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HUMANITY:
AN
INTRODUCTION
TO CULTURAL
ANTHROPOLOGY
By James Peoples and Garrick
Bailey
Chapter 5
The Development of
Anthropological Thought

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What Will You Learn?
 Discuss the global forces that
contributed to the emergence of
anthropology.
 Describe the main ideas of the 19 th

century unilineal evolutionists.

 Understand the ways American

historical particularism and British

functionalism challenged unilineal
evolutionism.
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What Will You Learn?
 Describe the mid-20th century rebirth of
evolutionary interests.
 Discuss the main differences between the

scientific and the humanistic approaches

to modern anthropological thought.
 Describe evolutionary psychology,

materialism, interpretive anthropology

and postmodernism.
 Analyze why contemporary anthropology

has no single unifying theoretical

orientation.
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The Emergence of
Anthropology
 By the 19th century, scholars who wanted
to understand human cultures had access
to two kinds of information:
 Written accounts left by travelers
 Tools that ancient, long-disappeared peoples
from Europe and North America had left behind
 Influenced by Darwin’s theories, the
intellectual climate of Enlightenment
scholars assimilated ideas about origins,
evolution, and progress.
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The Emergence of
Anthropology
 Unilineal evolutionism was a
theoretical orientation that held that
all human ways of life pass through a
similar sequence of stages in their
development.
 Such stages included:
 Savagery
 Barbarism
 Civilization
 Western Civilization
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The Emergence of
Anthropology
 Unilineal evolutionists are considered
to be the first cultural
anthropologists of our time.

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E. B. Tylor Levels of Religion
 In 1871, Primitive Culture was
published by Tylor.
 The earliest forms and levels of religion
are outlined.
 He believed that the most primitive
of cultures practice a form of
animism.
 Animism: Belief in spiritual beings

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E. B. Tylor Levels of Religion
 All other religions would have grown
or evolved from animism
 Animism
 Polytheism
 Monotheism (ultimately the most
evolved form of religion)

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Historical Particularism in
the
United States (1900-1940)
 By the end of the
1800s, American
anthropologist Franz
Boas questioned the
methods and findings
by unilineal
evolutionists.
 Seen as the father of
American anthropology,
he believed each
culture was separate
and unique.
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Historical Particularism
 Theoretical orientation emphasizing
that each culture is the unique product
of all the influences to which it was
subjected in its past, making cross-
cultural generalizations questionable.
 In order to understand culture, we

must study it individually, not as a

representative of some hypothetical
stage.
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Historical Particularism
 Discredited overly speculative
schemes of unilineal evolutionists
 Insisted that fieldwork is the primary

means of acquiring reliable

information

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Historical Particularism
 Imparted idea that cultural relativism
as a methodical principle is essential
for the most accurate understanding
of another culture
 Demonstrated and popularized the

notion that cultural differences and

biological differences have little to
do with each other

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Configurationalism
 Born from historical particularism,
configurationalism is the
theoretical idea that each culture
historically develops its own unique
thematic patterns around which
beliefs, values, and behaviors are
oriented.

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Ruth Benedict
 A student of Boas who authored
“Patterns of Culture” in 1934
 Argues that each particular culture

develops a limited number of patterns or

configurations that dominate the thinking
and responses of its members
 Each culture develops a distinctive set of

feelings and motivations that orients the

thoughts and behaviors of that culture.

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British Functionalism
(1920s-1960s)
 Bronislaw Malinowski
 A leading British Functionalist who
emphasized the needs of the individual
 Felt that main purpose of culture was to
serve human biological, psychological
and social needs

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British Functionalism
(1920s-1960s)
 Functionalisms main tenet was that
social and cultural features should
be explained mainly by their useful
functions to the people and to the
society.
 By the benefits they confer on
individuals and groups

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Critical Thought
 The idea of studying a cultural
“need” is challenging because needs
change from culture to culture over
time.
 Consider this: If needs do not take

into account wants, then all societies

have the same needs, which in itself
does not explain cultural differences.

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The Fieldwork Tradition
 Malinowski thought the main objective of
fieldwork was to see the culture as an
insider sees it.
 Often quoted from his1922 ethnography,
The Argonauts of the Western Pacific
 “[T]he final goal, of which an

Ethnographer should never lose

sight...is, briefly, to grasp the native’s
point of view, his relation to life, to
realize his vision of his world.”
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Mid-20th Century: Rebirth
of Evolutionism
 Neoevolutionism: “New
evolutionism,” or the mid-20th-
century rebirth of evolutionary
approaches to studying and
explaining culture

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North American
Anthropologists
 Leslie White (1940s-1960s) argued that
the technologies people use to acquire
nature’s resources have improved over
the centuries.
 Over time, the human social and

ideological systems have grown more

complex.
 White believed that technology often

determines almost everything important

in a culture.
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North American
Anthropologists
 Julian Steward, a contemporary of
White, agreed with White’s main
arguments.
 Stewards theory emphasized the

natural environment, which provided

food, fuel, water, and other
necessary resources.
 This was the driving force behind

cultural differences and similarities.

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Anthropological Thought
Today
 Unilineal evolutionists thought
anthropology should be like the natural
sciences in its goals.
 Their goal was to discover the general
principles that governed cultural development.
 Evolutionists uncritically placed similar
cultures in the same stage of progress.
 Historicists insisted that evolutionists’ idea of
progress was ethnocentric and therefore
stages are artificial creations.

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Anthropological Thought
Today
 The evolutionists compared cultures
from all parts of the world and found
customs they considered the same
among widely scattered peoples.

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Scientific Approaches
 General approaches suggesting that
human cultural differences and
similarities can be explained in the
same sense as biologists explain life
and its evolution

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Scientific Approaches
 Interested in questions
 What are the primary causes of social
and cultural differences and similarities?
 What makes societies and cultures
change at different rates?
 What are the relationships among the
major components of a people’s way of
life (resource acquisition, family and
political organization)?

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Two Scientific Approaches
 Evolutionary psychology
(sociobiology) is the scientific
approach emphasizing that humans
are animals and, as such, are subject
to similar evolutionary forces as
other animals
 Associated with the hypothesis that
human behavior patterns enhance
genetic fitness
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Two Scientific Approaches
 Materialism (cultural materialism)
is a scientific theoretical orientation
claiming that the main influences on
cultural differences and similarities
are technology, environment, and
how people produce and distribute
resources.

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Materialists
 Many customs and beliefs of a particular
culture can be explained by how they help
people live in the natural world.
 Population growth and intensification are

major factors that lead to cultural change.

 Generally, material forces like the natural

environment, technologies, and population

densities are more important than aspects
of cultural knowledge like values and
symbols.
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Humanistic Approach
 Rejects attempts to explain cultural
differences/similarities and cultural
changes in general in favor of
achieving an empathetic
understanding of particular cultures

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Humanistic Approach
 Scholars who adopt the humanistic
approach doubt or deny that any
general theory can “explain” culture
in the same way that evolutionary
theory explains life or that Einstein’s
relativity theory explains the
physical world.

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Interpretive Anthropology
 Contemporary theorists who analyze
cultural elements by explicating their
meanings to people and
understanding them in their local
context
 Generally emphasize cultural

diversity and the unique qualities of

particular cultures

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Postmodernism
 Emphasize the relativity of all
knowledge, including science
 Focus on how the knowledge of a

particular time and place is

constructed, especially on how
power relations affect the creation
and spread of ideas and beliefs

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Concept Review

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Critical Thought
 After learning about each type of
theoretical approach to anthropological
research which type are you?
 Do you take a more scientific or humanistic
approach?
 It might be helpful to go back over
evolutionary psychology, materialism,
interpretive anthropology and
postmodernism.
 Which approach seems most logical to you?
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Why Can’t All
Anthropologists Agree?
 Human subjects are conscious
beings who are aware of their own
behavior and state their own reasons
for why they do what they do.
 Anthropologists can’t set up

experiments that enable them to

control the conditions under which
people live, allowing their behavior
to be manipulated.
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Why Can’t All
Anthropologists Agree?
 The broad scope of the field and the
enormous diversity of reasons
people study anthropology make it
unlikely that consensus will emerge.
 Cultural anthropologists are among

the most diverse of scholars.

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