Chapter 2: A Short History of Cultural Anthropology

Welcome to Last Minute Lecture.

This free chapter overview is designed to help students review and understand key concepts.

These summaries supplement not replaced the original textbook and may not be redistributed or resold.

For complete coverage, always consult the official text.

Okay, let's unpack this.

Have you ever wondered how we even began to study human societies, you know, all their incredible diversity and complexity in a structured kind of scientific way?

Today, we're taking a deep dive into the fascinating, sometimes, well, fraught history of cultural anthropology.

Think of it as a shortcut to truly understanding how we got here.

It's a great mission.

And what's truly striking is that while human curiosity about other people is ancient,

the discipline of anthropology itself, it's surprisingly new.

Right.

This deep dive will trace its emergence, showing you the intellectual journey from say, religious dogma to scientific inquiry, and how our very understanding of humanity has dramatically evolved over time.

And we're drawing our insights from a chapter called A Short History of Cultural Anthropology from the book Human Societies.

A brief introduction.

Our goal is basically to pull out those essential nuggets, trace that intellectual journey that shaped the field, so you walk away genuinely well informed.

Almost like you've had a last minute lecture on the topic.

Exactly.

And to set the stage, just imagine Europe before about, say, 1860.

Thought was really dominated by the Christian church, its teachings guided most understanding of the world, of humanity.

But then a series of seismic shifts,

both intellectual and geopolitical, began to crack that foundation, opening the door for empirical science.

It wasn't overnight, though.

Oh, definitely not.

It wasn't an easy or rapid transition.

And as we'll see, the pursuit of understanding.

That's always a continuous process, isn't it?

So here's where it gets really interesting.

What were these pivotal forces that propelled Western scientific thought forward?

What really set the stage for this new way of looking at the world?

Well, there are several key things that kind of combine.

First, you've got the printing press invented back in 1446.

Huge invention.

Absolutely.

Before this, books were handwritten, incredibly rare, wildly expensive.

The printing far cheaper, which dramatically increased access to information and literacy rates across Europe.

That makes sense.

Suddenly ideas could spread like wildfire, challenging the old ways of thinking.

Precisely.

And then alongside that, you have a major geopolitical shift that completely redefined the intellectual landscape.

You mean Constantinople.

Exactly.

In 1453, the Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople, Istanbul, Turkey.

This city wasn't just a political capital.

It was the seat of the Orthodox Christian Church and a massive center of knowledge.

So when the Ottomans moved in, many scholars fled west to Europe.

This wasn't just people moving.

It quite literally shifted the center of knowledge, bringing new texts and new ideas with them.

So new information flowing, a new intellectual center forming, and then maybe the biggest catalyst of all, the European encounter with what they call the New World.

Absolutely.

The European invasion of the New World, starting in 1492 though, you know, we should acknowledge the Norse, the Vikings, had been there first, way back around 1000 AD.

Good point.

But this later invasion created an unprecedented influx of information.

European colonial powers, England, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, claimed huge territories.

And in doing so, they encountered countless traditional societies.

So much new data pouring in.

A flood of information about these new peoples.

They're vastly different lands.

It all poured back to Europe.

And while, you know, religious explanations tried to hold sway, people couldn't help but start asking completely new questions that just didn't fit the old frameworks.

So this raises a really important question.

How did these new discoveries directly challenge the existing beliefs,

particularly the church's long held doctrines about, say, the world's age and where humans came from?

Oh, the challenge was fundamental.

For centuries, the church held that the Earth was only about 6000 years old.

They'd even, believe it or not, deduce creation took place at 9 a .m.

on October

23rd, 4004 BC.

Wow, specific.

Right.

But then in the 1830s, Charles Lyell formulated this principle of uniformitarianism.

Okay, what's that exactly?

Basically, he argued that the same geological processes operating today,

you know, erosion, deposition, volcanism, that kind of thing, have always operated in the same way.

Okay.

And Lyell's groundbreaking insight was that to account for the geology we can actually see, the Earth had to be millions of years old, directly countering the church.

Millions, not 6000.

Exactly.

We now know, of course, it's more like 4 .5 billion years old, but even millions was revolutionary then.

That's a massive, almost unfathomable shift in perspective right there.

And it wasn't just geology messing with the timeline, was it?

Not at all.

Around the same time, archaeological discoveries were also shaking things up.

Stone tools were found buried deep beneath the remains of extinct animals in France.

Okay.

Now, following the law of superposition, which is just the geological idea that in undisturbed layers, deeper means older, these tools had to be older than the extinct animals found above them.

Then, in 1848, the remains of extinct humans, the enderthals, were discovered.

These finds just profoundly indicated that extinct humans and animals coexisted long before that accepted 4004 BC creation date.

It fundamentally questioned the church's story about human origins.

So the stage is really set.

We've got new knowledge, new questions, but the overall understanding of the universe, the cosmology, is still largely dominated by creationism.

Right.

The prevailing view was, what?

White people descended from Adam and Eve, other peoples had

degenerated, and the world hadn't really changed since creation.

How did we finally move past that?

How did we get to a natural scientific explanation?

Well, the big hurdle was explaining how evolution might occur naturally.

That was the real roadblock.

But then came this groundbreaking idea.

Darwin.

Darwin.

In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species.

He proposed a mechanism for natural evolution that finally made sense.

He'd been working on this for a while, right?

The Beagle Voyage.

Yeah.

He spent the 1830s as a naturalist on the HMS Beagle, did extensive studies, especially on the Galapagos Islands.

He actually held off publishing for years.

Why?

Well, it was controversial.

But then Alfred Wallace, another scientist, independently came up with basically the same idea.

That kind of forced Darwin's hand, compelled him to finally publish his monumental work.

A bit of scientific competition pushing things forward.

And the impact was just enormous, wasn't it?

Pushing humanity to rethink its place in the world.

Oh, absolutely.

Despite huge resistance, which, interestingly, you still see traces of today, Darwin's ideas, particularly natural selection, couldn't really be refuted scientifically.

Right.

This led to a gradual, but completely irreversible, shift away from supernatural explanations towards natural ones, basically moving from a religious framework to a scientific one.

And that, in turn, rapidly accelerated the development of scientific disciplines in universities.

Biological evolution became an accepted fact, even as understanding keeps getting deeper with genetics, DNA, all of that.

It helps to look at that idea of the evolution of evolution here.

Because farmers, for like 10 ,000 years, already understood directed evolution, right?

Exactly.

They knew through human intervention that plants and animals could be changed, evolved from wild to domesticated forms.

Yeah, like planting the bigger seeds, breeding the tamer animals.

Precisely.

Eat the small seeds, plant the large ones, crops get bigger, breed the docile animals, kill the aggressive ones, domesticated animals become more dependent.

So the idea of change wasn't totally alien.

But the mechanism for natural change was the missing piece.

Right.

There were early ideas that got rejected divine intervention, maybe a series of separate creations, even acquired characteristics, that old idea about giraffes stretching their necks.

Right, the Lamarckian idea.

Yeah.

But geological studies in the 1830s, like Lyell's work we mentioned, clearly showed the earth itself had changed over vast time periods.

That countered the idea of a fixed unchanged creation.

And so Darwin's natural selection proposed dissent with modification.

Basically, the fittest survive to reproduce, passing on successful traits.

Often summed up as survival of the fittest, or maybe even survival of the sexiest in terms of attracting mates.

But that core principle still forms the bedrock of biological evolution, just massively enriched now by genetics and DNA.

And crucially, cultural anthropologists saw these biological ideas and realized,

hey, society's changed too.

Exactly.

That insight gave birth to the concept of cultural evolution.

Though that idea itself has evolved quite a bit, moving from a very simple initial model to a much more nuanced view that each society has its own unique path.

Okay, so science is gaining ground, new ideas are taking hold.

The late 1800s see anthropology formally emerge as a discipline.

It's deeply tied up with European colonialism at this point.

Very much so.

This was the peak of colonial expansion.

A massive amount of raw information about subjugated traditional people started flooding back to colonial powers, especially Great Britain.

From where?

Military records explorers?

All of the above.

Military records, explorer accounts, missionary diaries, questionnaires, send out just tons of data.

And what happened to it?

What's fascinating is that a lot of it just got filed away by the British government.

Wasn't really looked at.

But some curious individuals did start digging into these records.

They began to synthesize it, put the pieces together, and form the first coherent theories about human societies.

And two of the really key early figures here were Edward B.

Tyler in London, working mostly with those British records, and an American, Louis H.

Morgan, who actually went out and studied Native Americans directly.

Yeah.

Morgan's story is interesting.

He was a lawyer hired by the Haudenosaunee Iroquois in New York in the 1840s for a land case.

And he just became captivated by their society.

So he wasn't initially trained as an anthropologist?

No, not formally.

But in 1851, he published League of the Haudenosaunee Iroquois.

And that's really recognized as the first ethnography ever published.

Wow.

It was a classic work, set a crucial standard for future field work, and actually made the Haudenosaunee quite famous.

Morgan then went on to classify kinship systems, many named after North American Nader groups.

And incredibly, some of those classifications are still used today.

These two, Tyler and Morgan,

if you were to picture them, you'd probably imagine these, you know, serious looking Victorian academics, foundational figures.

Absolutely.

And together, they developed anthropology's first real coherent theory.

But as our source chapter puts it, it was kind of the value of a bad idea.

Right.

Let's unpack that.

Unilinear Cultural Evolution, or UCE.

Yes, UCE,

proposed by Morgan and Tyler in the 1870s.

They suggested that all societies evolved along a single line, through three main stages, from savagery to barbarism, and finally to civilization.

With sub stages, right?

Yeah.

The first two, savagery and barbarism, each had three phases, lower, middle, and upper.

The core idea was that everyone started as lower savages way back in prehistory, and sort of climbed the ladder towards civilization as they evolved.

So picture this kind of grand universal ladder of human development.

Our chapter outlines it with examples.

At the very bottom, lower savagery, hypothetical, before fire and speech, no living examples.

Right.

Then middle savagery, fire and speech, like indigenous Australians were categorized.

Upper savagery, bow and arrow, like Polynesians.

Moving up.

Moving up.

Lower barbarian pottery, like the Iroquois.

Middle barbarian agriculture, like the Hopi.

Upper barbarian, using iron, like the early Greeks.

And finally, at the very top.

Civilization, defined by writing, represented, maybe unsurprisingly, by modern Europeans.

And the criteria for moving up that ladder, as you noted, was almost entirely based on technology.

Did they have fire, the bow,

pottery,

iron?

And surprise, surprise, the pinnacle was England and America.

Exactly.

Now this was the first kind of reasoned theory like this, so it got broad support initially, mainly because there wasn't much else.

But it had huge, deeply problematic flaws, didn't it?

Oh, absolutely.

First, it's incredibly ethnocentric.

Calling societies savage or barbaric just inherently puts your own culture at the top.

And that perspective has had a really lasting negative impact on how governments treated traditional societies.

An impact that, sadly, you can still see today.

That makes sense.

What else?

Second, using technology alone is just way too limited.

Technology is only one part of how complex a society is.

Think about the indigenous Australians, again, listed as middle savages because of relatively simple tech.

But their kinship system, way more complex than in the UK or US at the time.

So if kinship was the measure?

They'd be right up top.

And third, it pushed this false idea of progress in evolution.

In actual biological evolution, there's no inherent progress, there's just successful adaptation to an environment.

Better or worse suited, maybe, but not higher or lower in some absolute sense.

So deeply flawed idea.

But you mentioned it had value even though it was bad.

What was that value?

Well, the real insight here is how a theory that was basically wrong could still be a crucial stepping stone.

UCE got anthropologists' thinking.

It provided that initial framework, even if flawed.

It sparked debate.

Exactly.

Its flaws forced people to criticize it, to ask better questions, demand more rigorous evidence.

It ultimately sped things up by showing what not to do, leading to much better theories that quickly replaced it.

But the downside?

The really tragic part is that those simplistic, hierarchical UCE concepts, they still linger in popular thought and are still used horribly to justify racism, slavery, and even genocide.

Yeah, that's sobering.

Thankfully, anthropology did keep evolving, moving past UCE.

So what replaced it?

What new approaches started to emerge as the field matured?

Well, the first big approach that really effectively replaced UCE was historical particularism.

And this was championed by Franz Boas.

Boas, a huge name.

Huge.

He actually had a PhD in physics, studied seawater initially.

But during an Arctic expedition in 1883, he encountered the Inuit people and he realized they were just incredibly well adapted to their environment.

And that made him question UCE.

Completely.

It led him to conclude that those simplistic, single -ladder evolutionary ideas were just false.

His core idea became that each society is the product of its own unique history and its adaptation to its particular environment.

Not some universal path.

That makes a lot more sense.

Right.

Historical particularism quickly took over from UCE and it's still a foundational concept today.

Boas also strongly believed that each society was valid in its own right and shouldn't be judged by others.

That's his concept of cultural relativism.

Still vital today.

Absolutely.

And he argued strongly that race was not a factor in human development.

These ideas remain pillars of anthropology.

Plus, he introduced the scientific method advocating for detailed ethnographic fieldwork,

massive data collection.

He was truly monumental.

Which is why he's often called the father of American anthropology.

Developed the first PhD program, trained the first wave of anthropologists who then spread out.

Many focused on Native American groups in western North America.

If you picture Boas, you see this serious, thoughtful scholar whose impact is just immense.

Yeah.

And with those foundations laid by Boas, the field started branching out, looking at things from different angles.

For instance, some anthropologists focused on the purpose and structure of social institutions within cultures.

Leading to things like functionalism and structuralism.

Exactly.

Functionalism tried to figure out the function of institutions.

What purpose did this ritual or that social practice serve within the society?

Structuralism, on the other hand, looked at the underlying structure of those institutions as the key to understanding the culture.

People pretty quickly realized they were asking very similar questions, so now those approaches are generally combined.

And a major figure who really put these ideas into practice and into the public eye was Margaret Mead, one of Boas' students.

Right.

She went to Samoa in 1925, did fieldwork on sex and adolescence, which was pretty controversial for a woman anthropologist back in the 1920s.

I bet.

Her books, Coming of Age and Samoa from 1928, and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies from 1935 are still important.

Mead became this incredibly influential public figure impacting the feminist movement, women's rights, even the sexual revolution.

If you visualize her, you see this thoughtful, pioneering woman whose work really stirred things up.

Another Boa student, Ruth Benedict, also made big waves, right?

Studying the personalities of cultures.

Yes.

Benedict pioneered that approach.

She worked with the Puebloan people in the American Southwest, and she famously did a study on Japanese national character during World War II, published as The Chrysanthemum and the Sword in 1946.

How did that turn out?

Well, its conclusions were later found to be pretty erroneous.

It really highlighted the danger of doing studies of people at a distance, you know, without direct fieldwork.

A cautionary tale.

Okay, so we have these theoretical developments.

What about ways of organizing cultural information geographically?

Right.

Around the same time, back in the 1890s, actually, anthropologists developed the concept of culture areas.

This is just recognizing that there are large geographic regions where the environment and the culture, especially economics, tend to be pretty similar.

Like in North America?

Yeah.

North and South America have recognized culture areas.

North America alone has maybe 10 or 11.

A great example is the plains.

Geographically, it's that flat grassland, Mexico up to Canada, Mississippi to the Rockies.

Bison were the key animal.

Before horses arrived in historical times, people hunted bison on foot.

Populations were small.

But once horses spread, new groups moved in, and this general bison hunting culture on horseback developed pretty rapidly across the whole area.

So similar economies, but maybe different politics.

Exactly.

Economic systems stayed fairly similar, but political systems could change quite dramatically.

Culture areas are useful for broad comparisons, studying diffusion, migration,

but they have weaknesses too.

Like what?

Well, how do you define the boundaries?

The criteria can feel arbitrary.

It can make culture seem static, unchanging, and there's the risk of equating environment directly with cause that's called environmental determinism.

But the concept is still used informally today.

Then there was diffusionism, popular early on.

Yeah, early 1900s.

The idea that lots of cultural traits spread or diffused from just a few central places.

Some early diffusionists even argued complex societies only developed in one or two spots like ancient Egypt, and then everything spread from there.

But that didn't hold up.

No, later research showed it wasn't always the case.

So diffusion isn't seen as the automatic explanation for all similarities anymore.

And despite UCE failing, it was obvious societies do change.

This led back to cultural evolution, but a more nuanced version,

multilinear cultural evolution.

Meaning societies evolve along many different lines, not just one, depending on their specific conditions and environments.

Figuring out the how and why of cultural change, why some societies change fast, others slow that remains a really important research area.

And what about that interplay between culture and environment?

You mentioned environmental determinism.

Right.

For a while in the mid -20th century, some anthropologists leaned heavily on environment as the main driver environmental determinism.

But it soon became clear that culture itself is often the primary factor pushing cultural evolution and adaptation.

So it's more complex.

Much more.

The complex dynamic interaction between culture and environment, that's the focus of human ecology, sometimes called cultural ecology.

Okay, one more approach mentioned is cultural materialism.

How does that fit in?

Cultural materialism is a pretty basic but powerful approach.

It basically says societies are organized primarily to solve practical problems.

Like getting food.

Exactly.

It focuses on technology, the economy, especially food, the environment, population.

Its method is to start by looking for direct material payoffs to explain why a society does something.

So look for the food benefit first.

Right.

If you want to explain a cultural practice, first look for a material payoff like food.

If that doesn't work, look for another material payoff like shelter.

Only if all the material explanations fail do you then start looking at psychological or sociological factors.

It's a very grounded, practical way to analyze culture.

Okay, this brings us closer to the present.

Looking at shifts that really acknowledge the anthropologists' own position, their own biases.

Precisely.

Starting around the 1980s, you see the rise of postmodernism.

Some scholars became really dissatisfied with science, with the modern world in general.

And critical of anthropology itself.

Very critical.

Postmodernists often took a subjective, sometimes anti -scientific stance.

They argued that science itself was flawed.

Some claimed that because anthropologists were often biased,

you know, Western capitalists, frequently male,

their interpretations were inherently subjective.

There was no single objective truth to be found.

And the colonial connection.

Yeah, some argued anthropology had acted as an agent of colonialism, viewing other societies through this narrow Western industrial lens, ignoring the perspectives of the traditional people themselves.

That sounds like it must have caused a major shakeup in the field.

It definitely did.

Many anthropologists view this postmodern turn as a move towards a more humanistic, more democratic anthropology.

So some positive aspects came out of it.

Oh, for sure.

While some of the core postmodern arguments can be tricky, like saying humans can't be analyzed, but them analyzing them, or saying all interpretations are equal, but then rejecting some.

Right, some contradictions there.

Yeah.

But it undeniably forced anthropologists to critically engage with issues like social stratification,

minorities, gender, suppressed peoples, different ideologies.

It brought these things much more into focus.

And that really reflects a positive maturation of the field, making it more inclusive, more self -aware.

This really ties into the idea of recognizing and mitigating biases, doesn't it?

Anthropologists are human, they carry biases.

Western -trained, often white, historically often male, bringing ethnocentric views.

And that's a crucial point for any researcher, really.

Anthropologists get trained early on to try and mitigate those biases, to not be judgmental, not impose their views, not denigrate others, avoid acting superior, shed those colonial attitudes.

Is it easy?

Definitely not easy.

Many struggle to remain perfectly objective.

But it's an ongoing ethical effort within the profession, a constant striving.

And one specific bias they got called out was a significant male bias, right?

Early on, mostly men doing the research.

Yes.

Early anthropologists were mostly men, and they tended to focus heavily on what the men in other societies were doing.

This obviously led to a skewed view, with little understanding of women's roles, contributions, perspectives.

How has that changed?

Well, in recent decades, thankfully, many more women became anthropologists.

And there's been a much greater emphasis on studying women's roles.

But interestingly, that sometimes created a new tendency to neglect the men.

Oh, pendulum swing.

Kind of.

A good solution, used pretty commonly now, is to have teams of anthropologists, men and women, doing field work together.

But even so, the roles of children in many societies, still pretty poorly understood,

always more to learn.

And finally, there's the observer effect.

The simple fact that just being there changes things.

Yeah.

It's unavoidable.

The mere presence of anthropologists will alter the society they're studying.

It can change behavior, challenge worldviews, disrupt social structures, even create resentment or force some cultural activities underground, hidden from view.

What can be done about that?

Anthropologists do try to take this alteration into account.

Factor it into their analysis.

But there doesn't seem to be a perfect solution.

It's just inherent in the process.

The bottom line is, like all humans, anthropologists are biased.

But they continuously strive to mitigate those biases and understand their own impact.

It really is a work in progress, constantly refining methods.

So what does this all mean for you, listening?

We've journeyed from a time dominated by religious explanations, through the formal emergence of anthropology as a science, spurred by events like the printing press and those new world encounters.

We saw the rise and, frankly, the problematic fall of foundational theories like unilinear cultural evolution.

Which was quickly replaced by the much needed nuance of historical particularism.

Right.

And if you connect this to the bigger picture, this whole deep dive really highlights how our understanding of human societies has been constantly evolving.

It wasn't static.

No.

We went from those early attempts to stick all cultures on one ladder, through the really groundbreaking human -centered work of someone like Franz Boas, to all these specialized approaches.

Functionalism, structuralism, diffusionism, multilinear cultural evolution,

human ecology,

cultural materialism.

A whole toolkit.

A whole toolkit.

And finally, acknowledging that vital self -reflection brought by postmodernism, with its emphasis on things like gender, power, agency.

It's just a dynamic, always evolving field driven by this deep curiosity about what it means to be human.

This journey through cultural anthropology's past really shows us that even the way we understand and study humanity is constantly adapting.

It's a field built on challenging assumptions, embracing new perspectives.

It truly is a work in progress.

And that in itself is a powerful lesson.

That's a great point.

What's fascinating here is that the history of anthropology isn't just about the past.

It's a living lesson for us now in critical thinking and self -awareness.

It reminds us that every framework, every theory we use is a product of its time, and probably carries its own biases.

So, maybe consider this.

How might our current ways of studying human societies be viewed by anthropologists in the future?

And what biases are we still working to overcome today?

Something to think about.

Thank you for joining us on this deep dive from the Last Minute Lecture Team.