Book-Notes a History of Anthropology by Eriksen and Nielsen, 2001

A History of Anthropology by Eriksen and Nielsen, 2001

Victorians, Germans, and a Frenchman

1) 19th century- rise of modern Europe, the modern world, the Industrial Revolution. In the early 20th century, United States begins its ascent to world power, replacing the European powers.
2) Result of the Industrial Revolution was that production increased in both Ag and manufacturing which resulted in rise in population who migrated into the cities and to the other countries (United States, Australia, India, South America, Canada, South Africa, etc...).
3) New power relations arose, between colonial administrator and the Indian Merchant, between plantation owner and black slave, between Boer, Englishman and Bantu, between settler and Australian aborigine. International science emerged. If anthropology grew from Imperialism, sociology was a product of the changing class relations brought about by industrialization in Europe itself- all the founding fathers of sociology discuss the meaning of modernity and contrast it with pre modern conditions.
4) Biological and Social Evolutionism. Anthropology in 19th century Europe developed from an evolutionism ideal influenced by colonialism and Darwinism with social Darwinism, by Herbert Spencer. Social philosophy of individual competition- the fittest. However, leading anthropologists believed that all were born with roughly the same potentials and inherited differences were negligible.
5) Kant and Hegel, two philosophers of an earlier time frame believed that socially constructed reality must be studied on its own terms. Anthropologists classified and compared the external characteristics of societies all over the globe, sociologists were concerned with the internal dynamics of Western, industrial societies.
6) Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-81) was a lawyer from New York who was fascinated by Indians and lived the Iroquois for a time. He realized that most of the complexity of Native American culture would soon be irretrievably destroyed as a result of the influx of Europeans and considered it a crucial task to document traditional culture and social life before it was too late. Morgan was interested in Kinship. He devised a large-scale comparative study of kinship and the 1st typology of kinship systems and introduced a distinction between classificatory and descriptive kinships. He used this to study social evolution.
7) Karl Marx (1818-83)- it is his analysis of capitalist society that he contributed to social theory. Marx’s influence on social theory can be traced in many anthropological analyses to this day. His theoretical work can be traced to Hegel’s work from an earlier time. Marx retained Hegel’s dialectical principal, but argued that the movement of history took place on a material, not a spiritual level. Society consisted of infrastructure and superstructure. Infrastructure consists of the conditions for the existence – the material resources and the division of labor. Superstructure refers to all kinds of ideational systems- religion, law, and ideology. In all societies the primary contradiction runs through the infrastructure: between the relations of productions (that of organized labor and property) and the forces of productions (e.g. technology or land). When technological advances render previous relations of production obsolete, class conflict ensures and the relations of production are changed-e.g., from slavery to feudalism to capitalism.
8) Bastian, Tylor, and other Victorians-
• Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt trained German Anthropologist Adolf Bastian (1826-1905) as an ethnographer. He continued the tradition of volkskultur inspired by Herder. He was critical of evolutionism. His view was that all cultures have a common origin, from which they have branched off in various directions a view later developed with great sophistication by Boas and his students. It was Bastian’s work that embryonic principle of cultural relativism.
• Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917). First British Professor of anthropology, at Oxford. Significant work was his definition of culture: “culture, or civilization, taken in its broad, ethnographic sense, is the complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, laws, custom, and any other possible capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. (Eriksen and Nielsen 2001 [Tylor 1958{1871}: 1]: 23).
9) New Sociology- Ferdinand Tonnies (1855-1936), Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), Georg Simmel (1858-1918), and Max Weber (1864-1920). Tonnies studied simple/complex society dichotomy in sociology. Georg Simmel studied modernity, the city, and money. Durkheim impacted on anthropological themes and had immediate influence on British and French anthropology. In the United States, the main influence was Bastian and Volkerkunde School with Boas. They were oriented towards cultural history, linguistics and psychology rather than sociology.
10) Durkheim concerned with moral issues, promoter of social and educational reforms. He wrote Labor in Society and Suicide. And he founded the journal L’Annee Sociologique. His intellectual successor was Marcel Mauss. With Mauss, Durkheim wrote about non-European peoples. Which was a study of origins of knowledge systems. He believed in observable quantifiable data. He was convinced that societies were logical, integrated systems, in which all parts were dependent on each other and worked together to maintain the whole. He drew analogies between the functional systems of the body and society. He described society as a social organism. He juxtaposed traditional and modern societies without postulating that the former would ever evolve into the latter. Durkheim, unlike Bastian and the Volkerkunde School (Boas), was not concerned with culture, but with society, not with symbols and myths, but with organizations and institutions. He believed that society and mutual commitment are maintained by people’s perception of each other as different with complementary roles. Each carries out a different task that contributes to the whole. His last and greatest work was Elementary Forms of Religious Life. He tried to grasp the meaning of solidarity, itself, of the very forces that keep society together. Solidarity, Durkheim argues arises from collective representations- than and now a controversial term. He shows that religion becomes an important object of inquiry because the emotional attachment of individuals to collective representation is established and strengthened. The exotic could be understood as an integrated system of collective representations, whose function was to create social solidarity. He is described as founder of structural –functionalism, however it was a British school, developed by Radcliffe Brown and his students.
11) Weber studied Protestantism as a whole to formulate an explicit ideology that justified and even glorified the capitalist ethic. In Germany, there was great tradition of hermeneutics, the science of understanding and interpreting the viewpoint of an alien culture, person or text. Weber was interested in searching for motivations behind actions. It is an understanding and empathic sociology. He wanted to understand power. Marx and Weber saw that power is contested, overthrown, and society is changed. Weber focused on the effects of individual strategies to achieve power. Power, as he defined it, is the ability to get someone to do something that would not otherwise do. Legitimate power (authority) is power based on minimum of physical coercion and violence that has been accepted as a legal, moral, natural or God-given fat of life by a populace that has been taught to believe this is so. Three types of authority- traditional, bureaucratic, and charismatic. For Weber, society was a more individual and less collective endeavor than for Marx or Durkheim.

FOUR FOUNDING FATHERS

• The discipline of anthropology as we know it today was developed in the years around First World War. The men who were the considered the founding fathers were Franz Boas (1858-1942), Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942), A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955) and Marcel Mauss (1872-1950). They effected a near total renovation of the three national traditions of American, British, and French anthropology. All 4 were socially marginal in their societies. Mauss a Jew, Radcliffe-Brown, working class, Malinowski a foreigner, Boas a foreigner and Jew.
• Boas in 1886 came to New York. In 1899 became a Professor of Anthropology at the prestigious Columbia University. He became a teacher and mentor to two generations of students. He was skeptical of evolutionism and regarded diffusions with sympathy. He believed in collecting and systematically detailing data on particular cultures. Only then could one embark on theoretical generalizations.
• In Britain, anthropology became social anthropology, based on comparative disciplines with core concepts such as social structures norms, statuses and social interactions. In US anthropology became known as cultural anthropology. Culture was a wider concept than society. It included society. The science of humanity, concerned with everything human. He advocated a 4-field approach. Students were trained in all 4 fields later to specialize in one of them. He studied Inuit and Kwakiutl groups. He also worked with assistants who collected material on many other Indian peoples. When doing fieldwork he make use of the linguistically proficient members of the tribe under study, who would record, discuss and interpret the statements of informants. Some of these collaborators, including George Hunt, co-wrote several of Boas’s books on the Kwakiutl. Only recently has he been recognized. Fieldwork was team oriented. In opposition to evolutionism, he came up with historical particularism; each culture contained its own values and own unique history, which could, in some cases, be reconstructed by anthropologists. Boas was also a critic of racism and of science that inspired it. They argued that each race had a distinctive innate potential for cultural development. Boas answered that culture was sui generis, its own source. He coined cultural relativism. It is a method, not a methodological or moral imperative. Boas’ students include Alfred Kroeber (1876-1960), who founded the department of anthropology at UC Berkeley, with Robert H. Lowie (1883-1957), his long-time fellow cultural historian; Edward Sapir (1884-1939), founder of the department at Yale and the school of ethnolignuistics, Melville Herskovits (1895-1963), founder of Afro-American studies in the US, and Professor at Northwestern University. Later, Ruth Benedict (1887-1948), who inherited Boas chair at Columbia who formed the culture and personality’ school, and Margaret Mead (1901-78).
• Malinowski and the Trobriand Islands-In 1910 he moved to London. He spent nearly 4 years in the Trobriand Islands. When he returned he wrote Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) the most revolutionary work in the history of anthropology. Looked at the Kula trade, where symbolic valuables circulate over a lager area between islands of Melanesia. He described the planning of expeditions, the routes followed, the routes followed, the rites and practices associated with the Kula. He followed the connections between institutions such as political leadership, domestic economics, kinship and rank. He discovered a particular type of fieldwork method, which he called participant observation. To live with people one studied, and learn to participate as far as possible in tier lives and activities. For him, to stay in the field long enough to become thoroughly acquainted with the local way of life and use the local vernacular as one’s working language. Set a new standard. The sheer number of institutions and practices showed beyond doubt that a primitive simple society nears the bottom of evolutionist ladder was in fact a highly complex and multifaceted universe in itself. He named his theoretical program functionalism. All social practices and institutions were functional a fitted together in a functioning whole. He saw individuals, not society as the system’s ultimate goal.
• Radcliffe-Brown- was English working class. He did his studies on the Andaman Islands east of India. He read Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life and when his work was published in 1922 it was a brilliant demonstration of Durkheimian sociology applied ethnographic material. Spent years as an academic nomad, building up important anthropological milieu in Cape Town, Sydney and Chicago. Strong international network and was a celebrated exile when he took chair in Social Anthropology in 1937. Society is bound together by a structure of judicial rules, social statuses and moral norms that circumscribe and regulate behavior. Social structure exists independently of the individual actors who reproduce it. Look at governing principles of the existing situations. Kinship was a key to understanding social organizations in small-scale societies. Kinship was easily understood as a juridical system of norms and rules made it possible to exploit the analytical potential of kinship to the hilt. An unwritten constitution for social interaction a set of rules for the distribution of rights and duties. Kinship was a key institution of a self-sustaining organically integrated yet abstract entity called social structure. Structural-functionalists went on to study primitive societies: politics, economics, religion, ecological adaption, etc… Kinship was used as the framework.