With the rise of imperialism political and economic control over foreign lands in the 18th and 19th centuries, Europeans came into increasing contact with other peoples around the world, prompting new interest in the study of culture. The increasing dominance of global commerce, capitalist profit-driven economies, and industrialization in lateth-century Europe led to vast cultural changes and social upheavals throughout the world. European industries and the wealthy, elite classes of people who owned them looked to exotic foreign lands for sources of labor and goods for manufacturing.
In addition, poorer Europeans, many of whom were displaced from their land by industrialization, tried to build new lives abroad. Several European countries took over the administration of foreign regions as colonies see Colonialism and Colonies.
See also Capitalism. Europeans suddenly had a flood of new information about the foreign peoples encountered in colonial frontiers. The colonizing nations of Europe also wanted scientific explanations and justifications for their global dominance. In response to these developments, and out of an interest in new and strange cultures, the first amateur anthropologists formed societies in many Western European countries in the early 19th century.
These societies eventually spawned professional anthropology. Anthropological societies devoted themselves to scientifically studying the cultures of colonized and unexplored territories.
Researchers filled ethnological and archaeological museums with collections obtained from the new empires of Europe by explorers, missionaries, and colonial administrators. Toward the end of the 19th century anthropologists began to take academic positions in colleges and universities. Anthropological associations also became advocates for anthropologists to work in professional positions. They promoted anthropological knowledge for its political, commercial, and humanitarian value.
The Beginnings of Modern Anthropology. In the 19th century modern anthropology came into being along with the development and scientific acceptance of theories of biological and cultural evolution. In Danish archaeologist Christian Thomsen proposed that three long ages of technology had preceded the present era in Europe. Thomsen's concept of technological ages fit well with the views of Scottish geologist Sir Charles Lyell, who proposed that the earth was much older than previously believed and had changed through many gradual stages.
Evolutionary Theory. In this book, he argued that animal and plant species had changed, or evolved, through time under the influence of a process that he called natural selection.
Natural selection, Darwin said, acted on variations within species, so that some variants survived and reproduced, and others perished. In this way, new species slowly evolved even as others continued to exist. Evolutionary theory conflicted with established religious doctrine that all species had been determined at the creation of the world and had not changed since. English social philosopher Herbert Spencer applied a theory of progressive evolution to human societies in the middle s.
He likened societies to biological organisms, each of which adapted to survive or else perished. Spencer later coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" to describe this process. Anthropological Evolutionary Theories.
During the late s many anthropologists promoted their own models of social and biological evolution. Their writings portrayed people of European descent as biologically and culturally superior to all other peoples.
The most influential anthropological presentation of this viewpoint appeared in Ancient Society, published in by American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan. According to Morgan, human societies had evolved to civilization through earlier conditions, or stages, which he called Savagery and Barbarism. Morgan believed these stages occurred over many thousands of years and compared them to geological ages. But Morgan attributed cultural evolution to moral and mental improvements, which he proposed were, in turn, related to improvements in the ways that people produced food and to increases in brain size.
Morgan also examined the material basis of cultural development. He believed that under Savagery and Barbarism people owned property communally, as groups. Civilizations and political states, he said, developed together with the private ownership of property. Morgan's theories coincided with and influenced those of German political theorists Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. They saw communism, a new political and economic system based on the ideals of communality, as the next evolutionary stage for human society.
In the early 's, the type of ethnographic fieldwork advocated by Boas became an integral part of the Anthropology curriculum. The Vassar Program in Ethnographic Experience was established as a fieldwork option in , which was "designed to give students the opportunity to carry out ethnographic fieldwork under professional conditions. With ethnographic fieldwork established as its hallmark approach, anthropology was finally able to distinguish itself from the rest of the social sciences.
In the fall of , the Vassar College Sociology and Anthropology Departments split, illustrating the growth of anthropology as a discipline in the second half of the 20th century. The relevance of Boas', Benedict's, and other early anthropologist's contributions to the field today is also evident in the way anthropology departments around the country continue to structure their departments and curriculum. The "four field" concept of anthropology advocated by Boas, which stresses the distinctiveness yet complementarity of physical anthropology, linguistic anthropology, archaeological anthropology, and cultural anthropology, served and continues to serve as the model for the Vassar Anthropology Department's current introductory courses.
Soon after anthropology emerged as a distinct department at Vassar, faculty, students, and alumni had the opportunity to gather and reflect upon the development of the discipline as they explored the life and work of Vassar graduate Ruth Benedict.
At the Ruth Benedict Centennial, a number of invited prominent anthropologists and scholars, including Clifford Geertz, James Boon, Richard Handler, and Rhoda Metraux spoke at Vassar about the invaluable contributions of Benedict to the field of anthropology. Many of the speakers were pioneers of a new approach to anthropology called "symbolic anthropology.
Symbolic anthropologists believe that culture can be found in people's subjective interpretations of their own events, actions, and beliefs. These interpretive anthropologists continued to emphasize the importance of cultural relativism and ethnographic fieldwork to the discipline of anthropology. Students now need 12 Anthropology units for an undergraduate degree in Anthropology, and are required to take courses in 3 of the 4 fields.
In addition, two interdepartmental programs, Anthropology-Geography and Anthropology-Sociology, were established. We can't fly, run fast, or jump far, though we can run farther than any other animal. Many other creatures can kill and eat us. Yet, we are now the unquestionably dominant large animal on land, and our population has grown explosively, especially over the last 10, years. While we began as tropical animals and physically continue to be so, we have been able to successfully colonize most environments on our planet.
What has made this possible has been our ability to acquire knowledge and create technology to adapt to new environments. Any successful behavior, strategy, or technique for obtaining food and surviving in a new environment provides a selective advantage in the competition for survival with other life forms.
For instance, we have learned how to survive the winters in such areas as Northern Canada and Alaska with their extremely cold temperatures by storing food and creating artificial tropical environments in the form of well insulated houses, fires for heating, and clothes. Over thousands of years we also slowly adapt genetically to different climatic conditions. This largely accounts for the variation in human skin color around the globe. The most important core concept in anthropology is culture.
While there have been many definitions of culture, anthropologists usually consider it to be the full range of learned behavior patterns and knowledge acquired by people as members of a society. Culture is not genetically hardwired in--we do not inherit it biologically. We learn it from our parents and other people who are around us as we grow up. Anthropologists have come to realize that what sets our species apart from most, if not all, others is our heavy reliance and even dependence on culture for survival.
The progressive human development of cultural knowledge and technology over the last 2. Despite the power that culture gives us, it is a remarkably fragile phenomenon. It is constantly changing and easily lost because it exists almost entirely in our minds. Our written languages, governments, buildings, and other man-made things are merely the products of culture.
They are not culture in themselves. For this reason, archaeologists can not dig up culture directly in their excavations. The broken pots and other artifacts of ancient people that they uncover are only material remains that reflect cultural patterns--they are things that were made and used through cultural knowledge and skills.
Research in Anthropology. Anthropology is a dynamic field of study. Important new discoveries are made almost every week, especially in biological anthropology. The source of virtually all of this fresh knowledge is field work rather than laboratory experiments.
This method of learning and understanding by first-hand observation of people and other primates where they live is largely an inheritance from the naturalists of the 19th century. Because of the complexity of humans and their behavior in particular, it is extremely difficult to learn about them in any other way. Anthropologists are trained to do their research via the scientific method of enquiry.
This is the system now used in all sciences to objectively learn about natural phenomena. The well known 19th century British biologist, Thomas Huxley, aptly summarized what scientists do by saying "science is nothing but trained and organized common sense However, theories are not considered unchallengeable. If future evidence indicates that a theory does not adequately explain the observations, it is replaced by another one that does.
In other words, t he scientific method provides an objective system by which old assumptions are challenged and scientific knowledge grows. The scientific method has proven to be an invaluable tool for distinguishing between good and bad evidence for the critical questions of who we are and where we came from.
All rights reserved. The scientific method made easy --where it came from and how it works. To return here, you must click the "back" button on your browser program. The fiction of anthropology--a rugged adventurer who takes what he wants. Return to Menu.
0コメント