Anthropology

Development of the Discipline

During the 15th century, Europeans set sail in search of additional trade routes, and they encountered peoples and places, flora and fauna previously unknown to them. Developments in maritime technologies and the invention of the rifle aided European influence and imperial expansion, facilitating in myriad ways greater intercultural interactions as well as processes of acculturation (forcible culture change).

By the start of the 19th century, Europeans had traveled and collected vast amounts of information regarding different peoples and their environs, feeding speculations about “human nature” and “human society” on a global scale. Around this time, the word anthropologist came into use in the English language. Formalization of anthropology as an academic profession occurred in 1884, as Sir Edward Burnett Tylor accepted the first university position in anthropology as a University Reader at Oxford.

Ethnography, which refers to the written, photographic, and/or motion picture account of cultural anthropological fieldwork, and anthropology in general, were linked to imperialism and colonialism. The same European countries expanding their spheres of influence requested ethnographic data about colonized people in order to figure out how to manage them.

Some colonial era ethnographers, such as EvansPritchard, were renowned for their defense of indigenous ways of life, and still others actively critiqued the colonial enterprise (e.g., Franz Boas). However, not all of the so-called great colonial powers developed a discipline of anthropology—Portugal and Spain did not—and not only colonials collected anthropological data. Colonial administrators also [Page 53]relied heavily on accounts from missionaries, merchants, and other travelers.

The three major homes of academic anthropology today derived from 19th- and 20th-century hubs of imperial expansion. They are continental Europe, Britain, and the United States. Although of similar roots and some convergence, there have been differences in approaches among them. There are many and varied thinkers and movements that have contributed to the discipline of anthropology. For example, proto-anthropology can be traced back to Herodotus (5th century b.c.e.) and his detailed cultural descriptions; and contemporary anthropology can also be described as an outcome of the Age of Enlightenment and its varied attempts to methodically examine human beings through empirical research. Heavily influenced by natural history and the theory of evolution through natural selection, 19th-century anthropologists adopted the notion of “progress” to describe changes in human cultural practices over time.

Lewis Henry Morgan of the United States, fascinated with American Indians and cultural change, provided great contributions to kinship studies in the late 19th century. Drawing on his own fieldwork, other ethnographic accounts, and responses to questionnaires he had distributed to missionaries and travelers, Morgan embraced ethnology, the comparative study of human societies. Morgan's book Ancient Society (1877) codified the cultural evolutionist position in anthropology, proposing that some human societies had progressed more than others. This universalist and unilineal theory of human development drew from French philosopher Montesquieu and included three stages: savagery, barbarism, and civilization. The first two stages included subdivisions of lower, upper, and middle; new inventions marked transitions from one stage to the next, such as the use of fire, pottery, and so on. These stages of development tracked differences and changes in technology, political organization, and kinship systems. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels viewed Morgan's work as validating historical materialism and also providing comparative data from nonindustrial societies. Engels would later write Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), paralleling Morgan's Ancient Society and tying their materialist strategies together.

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