History Of Anthropology
I have learned many new theories I have
never known before, there are a great many
objectives and thoughts that I had
never even knew existed before. Learning
about the history of anthropology
has opened my mind of thinking in all these
different schools of thoughts.
One thing that has shocked me is that I have
learned the early evolutionists
had never done fieldwork, but would make
assumptions. The person that has
shocked me the most is the theories Herbert
Spencer. He saw the different
classes of the British Empire and he wanted to
know how to classify them,
which is normal. He came up with a cellular
difference, the rich have
intelligent cells and the poor have sex cells, this
seems ridiculous to me.
Spencer says the only thing that should matter to the
poor is survival of the
fittest, why waste public money and health benefits on
them when they don’t
do anything. The right way out of the poor to Spencer is
suicide. The things
he says are so unbelievable, they have no truth, or any type
of evidence to
back it, because of the fact that early evolutionist did no
fieldwork. The
next thing that has surprised me is the progress that appears
after the
enlightenment. Condorlet wrote mankind is perfectible and can
progress
through the expression of genius. Malthus says Condorlet was wrong,
he says
humanity will go down because of consumption, like food. These two
theories seem
a little bit strange to me. Condorlet’s theory makes sense, but
what can he
say about the rest of the people? Not everyone can be a Leonardo
Da Vinci.
Malthus worked out his theories with some type of mathematics,
but his
conclusion are not likely to happen and we are living proof, so what
type of
math did he do? The last thing that has surprised me is the
importance of Franz
Boaz. In previous Anthropology classes I have had,
there was little or no
mention of this name. Considering he is called the
father of Anthropology and he
created the four sub-fields I thought I would
have know more about him from
previous classes. In addition, he also formally
invented ethnographies and doing
fieldwork, which is a big step in
Anthropology because nowadays all
Anthropologists do fieldwork. Also,
some of the anthropology professors make you
read ethnographies and they
never really explained the origin of ethnographies.
It also amazes me on
how the so-called father of Anthropology became and
Anthropologist. He
was a naturalist studying the color of seawater in the Baltic
Sea. From
studying this he stumbled into Anthropology and has made it a growing
social
science. One of his early students was Margaret Mead. She has written
books
about the teenage girls on the island of Samoa. Her work on this island
was
what gave her her fame. A man by the name of Morgan Freeman showed her
work
to be wrong. This was kind of funny, because Anthropologist’s had split
views,
which made the crossfire more interesting. There is a great deal of
things in
Anthropology that can surprise and shock people. By learning
more and more about
it you can either clear your head or just confuse it,
which is for the person to
decide. Learning more and more has cleared my head
in some ways, but there is a
little cloud still overhead.