski
Polish anthropologist. Trobriand Islands, 1915-1918. Wrote Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Argued for participant observation and against the evolutionary ideas of Tylor and Frazer. His diary was found, in which he spoke derogatorily of the Trobrians. He described the Kula Ring of the Western Pacific. Used functionalism- social phenomena explained in relation to their social function.
Franz Boas
1858-1942. Created the idea of cultural relativism - the idea that there are no universal concepts. Argued against the evolutionary ideas of Tylor and Frazer and scientific racism. Wrote The Mind of Primitive Man in 1911. Known as the father of american anthropology. Mentor of Ruth Benedict. Worked among the Inuit and the Kwakiutl aboriginals from British Columbia.
E.E. Evans-Prichard
1902-1973. Worked in Sudan/Egypt with the Azande in the 1920s and the Nuer in the 1930s. Focussed on witchcraft and it’s role in social control. Wrote ‘Witchcraft Among the Azande’. British structural functionalist anthropologist and africanist.
Claude Levi-Strauss
French structuralist. Wrote Mythologiques in 1964 and Triste Tropiques in 1955. Tutor of Lizot. Against the evolutionary viewpoint, especially regarding magic and science. Came up with the theory of binary opposites, which require dialectic reconciliation. Saw totemism as the most basic magical thought.
Lizot
Paedophile who abused young Yanomamo boys and gave them shotguns - called “shotgun prostitution”. Worked with Good and Chagnon. Pupil of Levi-Strauss.
Napoleon Chagnon
Worked with the Yanomamo in Amazonia. Accused of falsifying data, causing a genocide with bad vaccines, inciting death through providing them with machetes. Brought paedos Good and Lizot into the Yanomamo and didn’t stop them. Accused of lying about the violence of the Yanomamo by Patrick Tierney in his book ‘Darkness in El Dorado’.
Kenneth Good
Worked with Chagnon but is now his rival. Married a very young Yanomamo girl and had children with her.
Mary Douglas
1921-2007. Wrote Purity and Danger in 1966. Showed a structuralist approach. Focussed on classification and dirt. Saw humans as chaotic but needing classifications to order it. British anthropologist; studied under Evans-Pritchard. Developed a form of structuralism, emphasizing the problems of impure, intermediate (anomalous) states and categories. She later did pioneering work on consumption.
Edward Burnett Tylor
Considered the father of anthropology. Wrote ‘Primitive Culture’ in 1871 in which he defined culture, civilization and his theory of Social Evolution. He believed that religious beliefs evolved from magic to science, and culture developed into it’s final Western form.
James Frazer
1854-1941. Wrote ‘The Golden Bough’ in 1890 on the subject of primitive cultures. He was an armchair anthropologist who never went into the field.
Alfred Radcliffe-Brown
1881-1955. Wrote about Structure-Functionalism.The relationships between social institutions- rules, norms and systems. Phenomena make sense because they contribute to the maintenance of the overall social structure.
Lila Abu-Lughod
b. 1952. American-Palestinian anthropologist; fieldwork among Bedouins in Egypt; Ph.D. (Harvard) 1984. Abu-Lughod is internationally recognized for her contributions to feminist anthropology, to studies of power and resistance (inspired by Foucault), and to the politics of gender in the Middle East. She explores these and other issues in her monograph Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (1986).
Ruth Benedict
1887–1948. American anthropologist; student of Franz Boas; founder of the “culture-and-personality” school. Known for her two, extremely popular, books: Patterns of Culture, which is a comparative study of cultural configurations, of the cultural emotional order she referred to as ethos; and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a configurationalist study of Japanese culture, which was an outgrowth of a Second World War project, in which she cooperated with Margaret Mead and others in a study of various national cultures “at a distance”.
Émile Durkheim
1858–1917. French sociologist; the father of modern sociology; a major influence on French structuralist anthropology and British structural functionalism (Radcliffe-Brown). His work on forms of social integration (solidarity), collective representations, and ritual, exerted a foundational impact on European anthropology, but were only much later assimilated into American anthropology.
Audrey Richards
1899-1984. British social anthropologist. Ph.D. at London School of Economics under Malinowski, 1929. Fieldwork in East Africa, esp. among Bemba (Zambia).(Chisungu). Founded and directed the Centre for African Studies at Cambridge University (1956-67). Influential work on nutrition, gender, psychological anthropology, land use and economic anthropology.
