Summary study book Anthropology, Culture and Society - A History of Anthropology of Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Finn Sivert Nielsen - ISBN: 9781849649193, Edition: 2, Year of publication: - (Summary by chapter)
Take-home exam History and Theory of Anthropology (CA3)
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Communicatiewetenschap: Anthropology
History and Theory of Anthropology (S_CTA)
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Index
1. Proto-Anthropology .......................................................................................................................................................... 3
2. Victorians, Germans and a Frenchman ............................................................................................................................. 8
3. Four founding fathers ..................................................................................................................................................... 13
4. Expansion and institutionalisation .................................................................................................................................. 17
5. Forms of Change. ........................................................................................................................................................... 22
6. The Power of Symbols ................................................................................................................................................... 26
7. Questioning Authority .................................................................................................................................................... 30
8. The End of Modernism? ................................................................................................................................................. 36
9. Global Networks............................................................................................................................................................. 40
,A History of Anthropology
Anthropology is a discipline based upon in-depth ethnographic works that deal with wider theoretical issues in the context of
particular, local conditions.
- This series has a particular mission: to publish work that moves away from an old-style descriptive ethnography that
is strongly area-studies oriented, and offer genuine theoretical arguments that are of interest to a much wider
readership, but which are nevertheless located and grounded in solid ethnographic research.
- If anthropology is to argue itself a place in the contemporary intellectual world, then it must surely be through such
research. As Clifford Geertz once said, ‘Anthropologists don’t study villages; they study in villages.’
- It is not true, in other words, that the past is safe and immune to change since what has happened has happened. As
anthropologists interested in history have shown time and again, the past is something malleable and dynamic. Each
generation has its own past. This is our anthropological past.
The book is chronologically ordered. Beginning with the ‘protoanthropologies’ from ancient Greece to the Enlightenment, it
continues with the creation of academic anthropology and the growth of classical sociology during the nineteenth century. The
third chapter concentrates on the four men who, by general consensus, are considered the founding fathers of twentieth-century
anthropology, and the fourth chapter indicates how their work was continued, and diversified, by their students. The fifth and
sixth chapters both deal with the same period – from about 1946 to about 1968, but concentrate on different trends: Chapter 5
discusses the theoretical controversies surrounding concepts of society and social integration, while Chapter 6 covers concepts
of culture and symbolic meaning. In Chapter 7, the intellectual and political upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s are presented,
with emphasis on the impulses emanating from Marxism and feminism. Chapter 8 deals with the 1980s, concentrating on the
postmodernist movement and its close cousin, postcolonialism, two critical trends, which seriously challenged the discipline’s
self-confidence; while the ninth and final chapter presents a few of the major post-postmodern trends that emerged during the
1990s.
, 1. Proto-Anthropology
How long have anthropologists existed? Opinions are divided on this issue. The answer depends on what you mean by an
anthropologist.
- It is beyond doubt that anthropology, considered as the science of humanity, originated in the region we commonly
refer to as ‘the West’, notably in four ‘Western’ countries: France, Britain, the USA and Germany.
- Historically speaking, this is a European discipline, and its practitioners, like those of all European sciences,
occasionally like to trace its roots back to the ancient Greeks.
Herodotus and other Greeks
- Thanks to research carried out by anthropologists, historians and archaeologists, we today believe that ‘the ancient
Greeks’ differed quite radically from ourselves.
o In the classical city-states, more than half the population were slaves; free citizens regarded manual labour
as degrading, and democracy (which was also ‘invented’ by the Greeks) was probably more similar to the
competitive potlatch feasts of the Kwakiutl, than to the institutions described in modern constitutions.
o little city-states surrounded by traditional farmland where family and kinship formed the main social units,
connected to the outside world through a network of maritime trade relationships between urban settlements
(trade in luxury goods and slaves).
o Where male citizens could meet and engage in philosophical disputes and speculations about how the world
was put together.
- It was in such a community that Herodotus of Halicarnassus (c. 484–425 bce) lived.
o Herodotus began to travel as a young man and gained personal knowledge of the many foreign peoples that
the Greeks maintained contacts with. In these narratives, far removed as they are from our present world,
we recognise a problem that has pursued anthropology, in various guises, up to this day: how should we
relate to ‘the Others’?
o Sometimes he is a prejudiced and ethnocentric ‘civilised man’, who disdains everything foreign. At other
times he acknowledges that different peoples have different values because they live under different
circumstances, not because they are morally deficient.
- Many Greeks tested their wits against a philosophical paradox that touches directly on the problem of how we should
relate to ‘the Others’. This is the paradox of universalism versus relativism.
o A present-day universalist would try to identify commonalities and similarities (or even universals)
between different societies, while a relativist would emphasise the uniqueness and particularity of each
society or culture.
- Also, Plato, Socrates and Sophist were lingered up in the discussion.
- Aristotle (384–322 bce) also indulged in sophisticated speculations about the nature of humanity.
o In his philosophical anthropology he discusses the differences between humans in general and animals, and
concludes that although humans have several needs in common with animals, only man possesses reason,
wisdom and morality.
- It seems clear that anthropology has vacillated up through history between a universalistic and a relativistic stance,
and that central figures in the discipline are also often said to lean either towards one position or the other.
After Antiquity
- Under the influence of Alexander The Great Greek urban Culture was spread wherever he had power (North-India,
later: Europe, Middle East, North Africa). In this complex, multinational society there was of course an interest in
the ‘other’. Strabo, a geographer, wrote about strange peoples and distant places.
- when Christianity was established as state religion and the Roman Empire started falling apart in the mid-fourth
century ce, a fundamental change took place in European cultural life. Gone were the affluent citizens of the cities
of Antiquity, who could indulge in science and philosophy, thanks to their income from trade and slave labour.
- Gone, indeed, was the entire city culture, the very glue that held the Roman Empire together as an (albeit loosely)
integrated state. In its place, countless local European peoples manifested themselves, carriers of Germanic, Slavic,
Finno-Ugric and Celtic traditions that were as ancient as those of pre-urban Greece.
o Politically, Europe fell apart into hundreds of chiefdoms, cities and autonomous local enclaves, which were
only integrated into larger units with the growth of the modern state, from the sixteenth century onwards.
Throughout this long period, what tied the continent together was largely the Church, the last lingering
trustee of Roman universalism.
- Europeans like to see themselves as linear descendants of Antiquity, but throughout the Middle Ages, Europe was an
economic, political and scientific periphery.
, - The greatest historian and social philosopher of this period was Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), who lived in present-day
Tunisia.
o He developed one of the first non-religious social theories, and anticipated Émile Durkheim’s ideas about
social solidarity (Chapter 2), which are today considered a cornerstone of sociology and anthropology.
o In line with Durkheim and the first anthropologists who utilised his theories, Khaldun stresses the
importance of kinship and religion in creating and maintaining a sense of solidarity and mutual commitment
among the members of a group.
- In spite of the cultural hegemony of the Arab world, there are a few European writings from the late medieval period,
which may be considered precursors of latter-day anthropology. Most famous is Marco Polo’s (1254–1323) account
of his expedition to China, where he allegedly spent 17 years.
The European Conquests and their impact
- The ‘Age of Discovery’ was of crucial importance for later developments in Europe and the world, and – on a lesser
scale – for the development of anthropology.
- These travelogues reached wide audiences, since the printing press (1448) soon made books a common and relatively
inexpensive commodity all over Europe.
- Many of the early travelogues from the New World were full of factual errors and saturated with Christian piety and
cultural prejudices.
o Famous example is the work of Amerigo Vespucci
- In most of the books a contrast is drawn between the Others (who are either ‘noble savages’ or ‘barbarians’) and the
existing order in Europe (which is either challenged or defended).
o The legacy of these early morally ambiguous accounts still weighs on contemporary anthropology. Often
descriptions are denounces as telling more about the researchers own background than about the people
under study.
- This potentially blasphemous insight stimulated the ongoing secularisation of European intellectual life, the liberation
of science from the authority of the Church, and the relativisation of concepts of morality and personhood (revolution
among European intellectuals – an entire continent has been discovered that was not even mentioned in the Bible).
o Questions stated being asked of: what does it mean to be human? What was natural?
- Now it became possible to ask whether the Native Americans represented an earlier state in the development of
humanity.
o Notions of progress and development & people shaping their own destinies.
o Europeans examined themselves as free, modern individuals.
o Essays of subjective freedom: Michel de Montaigne: cultural relativist - ‘The noble savage’: an idea of the
assumed inherent goodness of stateless peoples.
- In the following centuries, the European societies expanded rapidly in scale and complexity, and intercultural
encounters – through trade, warfare, missionary work, colonisation, migration and research – became increasingly
common.
- At the same time, ‘the others’ became increasingly visible in European cultural life. But in most of these accounts
‘the others’ still play a passive role: the authors are rarely interested in their lifeways as such, but rather in their
usefulness as rhetorical ammunition in European debates about Europe, or about ‘Man’, usually synonymous with a
‘Male European’.
o Famous example was debate between rationalists (theory)(Descartes) and empiricists (methods).
▪ Descartes distinguished two kinds of substance (Cartesian dualism): that of thought and mind
(consciousness and spiritual life), which had no spatial dimensions, and that of the spatially
organised world (material world and human body).
▪ Descartes assumed an attitude of ‘radical methodological doubt’: any idea that may be doubted
is uncertain, and thus an unsuitable foundation for science. Cogito ergo sum – I think, therefore
I am.
▪ The individual is the measure of all things.
▪ Belief in reason.
▪ John Locke, the first great Empiricist philosopher claimed that the human mind was a blank slate,
tabula rasa, at birth. Our ideas and our values have their origin in our experiences.
▪ Locke did not claim that people were born with no abilities at all. One had an inborn intellect.
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