Key Historical Anthropologists (Module 3)

Question 1

Lewis Henry Morgan

Answer 1

author of the first ethnography (1851) about the Iroquois

initiator of kinship studies

first social evolutionist in anthropology to relate the development of the family to the ways people make a living

Question 2

Sir Edward Burnett Tylor

Answer 2

leading Social Evolutionist in England (1860-1910)

reputation as an “armchair anthropologist” but did support fieldwork in his students (first Anth prof at Oxford)

coined the use of the term culture

Question 3

Franz Boas

Answer 3

founder of cultural relativism –developed from his military time amongst the Inuit if Baffin Island

after 1885 focused his research on the N. American West Coast cultures

professionalized anthropology as a discipline

Question 4

Alfred L. Kroeber

Answer 4

student of Boas – ethnographic work amongst First Nations in California

his work combined the ideas of holism and cultural relativism – focus on cultural history

founder of the ‘culture and personality’ school of thought in anthropology

Question 5

Bronislaw Malinowski

Answer 5

one of the founders of ethnographic fieldwork -
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 / 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

founder of functionalism school of thought

Question 6

Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard

Answer 6

instrumental in the development of social anthropology -
worked to have anthro moved out of the natural sciences and into the humanities

developed the concepts:

“risk” - how accusations, blame and responsibility are deployed though culturally-specific conceptions of misfortune and harm

“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

“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

Question 7

Ruth Fulton Benedict

Answer 7

Student of Boas and trained in cultural relativism

One of the founders of “culture and personality” school of thought

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”

Anti-racism activist – dismantled scientific claims of different intellectual endowments among racial groups

Question 8

Margaret Mead

Answer 8

“popularized’” anthropology by writing about it in the mass media and for publishing research results in book format (with no discipline jargon)

one of the most controversial anthropologists:

her reports about the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures amply informed the 1960s sexual revolution / broadened sexual mores within a context of traditional western religious life / revolutionized western ideas of child rearing

Question 9

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Answer 9

the “father of modern anthropology”

argued that the “savage” mind had the same structures as the “civilized” mind and that human characteristics are the same everywhere

one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought

Question 10

Clifford Geertz

Answer 10

development of thick description and symbolic or cultural anthropology

culture serves as a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms that serve to impose meaning on the world and make it understandable

critical issue in understanding other cultures, is the question of meaning and interpretation

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