Anthropologists and Their Traditions Across National Borders
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Roosevelts' Giant Panda Group Installed in William V
News Published Monthly by Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago Vol. 2 JANUARY, 1931 No. 1 ROOSEVELTS' GIANT PANDA GROUP INSTALLED IN WILLIAM V. KELLEY HALL By Wilfred H. Osgood conferences with them at Field Museum be superficial, and it was then transferred Curator, Department of Zoology while the expedition was being organized, to the group which includes the raccoons although it was agreed that a giant panda and allies, one of which was the little panda, The outstanding feature of the William would furnish a most satisfactory climax for or common which is also Asiatic in V. Kelley-Roosevelts Expedition to Eastern panda, their the chance of one was distribution. Still an Asia for Field Museum was the obtaining efforts, getting later, independent posi- considered so small it was best to tion was advocated for in which it became of a complete and perfect specimen of the thought it, make no announcement it when the sole of a peculiar animal known as the giant panda concerning living representative distinct or great panda. In popular accounts this they started. There were other less spec- family of mammals. Preliminary examina- rare beast has been described as an animal tacular animals to be hunted, the obtaining tion of the complete skeleton obtained by with a face like a raccoon, a body like a of which would be a sufficient measure of the Roosevelts seems to indicate that more bear, and feet like a cat. Although these success, so the placing of advance emphasis careful study will substantiate this last view. characterizations are The giant panda is not scientifically accu- a giant only by com- rate, all of them have parison with its sup- some basis in fact, and posed relative, the little it might even be added panda, which is long- that its teeth have cer- tailed and about the tain slight resem- size of a small fox. -
Islamization of Anthropological Knowledge
The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 6. No. 1, 1989 143 Review Article Islamization of Anthropological Knowledge A. R. Momin The expansion of Western coloniaHsrn during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought in its wake the economic and political domination and exploitation of the Third World countries. Western colonialism and ethnocentrism went hand in hand. The colonial ideology was rationalized and justified in terms of the white man's burden; it was believed that the White races of Europe had the moral duty to carry the torch of civilization which was equated with Christianity and Western culture-to the dark comers of Asia and Africa. The ideology of Victorian Europe accorded the full status of humanity only to European Christians; the "other" people were condemned, as Edmund Leach has bluntly put it, as "sub-human animals, monsters, degenerate men, damned souls, or the products of a separate creation" (Leach, 1982). One of the most damaging consequences of colonialism relates to a massive undermining of the self-confidence of the colonized peoples. Their cultural values and institutions were ridiculed and harshly criticized. Worse still, the Western pattern of education introduced by colonial governments produced a breed of Westernized native elite, who held their own cultural heritage in contempt and who consciously identified themselves with the culture of their colonial masters. During the nineteenth century Orientalism emerged as an intellectual ally of Western colonialism. As Edward Said has cogently demonstrated, Oriental ism was a product of certain political and ideological forces operating in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that it was inextricably bound up with Western ethnocentrism, racism, and imperialism (Said, 1978). -
Franz Boas's Legacy of “Useful Knowledge”: the APS Archives And
Franz Boas’s Legacy of “Useful Knowledge”: The APS Archives and the Future of Americanist Anthropology1 REGNA DARNELL Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology University of Western Ontario t is a pleasure and privilege, though also somewhat intimidating, to address the assembled membership of the American Philosophical ISociety. Like the august founders under whose portraits we assemble, Members come to hear their peers share the results of their inquiries across the full range of the sciences and arenas of public affairs to which they have contributed “useful knowledge.” Prior to the profes- sionalization of science in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the boundaries between disciplines were far less significant than they are today. Those who were not experts in particular topics could rest assured that their peers were capable of assessing both the state of knowledge in each other’s fields and the implications for society. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington were all polymaths, covering what we now separate into several kinds of science, humanities, and social science in ways that crosscut one another and illustrate the permeability of disciplinary boundaries. The study of the American Indian is a piece of that multidisciplinary heri- tage that constituted the APS and continues to characterize its public persona. The Founding Members of the Society all had direct and seminal experience with the Indians and with the conflict between their traditional ways of life and the infringing world of settler colonialism. On the one hand, they felt justified in exploiting Native resources, as surveyors, treaty negotiators, and land speculators. On the other hand, the Indians represented the uniqueness of the Americas, of the New World that defined itself apart from the decadence of old Europe. -
History of the Human Sciences
History of the Human Sciences http://hhs.sagepub.com/ Herder: culture, anthropology and the Enlightenment David Denby History of the Human Sciences 2005 18: 55 DOI: 10.1177/0952695105051126 The online version of this article can be found at: http://hhs.sagepub.com/content/18/1/55 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for History of the Human Sciences can be found at: Email Alerts: http://hhs.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://hhs.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://hhs.sagepub.com/content/18/1/55.refs.html Downloaded from hhs.sagepub.com at Zabol University on November 23, 2010 03HHS18-1 Denby (ds) 8/3/05 8:47 am Page 55 HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 18 No. 1 © 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) pp. 55–76 [18:1;55–76; DOI: 10.1177/0952695105051126] Herder: culture, anthropology and the Enlightenment DAVID DENBY ABSTRACT The anthropological sensibility has often been seen as growing out of opposition to Enlightenment universalism. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) is often cited as an ancestor of modern cultural relativism, in which cultures exist in the plural. This article argues that Herder’s anthropology, and anthropology generally, are more closely related to Enlightenment thought than is generally considered. Herder certainly attacks Enlightenment abstraction, the arrogance of its Eurocentric historical teleology, and argues the case for a proto-hermeneutical approach which emphasizes embeddedness, horizon, the usefulness of prejudice. His suspicion of the ideology of progress and of associated theories of stadial development leads to a critique of cosmopolitanism and, particularly, of colonialism. -
Table of Contents
Vol. 45, No. 1 January 2016 Newsof the lHistoryetter of Science Society Table of Contents From the President: Janet Browne From the President 1 HSS President, 2016-2017 Notes from the Inside 3 Publication of this January 2016 Newsletter provides me in congratulating Angela very warmly on a task Reflections on the Prague a welcome opportunity for the officers of the Society carried out superbly well. Conference “Gendering Science” 4 to wish members a very happy new year, and to thank Lone Star Historians of It is usual at this point in the cycle of Society business our outgoing president Angela Creager most sincerely Science—2015 8 for the incoming president also to write a few forward- for her inspired leadership. Presidents come and go, Lecturing on the History of looking words. As I take up this role it is heartening to but Angela has been special. She brought a unique Science in Unexpected Places: be able to say that I am the eighth female in this position Chronicling One Year on the Road 9 combination of insight, commitment, and sunny good since the Society’s foundation, and the third in a row. A Renaissance in Medieval nature to every meeting of the various committees and The dramatic increase of women in HSS’s structure Medical History 13 phone calls that her position entailed and has been and as speakers and organizers at the annual meeting, Member News 15 an important guide in steering the Society through from the time I first attended a meeting, perhaps a number of structural revisions and essential long- In Memoriam: John Farley 18 reflects a larger recalibration of the field as a whole. -
Society: a Key Concept in Anthropology - Christian Giordano and Andrea Boscoboinik
ETHNOLOGY, ETHNOGRAPHY AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY - Society: A Key Concept In Anthropology - Christian Giordano and Andrea Boscoboinik SOCIETY: A KEY CONCEPT IN ANTHROPOLOGY Christian Giordano and Andrea Boscoboinik University of Fribourg, Department of Social Sciences, Pérolles 90, 1700 Fribourg, Switzerland. Keywords: Society, Culture, Evolutionism, Functionalism, Structuralism, Post- Structuralism, Dynamic Anthropology, Diffusionism, Relativism, Interpretive Anthropology, Postmodern Anthropology Contents 1. Introduction: semantic ambiguities of the concept of anthropology 2. Pioneers of Social Anthropology: Evolutionism and Society 3. The Idea of Society in British Anthropology: Functionalism 4. The French School: Structuralism 5. From Structuralism to Post-Structuralism and Their Influence on Agency Theory 6. Against Stability: Dynamic Anthropology 7. Diffusionism, Historicism and Relativism in Franz Boas: Culture as the Expression of Society in American Anthropology 8. Beyond seemingly objective facts: the interpretive anthropology of Clifford Geertz 9. Postmodern Anthropology: The Advent of Methodological Individualism and the Omission of Society. 10. Conclusion. Glossary Bibliography Biographical Sketches Summary In this chapter, we present the major anthropological currents that directly or indirectly made use of the notion of society in their theoretical reflections and analyses of empirical data. Having first clarified the polysemic nature of the term anthropology, we analyze the theoretical framework of early anthropologists who drew upon the evolutionist theories stemming from natural science. We then analyze British functionalism,UNESCO-EOLSS whose theoretical basis chiefly consists in a criticism of evolutionism, which was regarded as too speculative. Functionalism is characterized by its interest in institutions that, through their functions, generate cohesion in societies deemed primitive. TypicalSAMPLE of British functionalism is CHAPTERSthe empirical orientation of research put forward by Bronislaw Malinowski. -
Chapter 2 Alternating Sounds and the Formal Franchise in Phonology James Mcelvenny University of Edinburgh
Chapter 2 Alternating sounds and the formal franchise in phonology James McElvenny University of Edinburgh A matter of some controversy in the intersecting worlds of late nineteenth-century linguistics and anthropology was the nature of “alternating sounds”. This phe- nomenon is the apparent tendency, long assumed to be characteristic of “primitive” languages, to freely vary the pronunciation of words, without any discernible sys- tem. Franz Boas (1858–1942), rebutting received opinion in the American anthro- pological establishment, denied the existence of this phenomenon, arguing that it was an artefact of observation. Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893), on the other hand, embraced the phenomenon and fashioned it into a critique of the compara- tive method as it was practised in Germany. Both Boas and Gabelentz – and indeed also their opponents – were well versed in the Humboldtian tradition of language scholarship, in particular as developed and transmitted by H. Steinthal (1823–1899). Although the late nineteenth-century debates surrounding alternating sounds were informed by a number of sources, this chapter argues that Steinthal’s writings served as a key point of reference and offered several motifs that were taken up by his scholarly successors. In addition, and most crucially, the chapter demonstrates that the positions at which the partic- ipants in these debates arrived were determined not so much by any simple tech- nical disagreements but by underlying philosophical differences and sociological factors. This episode in the joint history of linguistics and anthropology istelling for what it reveals about the dominant mindset and temperament of these disci- plines in relation to the formal analysis of the world’s languages. -
Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture
ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE RACIAL POLITICS OF CULTURE Lee D. Baker Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture Duke University Press Durham and London ( 2010 ) © 2010 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Warnock with Magma Compact display by Achorn International, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. Dedicated to WILLIAM A. LITTLE AND SABRINA L. THOMAS Contents Preface: Questions ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 1 (1) Research, Reform, and Racial Uplift 33 (2) Fabricating the Authentic and the Politics of the Real 66 (3) Race, Relevance, and Daniel G. Brinton’s Ill-Fated Bid for Prominence 117 (4) The Cult of Franz Boas and His “Conspiracy” to Destroy the White Race 156 Notes 221 Works Cited 235 Index 265 Preface Questions “Are you a hegro? I a hegro too. Are you a hegro?” My mother loves to recount the story of how, as a three year old, I used this innocent, mis pronounced question to interrogate the garbagemen as I furiously raced my Big Wheel up and down the driveway of our rather large house on Park Avenue, a beautiful tree-lined street in an all-white neighborhood in Yakima, Washington. It was 1969. The Vietnam War was raging in South- east Asia, and the brutal murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and Bobby and John F. Kennedy hung like a pall over a nation coming to grips with new formulations, relations, and understand- ings of race, culture, and power. -
Anthropological Regionalism at the American Museum of Natural History, 1895–1945
52 Ira Jacknis: ‘America Is Our Field’: Anthropological Regionalism at the American Museum of Natural History, 1895–1945 ‘America Is Our Field’: Anthropological Regionalism at the American Museum of Natural History, 1895–1945 *Ira Jacknis Abstract This article outlines the regional interests and emphases in anthropological collection, research, and display at the American Museum of Natural History, during the first half of the twentieth century. While all parts of the world were eventually represented in the museum’s collections, they came from radically different sources at different times, and for different reasons. Despite his identity as an Americanist, Franz Boas demonstrated a much more ambitious interest in world-wide collecting, especially in East Asia. During the post-Boasian years, after 1905, the Anthropology Department largely continued an Americanist emphasis, but increasingly the museum’s administration encouraged extensive collecting and exhibition for the Old World cultures. For the most part, these collections and exhibits diverged from anthropological concerns, expressing imperialist messages, biological documentation, or artistic display. In thus constituting the ‘stuff’ of an anthropology museum, one can trace the transvaluation of objects, the importance of networks, institutional competition, and the role of disciplinary definitions. Keywords: museum, anthropology, collecting, exhibition, culture areas, American Museum of Natural History Almost by definition, the great metropolitan natural history museums were founded on a problematic relationship to a distant ‘field.’ Wandering through their halls, the visitor is confronted by cultures that are usually far away in space and time.1 As they were developed in the nineteenth century, these natural history museums, parallel to the art museums (Duncan and Wallach 1980), adopted Enlightenment schemes of universal survey. -
Philosophical Anthropology
070.616 – Proseminar: Philosophical Anthropology Johns Hopkins University, Fall 2010, Macaulay 400, Thursdays 2-4 PM Anand Pandian* Working along four distinct axes of philosophical thought and anthropological investigation – the human and non-human, culture and history, space and time, and mind and matter – we will examine the relationship between conceptual and empirical work in classical and contemporary anthropology. The first three sections of the course begin with Enlightenment philosophies crucial for the development of modern social and cultural anthropology, tracking subsequent inheritances and transmutations of their conceptual positions; the final section instead explores a movement of thought from anthropology to philosophy and back again. Throughout the semester, we will be concerned with how concepts arise in, and circulate through, the exercise of anthropology: what is it to think – critically, imaginatively, comparatively, minutely – about human being and becoming? Required Texts. Michel Foucault, Order of Things; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, Volume 1; Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques; Hugh Raffles, The Illustrated Insectopedia; Johann Gottfried Herder, Herder: Philosophical Writings; Michael Fischer, Anthropological Futures; Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life; Alfred Gell, The Anthropology of Time; Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus; Todd Ochoa, Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuba; other articles and excerpts. Coursework. All required texts will be available either at the campus bookstore or through library reserve (password PAN616). You will be expected to have read them completely before each class meeting, and to be prepared to discuss them closely. -
Frameworks of Analysis
PART I Frameworks of Analysis INTRODUCTION Tony Bennett then examine the forms of cultural analysis that have been associated It is clear from our discussion in the general with the development of psychological and introduction that it is impossible to tie the sociological thought. Peter Burke’s discussion term ‘culture’ to a single concept or to a of cultural history provides a bridge into simple history of usage. It is better understood the next group of chapters focused mainly as referencing a network of loosely related on text-based disciplines. James English’s concepts that has been shaped by the relations account of the role that the analysis of form between the different histories and fields of has played in the development of literary usage with which the term has came to be studies is followed here by Tia DeNora’s entangled. A significant factor here has been consideration of music as both text and the different meanings deriving from the ways performance. Mieke Bal then examines the in which the concept has been used and relations between art history and the more interpreted in the social science disciplines recent development of visual culture studies. one the one hand and in the humanities The next two chapters – Tom Gunning’s on the other. These different disciplinary discussion of film studies and Toby Miller’s articulations of the concept are the focus account of broadcasting – are concerned with of the contributions composing this first the forms of cultural analysis that have been part of the book, which also assesses how developed in relation to the two main media the ‘cultural turn’ has affected developments systems of the twentieth century. -
Following Boas, Malinowski, Physics And
History of Anthropology Newsletter Volume 39 Issue 2 December 2012 Article 3 January 2012 Conversions, Dreams, Defining Aims? ollowingF Boas, Malinowski, Physics and Anthropology, Through Laboratory and Field Richard Staley Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/han Part of the Anthropology Commons, and the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Commons Recommended Citation Staley, Richard (2012) "Conversions, Dreams, Defining Aims? ollowingF Boas, Malinowski, Physics and Anthropology, Through Laboratory and Field," History of Anthropology Newsletter: Vol. 39 : Iss. 2 , Article 3. Available at: https://repository.upenn.edu/han/vol39/iss2/3 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/han/vol39/iss2/3 For more information, please contact [email protected]. History of Anthropology Newsletter 39.2 (December 2012) / 3 Conversions, Dreams, Defining Aims? Following Boas and Malinowski, Physics and Anthropology, through Laboratory and Field Richard Staley, University of Wisconsin–Madison, [email protected] Founding Figures Anthropology’s founding figures were academic travelers, who brought skills that were honed in a variety of fields to their new enterprise. Two such figures were Franz Boas, born in Minden, Westphalia in 1858, and Bronislaw Malinowski, born in Kraków, Galicia, in 1884. Both were recognized for helping to establish anthropology in their respective adopted homes of the United States and Britain. Both are associated with the development of participant observation, the fieldwork method requiring anthropologists to immerse themselves in the everyday lives of the peoples of other cultures.1 Both were initially trained in physics (amongst other subjects), and many historians stress that both traveled a considerable intellectual distance from the grounding their early work provided.