INTRODUCTION TO
ANTHROPOLOGY IN A
DECOLONIZING WORLD
LESSON 2: 3/10: HISTORY AND THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL DISCOURSE
Evolutionism, diffusionism, structural functionalism, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, “denial
of coevalness”, “writing culture”
CULTURAL EVOLUTIONISM
• Joseph Conrad – The Heart of darkness: about captain Marlowe:
= key novel about the dynamics of colonization
= Illustration of evolutionist notions of time
journey from the Atlantic coast to Africa (into the heart of darkness): to sail
upstream: the more you sail upstream, the more you go back into time: away from
the light/civilization/modernity the heart of Africa we find ourselves: we find
our own madness: Search for the Other (Africa) turns out to be a meeting
with our dark inner Self
• Armchair anthropologists: don’t go out in the field
• Cultural evolutionism: the idea that history is one stream, unilineal view on the
history of mankind (19th history)
- Physical anthropology became popular
- Race was also really important
- Write the history of humankind
- Critique: evolutionary theory = racist and incorrect
influence of Darwinism social Darwinism: applying the biological ideas of
Darwin to social systems
Lewis Henry Morgan: lawyer defending the Iroquois Indians in
America the only one with contact with the other culture
others = armchair anthropologists: (sit in their offices and
receive reports of missionaries,… about local cultures) write
books based on reports: Henry Maine, Edward Burnett Tylor
racial theory skin-color, measuring of people’s skulls: physical
anthropology
very quickly discarded: but still influenced the politics of the colonial
administration, still some influence nazi-Germany even after WWII
- Linear: from the early beginnings to the development of humankind people put
lots of effort to put all the information into one linear
- Distinction between lower, middle and upper barbarism
, - Internal colonization
• 19th century: rise of ethnographic museums e.g. The National History
museum in Tervuren: to show the civilization mission of King Leopold II (narrative
has changed today)
o Today the museum has made an effort to decolonize itself
o But it’s impossible to decolonize such place
o It showed that linear evolution is narrative: when you came in you first saw
the fauna and flora and animals then you saw insects and after that you
saw the people it leads you to primitive man that are showcased
o The last room tells all the good things about colonization about how good
the modernization was for the people who where colonized
Dia 10
- Before colonization: forest and little tiny huts and erosion and chaos
- After colonization: well build villages, structure
- It illustrates the well-doing of the colony
- The most intimate domains even were interrupted by the image of the colonizers
(bv polygamy mocht niet meer en zelfs in zo’n intiem domein bemoeide men zich)
- They were forcing people to mimic the image of the colonizer itself
- Inspecting households if they act like they wanted bv. Kijken of ze wel met mes en
vork aten als ze dat deden konden zwarte mensen een diploma krijgen om
hetzelfde te worden behandeld als blanke mensen
- It was deeply racist
Dia 11
- Later
- Celebrating the premodern nostalgia for an earlier period
- Space and time became much more important f.e. you can travel, the telephone,
faxing, railways, … with all of the changes came a nostalgia about how it was
before (the birth of romanticism)
- 19th century ew relation to the past: lots of new things but that means you also
lost lots of things that you could not return to, everything that was old was
vulnerable
- You can still take a tram to go to the museum to travel back and look at their past
Dia 12
- Live exhibitions of Africans: ‘the living zoo’, making an African village brought to
brussels; people came to have an idea about how the primitives lived
- Congolese as living ancestors (voorouders)
,Dia 13
- Human zoo as genre
- Showcasing more primitives races than ourselves
DIFFUSIONISM – FRANZ BOAS
• Beginning of WWI: critique against cultural evolutionists (evolutionism =
abandoned: at least in scientific circles)
Franz Boas: worked in Alaska indigenous groups
criticized the monocultural idea of evolutionism (no cultural diversity)
counter movement: diffusionism: emphasis on place (instead of only on time)
o NOT against ethnocentric
• He argued that culture cannot evolve in one line, not using one temporal timeline
it’s much more complex then that
• Father of the thought that you have to speak about cultures in their own right,
every culture needs to be considered in their own context, every culture is equal
• No superior culture, every culture has the right to exist and is based on it own
terms
• Boas argued that culture developed historically through the interactions of
groups of people and the diffusion of ideas, and that consequently there was
no process towards continuously "higher" cultural forms. This insight led Boas to
reject the "stage"-based organization of ethnological museums, instead
preferring to order items on display based on the affinity and proximity
of the cultural groups in question.
• With diffusionism came an emphasis on the plurality of cultures, on the
complexity of specific historical and geographical influences on their
development. The 'history' aspect was not excluded, but was approached from a
'diffusionist' attitude, from the suggestion that an element of a given culture
came from elsewhere.
A place invents something and travels to other regions: a story of cultural
invention and historical and geographical influences: Time in combination with
Space
• Cultural relativism = cultures cannot be objectively ranked as higher or lower,
all humans see/judge the world through the lens of their own culture, and judge it
according to their own culturally acquired norms.
Stress on plurality
Stress on the complexity of historical and geographical influences
For Boas the object of anthropology was to understand the way in which
culture conditioned people to understand and interact with the world in
different ways, and to do this it was necessary to gain an understanding of the
language and cultural practices of the people studied
Dia 17
- Stressing the plurality of culture
- Much more complex spacial map of the distribution of cultural items
, - Diffusionism lost its attraction and moved out of fashion but it made a revival
STRUCTURAL FUNCTIONALISM / MALINOWSKI
Dia 18
- Boas represents the birth of professional academic anthropology
- But at the same time different kind of development came up: Malinowski
o he traveled a lot before the start of the first world war
o but he got stuck on an island and that gave birth to the longtime field work
that he did
o founding fathers of new theoretical line of thought structural
functionalism
Dia 19
- interested in structural elements of the way we are living
- he would write about the institutions/ organs of the political body
- not the history of changes but about the underline structures of social life
- he is interested in everything that is fixed and permanent like law
- behaving and thinking according to principles we live in an organized world and
what is the function of all these rules and laws
- government by authority
- he wants to analyze that organization that is permanent and fixed
- he finds these rules and structures, he is after the skeleton of the world and how I
structures a living social world
Dia 20
- he is the founding father of the Kula Ring
- all of these islands are connected, they give gifts to each other like shells those
are valuable gifts
it establishes the theory of the gift
= once you give something it puts the receiver under the obligation to give
another gift, the gift always puts into motion a cycle of return
- gifts continue to be very important in our world, its dangerous because it gives
you the obligation to step into a relationship
British structural-functionalism: no interest in historical change but reach these
worlds in their untouched form, the skeleton
Dia 21
- Just read
RADCLIFFE-BROWN
Dia 22
- Worked with aboriginal groups
-
Dia 23
ANTHROPOLOGY IN A
DECOLONIZING WORLD
LESSON 2: 3/10: HISTORY AND THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL DISCOURSE
Evolutionism, diffusionism, structural functionalism, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, “denial
of coevalness”, “writing culture”
CULTURAL EVOLUTIONISM
• Joseph Conrad – The Heart of darkness: about captain Marlowe:
= key novel about the dynamics of colonization
= Illustration of evolutionist notions of time
journey from the Atlantic coast to Africa (into the heart of darkness): to sail
upstream: the more you sail upstream, the more you go back into time: away from
the light/civilization/modernity the heart of Africa we find ourselves: we find
our own madness: Search for the Other (Africa) turns out to be a meeting
with our dark inner Self
• Armchair anthropologists: don’t go out in the field
• Cultural evolutionism: the idea that history is one stream, unilineal view on the
history of mankind (19th history)
- Physical anthropology became popular
- Race was also really important
- Write the history of humankind
- Critique: evolutionary theory = racist and incorrect
influence of Darwinism social Darwinism: applying the biological ideas of
Darwin to social systems
Lewis Henry Morgan: lawyer defending the Iroquois Indians in
America the only one with contact with the other culture
others = armchair anthropologists: (sit in their offices and
receive reports of missionaries,… about local cultures) write
books based on reports: Henry Maine, Edward Burnett Tylor
racial theory skin-color, measuring of people’s skulls: physical
anthropology
very quickly discarded: but still influenced the politics of the colonial
administration, still some influence nazi-Germany even after WWII
- Linear: from the early beginnings to the development of humankind people put
lots of effort to put all the information into one linear
- Distinction between lower, middle and upper barbarism
, - Internal colonization
• 19th century: rise of ethnographic museums e.g. The National History
museum in Tervuren: to show the civilization mission of King Leopold II (narrative
has changed today)
o Today the museum has made an effort to decolonize itself
o But it’s impossible to decolonize such place
o It showed that linear evolution is narrative: when you came in you first saw
the fauna and flora and animals then you saw insects and after that you
saw the people it leads you to primitive man that are showcased
o The last room tells all the good things about colonization about how good
the modernization was for the people who where colonized
Dia 10
- Before colonization: forest and little tiny huts and erosion and chaos
- After colonization: well build villages, structure
- It illustrates the well-doing of the colony
- The most intimate domains even were interrupted by the image of the colonizers
(bv polygamy mocht niet meer en zelfs in zo’n intiem domein bemoeide men zich)
- They were forcing people to mimic the image of the colonizer itself
- Inspecting households if they act like they wanted bv. Kijken of ze wel met mes en
vork aten als ze dat deden konden zwarte mensen een diploma krijgen om
hetzelfde te worden behandeld als blanke mensen
- It was deeply racist
Dia 11
- Later
- Celebrating the premodern nostalgia for an earlier period
- Space and time became much more important f.e. you can travel, the telephone,
faxing, railways, … with all of the changes came a nostalgia about how it was
before (the birth of romanticism)
- 19th century ew relation to the past: lots of new things but that means you also
lost lots of things that you could not return to, everything that was old was
vulnerable
- You can still take a tram to go to the museum to travel back and look at their past
Dia 12
- Live exhibitions of Africans: ‘the living zoo’, making an African village brought to
brussels; people came to have an idea about how the primitives lived
- Congolese as living ancestors (voorouders)
,Dia 13
- Human zoo as genre
- Showcasing more primitives races than ourselves
DIFFUSIONISM – FRANZ BOAS
• Beginning of WWI: critique against cultural evolutionists (evolutionism =
abandoned: at least in scientific circles)
Franz Boas: worked in Alaska indigenous groups
criticized the monocultural idea of evolutionism (no cultural diversity)
counter movement: diffusionism: emphasis on place (instead of only on time)
o NOT against ethnocentric
• He argued that culture cannot evolve in one line, not using one temporal timeline
it’s much more complex then that
• Father of the thought that you have to speak about cultures in their own right,
every culture needs to be considered in their own context, every culture is equal
• No superior culture, every culture has the right to exist and is based on it own
terms
• Boas argued that culture developed historically through the interactions of
groups of people and the diffusion of ideas, and that consequently there was
no process towards continuously "higher" cultural forms. This insight led Boas to
reject the "stage"-based organization of ethnological museums, instead
preferring to order items on display based on the affinity and proximity
of the cultural groups in question.
• With diffusionism came an emphasis on the plurality of cultures, on the
complexity of specific historical and geographical influences on their
development. The 'history' aspect was not excluded, but was approached from a
'diffusionist' attitude, from the suggestion that an element of a given culture
came from elsewhere.
A place invents something and travels to other regions: a story of cultural
invention and historical and geographical influences: Time in combination with
Space
• Cultural relativism = cultures cannot be objectively ranked as higher or lower,
all humans see/judge the world through the lens of their own culture, and judge it
according to their own culturally acquired norms.
Stress on plurality
Stress on the complexity of historical and geographical influences
For Boas the object of anthropology was to understand the way in which
culture conditioned people to understand and interact with the world in
different ways, and to do this it was necessary to gain an understanding of the
language and cultural practices of the people studied
Dia 17
- Stressing the plurality of culture
- Much more complex spacial map of the distribution of cultural items
, - Diffusionism lost its attraction and moved out of fashion but it made a revival
STRUCTURAL FUNCTIONALISM / MALINOWSKI
Dia 18
- Boas represents the birth of professional academic anthropology
- But at the same time different kind of development came up: Malinowski
o he traveled a lot before the start of the first world war
o but he got stuck on an island and that gave birth to the longtime field work
that he did
o founding fathers of new theoretical line of thought structural
functionalism
Dia 19
- interested in structural elements of the way we are living
- he would write about the institutions/ organs of the political body
- not the history of changes but about the underline structures of social life
- he is interested in everything that is fixed and permanent like law
- behaving and thinking according to principles we live in an organized world and
what is the function of all these rules and laws
- government by authority
- he wants to analyze that organization that is permanent and fixed
- he finds these rules and structures, he is after the skeleton of the world and how I
structures a living social world
Dia 20
- he is the founding father of the Kula Ring
- all of these islands are connected, they give gifts to each other like shells those
are valuable gifts
it establishes the theory of the gift
= once you give something it puts the receiver under the obligation to give
another gift, the gift always puts into motion a cycle of return
- gifts continue to be very important in our world, its dangerous because it gives
you the obligation to step into a relationship
British structural-functionalism: no interest in historical change but reach these
worlds in their untouched form, the skeleton
Dia 21
- Just read
RADCLIFFE-BROWN
Dia 22
- Worked with aboriginal groups
-
Dia 23
