History and Theory of Anthropology Full Summary

EXAM
History & Theory of Anthropology

Content:
1. Placing Anthropology
2. Evolutionism
a. Spencer
b. Darwin
c. Tylor
d. Morgan
e. Antenor Firmin
3. Early Sociology
a. Durkheim
b. Weber
c. Marx
4. The Boasian Revolution
a. Franz Boas
b. Historical Particularism
5. Culture and Psychology
a. Margaret Mead
b. Ruth Benedict
6. Functionalism
a. Radcliffe-Brown
b. Malinowski
7. Neo-Evolutionism, Materialism & Ecology
a. Leslie White
b. Julian Steward
c. Marvin Harris
8. Structuralism
a. Claude Lévi-Strauss
9. Symbolic Anthropology
a. Clifford Geertz
b. Victor Turner
c. Anton Blok
10. Feminist Anthropology
a. Rubin
11. Actors and agents
a. Transactionalism
i. Fredrik Barth
b. Adam Smith
c. Marcel Mauss
d. Pierre Bourdieu
12. Re-placing Anthropology & postmodernism
a. Wolf
b. Asad
c. Ortner
d. Giddens
e. Sahlins

,Placing Anthropology
Francis Bacon
 Empiricist
 Five assumptions
o Objectivity and unbiased scientist
o Observational consensus: reality is independent
o Replicability
o Induction as method of reasoning
o Scientific process and accumulation

David Hume
 Fallacies for empiricism
o Fallacy of Selectivity
 We cannot observe everything; we must select
 Some evidence is more relevant
o Fallacy of Objectivity
 ?

Noam Chomsky
 Distinguishes:
o Nomological (deductive)
 Universal, quantifiable relationships between phenomena
 Third valuable can be calculated
o Statistical (Probabilistic)
 Probable association between phenomena
 Actual frequency: Determined statistically

Karl Popper
 Falsification as method; theory can never be proven true, but false.
 Provisionally accepted theory: A theory might be said true until falsified

Thomas Kuhn
 Paradigms are incommensurable
 Only when broader political/social/personal changes take place will shift
 Period of paradigmatic consensus: “normal science”

Whorf & Sapir
 The linguistic relativity hypothesis: Different languages, because of their differing
conceptual vocabularies and grammatical rules, predispose their speakers to view the
world in fundamentally different ways.

Ibn Khaldun
 “Modern” historian
 Pioneer of the social sciences in comparative studies
 Materialist reasoning and adaptation to material circumstances
 Theory of solidarity; later Durkheimian.



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, Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)
 First cultural relativist
 Savage is a natural human

Jean-Jacques Rosseau
 The noble savage as opposed to degenerate (nedgradert), civilized humans

Enlightenment (1600-1815: End of Napoleon wars)
 Evolutionary schemes: Universal stages of development
o Savagery  barbarism  civilization
 Rational thinking is the motor of change
 Knowledge will free people from ignorance
o Progress; better is yet to come
 Axiomatic: Social environment; culture, determines behavior.
 Secularization of knowledge

John Locke (1632-1704)
 Emphasized relationship with conditioning environment and human behavior
 Biology ≠ behavior
 The mind at birth is an empty cabinet; equal at birth; circumstances determine

Adam Ferguson (1723-1816)
 Cultural evolution through the evolutionary scheme
 Comparative method: primitive societies are our past
 They think themselves out of savagery.
 Rejected by Boas

Auguste Comte (1789-1857)
 Thought is the motor of change; it occurs through advancement of reasoning
o Universal laws will replace supernatural explanations
 Idealism: A society’s essence is in its belief system; ideas drive social change.
 Father of Sociology
 Coined Positivism
o Solutions to social issues with science. Order and progress.
 Influence on Durkheim:
o Organismic analogy
o Laws of coexistence; synchronic/static; how institutions are related.
o Laws of succession; diachronic/dynamic; how institutions develop over time.

Positivism
 Research reality without researcher’s identity and beliefs
 Modeled after natural sciences; general laws
 Functionalism; materialism; Harris?
 Etic understanding; excludes the emic
 Not reflexive




Theory
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