Anthropology

“ Anthropology modestly turned its attention to nations without records, to histories without notable events, to institutions strange in flavor and inventions hanging in their infancy, to languages that had never been written. ”

“ Nevertheless, anthropology has been able to teach certain facts that are of importance in our common every-day life. Owing to the breadth of its outlook, anthropology teaches better than any other science the relativity of the values of civilization. It enables us to free ourselves from the prejudices of our civilization, and to apply standards in measuring our achievements that have a greater absolute truth than those derived from a study of our civilization alone. ”

“ III ANTHROPOLOGY AND RELIGION Among the various forms of science which are reaching and affecting the new popular tradition, we have reckoned Anthropology. Pleasantly enough, Anthropology has herself but recently emerged from that limbo of the unrecognised in which Psychical Research is pining. ”

“ History, which, like charity, best begins at home, but, like charity, should not end there, will ramify into anthropology, archaeology, political history, and geography, with the history of the growth of the human mind and of its products in the shape of philosophy, science, and art. ”

“ In the end, if we go patiently onward, we shall find that 'pure anthropology' will be of immense practical importance in helping us to control and develop ourselves and individuals around us and all communities of men. ”

“ Here this sketch of Anthropology may close. The examination of man’s age on the earth, his bodily structure and varieties of race and language, has led us on to enquire into his intellectual and social history. ”

“ The change being so great,—the phenomenon of savage survivals in culture established, the position of the history and development of culture as an integral part of anthropology vindicated, and the claims of anthropology as a subject of study recognized by the Universities,—the question has naturally been more than once asked,—Is there any further need for the Folk-Lore Society? ”

“ The studies of anthropology, whose final object is to solve the problems of the evolution of the human race and man's place in nature, begin with analysis, or the examination of particular characteristics. Human characteristics may be arranged, according to their bearing on anthropology and ethnography, in five orders: External physical traits ”

“ That branch of anthropology which treats of the actual distribution of the human race in its different divisions, as distinguished by physical character, language, institutions, and customs, in contradistinction to ethnography, which treats historically of the origin and filiation of races and nations. ”

“ The third and last part of this chapter will show how, under modern conditions of science and education, anthropology is to realize its programme. Hitherto, the trouble with anthropologists has been to see the wood for the trees. Even whilst attending mainly to the peoples of rude culture, they have heaped together facts enough to bewilder both themselves and their readers. ”

“ With increasing knowledge of the data of anthropology, the forms of society, of religion, of art, and the development of invention, do not seem quite so simple as they appeared to earlier investigators. Attempts were made to fit the hypothetical typical evolution of mankind to the historical development of culture in different parts of the world, so far as it had been reconstructed. ”

“ Ethnology thus treats of the resemblances and differences of the modifications of the human species in their relations to each other, but anthropology, as now understood, has a far wider scope. It treats of mankind as a whole. It investigates his origin and his relations to the rest of the universe. It invokes the aid of the sciences of zoölogy, comparative anatomy, and physiology ”

“ In this sense, anthropology is the science that endeavors to reconstruct the early history of mankind, and that tries, wherever possible, to express in the form of laws ever-recurring modes of historical happenings. Since written history covers a brief span of time, and relates in fragmentary records the fates of a few only of the multitude of peoples of the earth, the anthropologist must endeavor by methods of his own to clear up the darkness of past ages and of remote parts of the world. ”

“ It will thus be seen that anthropology differs from history, and resembles the natural sciences in its endeavor to disregard the subjective values of historical happenings; that it tries to consider them objectively, simply as a sequence of events, regardless of their influence upon the course of our own civilization. ”

“ The Arts of Life in Anthropology.—The one great feature which it is desirable to emphasize in anthropological museums, said Lieutenant-General Pitt-Rivers, in the British Association, is evolution. To impress upon the mind the continuity and historical sequence of the arts of life is one of the most important lessons to be inculcated. ”

“ The task of descriptive anthropology is to record observations, without any admixture of theory; the task of comparative anthropology is to compare the observations made in all parts of the world, and from the comparison to deduce theories, more or less provisional, of the origin and growth of beliefs and institutions, always subject to modification and correction by facts which may afterwards be brought to light. ”

“ Here, then, is the cause of the seeming preoccupation of social or cultural anthropology with ancient and savage and exotic and extinct peoples: the desire to understand better all civilizations, irrespective of time and place, in the abstract or in form of generalized principle if possible. ”

“ While, from this theoretical point of view, anthropology must devote itself to the investigation of human types and human activities and thought the world over, its actual field of work is much more restricted. Biology and psychology on the one hand, and history, economics, sociology, and philology on the other, have taken up anthropological problems, each from its own point of view, and each in connection with its own subject of investigation. ”

“ As my own knowledge of and interest in Anthropology is confined to the great outlines rather than to the special details of the science, I propose to give a very brief and general sketch of the modern doctrine as to the Antiquity and Origin of Man, and to suggest certain points of difficulty which have not, I think, yet received sufficient attention. ”

“ ANTHROPOLOGY In attempting to set forth briefly the principal results of anthropological research, I find my task beset with many difficulties. If the clear enunciation of the aims and methods of physical or biological science is not an easy matter, difficulties many times greater are encountered in an attempt to explain the present position of investigation dealing with mankind from the biological, geographical, and psychological points of view,—subjects that seem to lack in unity, and that present a number of most divergent aspects. ”

“ Concerning the present use of the term “Anthropology,” few will take exception to the definition given by Topinard in his l’Anthropologie (1876) : “Anthropology is the branch of natural history which treats of man and the races of man.” It may be yet more succinctly described as “the science of man,” which comprises two main divisions—the one which deals with the natural man (ανθρωπος, or homo) ; the other which is concerned with man in relation to his fellows, or, in other words, with social man (εθνορ, or socius) . ”

“ Anthropology alone furnishes the key and clue to History. This also is meeting recognition. No longer are the best histories mainly chronicles of kings and wars, but records of the development and the decline of peoples ”

“ By 'anthropology' is meant not the anthropology of modern writers, who use the name to denote mainly the history of human culture in its more rudimentary stages, and as exhibited chiefly in material products, but the study of those aspects of psychology which are most closely allied with physiological conditions. ”

“ The student who seeks to understand how mankind came to be as they are, and to live as they do, ought first to know clearly whether men are new-comers on the earth, or old inhabitants. Did they appear with their various races and ways of life ready-made, or were these shaped by the long, slow growth of ages? In order to answer this question, our first business will be to take a rapid survey of the varieties of men, their languages, their civilization, and their ancient relics, to see what proofs may thus be had of man’s age in the world. ”

“ Anthropology, therefore, in the widest sense of the word, aims at discovering the general laws which have regulated human history in the past, and which, if nature is really uniform, may be expected to regulate it in the future. ”

“ These ten thousand years since the close of the Old Stone Age, half of them studied by the methods of anthropology, half also by those of history, and the whole forming the richest field in human culture history, are the subjects of the present chapter and the next. ”

“ THE SYSTEMATISERS OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY Hitherto we have been dealing with the great pioneers in Anthropology, those who laid the foundations, brought order out of chaos, and suggested the outlines of future work. Henceforward Anthropology may claim the name of a science, and the work developed on definite lines. ”

“ SOCIOLOGY AND RELIGION Those branches of cultural anthropology which deal with comparative sociology and magico-religious data are sometimes designated as “ethnology.” It frequently happens that students who have written upon these and closely allied subjects have in the same book treated the archæological, technical, and linguistic aspects of cultural anthropology or ethnology in the larger sense. ”

“ On the other hand, as an unmethodical body of knowledge, as an interest, anthropology is plainly one of the oldest of the sisterhood of sciences. How could it well be otherwise than that men were at least as much interested in each other as in the stars and mountains and plants and animals? ”

“ Biology, medicine, history, economies were all tilling their fields of knowledge in the nineteenth century, some with long occupancy, when anthropology shyly entered the scene and began to cultivate a corner here and a patch there. ”

“ There is no doubt that the further pursuit of the psychological investigation, which has hardly been begun, will help us to find a more satisfactory explanation of many anthropological phenomena than those that we have been able to give heretofore.
You will perceive that anthropology is a science that is only beginning to find its own bearings, that many of the fundamental questions are still open to discussion, and that the promising lines of approach are just opening. ”

“ It is now generally recognised (though some scholars hold out against the opinion) that the sciences of Anthropology and Archæoloy also throw much light on the human past, which has left no literary documents. ”

“ One of the most prominent was the singular conception of the nature of our first ancestors and primitive societies. Anthropology not having as yet revealed the conditions of our remoter forbears, men supposed, being influenced by the legends of the Bible, that man had issued perfect from the hands of the Creator. ”

“ But what can we learn of the state of anthropological knowledge in the days before Herodotus wrote?
The task of the anthropologist is, in its essence, to find an answer to these principal questions:—What is Man? What kinds of Men are there? and how and by what agencies are they formed, and distributed over the lands, as we find them? How is human life propagated under parental sanction, maintained by social institutions, and made tolerable by useful arts? ”

“ The history of Anthropology, like that of most other sciences, is full of examples of opposition from the prejudice and bigotry of those who place more reliance on tradition than on the results of investigations and the logical deductions therefrom ”

“ The types of human culture are, in fact, reducible to two, a simpler and a more complex, or, as we are wont to say (valuing our own achievements, I doubt not, rightly) , a lower and a higher. By established convention Anthropology occupies itself solely with culture of the simpler or lower kind. The Humanities, on the other hand—those humanizing studies that, for us at all events, have their parent source in the literatures of Greece and Rome—concentrate on whatever is most constitutive and characteristic of the higher life of society. ”

“ The first branch to attract workers was Somatology, the physical aspect of man, of which we have already noted the inception: not until the nineteenth century can Archæology, or Prehistoric Anthropology, be said to have developed into a science; while the scientific study of Ethnology, or Cultural Anthropology, is barely half a century old. ”

“ Definition. “Ethnology” is a term which is often loosely used as synonymous with “Anthropology,” to cover the whole field of the science of man. It was in this sense that it first came into prominence, being chosen by M. W. F. Edwards as the title for the Société ethnologique de Paris, in 1839. The society was concerned with what we should now call Anthropology; but it was more especially interested in the origins and relationships of the historical races of Europe, which was the etymological justification for its name. ”

“ The partial existence of such customs among some of the lower races of man, and the survival of peculiar ceremonies in the marriages of some civilized nations, are thought to furnish a proof of similar institutions having been once universal. There can be no question that the study of anthropology has considerably changed our views respecting the first appearance of man upon the earth. ”

“ Having now sketched what history, archæology, and geology teach as to man’s age and course on the earth, we shall proceed in the following chapters to describe more fully Man and his varieties as they appear in natural history, next examining the nature and growth of Language, and afterwards the development of the knowledge, arts, and institutions, which make up Civilization. ”