A Brief History of Anthropology

BEFORE SOCIAL/CULTURAL

ANTHROPOLOGY

Over 13,000 exhibits were displayed and viewed by over 6,200,000 visitors to the exhibition the Great Exhibition of 1851. Visitors marveled at the industrial revolution that was propelling Britain into the greatest power of the time.

The Crystal Palace, Hyde Park, London, 1st May to 15th October 1851.

1850 inventions/discoveries•2nd law of thermodynamics formulated•theory of primary numbers formulated•speed of nervous impulses determined•refrigeration to -30C •first cast iron railway bridge•first submarine telegraph cable•first flash photograph •first typewriter with a ribbon and keyboard•first daily weather maps (in USA)•first rubber hoses•steam hammer invented•first photographic paper (replacing glass)

•first cast iron bridge•first submarine•First electronic (telegraphic) transmission of an image (FAX)•measurement of speed of light to within 1% of true speed•Theory of continental drift first proposed•first delivery of piped water under pressure•first description of ion exchange•first use of a thermometer to measure a patients temperature•discovery that anthrax caused by a bacterium •first public health organization (in USA)

“anthropology is that great science which is now engrossing the attention of all thinking men and women' (anon. Anthropological Review 1868).  `at no previous time has the mind of thinking men been fixed on the subject of human origin, so generally, so intently, so discordantly, and, on the whole, so rationally as now' (anon. Anthropological Review 1869: 4).

To the Victorian mind it was far better to be civilized than to be a “savage”

1.Degenerationism Versus Progress

Three Problems

 “We have no reason to believe any community ever did, or ever can, emerge, unassisted by external helps from a state of utter barbarism into anything that can be called civilisation. Man has not emerged from the savage state; the progress of any community in civilisation, by its own internal means, must always have begun from a condition removed from that of complete barbarism, out of which it does not appear that men ever did or can raise themselves.”

Richard Whately, the Archbishop of Dublin, On the Origin of Civilization (1857)

2.Monogenism Versus Polygenism

3.Diffusion vs. Independent Invention

Edward Gibbon(1737-94)

James Ussher (1581-1656), Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland

Based on an intricate correlation of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean histories and Holy scriptures, he established the first day of creation as Sunday 23 October 4004 BC.

This date was incorporated into an authorized version of the Bible printed in 1701, and came to be regarded with almost as much unquestioning reverence as the Bible itself.

Dr. John Lightfoot (1602-1675) Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge refined the date to October 23, 4004 B.C., at nine o'clock in the morning

“the low [i.e. recent] antiquity of our species is not controverted by any experienced geologist. It is never pretended that our race co-existed with assemblages of animals and plants of which all or even a large proportion of species are extinct” (Lyell 1837: 249; emphasis original).

Anthropology: A Branch of History

`the history, not of tribes or nations, but of the condition of knowledge, religion, art, custom, and the like among them' (Tylor 1871 I: 5).

"no conception can be understood except through its history is a maxim which all ethnographers may adopt as a standing rule". (Tylor 1871).

`the past is continuously needed to explain the present and the whole to explain the part' (Tylor 1865: 2).

`there seems no human thought so primitive as to have lost its bearing on our own thought, nor so ancient as to have broken its connection with our own life' (Tylor 1871).

Making Stone Tools New Guinea

Australia

The Savage Becomes the Primitive

`the master-key to the investigation of man's primeval condition is held by Prehistoric Archaeology.

This key is the evidence of the Stone Age, proving that men of remotely ancient ages were in the savage state' (Tylor 1871 I: 58).

E. B. Tylor

1832-1917

“Looking over a collection of their [quaternary man's] implements and weapons on a museum shelf we may fairly judge by analogy that in their moral habits, as in their material arts, they had much in common with the rudest savages of modern times, users like them of chipped stone and flint.” (Tylor 1873a: 702)

“The condition of savage and barbarous tribes often more or less fairly represent stages of culture through which our own ancestors passed long ago' (Tylor 1871)

Central tenet

By comparing the various stages of civilization among races known to history, with the aid of archaeological inference from the remains of prehistoric tribes, it seems possible to judge in a rough way of an early general condition of man, which from our point of view is to be regarded as primitive condition…This hypothetical primitive condition corresponds in a considerable degree to that of modern savage tribes, who in spite of their difference and distance, have in common certain elements of civilization, which seem remains of an early state of the human race at large.” p. 21

CIVILIZATION: Writing, urban life; flowering of arts, architecture

BARBARISM: settled life; markets, rise of chiefs and kings, agriculture, arts develop

SAVAGERY: hunting and gathering; no surplus production; no permanent cohesive unit wider than band, stone tools

universal sequence of “stages” through

which it was hypothesized all

societies will sooner or later pass unless their development is

arrested by some exogenous

circumstance (extinction, conquest,

absorption by another society or

achieving a perfect equilibrium with the

environment)

Uniformitarian principle

The same kind of development in culture which has gone on inside our range of knowledge has also gone on outside it, its course of proceeding being unaffected by our having or not having reporters present. If any one holds that human thought and action were worked out in primæval times according to laws essentially other than those of the modern world, it is for him to prove by valid evidence this anomalous state of things, otherwise the doctrine of permanent principle will hold good, as in astronomy or geology. That the tendency of culture has been similar throughout the existence of human society, and that we may fairly judge from its known historic course what its prehistoric course may have been, is a theory clearly entitled to precedence as a fundamental principle of ethnographic research. (1871a I: 32-33)

Hand Gonne c.1400

Matchlock 1400-1700

Wheellock 1500-1820

Flintlock 1608-1865

The phenomena of Culture may be classified and arranged, stage by stage, in a probable order of evolution” p. 6

U N I F O R M I T Y O F S T A G E S

A present day society in the stage of Barbarism (e.g. Hawai’i or Samoa) could shed light on the distant past when northern European society was in the stage of Barbarism

just as an Australian Aboriginal society could inform Europeans of their history in the stage of Savagery Hawai

’i

EuropeansAustralia

n Aborigine

s

“Among evidence aiding us to trace the course which the civilization of the world has actually followed, is that great class of facts to denote which I have found it convenient to introduce the term”Survivals”. These are processes, customs, opinions, and so forth which have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which they had their original home, and they thus remain as proofs and examples of an older condition of culture out of which a newer has evolved…. Such examples lead us back to the habits of hundreds and even thousands of years ago, p. 16.

“games, popular sayings, customs, superstitions, and the like”.

Survivals

Outskirts of London, 1891

Maypole Dancing

first stage was a time of sexual promiscuity

Female infanticide led to a shortage of women, who had to be shared in a polyandrous matriarchal situation

Because men don’t like to share wives they captured them from neighbors (exogamy) – patriarchy and monogamy

John Ferguson McLennan, (1827-81)1865 Primitive Marriage: An Enquiry into the Origin of the Form of Capture in Marriage Ceremonies

Lewis Henry Morgan(1818 – 1881)

1851 League of the Iroquois

1871 Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity

1877 Ancient Society

Assumptions of Nineteenth Century Evolutionism

1. Like the natural world the cultural world is governed by laws that science can discover.

2. These laws operated on the distant past as they do on the present. - Uniformitariamism

3. The present grows out of the past by a continuous process - developmentalism

4. This growth is simple to complex.

5. All humans share a single psychic nature.

6. The moving force of cultural development is interaction with the environment.

7. Different development is due to different environments.

8. These differences can be measured.

9. In these terms cultures can be ordered in a hierarchical manner.

10. Certain contemporary cultures are like earlier stages.

11. In the absence of data these stages can be reconstructed by the comparative method.

12. The results of the comparative method can be confirmed by the study of survivals.

Assumptions of Nineteenth Century Evolutionism Continued

What was wrong with evolutionism?

EVOLUTION VS. DIFFUSION

EVOLUTION = the directional nature of the pattern of change of human societies and cultures over time — in the direction of increasing complexity, internal integration, and control over Nature

DIFFUSION = the movement of cultural phenomena (inventions, objects, ideas, or even whole cultures) in space, from one place to another

DIFFUSIONISM: a conception of human cultural development which sees diffusion as a more common source of evolutionary change in societies than independent evolution — that is, the forces that lead to change are more commonly external rather than internal

The criticism of the Diffusionists vis-à-vis the Evolutionists was not that social evolution did not occur…

They believed it did — but not nearly so regularly as the Evolutionists believed

Most human history, they believed, was shaped by diffusion borrowing migration

Important advances (agriculture, animal domestication, metallurgy, state organization) were not invented multiple times in different places — they were typically invented once, then widely diffused

The Spread of Agriculture in Europe

Diffusionists’ take on human nature quite

different from the Evolutionists’:

• Evolutionists saw humans as inventive,

opportunistic, questing, possessing a

“psychic unity” which made disparate

groups equally likely to invent

• Diffusionists saw humans as much more

conservative…

clinging to old cultural patterns and

with a bias against accepting new

patterns…

and, when they did change, more

inclined to borrow than to invent

EXAMPLE: EAST AFRICAN CATTLE COMPLEXEXAMPLE: EAST AFRICAN CATTLE COMPLEX

• an item of technology which diffused into Africa from the Middle East circa 1100 CE — husbandry of dairy cattle

• first appears in Horn and Eastern Sudan, then diffuses progressively southward to the Cape (with exception of zone or tse tse fly infestation in Central Africa)

• everywhere social values become oriented to and expressed in terms of cattle (wealth, power, beauty, and even God)

• “cattle complex” cultures share a broad similarity of economic structure, social organization and values

A typical diffusionist culture complex:

THE SEVEN CULTURE CIRCLESTHE SEVEN CULTURE CIRCLES

1234 5

6 7

In the Vienna School view, the human race had originated in Asia, and the earth settled by processes of migration, which could be traced thanks to the great conservatism of the “culture circles”, which retained their basic patterns despite subsequent borrowing

THE BRITISH DIFFUSIONISTSTHE BRITISH DIFFUSIONISTS

Finally, the diffusionist idea was taken up

in England by a pair of Cambridge

professors:

GRAFTON ELLIOT SMITH

WILLIAM J. PERRY

Smith and Perry carried the diffusionist

idea to its ultimate conclusion — all cultural

advancement came from one single source,

the ancient Egyptians, who made the great

leap forward to civilization, and who

(through migration and borrowing) diffused

it throughout the worldGRAFTON ELLIOT SMITH

1871-1937

The Growth of Fieldwork

3 Impetuses

1. Increasing knowledge of other cultures

2. dissatisfaction with the quality and quantity of much of the data contained in the ethnological writings

3. the belief that the `savage' tribes in their `natural' state were rapidly disappearing in the face of contact with the more civilized nations

Increasing knowledge of other cultures

Explorers and travellers were replaced by government officials and missionaries who formed a closer association with the people they were in contact with.

Appearance of Literary journals such as •The Fortnightly Review (1865-1934), •The Nineteenth Century (1877), •The Academy (1871) •The Contemporary Review (1866- )

First Monographs Eg. The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899), B.

Spencer and F. Gillen's

Questionnaires

Notes and Queries on Anthropology 1874

Purpose: `to promote accurate anthropological observation on the part of travellers, and to enable those who are not anthropologists to supply the information, which is needed for the scientific study of anthropology at home' (BAAS 1874: vii).

`In view of the fast vanishing "primitive" cultures, and the rapid extinction of some of the more primitive and ethnologically interesting races the importance of such efforts to secure information ere it is too late cannot be over-estimated' (Balfour 1905: 15).

Fear that primitive tribes were rapidly disappearing

Alfred Court Hadddon (1855-1940)

1898 Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Straits

W H R Rivers 1864-1922

A typical piece of intensive work is one in which the worker lives for a year or more among a community of perhaps four or five hundred people and studies every detail of their life and culture; in which he comes to know every member of the community personally; in which he is not content with generalized information, but studies every feature of life and custom in concrete detail and by means of the vernacular language. It is only by such work that one can fully realise the immense extent of the knowledge which is now awaiting the inquirer, even in places where the culture has already suffered much change. It is only by such work that it is possible to discover the incomplete and even misleading character of much of the vast mass of survey work which forms the existing basis of anthropology” Rivers 1913

Survey Versus Intensive Fieldwork

Rivers’ “the goal of anthropology is the reconstruction of the history of `primitive' peoples

Balfour “the ethnographer's purpose is to determine their `place in time' (1905: 18)

Haddon's aim “to elucidate the `nature, origin and distribution of the races and peoples of a limited ethnological area and to define their place in the evolutionary tree‘

Still Evolutionary Theory

Two things were absent from fieldwork at this time

1. participation

`at Bendiyagalge we were particularly well situated to observe their behaviour, our camp being out of sight of the Vedda camp but within two hundred yards of it, here we could listen to their unrestrained chatter and laughter' (Seligman and Seligman The Vedda 1911: 85).

Most ethnographers at this time also relied heavily on translators

2. sociological theory

Emile Durkheim (1858-1917).

What is a Social Fact?

“A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations”

External to the Individual• found ready-made at birth

• Objective

Leaned

•Relative

Endowed with coercive power

A new variety of phenomena

•source is not the individual but in society a collective phenomenon

Social Facts Characteristics

Rules of the Sociological MethodSociety is part of nature and a science of society must be based on the same principles as those of the natural sciences Social facts must be treated as things I.e. objectivelyThe properties of the totality cannot be deduced from those of the individuals who combine to form it. Rejection of “methodological individualism”Social facts have to be explained in terms of their function

Functional ExplanationFunctional

function of a social item refers to its correspondence with “the general needs of the social organism not the individual

Function must be clearly distinguished from intention or purpose

Human societies consist of a number of institutions which over time achieve a harmonious “fit” to one

another

integrationserve adaptive ends — i.e. contribute to the

survival of the overall society function

do not just reflect universal human nature, but shape it in distinctive ways

determinism

The root idea in functionalism:

Functionalist view of a society (1)

SOCIETY

INSTI- TUTIONS

PERSON

• A society consists of a distinct set of institutions which introject distinctive motivations into its members from earliest childhood

Functionalist view of a society (2)

• Different institutions produce different persons with different motivations

Functionalism in a Nutshell

how does a social phenomenon contribute to the survival of the society as a whole

BRONISŁAW MALINOWSKI

1884 1942

Trobriand Is.

“Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear on a tropical beach close to a native village while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight”.

“Imagine yourself then, making your first entry into the village”

“Some natives flock around you, especially if they smell tobacco”

“He ought to put himself in good conditions of work, that is, in the main, to live without other white men, right among the natives”

“One step further in this line can be made by the Ethnographer who acquires a knowledge of the native language and can use it as an instrument of inquiry.” (p. 23)

The goal [of the Ethnographer] is, briefly; to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world” P. 25

Perhaps through realising human nature in a shape very distant and foreign to us, we shall have some light shed on our own. P. 25

The Goal of Ethnography

Participant• It is good for the Ethnographer

sometimes to put aside camera, note book and pencil, and to join in himself in what is going on p. 21

Observation• An ethnographic diary, carried

on systematically throughout the course of one’s work in a district would be the ideal instrument for this sort of study

inside view

outside (analy- tical) view

A functional account is an analyst’s account which asks what is the `sociological function of these customs what part do they play in the maintenance and development of civilization?”Functional accounts don’t worry about how an institution arose

–most institutional origins lost in the mists of time –can at most speculate about them (“conjectural history”

For functionalists, what is important is not how things originated but how they work (function)…

–how they contribute to peoples’ lives

language binds the community together

Magic warrants a myth's truth,

Myth expresses, enhances, and codifies belief; it safeguards and enforces morality'

Scientific knowledge ensures Man's survival

Religion establishes, fixes, and enhances all valuable mental attitudes, such as reverence for tradition, harmony with environment, courage and confidence in the struggle with different cultures and at the prospect of death

law curbs certain natural propensities, to hem in and control human instincts and to impose a non-spontaneous, compulsory behaviour'

Various Institutional Functions

‘Basic’ needs Food, shelter, sex, etc.universal this supplies a certain commonality to all human cultures and is ultimately what makes them comparable.Also makes ethnology scientificeach culture responds to the particular needs of its members through institutionsevery institution centers around a fundamental need For example, tools function to provide Man's food, and construct his sheltersThe variation in the form of the institution is culturally determined

Malinowski’s Hierarchy of needs

instrumental’ needs

but tools require skilled artisans and trade groups etc. In a sense, the tools themselves have needs.

These are instrumental needs

the three primary ones being economic organization, law, and education

integrative needs

these institutions must in turn be functionally adjusted to each other in order to form a more or less consistent pattern…

this produces requirements not of individuals but of the cultural system itself

2. STRUCTURAL FUNCTIONALISM

The dominant theoretical paradigm of the British school of social anthropology, 1930–1955.

Associated with the

theoretical writings of A. R.

Radcliffe-Brown in Structure

and function in primitive

society

A. R. Radcliffe-Brown 1881-1955

Biopsychological Functionalism or “Needs” Functionalism (Malinowski)

Structural Functionalism (Radcliffe-Brown)

Exchange Functionalism (Mauss)

Structural Functionalism

Structuralism: theory examines cultures in terms of systems of structured relationships between social phenomena.

Functionalism: theory that all social facts can and should be explained by their function in relation to society.

Structural Functionalism: societies seen as having structure and order, and all phenomena occurring within the culture are seen to have the underlying goal of maintaining the overall societal structure and order, despite individual motivation..

1. Society is seen as an organically structured whole akin to a biological organism.

2. Society has a social structure - an ordered arrangement of parts.

3. Structure is ideally integrated, unified, and exists in equilibrium.

4. This structure is the object of analysis; the most valued data is the structure you can abstract.

5. The function of Social activities and institutions is ultimately interpreted in terms of maintaining the whole social structure of the society

FIVE BASIC PRINCIPLES

INSTITUTIONS: Distinguishable sets of roles, norms, and statuses within a social system e.g. kinship system it is to institutions that the concept of “function” is applicable the function of an institution is its contribution to the overall perpetuation and adaptation of the society

For social life to persist or continue the various institutions must exhibit some kind of measure of coherence or consistence

THE STRUCTURE IS INTEGRATED

THE FUNCTION OF INSTITUTIONS IS TO MAINTAIN THE STRUCTURE

The problem for society is to survive — to maintain its structure

But basic human nature is inherently selfish and is therefore inimical to that survival.

Therefore the behaviour of individuals must be molded to the requirements society needs to survive

Conflict must be restrained and the conduct of persons in their interrelations with each other must be controlled by norms or rules of behaviour

Failure of the individual to follow these norms results in sanctions.

MALINOWSKI: Society seen as a nurturing, comforting, cocoon emanating from, and responding to, human needs

RADCLIFFE-BROWN: Society seen as a tyrannical entity, often at odds with human nature, which controls humans by injecting fears and anxieties into their psyches, and if necessary sacrificing them for its own sake

1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940

Boas

Radcliffe Brown

Malinowski

AMERICAN CULTURAL ANTHRO- POLOGY

BRITISH SOCIAL

ANTHRO- POLOGY

REACTION AGAINSTEVOLUTIONARY THEORY

FRENCH ETHNO-LOGIE

EVOLUTIONISM

DIFFUSIONISM

FUNCTIONALISM

DEVELOPMENT OF NATIONAL SCHOOLS

DURKHEIMIAN SOCIOLOGY

MODERN PERIODPERIOD OF GRAND THEORY