A Brief History of Anthropology

1. A Brief History of Anthropology

2. BEFORE SOCIAL/CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

3. 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.

6. 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)

7. “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).

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

9. 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)

10. Monogenism Versus Polygenism • Diffusion vs. Independent Invention

11. Edward Gibbon(1737-94)

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

14. “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).

16. 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).

17. 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).

18. E. B. Tylor 1832-1917

19. “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)

20. 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

21. 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

22. 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)

23. 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

24. 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

25. 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”. 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”.

26. Maypole Dancing Outskirts of London, 1891

27. 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

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

29. 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.

30. 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.

31. What was wrong with evolutionism?

32. 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

33. 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

34. The Spread of Agriculture in Europe

35. 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

36. 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

37. 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

38. 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

40. The Growth of Fieldwork

41. 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

42. 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

43. 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).

44. Fear that primitive tribes were rapidly disappearing `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).

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

47. Survey Versus Intensive Fieldwork 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 lifeand 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”Rivers1913

48. Still Evolutionary Theory • 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‘

49. Two things were absent from fieldwork at this time • 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

50. Emile Durkheim (1858-1917).