ANTH essay
Sooooooft
Anthropology 150 CSUN Michael Love
Lecture 2: History of Anthropology Outline of the Lecture I. First steps in the Renaissance II. Enlightenment studies: interest in evolution. Classification, documentation III. Late 1880's Formalization of the discipline — Early Evolutionists Lewis Henry Morgan Tylor Many new intellectual trends: Geology, theory of natural selection, Freud IV. Cultural Historical School Begins with the arrival of Franz Boas in the US in 1883 IV. Functionalism Comes out of the European tradition of sociology, esp. Durkheim V. Neo-evolutionary school - the new functionalism Classification, derivation of laws, ‘Science’ VI. Structuralism and Hermeneutics The return of idealism and emic studies: emphasis on meaning.
In Lecture 1, I said that anthropology really has two dimensions of interest. The first is
synchronic variation, how different are people now? The second is temporal variation: how
different are people through time?
It is interesting to note that historically, it was the interest in temporal variation that
resulted in the intellectual tradition that led to anthropology. So it is important to understand the
history of anthropology.
The tradition of intellectual inquiry that led to modern anthropology has its roots in the
Italian Renaissance. Before that there were individuals that we might consider to have
anthropological interests; Herodotus provided ancient Greeks with descriptions of Arabia and
Egypt, and related accounts of the Scythian women, which gave rise to the myth of the Amazons.
In Rome, Julius Caesar wrote the Conquest of Gaul, in which we discussed the customs and
history of ancient Frenchmen. Another Roman, Tacitus, wrote about the Germans and the
Britons for the Roman crowd. There were various Arab scholars of the middle ages who wrote
about peoples that they encountered in trading sojourns. But all of these examples consist of
isolated individuals with tenuous connections, if any, to one another. My point is simply that
there was no sustained tradition of inquiry prior to the Renaissance that was concerned with the
study of human differences. To the contrary, in medieval Europe, people who were perceived to
be different, especially in matters of religion, were usually killed.
The Rennaissance Roots of Anthropology.
The key to the Renaissance, which began in Italy in the 14th Century, was the rediscovery
of classical antiquity, largely in reaction to the Gothic movement of the 13th century. The early
scholars of the renaissance looked to antiquity for knowledge and began to seek out and circulate
classical texts which had been out of circulation for hundreds of years. From the study of these
texts Renaissance scholars gained an appreciation of the difference between themselves and
antiquity. That appreciation did not exist in the Middle Ages, when Europeans thought that life
was largely unchanged since Roman times.
The discipline of archaeology can be said to have begun in 1421 with the studies of
Ciriaco de’ Pizzacoli. Ciriaco was the first to study ancient monuments when he undertook to
investigate the triumphal arch of Trajan at Ancona. He devoted the rest of his life to the study
of ancient monuments, architecture, and text. Once, when asked what he was doing, he replied “
restoring the dead to life.”
The aim of Renaissance scholars was to understand and try to emulate the
accomplishments of Classical antiquity. Much of this work was financed by Italian princes
seeking to legitimate their power by establishing linkages to the ancient world. The importance
of these renaissance studies was that they provided a sense of perspective to European society,
especially in Italy, where the Renaissance began and flourished most strongly. It sensitized them
to viewing cultural differences as something worthy of intellectual consideration. The
importance of this point of view comes into focus very quickly in the 15th century as European
seafarers began voyages of exploration in African and the Atlantic. Most of the logs concern
problems in navigation, the weather, the physical geography of the places, and the possibilities
for trade. The Italians though, wrote what we might consider to be the first ethnographic
accounts. Notable is Alvis Ca’da Most (1432 - 1483), who made two voyages to Africa for
Prince Henry of Portugal (Henry the Navigator) in 1455 and 1456.
When Columbus returned to Spain in 1493, having reached the Americas, ethnography
became a growth industry. Europe was suddenly confronted with a New World, which it did not
quite know to deal with. More than anything else, it was coming to grips with Native
Americans and their relationship to the rest of humanity that gave rise to inquiries that eventually
resulted in modern anthropology. Two elements of the modern anthropological tradition were
sorely lacking at this time, however. The first was methodology; there was little systematic
comparison among peoples. The second was tolerance. Europeans were interested in the
cultures they found and thought it was worthwhile to study them, but it was largely with a view
to either exploiting them or changing them. Tolerance was still not big in Europe, especially
among the Catholic nations. Remember that in 1492 two things happened. Cristobal Colon left
Spain, and the Jews were expelled from that same country. In the 1500s when Spanish friars
documented the culture and society of Native Americans it was done with an eye to
exterminating native practices and converting them to Christianity. The doctrine of cultural
relativism, which is that one should not judge another culture by one’s own standards, did not
develop until anthropology became a formal academic discipline in the 19th century.
The discovery of the New World provided a great impetus to archaeology. The
conception of cultural difference in time (the basis of archaeology) was extended to the
acceptance of contemporary cultural differences in geographic space (the initial basis of
anthropology). The discovery of people using stone tools in the Americas and in the islands of
the Pacific led to the recognition that stone tools found in Europe, which had been thought by
many to be created by thunder (and called “thunder stones”), were now recognized as being the
remains of people living before the invention of metal-working.
With the development of the Enlightenment, and it’s tradition of rationalism and logical
thought, an evolutionary perspective began to emerge, and the idea of Progress took hold. Where
it had previously been believed that people living in simple societies had degenerated since the
Creation, they were now interpreted as being representative of earlier stages of evolution.
Scholars of the enlightenment saw the evolutionary framework of the Roman writer
Lucretius as a model for cultural evolution. Lucretius' ideas were modified slightly by the
French Scholar Nicolas Mahudel and presented in 1734 as a three stage evolution from tools of
stone to those of Bronze, to those of Iron.
However, it was the first course of humanistic antiquarianism, in northern Europe, that
led more directly to what can be rightly called the first systematic archaeology. This occurred in
Denmark where in 1819 J.C. Thomsen (1788-1863) followed up the work of Nyerup by
organizing the nation museum of that country along the lines of the 'Three-Age' system. This
system was predicated on the belief that the ancient inhabitants of Europe (and probably other
parts of the world) hadpassed, successively, through ages characterized by the use of stone,
bronze, and iron implements. The idea of three ages was quite old, as already mentioned, but
Thomsen was the first to apply the classification to archaeological collections, to insist that the
classification corresponded to a sequence of chronologically defined periods, and to go on on
from the identificaiton of stone, bronze, and iron materials to stylistic differences in weapons and
tools that could be correlated with the three ages.
Thomsen’s work was continued by his younger colleague, J.J.A. Worsaae (1821-85), who
enunciated some of the first important principles of archaeology, including the notion that
objects accompanying the same burial are generally things that were used at the same time. This
and similar principles are the basis of all chronological ordering in archaeology.
At about this same time another line of investigation in geology was beginning to merge
with the Danish advances in the development of archaeology. In 1833 Charles Lyell, considered
to be the father of modern geology published his studies done in England and Europe, called the
Principles of Geology. In this book he proposed the principle of uniformitarianism, which states
that the processes that you can observe today are the same processes that caused geological
changes in the past. He studied modern water flow, the formation of chalk deposits, volcanoes,
and other things. His studies were important for several reasons. First, he reasoned that
geological processes operate over very long periods of time, so that the world had to be very old,
much older than the 6000 years that theologians proposed. Secondly, it provided means of
interpreting geological strata, both in terms of their relative ages and the processes that produced
them.
In 1836 the French scholar Boucher de Perthes announced discoveries of man-made
artifacts in deep geological strata and claimed that they were of great antiquity. This discovery
and the claims made for their antiquity proved to be the beginning of Paleolithic archaeology.
The importance of these discoveries was not simply their claimed age, however. Equally
important was that archaeological materials were present in several different geological strata,
and in strata superimposed one over the other. This introduced to archaeology the concept of
relative dating by stratigraphy. This refined the concept of archaeological time beyond the Three
Age system by positing that significant changes had occurred within the Stone Age.
Still another intellectual force appeared in the mid-19th century to aid in the growth of
studies of the past. In 1859 Darwin published The Origin of the Species. The book had a
revolutionary impact on all science and learned thought, first and foremost because it showed
that life on earth was not static, but had changed significantly through time. The principles of
biological change presented by Darwin resonated with those who thought about cultural change.
The Study of Cultural Change
In the early 1800s the systematic study of contemporary peoples began to take hold.
Many people wanted to take the philosophical ideas of Enlightenment philosophers like John
Locke, John Stuart Mills, David Hume, and others, and subject them to empirical investigation.
All of these enlightenment scholars presented ideas about human nature, and especially about the
influence of learning and social life on behavior. In the 1800s people started to ask whether it
was possible to systematically collect information on the topic, rather than relying on common
sense notions or introspective contemplation.
By the mid-1800s the fields of anthropology and sociology were developing and began to
provide interpretive frameworks for the newly discovered materials. The growth of evolutionary
thought in biology was paralleled by the development of the concept of evolution in social
theory. Although it is often said that the concept of cultural evolution is derived from biological
theory, it isn't so. The concept of cultural evolution precedes the biological concept and the term
“evolution” was first applied within the social sciences.
Both sociology and anthropology can trace many of their central ideas to the French
scholar Auguste Comte. Comte argued for the creation of a new ‘science of man’, which was to
apply the same objectivity that others had applied to chemistry, physics, and biology. Comte
hoped to create what he called ‘social physics’ and coined the term sociology to describe the new
discipline. Comte himself and his students, however, focused their interests on European society,
and it fell to others to study non-European societies.
Two important figures in this development were E.B. Tylor (1832-1917) and L.H.
Morgan (1818-81). The saw the evidence of the antiquity of man, combined it with ethnographic
observation of modern peoples and the idea of the Three Age system, and constructed a model of
the human social and cultural past. They posited a series of universal stages: Savagery,
Barbarism, and Civilization through which all cultures had passed. These stages were based on a
number of traits: types of kinship organization, the modes of subsistence, and the sophistication
of technology. Much of their evidence was faulty, however. They relied too heavily on second-
hand accounts and their syntheses were, simply, over-generalized.
Finally, and less specifically, there were other influences converging to aid in the
development of archaeology in the early and middle 19th century. There was the general rise and
appreciation of science in general, a trend that began in 18th century rationalism and had
gathered momentum from that time forward. Closely interrelated with this was the rising
industrialism of western Europe and America, along with the expansion of the power of these
regions to the rest of the world. As Europeans encountered new peoples and new places, it
stimulated intellectual curiosity, while the economic exploitation of these other regions provided
the wealth for men of leisure to indulge their curiosities.
Boas and the Culture Historical School
Franz Boas was German, trained in linguistics and cultural geography. He studied with
the geographer Fredrich Ratzel, who emphasized the importance of ethnic groups with distinct
cultural boundaries.
Boas came to the United States in the 1860s to conduct research on Native American
language, especially in the Pacific Northwest. He spent many years working at the American
Museum of Natural History, in New York, and in 1885 he was hired by Columbia University to
begin a Department of Anthropology. From Columbia, Boas trained the first generation of
professional anthropologists in North America, figures who would dominate the field for nearly
50 years. Boas’s students included Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Margaret Mead, Ruth
Benedict, Edward Sapir, Herman Herskovits, and many others.
Boas was a rigorous empiricist and his critique of the type of Cultural Evolutionism
proposed by Morgan and Tyler was severe. Boas ejected evolutionism as an unsubstantiated
generalization based on faulty data. He chided the lack of first-hand evidence and the use of
‘armchair anthropology’, based upon hearsay and travelogues. He urged the rigorous collection
of data by professionals who spoke the languages of the peoples that they studied.
Language was especially important to Boas because he felt that without speaking the
language of the people being studied, anthropologists could not understand their view of the
world. In this view, Boas proposed what is now one of the guiding principles of anthropology:
cultural relativism. Boas felt that cultural evolutionism was biased insofar as it placed European
society at the pinnacle of social advancement. He felt that every culture was worthy of study in
its own right, without evaluation as to whether it was “primitive” or “advanced,” and that each
culture had something to offer the world. He further argued that culture could only be understood
from the “inside out,” or through the minds of people in the culture. To understand the mind of
other peoples, one has to converse with them in their own language.
So, Boas trained generation of people who undertook rigorous ethnography. That is, they
lived among the people that they studied for extended periods of time, doing what came to be
called ‘participant observation.’ Boas’s student shared a perspective now known as “Cultural
Historicism” or “the Culture-History Approach.” They focused on detailed studies of individual
cultures and their historical development, rather than trying to synthesize grand conclusions
about “social evolution.”
For Boas and his students, culture was largely a psychological phenomenon. Culture
consisted of people’s shared beliefs and a unique view of the world. The goal of ethnography
from this perspective was to collect information, in great detail, about cultural groups and how
they differed from one another.
The Functionalist Approach
At the same time that Boas and his students focused attention on the concept of culture, a
European tradition of anthropology developed that was strongly influenced by the school of
sociology promoted by Emile Durkheim. In this view, which came to be known as
functionalism, a society is composed of numerous parts that articulate with one another, much as
the individual parts of a body (head, eyes, arms, internal organs) all form part of an integrated
whole. For this reason, functionalism is often described as a point of view that is based upon
analogies between social forms and biological organisms.
European anthropology, sometimes called “Social Anthropology” initially developed as a
discipline that undertook the sociological study of “primitive” (non-western) societies. Like
Boas and his students, European Social Anthropology came to place an emphasis on first-hand
field work and the rigorous collection of data.
Two of the most prominent practitioners of ethnography in the tradition of Social
Anthropology were A.R. Radcliffe Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski. Much of their fieldwork
was done prior to World War II, and they gained world-wide reputations. After WWII, both
took positions in the United States and influenced a large number of American students.
Neo-Evolutionism
The expanding influence of functionalism met with a renewed interest in generalization
after WWII. In part, this was due to the growing influence of Marxist thought, which was heavily
influenced by Marx’s and Engel’s readings of L.H. Morgan. Even in the McCarthy era of the
1950s, when being openly Marxist was dangerous in the United States, the perspective thrived
under the neo-evolutionary label.
Neo-evolutionism sought to meld the search for patterns in cultural change through time
with the functionalist perspective regarding the integration of social systems. Adaptation to the
environment became a central theme as one of the prime forces driving social change. This
perspective remains an important part of many archaeological syntheses today and still is very
influential in social-cultural anthropology.
Hermeneutics and Symbolic Approaches
Partly as a reaction to the increasingly popularity of functionalist and neo-evolutionary
approaches, hermeneutics developed as a movement to emphasize the non-biological aspects of
culture. Hermeneutics is based upon the premise that cultural systems are primarily symbolic and
are constructed via internal understandings of the world, understanding which are mediated by
language. Hence, the goal of hermeneutics is to understand the symbolic nature of culture and
how culture operates as an internally consistent and self-referential system. By definition,
hermeneutic approaches demand that the analyst attempt to understand how her or his subject
views the world. In this sense, it ultimately traces its roots back to Boasian perspectives on
culture as a psychological phenomenon.
Tensions and Conflicts
In many respects, anthropology today can be seen as an ongoing dialogue between
culture historical approaches (derived from Boas) and functionalist approaches (derived from
Durkheim). It is part of a much larger discourse and conflict between materialist and idealist
approaches to the social sciences.
Functionalists view themselves as scientific in their approaches, while culture historical
practitioners tend be more humanistic. In the past twenty years, more and more socio-cultural
anthropologists in the US have favored the culture-historical side of the equation, and eschewed
attempts to view their subjects via scientific methodologies. That trend has produced tensions
between cultural anthropologists on the one hand and physical anthropologists on the other. The
latter prefer to be rigorously scientific as are others who study biological evolution in non-human
species. Hence, a schism has developed in anthropology as a whole; in many departments
physical anthropologists have felt obliged to leave for biology programs in order to feel the love
of like-minded people.
It seems odd to me than in a discipline shaped by the concept of cultural relativity, people
of different intellectual perspectives cannot learn to live together. I continue to hope for
reconciliation that will preserve the integrated an holistic perspective of anthropology.