A Brief History of Anthropology

1. A Brief History of Anthropology

2. BEFORE SOCIAL/CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

3. 1st edition published April 25, 1719

4. first, I let him know his name should be Friday, which was the day I saved his life. I likewise taught him to say Master; and then let him know that was to be my name … as soon as it was day I beckoned to him to come with me, and let him know I would give him some clothes; at which he seemed very glad, for he was stark naked

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

8. 1850 inventions/discoveries • 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) • 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)

9. “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).

10. The value of science and the superiority of Western civilization was confirmed by • the evidence of material progress • The rapidly expanding European empires • the contrast with less advanced civilizations It was self-evident to most that European civilization was far better than the savage condition.

11. Three Problems • Degenerationism Versus Progress “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)

12. ancient ruins in Egypt, Rome, Greece and Central America seemed to confirm Degenerationism

13. Monogenism Versus Polygenism Oliver Goldsmith’s (1728-74) illustrated races (1774) • Did the various races have a single, or monogenic origin, or did they have a multiple or polygenic one? • Polygenesis threatened the notion of progress • If the diversity of cultures was due to the diversity of human minds then `primitive' humans lacked the capacity for self-improvement and no theory of progress could arise

14. Diffusion vs. Independent Invention Was culture the product of independent invention or was it the result of borrowing or diffusion Diffusion supported the degenerationist argument and suggested that savages lacked the capacity for self-improvement and had to borrow ideas from civilized cultures

15. Edward Gibbon(1737-94) One of the favourite pastimes of historians in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was to write histories of civilization Most `Histories of Civilization' were concerned primarily with synchronizing the history of Greek, Roman, Egyptian and other civilizations, with biblical history.

16. Based on a correlation of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean histories and Holy scriptures, Ussher 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. James Ussher (1581-1656), Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland • 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 short chronology posed an obstacle to the development of `prehistory'. Indeed, there was no `prehistory' - only history

18. Uniformitarianism • Lyell's uniformitarian assumption, by demonstrating that even the largest geological formations could be accounted for by ordinary laws of nature given sufficient time, broke the yoke of biblical interpretation and firmly established the great antiquity of the earth. • Acceptance of Lyell's theory made his time scale available to other sciences such as biology and anthropology. • But establishing the great age of the earth was one thing establishing the great age for Human beings was another.

19. “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).

21. 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).

22. Australia The Savage Becomes the Primitive Making Stone Tools New Guinea `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).

23. “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)

24. Central tenet “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) 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).

25. 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) 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

26. 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)

27. The phenomena of Culture may be classified and arranged, stage by stage, in a probable order of evolution” p. 6 Hand Gonne c.1400 Matchlock 1400-1700 Wheellock 1500-1820 Flintlock 1608-1865

28. 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 Europeans Hawai’i Australian Aborigines

29. Survivals 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”. Maypole Dancing Outskirts of London, 1891 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”.

30. E.B. Tylor 1832-1917 • 1871 Primitive Culture • correlates the three levels of social evolution to types of religion: • Savagery — animatism • barbarism — polytheism • civilization — monotheism • Also linked to morality

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

32. Lewis Henry Morgan (1818 – 1881) 1851 League of the Iroquois 1871 Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity 1877 Ancient Society

33. 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.

34. Assumptions of Nineteenth Century Evolutionism Continued 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.

35. What was wrong with evolutionism?

36. 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

37. 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

39. Human Nature • 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

40. EXAMPLE: EAST AFRICAN CATTLE COMPLEX Atypical diffusionist culture 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

41. THE SEVEN CULTURE CIRCLES 1 2 4 3 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

42. THE 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 world GRAFTON ELLIOT SMITH 1871-1937

43. HELIOCENTRIC DIFFUSIONISM • The British diffusionist school is usually called “heliocentric” because of the centrality of sun symbolism in ancient Egyptian religion • Smith and Perry cited as “evidence” of these cultural connections the frequency of pyramids and sun symbolism among world civilizations (e.g. Aztec, Cambodian, Chinese, Dravidian and Hindu, Greek) • Much of their theory suggested that most of the cultures of the world, having once been “civilized” through contact with the Egyptians, “degenerated” to more “primitive” stages of organization

44. The Growth of Fieldwork N. Chagnon in Brazil with the Yanomamo

45. 3 Impetuses • Increasing knowledge of other cultures • dissatisfaction with the quality and quantity of much of the data contained in the ethnological writings • the belief that the `savage' tribes in their `natural' state were rapidly disappearing in the face of contact with the more civilized nations

46. 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 • TheFortnightly 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

47. 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).

48. Fear that “primitive” tribes were rapidly disappearing Ona family of Tierra Del Fuego `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).

49. Alfred Court Hadddon (1855-1940) W H R Rivers 1864-1922 1898 Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Straits