The World Before Anthropology The Social Milieu that Gave Shape to the Discipline

2 Precursors 16 th C. – Age of discovery European world view  Europeans favored by God  “Savages” lacked Christianity, lived in a state of nature  Concept of “Natural Order” World understood in terms of religious beliefs  Galileo threatened with torture for supporting Copernicus’ idea of a heliocentric universe  Archbishop Ussher: the world was created 4004 B.C.

3 18 th C. Enlightenment Concern for freedom from religious authority Shift from ideas influenced by theology & supernatural causation to empirical inquiry & scientific objectivity Scientific method & universal laws of human behavior Rationality & natural law

4 Philosophers contribute concept of humanism Hobbes: the condition of man in a state of nature is a condition of war against everyone Rousseau: humans in a state of nature are essentially good, but ruined by civilization Locke: humans born as a tabla rasa, experience makes them what they are

5 Montesquieu: cultural differences explained by environmental causes, concept of cultural relativism Turgot: human diversity attributed to cultural, rather than biological causes Condorcet: belief in perfectibility of human beings

6 PROGRESS All peoples, including “savages” capable of progress to civilization Idea of the “noble savage” Psychic unity of human kind 1800 Society for the Observation of Man: comparative anatomy, languages, ethnography

7 The Comparative Method To determine degrees of civilization & assign each group to its stage on a universal evolutionary scale of progress Comparative method substitutes for lack of historical knowledge

8 Citizen Degérando “Small wonder that most travel accounts transmit to us Bizarre descriptions which amuse the idle curiosity of the vulgar, but which furnish no information useful for the scientific spirit” Human nature is fundamentally the same everywhere, attributed abstract ideas to natives Positive method, live among natives, learn language

9 Degérando differs from 19 th C “If the savage had not climbed the scale of civilization, there was no question of his capacity to do so” One thing was missing —the concept of race He represents the egalitarian humanitarianism of the Enlightenment

10 18 th vs 19 th Centuries 18 th : Civilization was the destiny of all humankind 19 th : Civilization was the achievement of certain races

11 19 th C. Evolutionary Theory Re: Debates on monogenism, polygenism, degeneration Religious reaction to Enlightenment = resurgence of theological interpretations Conservative political reaction to egalitarian optimism of the French Revolution Laissez-faire economics linked to industrial capitalism

12 Darwin: Origin of Species Materialist theory challenged theologians New ideas about the age of the earth (Lyell’s Uniformitarianism) Return to a doctrine of progress Spencer: “Survival of the Fittest”  the application of biological evolution to human societies