29 Progress and development in Anthropology

Suvendu Maji

Contents:

Introduction

History and path breaking contribution of different eminent contributors around the world

National Anthropological Traditions

20th Century Development in Anthropological Ideas and Research

Brief history and Progress of Anthropological Theory

Conclusion

Summary

Learning Objectives:

• History and path breaking contribution of different eminent contributors around the world.
• Chronologically arranged different milestone events around the world that explain the development of the discipline
• Few path breaking publications that direct the future pathway of the Anthropological research and development
• Brief history and Progress of Anthropological Theory

    Introduction

History of anthropology refers primarily to the 18th- and 19th-century precursors of modern anthropology. The development of the anthropological thought has sprung in the 19th century with the enlightening theory of philosophical rationalism. Through a logical interpretative endeavour, phylogenetically man’s rationality followed an inevitable development as a byproduct of continuous biological and cultural evolutionary processes. The development of different school of thought along with different time and space thoroughly explained in the following sections.

History and path breaking contribution of different eminent contributors around the world

The term anthropology itself, innovated as a New Latin scientific word during the Renaissance, has always meant “the study (or science) of man.” The topics to be included and the terminology have varied historically. Marvin Harris, a historian of anthropology, begins that the ‘Rise of Anthropological Theory’ with the statement that anthropology is “the science of history.”[1] He is not suggesting that history be renamed to anthropology, or that there is no distinction between history and prehistory, or that anthropology excludes current social practices, as the general meaning of history, which it has in “history of anthropology,” would seem to imply. As one of the founders of cultural anthropology, Harris used the term “history” in a special sense. He used it as: [1] “the natural history of society,” in the words of Herbert Spencer, [1] or the “universal history of mankind”. According to Harris, the 19th-century anthropologists were theorizing under the presumption that the development of society followed some sort of laws. He decries the loss of that view in the 20th century by the denial that any laws are discernable or that current institutions have any bearing on ancient. He coins the term ideographic for them. The 19th-century views, on the other hand, are nomothetic; that is, they provide laws. He intends “to reassert the methodological priority of the search for the laws of history in the science of man.” [1] He is looking for “a general theory of history.” [1] His perception of the laws: “I believe that the analogue of the Darwinian strategy in the realm of sociocultural phenomena is the principle of techno-environmental and techno-economic determinism,” he calls cultural materialism, which he also details in Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture. Elsewhere he refers to “my theories of historical determinism,” defining the latter: “By a deterministic relationship among cultural phenomena, I mean merely that similar variables under similar conditions tend to give rise to similar consequences.”[1] The use of “tends to” implies some degree of freedom to happen or not happen, but in strict determinism, given certain causes, the result and only that result must occur. Different philosophers, however, use determinism in different senses. The deterministic element that Harris sees is lack of human social engineering: “free will and moral choice have had virtually no significant effect upon the direction taken thus far by evolving systems of social life.” [1]

He borrows terms from linguistics: just as a phon-etic system is a description of sounds developed without regard to the meaning and structure of the language, while a phon-emic system describes the meaningful sounds actually used within the language, so anthropological data can be emic and etic. He makes a further distinction between synchronic and diachronic. [1] Synchronic (“same time”) with reference to anthropological data is contemporaneous and cross-cultural. Diachronic (“through time”) data shows the development of lines through time. Cultural materialism, being a “processually holistic and globally comparative scientific research strategy” must depend for accuracy on all four types of data. [1] Cultural materialism differs from the others by the insertion of culture as the effect. Different material factors produce different cultures. Harris, like many other anthropologists, in looking for anthropological method and data before the use of the term anthropology, had little difficulty finding them among the ancient authors. Apart from a rudimentary three-age system, the stages of history, such as are found in Lubbock, Tylor, Morgan, Marx and others, are yet unformulated. The Enlightenment roots of the discipline

Many scholars consider modern anthropology as an outgrowth of the Age of Enlightenment (1715– 89),[2] a period when Europeans attempted to study human behaviour systematically, the known varieties of which had been increasing since the fifteenth century as a result of the first European colonization wave. The traditions of jurisprudence, history, philology, and sociology then evolved into something more closely resembling the modern views of these disciplines and informed the development of the social sciences, of which anthropology was a part.

It took Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) 25 years to write one of the first major treatises on anthropology, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), which treats it as a branch of philosophy. [3] Kant is not generally considered to be a modern anthropologist, as he never left his region of Germany, nor did he study any cultures besides his own.[4] He did, however, begin teaching an annual course in anthropology in 1772.

Institutionally, anthropology emerged from the development of natural history (expounded by authors such as Buffon) that occurred during the European colonization of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century’s. Programs of ethnographic study originated in this era as the study of the “human primitives” overseen by colonial administrations.

There was a tendency in late eighteenth century Enlightenment thought to understand human society as natural phenomena that behaved according to certain principles and that could be observed empirically. In some ways, studying the language, culture, physiology, and artifacts of European colonies was not unlike studying the flora and fauna of those places. Early anthropology was divided between proponents of unilinealism, who argued that all societies passed through a single evolutionary process, from the most primitive to the most advanced, and various forms of non-lineal theorists, who tended to subscribe to ideas such as diffusionism.[5] Most nineteenth-century social theorists, including anthropologists, viewed non-European societies as windows onto the pre-industrial human past.

National Anthropological Traditions

As academic disciplines began to differentiate over the course of the nineteenth century, anthropology grew increasingly distinct from the biological approach of natural history, on the one hand, and from purely historical or literary fields such as Classics, on the other.

Britain: Museums such as the British Museum weren’t the only site of anthropological studies: with the New Imperialism period, starting in the 1870s, zoos became unattended “laboratories”, especially the so-called “ethnological exhibitions” or “Negro villages”. Thus, “savages” from the colonies were displayed, often nudes, in cages, in what has been called “human zoos”. For example, in 1906, Congolese pygmy Ota Benga was put by anthropologist Madison Grant in a cage in the Bronx Zoo, labelled “the missing link” between an orangutan and the “white race” – Grant, a renowned eugenicist, was also the author of The Passing of the Great Race (1916). Such exhibitions were attempts to illustrate and prove in the same movement the validity of scientific racism, which first formulation may be found in Arthur de Gobineau’s An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853–55). In 1931, the Colonial Exhibition in Paris still displayed Kanaks from New Caledonia in the “indigenous village”; it received 24 million visitors in six months, thus demonstrating the popularity of such “human zoos”.

Anthropology grew increasingly distinct from natural history and by the end of the nineteenth century the discipline began to crystallize into its modern form – by 1935, for example, it was possible for T.K. Penniman to write a history of the discipline entitled A Hundred Years of Anthropology. Non-European societies were thus seen as evolutionary ‘living fossils’ that could be studied in order to understand the European past. Scholars wrote histories of prehistoric migrations which were sometimes valuable but often also fanciful. It was during this time that Europeans first accurately traced Polynesian migrations across the Pacific Ocean for instance – although some of them believed it originated in Egypt. Finally, the concept of race was actively discussed as a way to classify – and rank – human beings based on difference.

Edward Burnett Tylor (2 October 1832 – 2 January 1917) and James George Frazer (1 January 1854 – 7 May 1941) are generally considered the antecedents to modern social anthropology in Britain. Although Tylor undertook a field trip to Mexico, both he and Frazer derived most of the material for their comparative studies through extensive reading, not fieldwork, mainly the Classics (literature and history of Greece and Rome), the work of the early European folklorists, and reports from missionaries, travelers, and contemporaneous ethnologists.

Tylor advocated strongly for unilinealism and a form of “uniformity of mankind”. Tylor in particular laid the groundwork for theories of cultural diffusionism, stating that there are three ways that different groups can have similar cultural forms or technologies: “independent invention, inheritance from ancestors in a distant region, transmission from one race to another.”[6]

Tylor formulated one of the early and influential anthropological conceptions of culture as “that complex whole, which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by [humans] as [members] of society.”[7]

Frazer, a Scottish scholar with a broad knowledge of Classics, also concerned himself with religion, myth, and magic. His comparative studies, most influentially in the numerous editions of The Golden Bough, analyzed similarities in religious belief and symbolism globally.

Bronislaw Malinowski and the British School: Toward the turn of the twentieth century, a number of anthropologists became dissatisfied with this categorization of cultural elements; historical reconstructions also came to seem increasingly speculative to them. Under the influence of several younger scholars, a new approach came to predominate among British anthropologists, concerned with analyzing how societies held together in the present (synchronic analysis, rather than diachronic or historical analysis), and emphasizing long-term (one to several years) immersion fieldwork. He made use of the time by undertaking far more intensive fieldwork than had been done by British anthropologists, and his classic ethnography, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) advocated an approach to fieldwork that became standard in the field: getting “the native’s point of view” through participant observation. Theoretically, he advocated a functionalist interpretation, which examined how social institutions functioned to satisfy individual needs. British social anthropology had an expansive moment in the Interwar period, with key contributions coming from the Polish-British Bronisław Malinowski and Meyer Fortes [8]

A. R. Radcliffe-Brown also published a seminal work in 1922. He had carried out his initial fieldwork in the Andaman Islands in the old style of historical reconstruction. However, after reading the work of French sociologists Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Radcliffe-Brown published an account of his research (entitled simply The Andaman Islanders) that paid close attention to the meaning and purpose of rituals and myths.

Post WW II trends

Max Gluckman, together with many of his colleagues at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and students at Manchester University, collectively known as the Manchester School, took BSA in new directions through their introduction of explicitly Marxist-informed theory, their emphasis on conflicts and conflict resolution, and their attention to the ways in which individuals negotiate and make use of the social structural possibilities.

In Britain, anthropology had a great intellectual impact, it “contributed to the erosion of Christianity, the growth of cultural relativism, an awareness of the survival of the primitive in modern life, and the replacement of diachronic modes of analysis with synchronic, all of which are central to modern culture.”[9]

Claude Lévi-Strauss helped institutionalize anthropology in France. Along with the enormous influence that his theory of structuralism exerted across multiple disciplines, Lévi-Strauss established ties with American and British anthropologists. At the same time, he established centers and laboratories within France to provide an institutional context within anthropology, while training influential students such as Maurice Godelier and Françoise Héritier. They proved influential in the world of French anthropology.

United States: From its beginnings in the early 19th century through the early 20th century, anthropology in the United States was influenced by the presence of Native American societies. Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881), a lawyer from Rochester, New York, became an advocate for and ethnological scholar of the Iroquois. His comparative analyses of religion, government, material culture, and especially kinship patterns proved to be influential contributions to the field of anthropology. Like other scholars of his day (such as Edward Tylor), Morgan argued that human societies could be classified into categories of cultural evolution on a scale of progression that ranged from savagery, to barbarism, to civilization. Generally, Morgan used technology (such as bowmaking or pottery) as an indicator of position on this scale.

Franz Boas established academic anthropology in the United States in opposition to this sort of evolutionary perspective. His approach was empirical, skeptical of overgeneralizations, and eschewed attempts to establish universal laws. For example, Boas studied immigrant children to demonstrate that biological race was not immutable, and that human conduct and behaviour resulted from nurture, rather than nature.

Influenced by the German tradition, Boas argued that the world was full of distinct cultures, rather than societies whose evolution could be measured by how much or how little “civilization” they had. He believed that each culture has to be studied in its particularity, and argued that cross-cultural generalizations, like those made in the natural sciences, were not possible.

In doing so, he fought discrimination against immigrants, blacks, and indigenous peoples of the Americas. [10] Many American anthropologists adopted his agenda for social reform, and theories of race continue to be popular subjects for anthropologists today. The so-called “Four Field Approach” has its origins in Boasian Anthropology, dividing the discipline in the four crucial and interrelated fields of sociocultural, biological, linguistic, and archaic anthropology (e.g. archaeology). Anthropology in the United States continues to be deeply influenced by the Boasian tradition, especially its emphasis on culture.

20th Century Development in Anthropological Ideas and Research:

In the mid-20th century, American anthropology began to study its own history more systematically. In 1967, an American Anthropologist, Marvin Harris published his The Rise of Anthropological Theory, presenting argumentative examinations of anthropology’s historical developments, and George W. Stocking, Jr., established the historicist school, examining the historical contexts of anthropological movements. In his work, he combined Karl Marx’s emphasis on the forces of production with Thomas Malthus’s insights on the impact of demographic factors on other parts of the sociocultural system. Labelling demographic and production factors as infrastructure, Harris posited these factors as key in determining a society’s social structure and culture. After the publication of The Rise of Anthropological Theory in 1968, Harris helped focus the interest of anthropologists in cultural-ecological relationships for the rest of his career. Many of his publications gained wide circulation among lay readers. In his final book, Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times, Harris argued that the political consequences of postmodern theory were harmful; a critique similar to those later developed by philosopher Richard Wolin and others. George W. Stocking, Jr., student on to attend Harvard University. He graduated from Harvard in 1949. From 1949 to 1956 he was a member of the Communist Party. Eventually Stocking grew disaffected with politics, and in 1957 he entered graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. There, he was a student in the interdisciplinary program on “American Civilization”, where he was a student of A. Irving Hallowell. In 1960 he earned his Ph.D. with a dissertation entitled “American Social Scientists and Race Theory: 1890–1915”.

Table 1: Chronologically arranged different milestone events around the world that explain the development of the discipline

Table 2: Few path breaking publications that direct the future pathway of the Anthropological research and development

    Brief history and Progress of Anthropological Theory:

1. Which aspects of life anthropologists concentrate on usually reflects their theoretical orientation, subject interest, or preferred method of research.
2. A theoretical orientation is usually a general attitude about how cultural phenomena are to be explained.
3. Ideas about evolution took a long time to take hold because they contradicted the biblical view of events; species were viewed as fixed in their form by the creator. But in the 18th and early 19th centuries, increasing evidence suggested that evolution was a viable theory. In geology, the concept of uniformitarianism suggested that the earth is constantly subject to shaping and reshaping by natural forces working over vast stretches of time.
4. The prevailing theoretical orientation in anthropology during the 19th century was based on a belief that culture generally evolves in a uniform and progressive manner; that is, most societies were believed to pass through the same series of stages, to arrive ultimately at a common end. Two proponents of this early theory of cultural evolution were Edward B. Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan.
5. The diffusionist approach, popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was developed by two main schools—the British and the German-Austrian. In general, diffusionists believed that most aspects of high civilization had emerged in culture centers from which they then diffused outward.
6. During the early 20th century, the leading opponent of evolutionism was Franz Boas, whose historical particularism rejected the way in which early evolutionists had assumed that universal laws governed all human culture. Boas stressed the importance of collecting as much anthropological data as possible, from which the laws governing cultural variation would supposedly emerge by themselves.
7. The psychological orientation in anthropology, which began in the 1920s, seeks to understand how psychological factors and processes may help us explain cultural practices.
8. Functionalism in social science looks for the part (function) that some aspect of culture or social life plays in maintaining a cultural system. There are two quite different schools of functionalism. Malinowski’s version of functionalism assumes that all cultural traits serve the needs of individuals in a society. Radcliffe-Brown’s felt that the various aspects of social behavior maintain a society’s social structure rather than satisfying individual needs.
9. In the 1940s, Leslie A. White revived the evolutionary approach to cultural development. White believed that technological development, or the amount of energy harnessed per capita, was the main driving force creating cultural evolution. Anthropologists such as Julian H. Steward, Marshall Sahlins, and Elman Service have also presented evolutionary viewpoints.
10. Claude Lévi-Strauss has been the leading proponent of structuralism. Lévi-Strauss sees culture, as it is expressed in art, ritual, and the patterns of daily life, as a surface representation of the underlying patterns of the human mind.
11. Whereas Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist approach involves intuitively grasping the rules of thought that may underlie a given culture, an ethnographic approach known as ethnoscience attempts to derive these rules from a logical analysis of data—particularly the words people use to describe their activities. Cognitive anthropology has its roots in ethnoscience.
12. Cultural ecology seeks to understand the relationships between cultures and their physical and social environments. Cultural ecologists ask how a particular culture trait may be adaptive in its environment.
13. The theoretical orientation called political economy focuses on the impact of external political and economic processes, particularly as connected to colonialism and imperialism, on local events and cultures in the underdeveloped world. The political economy approach has reminded us that all parts of the world are interconnected for better or worse.
14. Evolutionary ecology involves the application of biological evolutionary principles to the social behaviour of animals, including humans.
15. Feminist approaches were born from the realization that the study of women and women’s roles in other cultures was relatively rare. Some feminist anthropologists take an overtly political stance, seeing their task as identifying ways in which women are exploited and working to overcome them. Others simply try to understand women’s lives and how they differ from those of men.
16. For many interpretive anthropologists, the goal of anthropology is to understand what it means to be a person living in a particular culture, rather than to explain why cultures vary. The task of understanding meaning, these scholars claim, cannot be achieved scientifically, but can only be approached through forms of literary analysis.
17. Postmodernists take the interpretative idea that all knowledge is subjective, further arguing that knowledge is actively shaped by the political powers.

    Table 3: Schematic illustration of the

Conclusion

Evolutionism is often thought of as a nineteenth-century theory and it is not entirely unrelated to the commonplace idea of progress or to the notion of social development. ‘Progress’, in fact, was a very nineteenth century concept, and it is retained in our thinking today. The word ‘development’, with its present-day meaning of helping out people in poorer countries to be economically, at least, more like people in richer countries, is only about forty or fifty years old. Yet in some respects, this concept represents a re-invention of Victorian evolutionary theory. It suggests similar ways of thinking about relations between technology, economics, and society to those pursued by nineteenth-century reformers and social theorists. What many nineteenth- and late twentieth-century anthropologists have in common is a desire to understand causal relationships within a framework of ‘progress’ or ‘advancement’. Some late twentieth-century anthropologists have even taken up the search for human cultural origins, and this represents a promising development given especially the much greater sophistication of relevant cognate disciplines, such as archaeology, linguistics, and human genetics. Diffusionism in its pure and extreme forms is long dead, but ideas which grew from diffusionist schools, such as an interest in historical particularities and the notion of the culture area, have, if anything, increased in importance in the last few decades. Relativism has been a prominent feature of anthropological traditions, especially in North America, since Boas. In a sense, all anthropology is relativistic, as by its very nature the study of variety in human culture does, or at least should, lead to an appreciation of cultures in their own terms. Functionalism, like diffusionism, is a word few anthropologists would be associated with today. However, functionalist methodology remains the basis of anthropological Fieldwork. As Edmund Leach used to say, all anthropologists are functionalists when in the field, because they need to see how social institutions are related and how individuals interact with one another. Structuralism achieved great notoriety, thanks especially to the work of Le´vi-Strauss, which was in Xuential well beyond the boundaries of anthropology. Within anthropology, Marxist thought frequently had a strong structuralist element. Regional comparison as a theoretical paradigm took much from Le´vi-Straussian structuralism. Processual and interactive approaches had their heyday in the immediate post-functionalist era, but they too have strengthened with each challenge to the conservatism of static approaches of all kinds. Early British interpretive approaches, such as the diverse ones of Evans-Pritchard, Needham, and Ardener at Oxford, built upon functionalism and structuralism while rejecting the analogies on which they are based. They sought structures which are intuitive, and encouraged scepticism of formal approaches and universalistic comparisons. Postmodernist, poststructuralist, feminist, and Marxist approaches all amplify this through their emphasis on the relation between the culture of the anthropologist and the culture of the informant, and more particularly on the relationship between anthropologist and informant as people, each with their own understanding of the other. Anthropological theory has a complex history, but its structure can be seen through the in Xuences of individuals, the interplay within and between national traditions, and the development of new foci of interest, new ideas from within and from beyond anthropology itself, and (every few decades) new grand perspectives. [11]

Summary

As Boas stated in his article that “A last word as to the value that the anthropological method is assuming in the general system of our culture and education.”[12] In the last paragraph of the article he also mentioned that “Of greater educational importance is its power to make us understand the roots from which our civilization has sprung, that it impresses us with the relative value of all forms of culture, and thus serves as a check to an exaggerated valuation of the standpoint of our own period, which we are only too liable to consider the ultimate goal of human evolution, thus depriving ourselves of the benefits to be gained from the teachings of other cultures and hindering an objective criticism of our own work.”[12] The evolution of the subject ranging from the influence of Darwinian concept of evolution to postmodern criticism of objective based research continuously enrich anthropological thought and practices in multiple areas of man and his cultural productivity. In a different view anthropology was showcased as a scientific mirror that enhances the understanding of human reality. Voget explained the subject as “its scientific aim has been committed to a cumulative unfolding of the human reality, it would be strange indeed if it did not demonstrate periodic shifts in its theoretical conceptions of that reality, defined traditionally as man and his cultural milieu.” In any community man’s intelligence is a product of his lifetime experiences that faculty of intellect blossom in the upcoming cultural milieu. [13]