History of Anthropology Flashcards
What is Anthropology?
Anthropology is the study of what makes us human. Anthropologists take a broad approach to understanding the many different aspects of the human experience, which we call holism. They consider the past, through archaeology, to see how human groups lived hundreds or thousands of years ago and what was important to them. They consider what makes up our biological bodies and genetics, as well as our bones, diet, and health. Anthropologists also compare humans with other animals to see what we have in common with them and what makes us unique. Anthropologists also try to understand how people interact in social relationships. They look at the different ways people dress and communicate in different societies. Many anthropologists work in their own societies looking at economics, health, education, law, and policy (to name just a few topics). When trying to understand these complex issues, they keep in mind what they know about biology, culture, types of communication, and how humans lived in the past.
What are the origins of Anthropology?
Anthropology is embedded in colonial history and schemes, yet always striving to overcome them. There was a relation of domination between two parts of the world. But while in the fieldwork, anthropologists understood one fundamental thing: the people, object of their studies, were not too irrational/different and strange as they thought and expected.
The original impetus of anthropologists was the idea of classifying others, fitting them into a box. Some colonial authorities were expecting from them a sort of collaboration in categorizing populations and therefore dominating them. The professional anthropologists had pretty different aims than colonial authorities, and for this reason some of them were prohibited from accessing the field.
What is the noosphere?
Vernadsky defined the noosphere as the new state of the biosphere and described it as the planetary “sphere of reason”. The noosphere represents the highest stage of biospheric development, its defining factor being the development of humankind’s rational activities. In scientific research, the noosphere explains how what researchers do is reliable (when the results are verified by other scholars, and valid). Anthropology is a scientific field because it uses a scientific framework to understand human beings.
What are the three main subfields of Anthropology?
Sociocultural, biological, and archaeology.
Sociocultural: interprets the content of particular cultures, explains variation among cultures, and studies processes of cultural change and social transformation. Sociocultural anthropologists conduct research on most areas of the world, focusing on topics that include: human ecology; gender relations; culture and ideology; demography and family systems; race, class and gender inequality; resistance movements; colonialism, neocolonialism, development and cultural politics in the West.
Biological: studies a variety of aspects of human evolutionary biology. Some anthropologists examine fossils and apply their observations to understanding human evolution; others compare morphological, biochemical, genetic, and physiological adaptations of living humans to their environments; still others observe behavior of human and nonhuman primates (monkeys and apes) to understand the roots of human behavior.
Archeology: studies the material remains of present and past cultural systems to understand the technical, social and political organization of those systems and the larger cultural evolutionary process that stand behind them.
Explain evolutionary Anthropology
The modern discourse of anthropology crystallized in the 1860s, fired by advances in biology, philology, and prehistoric archaeology. In The Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin affirmed that all forms of life share a common ancestry. Fossils began to be reliably associated with particular geologic strata, and fossils of recent human ancestors were discovered, most famously the first Neanderthal specimen, unearthed in 1856. In 1871 Darwin published The Descent of Man, which argued that human beings shared a recent common ancestor with the great African apes. He identified the defining characteristic of the human species as their relatively large brain size and deduced that the evolutionary advantage of the human species was intelligence, which yielded language and technology.
Explain how evolutionary theories were applied to society
The pioneering anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) concluded that as intelligence increased, so civilization advanced. All past and present societies could be arranged in an evolutionary sequence. Archaeological findings were organized in a single universal series (Stone Age, Iron Age, Bronze Age, etc.) that corresponded to stages of economic organization from hunting and gathering to pastoralism, agriculture, and industry. Some contemporary peoples that remained hunter-gatherers or pastoralists were regarded as laggards in evolutionary terms, representing stages of evolution through which all other societies had passed. They bore witness to early stages of human development, while the industrial societies of northern Europe and the United States represented the pinnacle of human achievement.
Evolutionary theories in the study of religions
Darwin’s arguments were drawn upon to underwrite the universal history of the Enlightenment, according to which the progress of human institutions was inevitable, guaranteed by the development of rationality. It was assumed that technological progress was constant and that it was matched by developments in the understanding of the world and in social forms. Tylor advanced the view that all religions had a common origin, in the belief in spirits. The original religious rite was sacrifice, which was a way of feeding these spirits. Modern religions retained some of these early features, but as human beings became more intelligent, and so more rational, superstitions were gradually refined and would eventually be abandoned. James George Frazer (1845 - 1941) posited a progressive and universal progress from faith in magic through to belief in religion and, finally, to the understanding of science.
Evolutionary theory applied to kin and family structures
John Ferguson McLennan (1827 - 1881), Lewis Henry Morgan (1818 - 1881), and other writers argued that there was a parallel development of social institutions. The first humans were promiscuous (like, it was thought, the African apes), but at some stage blood ties were recognized between mother and children and incest between mother and son was forbidden. In time more restrictive forms of mating were introduced and paternity was recognized. Blood ties began to be distinguished from territorial relationships, and distinctive political structures developed beyond the family circle. At last monogamous marriage evolved. Paralleling these developments, technological advances produced increasing wealth, and arrangements guaranteeing property ownership and regulating inheritance became more significant. Eventually the modern institutions of private property and territorially based political systems developed, together with the nuclear family.
Explain the diffusionist approach
An alternative to this Anglo-American “evolutionist” anthropology established itself in the German-speaking countries. Its scientific roots were in geography and philology, and it was concerned with the study of cultural traditions and with adaptations to local ecological constraints rather than with universal human histories. This more particularistic and historical approach was spread to the United States at the end of the 19th century by the German-trained scholar Franz Boas (1858 - 1942). Skeptical of evolutionist generalizations, Boas advocated instead a “diffusionist” approach. Rather than graduating through a fixed series of intellectual, moral, and technological stages, societies or cultures changed unpredictably, as a consequence of migration and borrowing.
Who were armchair anthropologists?
The first generation of anthropologists had tended to rely on others—locally based missionaries, colonial administrators, and so on—to collect ethnographic information, often guided by questionnaires that were issued by metropolitan theorists. In the late 19th century, several ethnographic expeditions were organized, often by museums. As reports on customs came in from these various sources, the theorists would collate the findings in comparative frameworks to illustrate the course of evolutionary development or to trace local historical relationships.
First approaches to ethnography
The first generation of professionally trained anthropologists began to undertake intensive fieldwork on their own account in the early 20th century. As theoretically trained investigators began to spend long periods alone in the field, on a single island or in a particular tribal community, the object of investigation shifted. The aim was no longer to establish and list traditional customs. Field-workers began to record the activities of flesh-and-blood human beings going about their daily business. To get this sort of material, it was no longer enough to interview local authority figures. The field-worker had to observe people in action, off guard, to listen to what they said to each other, to participate in their daily activities. The most famous of these early intensive ethnographic studies was carried out between 1915 and 1918 by Bronisław Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands (now Kiriwina Islands) off the southeastern coast of New Guinea, and his Trobriand monographs, published between 1922 and 1935, set new standards for ethnographic reportage.
First steps towards a functionalist approach
These new field studies reflected and accelerated a change of theoretical focus from the evolutionary and historical interests of the 19th century. Inspired by the social theories of Émile Durkheim (1958 - 1917) and the psychological theories of Wilhelm Wundt (1832 - 1920) and others, the ultimate aim was no longer to discover the origins of Western customs but rather to explain the purposes that were served by particular institutions or religious beliefs and practices. Malinowski explained that Trobriand magic was not simply poor science. The “function” of garden magic was to sustain the confidence of gardeners, whose investments could not be guaranteed.
His colleague, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881 - 1955), adopted a more sociological, Durkheimian line of argument, explaining, for example, that the “function” of ancestor worship was to sustain the authority of fathers and grandfathers and to back up the claims of family responsibility. Perhaps the most influential sociological explanation of early institutions was Marcel Mauss’s (1872 - 1950) account of gift exchanges. Mauss argued that apparently irrational forms of economic consumption made sense when they were properly understood, as modes of social competition regulated by strict and universal rules of reciprocity.
What is social and cultural anthropology?
A distinctive “social” or “cultural” anthropology emerged in the 1920s. It was associated with the social sciences and linguistics, rather than with human biology and archaeology. In Britain in particular social anthropologists came to regard themselves as comparative sociologists, but the assumption persisted that anthropologists were primarily concerned with contemporary hunter-gatherers or pastoralists, and in practice evolutionary ways of thinking may often be discerned below the surface of functionalist argument that represents itself as ahistorical.
In the 1930s and ’40s Meyer Fortes and Edward Evans-Pritchard proposed a triadic classification of African politics.
There were similar attempts to classify systems of kinship and marriage, the most famous being that of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1949.
American anthropology since the 50s
In the United States culture was the main subject, while in Europe it was society.
In the 1950s and ’60s, evolutionist ideas gained fresh currency in American anthropology. Some of the new evolutionists (led by Leslie White) argued for a coherent world history of human development, through a succession of stages, from a common early base. The more developed a society, the more complex its organization and the more energy it consumes. White believed that energy consumption was the gauge of cultural advance.
Another tendency, led by Julian Steward, argued rather for an evolutionism that was more directly Darwinian in inspiration. Cultural practices were to be treated as modes of adaptation to specific environmental challenges. Steward urged the study of particular evolutionary processes within enduring culture areas, in which societies with a common origin were exposed to similar ecological constraints.
American anthropology is divided between two intellectual tendencies. One school, inspired by modern developments in genetics, looked for biological determinants of human cultures and sought to revive the traditional alliance between cultural anthropology and biological anthropology. Another school insisted that cultural anthropology should aim to interpret other cultures rather than to seek laws of cultural development or cultural integration and that it should therefore situate itself within the humanities rather than in the biological sciences or the social sciences.
Clifford Geertz was the most influential proponent of an “interpretive” anthropology. The ethnographer was to focus on symbolic communications, and so rituals and other cultural performances became the main focus of research. Sociological and psychological explanations were left to other disciplines.
In the next generation, a radically relativist version of Geertz’s program became influential. It was argued that cultural consensus is rare and that interpretations are therefore always partial. Cultural boundaries are provisional and uncertain, identities fragile and fabricated. Consequently ethnographers should represent a variety of discordant voices, not try to identify a supposedly normative cultural view. In short, it was an illusion that objective ethnographic studies could be produced and reliable comparisons undertaken.
European anthropology since the 50s
In the second half of the 20th century, the ethnographic focus of anthropologists changed decisively. The initial focus had been on contemporary hunter-gatherers or pastoralists. Later, ethnographers specialized in the study of formerly colonized societies, including the complex villages and towns of Asia. From the 1970s fieldwork began increasingly to be carried out in European societies and among ethnic minorities, church communities, and other groups in the United States. In the formerly colonized societies, local anthropologists began to dominate ethnographic research, and community leaders increasingly insisted on controlling the agenda of field-workers.
The liveliest intellectual developments were perhaps to be found beyond the mainstream. Fresh specializations emerged, notably the anthropology of women in the 1970s and, in the following decades, medical anthropology, psychological anthropology, visual anthropology, the anthropology of music and dance, and demographic anthropology. The anthropology of the 21st century was polycentric and cosmopolitan, and it was not entirely at home among the biological or social sciences or in the humanities.
