anthropology

anthropology Embracing nature and the cosmos, the philosophical thinking of classical antiquity did not consider anthropology, the ‘science of man’, as a subject independent of the greater ontological context. Yet the problems set out in those days were to shape inquiry in later centuries. Were ideas innate or acquired? How did body and soul communicate with the outside world? How did progress come about? And how was it possible that there were varying types of men?

Within Christendom, in the period from the decline of the Roman Empire until the Renaissance all knowledge of mankind was believed to reside in the religious doctrines. The bases of anthropological curiosity were established during the sixteenth century. By the end of the eighteenth century the subject was systematically treated. Subsequently it developed into a science, diversifying into social, physical, and linguistic anthropology; ethnology; ethnography; archaeology; and other sub-disciplines.

In a literal translation of the Greek term, René Descartes (1596–1650) and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716) spoke of ‘doctrina de homine’: Descartes applied the mechanistic philosophy to the natural realm; considering all animals — including mankind in its physical respects — as machines, he showed that human nature was open to scientific investigation. Leibniz built upon the theory of the ‘great chain of being’, situating mankind on an uninterrupted ascending scale that led from the realm of the mineral, through lesser organisms, to mankind, and thence to heavenly creatures. Man's place in nature was thus fixed — until the end of the eighteenth century, when the theory came into disrepute.

At that time, anthropology stood on three legs. Dealing with the individual, medicine told people how to be legislators of their personal bodily constitutions; cultural and political philosophers, by contrast, treating society, inquired into the historical laws governing the growth of civilization; naturalists, finally, devised natural systems which assigned mankind a place among their fellow creatures. Yet philosophers were increasingly occupied not just with the uniqueness of mankind, but also with the classification of human varieties and the question of how physical and psychological differences had been engendered.

In 1594, Otto Casmann had determined anthropology as a science accounting for the dual nature of man as a physical and spiritual being. Reiterating the point, Chambers' Cyclopaedia (1727–51) stated that anthropology ‘includes the consideration both of the human body and soul’. Eighteenth-century Germany has been credited with exploring human nature in this vein, thus putting anthropology as a science in its own right on the map. In his Anthropologie für Ärzte und Weltweise (‘Anthropology for Doctors and Savants’, 1772), Ernst Platner stressed that it was the task of the anthropologists to investigate the relationships between, and mutual influences of, body and soul. The idea struck a chord with minds dwelling in pre-Romantic complexities of thought.

Eighteenth-century Germany knew three different approaches to the subject: anthropology was treated (i) as part of theoretical philosophy; (ii) as part of psychological investigations; and (iii) as one among several empirical sciences dealing with mankind. Immanuel Kant's Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (‘Anthropology in a pragmatic understanding’, 1798), aiming to scrutinize the framework of the human soul from an empirical viewpoint, belongs to the second category. As the Penny Cyclopedia put it in the 1830s, this perspective did not turn on ‘the investigation of what nature makes of man’, but on the question ‘what man, as a free agent, either makes, or can and ought to make of himself’. The third approach was pursued in various ways. It was here that writers through-out Europe departed from the assumption of the psychological and physiological unity of mankind: physiologists and anatomists, in particular, attempted to differentiate between varying human types.

Physical anthropology, as it was to be called, took its starting point from the dissatisfaction with previous attempts to depict man's place in nature. In 1735 the Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus set down a taxonomy of nature (Systema naturae). Considering hands and feet as equal units, he subsumed several sorts of men under the common name of ‘quadrupeds’, including the mythical, ape-like ‘Troglodytes’ as well as humans properly speaking. Himself a pious Protestant, Linnaeus was later accused of having devalued man's special role. In order to defend mankind against the Cartesian suspicion that they were no better than reasoning animals, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) came up with a new category that applied solely to humans: bimana — the two-handed. On the basis of his examination of skulls, he distinguished five different human varieties. Numerous alternative classifications were put forward by Oliver Goldsmith, John Hunter, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried Herder, Buffon, Georges Cuvier, Julien-Joseph Virey, Louis-Antoine Desmouslins, and many others.

In The Order of Things (1970), Michel Foucault famously characterized eighteenth-century science as descriptive. Discussing the anthropology of French Enlightenment philosophers, Michel Duchet has, however, shown that the quest for causes was equally characteristic of eighteenth-century anthropology. In France, its purpose was not unanimously regarded as the theory of body and soul. Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis (1757–1808) and A. L. C. Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) — followers of Condillac's philosophy of the mind — argued that medicine and morals were two branches of the same science, but the influential school of Paul-Joseph Barthez (1734–1806) stressed that the science of man was only another name for general physiology. In France the ‘physical’ was widely seen to be opposed to the ‘moral’. A reconciliation was brought about once anthropology was established as a science. Until the second half of the nineteenth century it was dominated by phrenology, which soon became the paramount technique of determining physiological as well as psychological racial traits.

The eighteenth century had not distinguished between anthropological and ethnological enquiries, the latter forming part of the physical history of man. In the early nineteenth century that changed. The new science of ethnology concentrated on the description of different peoples. Its early students tended to believe in the unity of mankind, using historical linguistics to trace genealogical links, while until the mid century physical anthropology was rather the domain of those who thought that mankind was made up of several species or races of man. One of the scholars whose works contributed much to the development of an antagonism between anthropology and ethnology was the doctor James Cowles Prichard. On account of his philanthropic outlooks and his strong belief in the truth of Genesis, he was fervently opposed to the theory of race. His Researchers into the Physical History of Mankind (1836–47, 3rd edn) aimed to delineate the genealogical links between all human races. Praised as the founder of British ethnology, he himself referred the origins of the science to Blumenbach, whom others cherished as the father of anthropology. The parallel in France was Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–88). Nowadays, adulating the fathers of a particular discipline has given way to a more historical perspective.

During the nineteenth century, anthropological institutions were set up in many countries, the Société Ethnologique de Paris being founded in 1839. In London, the Ethnological Society was established in 1843, and the Anthropological Society in 1863 — modelled on Paul Broca's Société Anthropologique de Paris that had opened its doors four years previously. The first German institute, Rudolf Virchow's Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, dated from 1869. Initially, the discipline was dominated by physical anthropology. Craniology — or phrenology — was the core of all anthropometry, as the form of the skull seemed to permit inferences on mental faculties. The polygenist Paul Broca became the dominant figure in the field.

Physical anthropology did not necessarily imply racism, as the example of the liberal Rudolf Virchow proved. Not least thanks to his influence, German physical anthropology between 1860 and 1890 — unlike that in America, France, and Austria — was adamantly anti-racist. Darwinian biological determinism was rejected in favour of neo-Lamarckian theories and the belief that physiognomy was subject to cultural influences. This changed towards the end of the century, when a turn to evolutionist Darwinian theory and German nationalism drove German anthropology towards racialism. Physical yielded to biological anthropology. Craniology was replaced by Mendelism and biometry. The latter, a brainchild of Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, held sway throughout the Western world. Eugenic theories and the urges to implement policies of ‘public hygiene’ and race hygiene began to thrive.

These international developments notwithstanding, in Britain and America anthropology also took a course of its own. A universalizing form of cultural philosophy had been pursued during the age of Enlightenment. From the 1860s the threads were taken up by scholars like Edward B. Tylor, James G. Frazer, and Lewis Henry Morgan, once the theory of evolution gained ground. As in the eighteenth century, human development was seen as progress from ape-like rudeness to civilization, this time within the framework of Darwinism. Classical Victorian evolutionism regarded the archaically living Tasmanian Aborigines — who were dying out before their very eyes — as the living representatives of the early Stone Age. Not until 1911 did the American Franz Boas — a former pupil of Virchow, who adhered to the theory of cultural diffusionism and was interested in linguistic differentiation — criticize the evolutionist view of anthropology in his The Mind of Primitive Man. In the same year, the Englishman William Rivers discarded evolutionism in favour of diffusionist theories to explain the historical spread of customs and belief systems. Bronislaw Malinowski, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, and others, by contrast, followed a functional approach, pursued by Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss (and later resumed by Claude Lévi-Strauss). A pluralist and relativist methodology was introduced.

The ‘revolutionary’ reaction against evolutionary anthropology brought about a dehistoricization of the subject. Descriptive ethnography and field work found many adherents, some researchers depicting foreign peoples in the tradition of the ‘noble savage’ — Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's notion of a particular ‘primitive mentality’ (Mentalité primitive, 1922) formed part of that tendency. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty was not only an ardent proponent of existentialist philosophy, but also formulated ideas on bodily behaviour and perception which stimulated interest in the phenomenology of the body. Marxist theory, being based on a developmental philosophy, brought new acumen to evolutionism. Latterly, functional anthropology has been criticized by advocates of a more historically-oriented position. In any case, the multi-faceted nature of the discipline, which inquires into the evolution from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens as well as into functions and the development of myths and rites, hardly instills the impression that one method alone will suffice to answer all anthropological problems.

H. F. Augstein

Bibliography

Leaf, M. (1979). Man, mind and science: a history of anthropology. Columbia University Press, New York.
Slotkin, J. S. (ed.) (1965). Readings in early anthropology. Methuen, London.
Stocking, G. (1987). Victorian anthropology. Free Press, New York.

See also craniometry; evolution, human; phrenology; skull.