Main anthropologists Flashcards
Edward B. Tylor
Edward B. Tylor (1832-1917) established the theoretical principles of Victorian anthropology by adapting evolutionary theory to the study of human society.
For Tylor, Anthropology was a “science of culture,” a system for analyzing existing elements of human civilization that are socially created rather than biologically inherited. His work was critical to the recognition of anthropology as a distinct branch of science in 1884, when the British Association for the Advancement of Science admitted it as a major branch, or section, of the society, rather than a subset of biology, as had previously been the case. Tyler was the first president of the section, and in 1896 became Professor of Anthropology at Oxford, the first academic chair in the new discipline.
While a foundational figure in cultural anthropology, Tylor thought about culture in radically different terms than we do today. He accepted the premise that all societies develop in the same way and insisted on the universal progression of human civilization from savage to barbarian to civilized. Nowhere in his writing does the plural “cultures” appear. In his view, culture is synonymous with civilization, rather than something particular to unique societies, and, so, his definition refers to “Culture or civilization.”
The biology of evolution was explained by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species (1859), and he expanded his finding to include human evolution in The Descent of Man (1871), which was published the same year as Primitive Culture. While Darwin concentrated on biology, Tylor focused solely on the evolution of human culture. In this, he participated in a lengthy philosophical tradition explaining human development from its beginning to the present day.
Here anthropology starts from individual differences and works its way to similarities. From the simple to complex (in brief) is transposed to the field of culture. Ex. from villages to nations to empires from gatherers and hunters to industrial society. This perspective was comforting the idea of superiority of Europe. Spirit of the time: white superiority. Hegemonic paradigm: evolutionism.
Lewis Henry Morgan
American ethnologist and a principal founder of scientific anthropology, known especially for establishing the study of kinship systems and for his comprehensive theory of social evolution.
Morgan’s kinship study led him to develop his theory of cultural evolution, which was set forth in Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (1877). This was among the first major scientific accounts of the origin and evolution of civilization. Morgan posited that advances in social organization arose primarily from changes in food production. Society had progressed from a hunting-and-gathering stage (which he denoted by the term “savagery”) to a stage of settled agriculture (“barbarism”) and then on to an urban society possessing a more advanced agriculture (“civilization”). He illustrated these developmental stages with examples drawn from various cultures. Morgan’s ideas about the development of technology over time have come to be regarded as generally correct in their fundamental aspects. His theory that human social life advanced from an initial stage of promiscuity through various forms of family life that culminated in monogamy has long been held obsolete, however.
Sir James George Frazer
British anthropologist, folklorist, and classical scholar. His outstanding position among anthropologists was established by the publication in 1890 of The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion. The underlying theme of the work is Frazer’s theory of a general development of modes of thought from the magical to the religious and, finally, to the scientific. Although the evolutionary sequence of magical, religious, and scientific thought is no longer accepted and Frazer’s broad general psychological theory has proved unsatisfactory, his work enabled him to synthesize and compare a wider range of information about religious and magical practices than has been achieved subsequently by any other single anthropologist.
In making a vast range of primitive customs appear intelligible to European thinkers of his time, Frazer had a wide influence among men of letters; and, though he traveled little himself, he was in close contact with missionaries and administrators who provided information for him and valued his interpretation of it.
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl
French philosopher whose study of the psychology of primitive peoples gave anthropology a new approach to understanding irrational factors in social thought and primitive religion and mythology.
Much of his attention was devoted to the mentality of people in so-called primitive societies, which he first examined at length in Les Fonctions mentales dans les sociétés primitives. From the French sociologist Émile Durkheim he adopted the concept of représentations collectives, or group ideas, which account for differences in reasoning between people in primitive societies and those in modern Western ones. He suggested that primitive thought and perceptions are pervaded by mysticism and that the primitive mentality, though not opposed to the laws of logic, is not governed exclusively by them.
Alfred Cort Haddon
One of the founders of modern British anthropology. Virtually the sole exponent of anthropology at Cambridge for 30 years, it was largely through his work and especially his teaching that the subject assumed its place among the observational sciences.
In 1888 Haddon went to the Torres Strait—the channel between New Guinea and Australia—to study marine biology but instead found himself irresistibly drawn to the indigenous people; thereafter, his interests lay in the study of human societies. He moved to the University of Cambridge in 1893 and began giving lectures in physical anthropology there. In 1898 he organized and led the Cambridge anthropological expedition to the Torres Strait Islands, New Guinea, and Sarawak, in which were worked out some of the basic techniques of anthropological fieldwork, in particular, the use of genealogies.
Bronisław Malinowski
One of the most important anthropologists of the 20th century who is widely recognized as a founder of social anthropology and principally associated with field studies of the peoples of Oceania.
His book Argonauts of the Western Pacific is widely regarded as a masterpiece of anthropology. Through it Malinowski became one of the best-known anthropologists in the world in the 1920’s. Published in 1922, the book is about the Trobriand people who live on the small Kiriwana island chain northeast of the island of New Guinea.
Unlike the armchair anthropology of previous researchers, his method was characterized by participant observation: informal interviews, direct observation, participation in the life of the group, collective discussions, analyses of personal documents produced within the group, self-analysis, results from activities undertaken off or online, and life-histories. Considered the first modern ethnography, Argonauts of the Western Pacific redefined the ethnographic genre. He defines the methodology of ethnography:
- no company of other white men
- close contact with native people
- grasp the native’s point of view
- realize his vision of his world
E.E. Evans-Pritchard
One of England’s foremost social anthropologists, especially known for his investigations of African cultures, for his exploration of segmentary systems, and for his explanations of witchcraft and magic.
Although Evans-Pritchard was throughout his life a prolific writer, especially on kinship, religion, and the history of anthropology, his later writings were eclipsed by his earlier work. His later writings were often theoretical essays and lectures on the relations between anthropology and other social sciences. These revealed a great depth of scholarship but were often controversial and divergent from the trends of the time. However, his influence as a teacher in the latter part of his life was considerable, for under his guidance the Oxford school of social anthropology attracted students from many parts of the world; and he sponsored fieldwork in Africa and elsewhere as a member of the Colonial Social Science Research Council.
Franz Boas
German-born American anthropologist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the founder of the relativistic, culture-centred school of American anthropology that became dominant in the 20th century. During his tenure at Columbia University in New York City (1899–1942), he developed one of the foremost departments of anthropology in the United States. Boas was a specialist in North American Indian cultures and languages, but he was, in addition, the organizer of a profession and the great teacher of a number of scientists who developed anthropology in the United States.
It is largely because of Boas’s influence that anthropologists and other social scientists from the mid-20th century onward believed that differences among the races were a result of historically particular events rather than physiological destiny, and that race itself was a cultural construct.
Within this common framework there have sometimes been differences in view as to the actual attainments of particular peoples. Some anthropologists, often calling themselves evolutionary, argue that some peoples have achieved “higher” states of culture, leaving behind—at least temporarily—other peoples. They believe that the differences between “civilized” and “primitive” peoples are the result of environmental, cultural, and historical circumstances. Other anthropologists, frequently called cultural relativists, argue that the evolutionary view is ethnocentric, deriving from a human disposition to characterize groups other than one’s own as inferior, and that all surviving human groups have evolved equally but in different ways.
Franz Boas was of the second persuasion. Since British and U.S. anthropologists in the last third of the 19th century were not particularly disposed to this view, Boas’s success in making it overwhelmingly dominant was all the more remarkable. While he had originally assumed as a natural scientist that universal laws must exist that would explain how different peoples have wound up with their characteristic ways of life, he concluded that the problem was too complex for any general solution. Laws of cultural causation, he argued, had to be discovered rather than assumed.
Boas’s view requires the anthropologist to be capable of understanding all factors that might influence the histories of peoples. Thus, to assert that cultural differences are not the result of biological differences, one must know something of biology; and to see the interrelations of humans and their environment, the anthropologist must understand such things as migration, nutrition, child-raising customs, and disease, as well as the movements and interrelations of peoples and their cultures. Anthropology then becomes holistic and eclectic, involved in any field of science or scholarship that appears relevant to a particular problem.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
French social anthropologist and leading exponent of structuralism, a name applied to the analysis of cultural systems (e.g., kinship and mythical systems) in terms of the structural relations among their elements. Structuralism has influenced not only social science but also the study of philosophy, comparative religion, literature, and film.
Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism was an effort to reduce the enormous amount of information about cultural systems to what he believed were the essentials, the formal relationships among their elements. He viewed cultures as systems of communication, and he constructed models based on structural linguistics, information theory, and cybernetics to interpret them.
The study of indigenous paradigms owes a lot to Lèvi-Struass. It is a new radical recovery of the environment, the basic framework of Lèvi-Strauss. We need to classify social life (kinship,myths..) since they are elementary forms of the human mind. Finite combinations of one structure of human beings, find other forms of this elementary forms, social life can be organised in many different ways. Each society has a peculiar combination of universal basic elements. Idea of categories→ categories are cultural.
