Anthropological Thoughgts in 19th century

Assignment No 1

Submitted By: Nabeel Riasat

Submitted To: Sir Riaz

Roll No: S2F18BSEN0029

Subject: Intro To Anthropology

Topic: Anthropological Thoughgts in 19th century

University Of Central Punjab Sheikhupura.

Contents
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 Anthropological Thoughgts in 19th century

What is Anthropology?......................................................................3
Anthropology is holistic......................................................................3
Branches:.............................................................................................3
1.Cultural anthropology :................................................................3
2.Archaeological:..............................................................................3
3.Biological anthropology :.............................................................3
4. Social Anthropology:...................................................................4
Holism in Anthropology.....................................................................4
What is Culture?.................................................................................4
For example:.......................................................................................5
19TH Century Anthropology :...........................................................5
Introduction:.......................................................................................5
The Beginnings of Modern Anthropology........................................6
Famous anthropologist in 19th century:............................................7
Sir Edward Burnett Tylor,..............................................................7
Lewis Henry Morgan.......................................................................7
1. Evolutionary Theory......................................................................7
2. Anthropological Evolutionary Theories:......................................8
3. Cultural Evolution, Colonialism, and Social Darwinism............9
Conclusion:..........................................................................................9
Refference:........................................................................................10

What is Anthropology?

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 Anthropological Thoughgts in 19th century

 Anthropology is the study of humans in past and present.

 It examines the cultures of mankind and how we all came to be where we
are.
 Anthropology is a science of humankind. It studies all facts of society and
culture. It studies tools, techniques, traditions, language, beliefs, kinships,
values, social institutions, economic mechanisms, cravings for beauty and
art, struggles for prestige.

Anthropology is holistic:
Interested in the whole of the human condition

 Past, present, and future

 Biology
 Society
 Language
 Culture

Branches:
There are 4 branches of anthropology,

1. Cutural Anthropological
2. Archaeological
3. Biological Anthropology
4. Social Anthropology

1.Cultural anthropology :
examines cultural diversity of the present and recent
past.Itis primarily concerned with existing human cultures, sub-cultures, and
may focus on such concerns as gender, race, sex, ethnicity, politics, and any
other number of aspects of human culture.

2.Archaeological:

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 Anthropological Thoughgts in 19th century

Archaeologists study past peoples and cultures, from

the deepest prehistory to the recent past, through the analysis of material
remains, ranging from artifacts and evidence of past environments to
architecture and landscapes.

3.Biological anthropology :
Study of human fossils, genetics, and bodily growth
and nonhuman primates. It plays an important part in paleoanthropology(the
study of human origins) and in forensic anthropology (the analysis and
identification of human remains for legal purposes).

4. Social Anthropology:
It studies about how contemporary human beings
behave in social groups. This is also known as Applied Anthropology.

Applied Anthropology uses anthropological knowledge and expertise to deal

with modern problems. For example, it aids in impact studies of technological
innovations, public health schemes, or economic development patterns.

Holism in Anthropology:
Holism is the perspective on the human condition that assumes that mind, body,
individuals, society, and the environment interpenetrate, and even define one
another. In anthropology holism tries to integrate all that is known about human
beings and their activities.

What is Culture?
Culture is the patterns of learned and shared behavior and beliefs of a particular
social, ethnic, or age group. It can also be described as the complex whole of
collective human beliefs with a structured stage of civilization that can be
specific to a nation or time period.

Culture is:
 Learned
 Shared
 Patterned
 Adaptive
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 Anthropological Thoughgts in 19th century

 Symbolic

Cultural Anthropology Today

Ethnology:
Ethnology is the comparative study of two or more cultures.

Ethnology utilizes the data taken from ethnographic research and applies it to a
single cross cultural topic. Ethnography: ethnography is a description of “the
customary social behaviors of an identifiable group of people”.

Technology:
Technology is an important aspect of Cultural Anthropology. Anthropologists
have studied the examples of material life established in different human
civilizations.

Different cultures use technology in different ways. Western technology that is

used in non-Western cultures are being used in new and creative ways.

For example:
 The differences between generations in the American culture.
 For the adult generation: It is much harder to do the simple tasks.
 young adults :do daily with technology.
 Today teenagers rarely go a day without using either their cell phone,
laptop, ipod, or a television.

19TH Century Anthropology :

Introduction:
Specific theories of social or cultural evolution often attempt to explain
differences between coeval societies, by positing that different societies have
reached different stages of development. Although such theories typically
provide models for understanding the relationship between technologies, social

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structure, or values of a society, they vary as to the extent to which they

describe specific mechanisms of variation and change.

Early socio-cultural evolution theories —the theories of Auguste Comte,

Herbert Spencer and Lewis Henry Morgan—developed simultaneously with,
but independently of, Charles Darwin's works and were popular from the late
19th century to the end of World War I. These 19th-century unilineal evolution
theories claimed that societies start out in a primitive state and gradually
become more civilized over time, and equated the culture and technology of
Western civilization with progress. Some forms of early socio-cultural evolution
theories (mainly unilineal ones) have led to much criticized theories like social
Darwinism, and scientific racism, used in the past 2 to justify existing policies
of colonialism and slavery, and to justify new policies such as eugenics.

Most 19th-century and some 20th-century approaches aimed to provide models

for the evolution of humankind as a single entity. However, most 20th-century
approaches, such as multilineal evolution, focused on changes specific to
individual societies. Moreover, they rejected directional change (i.e.
orthogenetic, teleological or progressive change). Most archaeologists work
within the framework of multilineal evolution.

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 the early 19th century, a number of scientific observations,
especially of unearthed bones and other remains, such as stone tools, indicated
that humanity’s past had covered a much greater span of time than that
indicated by the Bible (see Creationism).

In 1836 Danish archaeologist Christian Thomsen proposed that three long ages
of technology had preceded the present era in Europe. He called these the Stone
Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age. 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.

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 Anthropological Thoughgts in 19th century

Famous anthropologist in 19th century:

Sir Edward Burnett Tylor:
(Born Oct. 2, 1832, London—died Jan. 2, 1917, Wellington, Somerset, Eng.),
English anthropologist, regarded as the founder of cultural anthropology. His
most important work, Primitive Culture (1871), influenced in part by Darwin’s
theory of biological evolution, developed the theory of an evolutionary,
progressive relationship from primitive to modern cultures.

Lewis Henry Morgan:

(born November 21, 1818, near Aurora, New York, U.S.—died December 17,
1881, Rochester, New York), American ethnologist and a principal founder of
scientific anthropology, known especially for establishing the study of kinship
systems and for his comprehensive theory of social evolution.

1. Evolutionary Theory:
In 1859 British naturalist Charles Darwin published his influential book On the
Origin of Species. 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. Darwin’s theory was later supported by studies of genetic inheritance
conducted in the 1850s and 1860s by Austrian monk Gregor Mendel.

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 1800s. He likened societies to the
biological organisms, each of which adapted to survive or else perished.
Spencer later coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" to describe this process.
Theories of social evolution such as Spencer’s seemed to offer an explanation
for the apparent success of European nations as so-called advanced
civilizations.

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2. Anthropological Evolutionary Theories:

During the late 1800s 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 1877 by American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan.

Morgan argued that European civilization was the pinnacle of human

evolutionary progress, representing humanity’s highest biological, moral, and
technological achievement. 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. States thus protected people’s rights to own
property. Morgan's theories coincided with and influenced those of German
political theorists Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. Engels and Marx, using a
model like Morgan’s, predicted the demise of state-supported capitalism. They
saw communism, a new political and economic system based on the ideals of
communality, as the next evolutionary stage for human society.

Like Morgan, Sir Edward Tylor, a founder of British anthropology, also

promoted the theories of cultural evolution in the late 1800s. Tylor attempted to
describe the development of particular kinds of customs and beliefs found
across many cultures. For example, he proposed a sequence of stages for the
evolution of religion—from animism (the belief in spirits), through polytheism
(the belief in many gods), to monotheism (the belief in one god).

In 1871 Tylor also wrote a still widely quoted definition of culture, describing it
as “that complex whole that includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law,
custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of a

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society.” This definition formed the basis for the modern anthropological
concept of culture.

3. Cultural Evolution, Colonialism, and Social

Darwinism :
The colonial nations of Europe used ethnocentric theories of cultural evolution
to justify the expansion of their empires. Writings based on such theories
described conquered peoples as “backward” and therefore unfit for survival
unless colonists “civilized” them to live and act as Europeans did. This
application of evolutionary theory to control social and political policy became
known as social Darwinism.

Theories of cultural evolution in the 19th century took no account of the

successes of small-scale societies that had developed long-term adaptations to
particular environments. Nor did they recognize any shortcomings of European
civilization, such as high rates of poverty and crime.

Furthermore, while many proponents of cultural evolution suggested that the

people in small-scale societies were biologically inferior to people of European
descent, no evidence actually supported this position. But not all anthropologists
believed in this type of cultural evolution. Many actually rejected all
evolutionary theory because others misused and abused it.

Conclusion:
For Europeans, these African/American natives and their practices seemed
BIZARRE or IRRATIONAL, yet it was important to live with them to
UNDERSTAND their CULTURES.

CROSS-CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING as one of the roots of

Anthropology.

Emerging focus on EVOLUTION

Other cultures could be changed, that they could and should be “civilized”. The
movement by Europeans to “civilize” others between the 16th and 19th
centuries destroyed some of the world’s CULTURAL DIVERSITY, but the
field of Anthropology emerged. Despite colonialism’s impact on cultures,

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anthropologists support the value of other ways of life and try to support the
needs of people formerly colonized/dominated by powerful nation-states.

REFEERENCE:
CAROL EMBER AND MELVIN EMBER, CULTURAL
ANTHROPOLOGY , 13TH ED

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