The Emergence of Modern Anthropology
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This page provides information about the theoretical origins of modern anthropology and its historical role in colonial injustices.
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2022-06-08T16:16:50+00:00
While anthropology emerged as a distinct discipline in the mid-19th century, its initial ideological bases drew from the philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries. 17th century thinkers Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf considered the question of “human nature” and how humans interact with society. Grotius believed that humans are sociable beings in essence, and that nations themselves form a greater society of nations whose relations are governed by the natural laws that govern our societies of humans. Pufendorf agreed that humans are inherently sociable beings, and therefore society and human nature are indivisible. Around the same time, Thomas Hobbes argued that human nature favors self-interest, so humans form societies in order to submit to authority that will maintain peace and security. John Locke believed that the role of authority was less oppressive, and that humans consent to the social contract to settle disputes while maintaining the freedom to exist in our nature which is peaceful and tranquil. Jean-Jacques Rousseau developed these ideas further to assert that government was formed out of the desire of the rich to protect the property they had acquired, while the social contract described an idealized society in which people agree to a general will which is mutually beneficial. These questions of human nature, the social contract, and the dichotomy between the two formed the basis for anthropology’s concern with the “natural” and the “cultural”.
From these ideas, the discipline emerged as its own branch of study out of the 19th-century debate between monogenists and polygenists. Monogenism, which is widely accepted by anthropologists today, is the belief that humans all descend from a common ancestor, while polygenism asserts that humans descend from more than one ancestor and that the “races” are different species descended from different ancestors. Because the monogenists believed that all societies evolved through the same stages, they laid the foundations for early anthropology’s focus on studying the “lower” races to learn about the early phases of their own societies while simultaneously maintaining that the “lower” races were inferior and in need of betterment (Barnard 2000).
The institutionalization of anthropology based on these ideas began in the 1890s with the revival of the American Ethnological Society by Franz Boas. Boas wanted organizational control over the discipline, so he restricted who could join AES. In 1902 Boas co-founded the American Anthropological Association with W.J. McGee. McGee, in contrast to Boas’ ideas, ensured that it had a policy of open membership, meaning any interested person could join (Darnell n.d.). The first president of the AAA, McGee was also the anthropologist that directed the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. The Exposition brought Indigenous people from across the globe to display in “human zoos,” and McGee was instrumental in its exploitation of people to garner press coverage and anthropology’s legitimacy as a discipline (Parezo and Fowler 2007). In fabricating and emphasizing the otherness of these people, McGee used them to justify anthropology as a science that studies the “lower” races.
Since the early 20th century, the American Anthropology Association has demonstrated a supposed shift from the problematic ideas of the discipline at the time of its founding. In its 1998 Statement on Race, it acknowledged that “any attempt to establish lines of division among biological populations [is] both arbitrary and subjective” (AAA 1998). Still, the dark history of anthropological practices requires further decolonization of the discipline in the form of more concrete actions that, at least in this context, center Indigenous epistemologies.
