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Cultural Antropology 3:Anthropology and the Greeks:
Anthropology is a discipline with no set ‘time’ roots. It originated in 4 countries; Britain,
Germany, France and the USA, so it is a dominantly European discipline. The practitioners
like to trace their roots back to the ancient Greeks.
We differ quite a lot from the ancient Greeks, we peer into their world through cracked and
smokey glass. We see little city-states surrounded by farmland, family and kinship formed the
main social units, connected through trade with urban settlements along the Mediterranean
and Black sea. Trade in luxury goods and free labor, generated wealth to build temples,
stadiums, baths and public buildings.
Herodotus grew up in a colonial town in contemporary Turkey and gained knowledge of
many foreign people that he met while traveling to places Greeks had ties with. He wrote
detailed travel narratives form various parts of western Asia, Egypt, Ethiopians and Indus
valley.
These narratives have a problem that has pursued anthropology: ‘how should we relate to ‘the
others’’? Are they like us, or basically different? Anthropological theory has tried to strike a
balance between these positions. Sometimes talking/looking with prejudice and ethnocentric,
and sometimes acknowledging that different people have different values, due to different
circumstances and not because they are morally deficient (incapable).
This problem on relating to ‘others’ is the paradox of universalism vs. relativism. A
universalist would try to identify commonalities and similarities (even universals) between
societies, while relativist would emphasize the uniqueness and particularity of each society or
culture. The Sophists of Athens are sometimes described as the first relativists in European
tradition.
In Plato’s (427–347 bce) dialogues Protagoras and Gorgias, Socrates argues with the
Sophists. We may picture them in dignified intellectual battle. Other citizens stand as
spectators, while Socrates’ faith in a universal reason, capable of ascertaining universal truths,
is confronted by the relativist view that truth will always vary with experience and what we
would today call culture.
Plato’s dialogues do not deal directly with cultural differences. But they bear witness to the
fact that cross-cultural encounters were part of everyday life in the city-states.
Aristotle (384–322 bce) also indulged in sophisticated speculations about the nature of
humanity. He discusses the differences between humans and animals and concludes that
although humans have several needs in common with animals, only man possesses reason,
wisdom and morality. He also argued that humans are fundamentally social by nature. In
anthropology and elsewhere, such a universalistic style of thought, which seeks to establish
similarities rather than differences between groups of people, plays a prominent role to this
day. Furthermore, 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. (p.4)
After Antiquity: (P.4)
But 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, was the entire city
culture, the very glue that held the Roman Empire together as an 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.
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. Under the aegis of the Church, international
networks of monks and clergymen arose and flourished, connecting the pockets of learning in
which the philosophical and scientific traditions of Antiquity survived.
In line with Durkheim and the first anthropologists who utilized his theories, Khaldun (wrote
about Arabic’s) stresses the importance of kinship and religion in creating and maintaining a
sense of solidarity and mutual commitment among the members of a group. His theory of the
difference between pastoral nomads and city-states may, said to have been centuries ahead of
its time.
The European conquests and their impact: (p.6)
With the advent of mercantilist economies and the Renaissance in the sciences and arts, the
small, but rich European cities of the late Middle Ages began to develop rapidly, and the
earliest signs of a capitalist class emerged. Fired by these great social movements and
financed by the new entrepreneurs, a series of grand exploratory sea voyages were launched
by European rulers. These journeys – to Africa, Asia and America – are often described in the
West as the ‘Age of Discovery’.
The ‘Age of Discovery’ was of crucial importance for later developments in Europe and
the world, and for the development of anthropology. The travels of this period fed the
imaginations of Europeans with vivid descriptions of places whose very existence they had
been unaware of.
These travelogues reached wide audiences, since the printing press soon made books a
common and relatively inexpensive commodity all over Europe. 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).
The conquest of America contributed to a veritable revolution among European intellectuals.
Not only did it provoke thought about cultural differences, it soon became clear that an entire
continent had been discovered which was not even mentioned in the Bible! 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.
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 – from Shakespeare’s plays to
Rameau’s librettos. (p.8)
John Locke (1632–1704), the first great Empiricist philosopher, claimed that the human mind
was a blank slate, tabula rasa, at birth. Our ideas and values have their origin in our
experiences, or ‘sense impressions’, as they were called. One had an inborn intellect, but
,when sense impressions put their mark on the blank slate, the intellect combined them with
other sense impressions to form ideas about the world, that became points of departure for
abstraction and generalisation. Locke is laying the groundwork of a human science that
combines a universalistic principle (we are all born the same) and a relativistic principle (our
differing experiences make us different).
The seeds were sown in early modern philosophy, important advances were made in the
eighteenth century, but it was only in the nineteenth century that anthropology became an
academic discipline, and only in the twentieth century that it attained the form in which it
is taught today.
The enlightenment: (P.11)
The eighteenth century saw a flowering of science and philosophy in Europe. The self-
confidence of the bourgeoisie increased, citizens reflected on the world and their place in it,
and would soon make political demands for a rational, just, predictable and transparent social
order.
The key word was enlightenment (Aufklärung, lumières), shedding light on matters that had
been left in the dark.
the authority of God and princes was no longer taken for granted.
Bourgeoisie sought to free itself from the power of Church and nobility, and to establish a
secular democracy. Traditional religious beliefs were increasingly denounced as superstitions
or roadblocks on the way to a better society, governed by reason.
The idea of progress also seemed to be confirmed by the development of technology,
which made important advances at this time. New technologies made scientific measurements
more accurate.
But we are still in the eighteenth century, the ‘Age of Reason’, when the first attempts were
made at creating an anthropological science.
Giambattista Vico’s (1668–1744) La scienza nuova; Vico proposed a universal scheme of
social development, in which all societies passed through four phases, with particular, well-
defined characteristics:
1. ‘bestial condition’ without morality or art
2. ‘Age of Gods’, of nature worship and rudimentary social structures.
3. ‘Age of Heroes’, with widespread social unrest due to great social inequality
4. ‘Age of Man’, when class differences disappeared, and equality reigned.
Here, for the first time, we see a theory of social development that not only contrasts
barbarism and civilization, but specifies a number of transitional stages. Vico’s theory would
become a model for later evolutionists from Karl Marx to James Frazer.
Problem: Societies do not necessarily develop linearly towards constantly improved
conditions but go through cycles of degeneration and growth.
Yet another step towards a science of anthropology was taken by a group of idealistic French
intellectuals. These were the Encyclopedists, led by the philosopher Denis Diderot (1713–
1784) and the mathematician Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (1717–1783). Their aim was to
collect, classify and systematize as much knowledge as possible in order to further the
advance of reason, progress, science and technology. One of its youngest contributors,
Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794), wrote systematic comparisons between different social
systems, and tried to develop a synthesis of mathematics and social science that would allow
him to formulate objective laws of social development.
, The most influential contributor to the Encyclopédie was Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–
1778). Rousseau argued that development was not progressive, but degenerative, and that the
source of decline was society itself. Starting from an initial, innocent state of nature, where
each individual lived by himself in harmony with his surroundings, people went on to found
institutions of marriage and kinship, and settled in small, sedentary groups. Eventually, these
groups grew in complexity, and invented priests and chiefs, kings and princes, private
property, police and magistrates, until the free and good soul of man was crushed under the
weight of society. All human vices were the product of society’s increasing demands on the
individual, particularly the increasing social inequality that development entailed.
Most importantly, though, Rousseau was a mediator between the French-dominated
Enlightenment and the predominantly German Romanticism that took over the leading
position in European philosophy toward the end of the eighteenth century. Here, Rousseau’s
admiration for the original human being was further developed, the first theoretical concepts
of culture were put forth, and the outlines of scientific anthropology start emerging.
Romanticism P.15:
- Enlightenment thinkers saw society as a law-bound association of reasoning citizens
- Romanticism cultivated the creative, emotional individual, and the warm-blooded
community of feeling – the nation.
Romanticism is often said to displace the Enlightenment during the years of reaction after
the French Revolution. Gellner (1991) suggests, to see the two movements as parallel flows, at
times diverging or competing, at times intersecting and binding together.
This is especially true of anthropology, which seeks not only to understand cultural wholes
(a Romantic project), but also to dissect, analyse and compare them (an enterprise of the
Enlightenment).
Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803): Herder attacks French universalism and argues that human
experience is a totality that cannot be split into separate functions, such as reason, sense
perception and emotion. Every people (Volk) shares a holistic, bodily experience, grounded in
common history, common dependence on local natural environments and a national
character (Volksgeist) that expressed itself through language, folklore and myths. Herder is
considerd the father of anthropological concepts and relativism.
The greatest philosopher of the time was Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Here we consider him
a German Romanticist in order to highlight how his work was continued by the Romanticist
Hegel. The Romantic element in Kant lies in his overcoming the split between sensual and
rational knowledge.
Kant argued that empiricism and rationalism were not opposed, but two sides of the same
coin. Knowledge was both sensual and mathematical, objective and subjective.
The problem was not a matter of choosing between extremes, but of demonstrating how
they presuppose each other.
After Kant’s revolution, knowledge no longer consisted of mental images that reflected
reality as it is in itself more or less adequately, but of mental judgements based on criteria that
are subjective (they exist only in the mind), but also objective (they are universally present in
every knowing mind).
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