Historical Anthropologist Flashcards
Lewis Henry Morgan
Initiator of kinship studied
Lewis Henry Morgan
first social evolutionist in anthropology to relate the development of the family to the ways people make a living
Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917)
British
Leading Social Evolutionist in England (1860-1910)
Sir Edward Burnett Taylor
reputation as an “armchair anthropologist” but did support fieldwork in his students (first Anth prof at Oxford)
Sir Edward Burnett Taylor
coined the use of the term culture
Sir Edward Burnett Taylor
research focus of mythology, folklore, and linguistics
Franz Boas
German (central figure in 20th C. American Anthropology)
professionalized anthropology as a discipline
Franz Boas
founder of cultural relativism –developed from his military time amongst the Inuit if Baffin Island –”…civilization is not something absolute, but … is relative, and … our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes” (1887)
Franz Boas
after 1885 focused his research on the N. American West Coast cultures
Franz Boas
professionalized anthropology as a discipline
Alfred L. Kroeber
American
student of Boas – ethnographic work amongst First Nations in California
Alfred L. Kroeber
his work combined the ideas of holism and cultural relativism
Alfred L. Kroeber
founder of the ‘culture and personality’ school of thought in anthropology
Bronislaw Malinowski
Austrian
one of the founders of ethnographic fieldwork
Bronislaw Malinowski
in his pioneering research of the Trobriand islanders he recorded “texts” freely on the scene as well as in set interviews, and observed reactions with an acute clinical eye
Bronislaw Malinowski
presented a dynamic picture of social institutions that clearly separated ideal norms from actual behaviour and in doing so laid much of the basis for modern anthropological field research
Bronislaw Malinowski
founder of functionalism school of thought
Bronislaw Malinowski
seek to describe the different parts of a society and their relationship through the organic analogy
Bronislaw Malinowski
suggested that individuals have physiological needs (reproduction, food, shelter) and that social institutions exist to meet these needs- there are also culturally derived needs and four basic “instrumental needs” (economics, social control, education, and political organization), that require institutional devices
Lewis Henry Morgan
Theory that states that social traits are selected over time and gradually develop into behavioral or social norms.
Alfred L. Kroeber
examines the interaction between psychological aspects of the individual and the overreaching culture
Alfred L. Kroeber
focus on cultural history
Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard
British
instrumental in the development of social anthropology
Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard
worked to have anthro moved out of the natural sciences and into the humanities
Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard
developed the concept: “risk” - how accusations, blame and responsibility are deployed though culturally-specific conceptions of misfortune and harm
Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard
developed the concept
“observer bias” - anthropologists rarely succeeded in entering the minds of the people they studied, and so ascribed to them motivations which more closely matched themselves and their own culture, not the one they are studying
Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard
develop the concept:
translation” - the main issue facing anthropologists was one of translation - finding a way to translate one’s own thoughts into the world of another culture and thus manage to come to understand it, and then to translate this understanding back so as to explain it to people of one’s own culture
Ruth Fulton Benedict
American
Student of Boas and trained in cultural relativism
Ruth Fulton Benedict
One of the founders of “culture and personality” school of thought
Ruth Fulton Benedict
Developed the concept of “patterns” – “every culture selects along an ‘arc of traits’ choosing from a universal span pieces that at once fit together and create a distinct character”
Ruth Fulton Benedict
Anti-racism activist – dismantled scientific claims of different intellectual endowments among racial groups
Margaret Mead
American
“popularized’” anthropology by writing about it in the mass media and for publishing research results in book format (with no discipline jargon)
Margaret Mead
one of the most controversial anthropologists
Margaret Mead
her reports about the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures amply informed the 1960s sexual revolution
Margaret Mead
broadened sexual mores within a context of traditional western religious life
Margaret Mead
revolutionized western ideas of child rearing
Claude Lévi-Strauss
French
the “father of modern anthropology”
Claude Lévi-Strauss
argued that the “savage” mind had the same structures as the “civilized” mind and that human characteristics are the same everywhere
Claude Lévi-Strauss
one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought
–the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity
Clifford Geertz
American
development of thick description and symbolic or cultural anthropology
Clifford Geertz
culture serves as a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms that serve to impose meaning on the world and make it understandable
Clifford Geertz
critical issue in understanding other cultures, is the question of meaning and interpretation
Clifford Geertz
argued that aspects of social interaction have multiple meanings on many different levels and the role of an anthropologist is to bring out all these interpretations to created an integrated web of meaning, symbolism and ritual in human behaviour
Lewis Henry Morgan
American
Author of the first ethnography (1851) about the Iroquois