History of Anthropology

Question 1

anthropology in history

Answer 1

as the study of cultural variation may be found as far back as ancient Greeks

Question 2

Herodotus

Answer 2

wrote of barbarian peoples and compared their customs and practices with those in Athenian society

Question 3

Sophists

Answer 3

first philosophical relativists, there can be no absolute truth, truth is culture-bound

Question 4

Thomas Hobbes, Giambattista Vico

Answer 4

European thinkers trying to account for cultural variability and global cultural history

Question 5

David Hume, Adam Smith

Answer 5

experience as the only trustworthy source of valid knowledge

Question 6

Rousseau, Montesquieu, Diderot

Answer 6

18th century philosophers, trying to find systemic rules for laws of society , seeing world through eyes of the cultural other

Question 7

Victorian anthropology

Answer 7

19th century, belief in social evolution; human societies developed in a particular direction, beginning with savagery and ending with civilization

Question 8

Henry Maine

Answer 8

theories of cultural variation, status and contract societies; kinship and myth vs status and achievement, traditional vs modern societies

Question 9

Lewis Henry Morgan

Answer 9

7 stage model, lower savagery to civilization; evolution based on technological achievements

Question 10

Tylor and Frazer

Answer 10

evolutionists; how thought was evolved from magical to religious and finally scientific

Question 11

Franz Boas

Answer 11

USA; emphasis on cultural relativism, against evolutionary approach to society, historical particularism

Question 12

Bronislaw Malinowski

Answer 12

UK; worked in Trobriand Islands, set stage for fieldwork and ethnographic data collection; father of ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation

Question 13

Radcliffe-Brown

Answer 13

UK; structural functionalism, emphasis on social institutions (kinship, norms, politics) and their interrelationship, individual unimportant

Question 14

Marcell Mauss

Answer 14

France; never conducted fieldwork, detailed essays on exchange, systematic comparison of social life patterns

Question 15

Claude Levi-Strauss

Answer 15

structuralism; systematic analysis of social organization and interconnected relationships; based upon innate, ingrained mental structures

Question 16

1950s

Answer 16

shift from function to meaning, humanities focus; accounting for individual choice and agency, social structure loose set of constraints

Question 17

Marvin Harris

Answer 17

cultural materialism; attempt to maintain scientific rigor in anthropology

Question 18

Clifford Geertz

Answer 18

symbolic and cognitive anthropology; hermeneutics (interpretive method), webs of meaning; stressed cultural relativism; importance of symbolic realm; cultural variation cannot be explained by material conditions or inborn biological properties of humans

Question 19

today’s anthropology

Answer 19

highly specialized studies; social organization, knowledge, kinship, myth, and ritual still remain important areas of study.