Chapter 3: The Prehistory of Anthropology © 2014 Mark Moberg

Anthropology as an academic discipline dates from the 1870s, but its roots extend to classical antiquity. Whenever different groups of people came in contact, they felt compelled to account for those differences. Classical Greek and Roman accounts of non-Mediterranean people were highly ethnocentric. The term “Barbarian” was coined to refer to those who did not speak Greek. Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder (d. AD 76) speculated about fantastic semi- human beings that lived beyond the margins of the known world. Members of the Plinean races combined features of humans and animals, leading to a belief that non-Europeans were not fully human. Such beliefs persisted for many centuries, even into the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Responding to the pleas of crusading churchman Bartolome de las Cases, who witnessed Spanish atrocities against newly converted Indians, in 1537 Pope Paul III declared Native Americans to be “truly men,” possessed of a soul and worthy of the sacraments. This unleashed waves of churchman across the Americas to convert Indians to Catholicism. Several orders, especially Jesuits, documented native societies and languages as part of their conversion work. © 2014 Mark Moberg

The ethnographic information amassed by Jesuit ethnographers prompted scholars to account for differences in human behavior and thought. During the Enlightenment (~1600–1815) scholars challenged the notion that behavior was innate. John Locke asserted that at birth the mind was an “empty cabinet” (blank slate) to be filled with the influences of one’s social environment. With its emphasis on human equality this doctrine was a powerful call for democracy, influencing both the American and French revolutions. The monarchies that were restored after the Napoleonic wars suppressed arguments for equality and democracy. Evolutionary theories were replaced with polygenesis, which held that God created the various races separately, intending darker skinned people to be servants to whites. By the 1830s, August Comte called for a positivist science of society that would apply the same principles as those of the natural sciences to explain social phenomena. He is often called “the father of sociology,” and many of his ideas were subsequently developed by Emile Durkheim. © 2014 Mark Moberg