A Brief History of Anthropology

Industrial Revolution

Science

Positivism

Rationalism – Reason

Rapid Change

Progress

Christianity under attack

Age of Empire

Philosophy of History

19th Century Characteristics

With the industrial revolution literally steaming ahead the 19th century was a century of rapid change

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

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).

“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)

Anthropologists could then use the `indirect evidence' provided by contemporary savagery `as a means of re-constructing the lost records of early or barbarous times' (1865: 5).

“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

Ona of Tierra del Fuego

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)

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

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

Flintlock1608-1865

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

“it is desirable to work out a systematically as possible a scheme of evolution of this culture along its many lines”. P. 21

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”.

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”.

Maypole Dancing Outskirts of London, 1891

E.B. Tylor 1832-19171871 Primitive Culture

correlates the three levels of social evolution to types of religion:

•Savagery — animism•barbarism — polytheism•civilization — monotheism

Also linked to morality

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

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

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

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. - Uniformitarianism

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

CRITIQUE OF EVOLUTIONISM

Is the Central Tenet Valid?

Is it Ethnocentric?

Did the Data support the theory?

Is the Doctrine of survivals valid?

The Growth of Fieldwork

N. Chagnon in Brazil with the Yanomamo

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

Onas hunting in Tierra Del Fuego c. 1900

•Tierra del Fuego has probably been inhabited for at least 9000 years.

•Around 1880 there were between 3500 and 4000 Ona

•In 1919 there were < 300

•By 1930 < 100 Ona remained.

•the last full-blooded Ona died in 1977.

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

Fieldwork conducted under an evolutionary paradigm did not necessitate participation. Since ethnographers were interested in establishing historical links with other cultures, the meanings which the myths and ceremonies they were describing had for the people concerned was of little interest

2. sociological theory

Emile Durkheim1858 - 1917

The Division of Labour in Society 1893

Rules of the Sociological Method 1895

Suicide 1897

Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1912

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”

When I perform my duties as a father or a husband for example, I fulfill obligations which are defined in law and custom and which are external to myself and my actions.

Even when they conform to my own sentiments and when I feel their reality within me, that reality does not cease to be objective, for it is not I who have prescribed these duties; I have received them through education.

External to the Individual• found ready-made at birth

• Objective

Learned

•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. objectively

The properties of the totality cannot be deduced from those of the individuals who combine to form it. E.g. Suicide rates

Social facts have to be explained in terms of their function

Functional Explanationfunction 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

• 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 MALINOWSKI1884 - 1942 1884 born in Kraków, Poland, then

part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire 1910: emigrates to England to begin postgraduate work in anthropology at the LSE1912 receives a Ph.D from the LSE for a library dissertation on the Australian aborigines1914 travels to the British Association for the Advancement of Science’s meeting in MelbourneSept 1914 War is declared while en route and Malinowski is classified as an enemy alien. spends 2 ½ years in the Trobriands

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 centres around a fundamental need For example, tools function to provide food, and shelterThe 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

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.

In the Trobriand Islands, a shaved head and a body blackened with charcoal are signs of mourning. This is followed by ritual wailing by the deceased maternal kin

How does this ritual mourning contribute to the survival of the society as a whole?

CRITIQUE OF FUNCTIONALISMWhat is the Functionalist view of Human Nature?

What is the Relationship between the individual and the society?

How do Functionalists account for change?

How do functionalists deal with conflict?

How is the function of a given institution determined?

How does one decide, or know what is good for the society as a whole?

Must all institutions have a function?

What is its methodology?

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

FRANZ BOAS 1858-1942

Boas en route to Baffin Island 1883 and Central Inuit; to study the reflectivity of sea-water

Inuit can perceive and name hundreds of colors and qualities of sea-water and surfaces unknown in European languages…

• distinctions which can be described ‘scientifically’ in physics and optics

• and which are of adaptive value to a sea-mammal hunting culture

Boas’ study: earliest anthropological attempt to describe a non-European ‘ethno-science’ in phenomenological terms

CENTRAL ESKIMO (IGULIK) STUDY

Analyst seeks to understand phenomena by grasping how they make sense within the framework of the subject’s thought-world i.e relatively

posing as a Kwakiutl dancer for a National Museum diorama, 1895

1885: First expedition to Northwest Coast (Bella Coola)

1886: First collecting trip for American Museum of Natural History (New York City) to Nootka and Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka'wakw)

— massive documentation of Northwest Coast culture

Anti-Evolutionist

Evolutionism assumes what it is trying to prove

Order of cultural traits is arbitrary, eg representative and geometric art forms

positioning individual cultures on the savagery-barbarism-civilization ladder discounts their particularity and integrity

sidesteps the important task of reconstructing unwritten histories for non-Western peoples

Rational psychological explanation is misleading i.e. people did not reason themselves out of their primitive state because one of the fundamental characteristics of people is that they act automatically and unconsciously

Three pillars explain cultural customs

1. Cultures can only be understood with reference to their particular historical development. Therefore each culture is unique

2. Environmental conditions

3. Individual psychological factors

CULTURAL/HISTORICAL PARTICULARISM

idea was not to make a preconceived hypothesis,

but to collect as much data about a particular culture without any theory

general theories of human Behaviour would arise once enough data had been collected

“We refrain from the attempt to solve the fundamental problem of the general development of civilization until we have been able to unravel the processes that are going on under our eyes”

Hallmark of historical particularism became the intensive study of specific cultures through long periods of fieldwork

CULTURAL/HISTORICAL PARTICULARISM

BOASIAN CONCEPT OF CULTURE

superorganic —the product of collective or group life; but the individual has an influence

unconscious — a filter through which reality is perceived, but which is not itself the object of attention

adaptive — culture ultimately helps individuals adapt to their environment.

SOCIAL AND CULTURAL

LINGUISTICS

ARCHAEOLOGY

PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

ANTHROPOLOGY

Four Field Approach

Cultural/historical particularism

“race, language, and culture” as independent variables

Relativism

superorganic

Cultural Determinism

Data Collection “without” theory

Emphasis on Fieldwork

4-field approach

FRANZ BOAS

Alfred Louis Kroeber (1876-1960) 1897 enrolled in a course in

American Indian languages at Columbia University offered by Franz Boas

1901 completed his dissertation on symbolism in Arapaho art in Montana and received the first doctorate in anthropology to be awarded by Columbia

1901-1946 first instructor of newly created anthropology dept. at U of California, Berkeley

“ no culture is wholly intelligible without reference to the non-cultural or so-called environmental factors with which it is in relation and which condition it" (Kroeber, 1939: 205).

“cultures occur in nature as wholes; and these wholes can never be entirely formulated through consideration of their elements.

Arapaho camp with buffalo meat drying near Fort Dodge, Kansas 1870. William S. Soule

SUBARCTIC

ARCTIC

PLATEAU

NORTHWESTCOAST

CALIFORNIA

EASTERN WOODLANDS

BASIN

BAJACALIFORNIA

N-EMEXICOSOUTHWEST

PRAIRIE

PLAINS

MESOAMERICANATIVE NORTH AMERICA: CULTURE AREAS

Cultural and natural areas of Native North America (1939)

The Superorganic

“The superorganic or superspsychic or super-individual that we call civilization appears to have an existence, an order, and a causality as objective and as determinable as those of the subpsychic or inorganic”

individuals have very little if any impact on a culture’s development and change

Culture plays a determining role in individual human behaviour.

Culture has an existence outside of us and compels us to conform to patterns that could be statistically demonstrated

e.g. changes in fashion show that cyclical patterns of change have occurred beyond the influence or understanding of any given individual. Kroeber showed that hem length, height, and width tended to move up and down in regular cycles,

Alfred Kroeber Culture Areas

Superorganic

Deterministic

First American Textbook in anthropology (1923)

Margaret Mead 1901-1978

1922 Barnard College under Boas, Meets Ruth Benedict.

1925-26 8 months Fieldwork in Samoa

Coming of Age in Samoa 1926

Is adolescence a universally traumatic and stressful time due to biological factors or is the experience of adolescence dependent on one's cultural upbringing?

nature vs nurture

The basic conclusion was that adolescence in Samoa was not a stressful periodfor girls

Because, in general, Samoan society lacked stresses

based on a detailed study of 68 girls between 8 and 20 in three contiguous villages

Mead described sexual relations as frequent and usually without consequence – or issue

Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (1983)

Mead did not spend enough time in Samoa and lived in naval dispensary with an American family rather than in a Samoan household

was not familiar with the Samoan language

ignored violence in Samoan life,

Failed to consider the influence of biology on behaviorDerek Freeman (1916-

2001) Mead had been lied to by her female informants and thus came to erroneous conclusions about Samoan culture and the sexual freedom of the girls

also went to Samoa with preconceived intention of showing that culture, not biology, determined human responses to life’s situations.

sought to discover extent temperamental differences between the sexes were culturally determined rather than innate biological

Mead found a different pattern of male and female behavior in each of the cultures she studied, all different from gender role expectations in the United States at that time.

Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)

The gentle mountain-dwelling Arapesh

Arapesh child-rearing responsibilities

evenly divided among men and women

The fierce cannibalistic Mundugumora natural hostility exists between all members of the same sex”. Mundugumor fathers and sons, and mothers and daughters were adversaries.

The “graceful” headhunters of Tchambuli

While men were preoccupied with art the women had the real power, controlling fishing and manufacturing

Mead's contribution in separating biologically-based sex from socially-

constructed gender was groundbreaking, gender roles."

Characteristics of Mead’s anthropology

Relativism

Ahistorical

Holistic

Participant observation

Romanticism

Humans select their culture, choosing some traits and ignoring others.

Where’s the history?

How are culture & individual psychology related? For example, does culture somehow 'cause' individual personality?

Is individual behaviour patterned? How? What best accounts for the observed patterns?

Circular -- Basic personality structure was inferred from some aspects of behaviour then used to explain other behaviour

linked anthropology with psychology

Culture and Personality - Critique