A Short History of Anthropology

The 19th-century idea that all societies climb a single ladder of progress (e.g., savagery → barbarism → civilization), with Victorian Europe at the top.

E. B. Tylor, an armchair evolutionist who argued all societies could be compared on one scale of development.

*Ancient Society* (1877) with its savagery/barbarism/civilization stages, plus fieldwork among the Haudenosaunee and pioneering charts of kinship terminology.

Early anthropologists rarely traveled; they analyzed second-hand missionary reports, traders' letters, and colonial surveys from home.

A commitment to human unity (all societies studiable by the same comparative methods) and the creation of lasting tools like kinship terminology analysis.

Proposed a sequence of human thought — magic → religion → science — and influenced poets more than later anthropologists.

Boas's view that each culture results from its own contingent history of diffusion, migration, and borrowing, not from universal stages.

The principle that a practice must be understood within its own cultural context before it is judged.

Anthropometric data showed skull shapes in immigrant families changed within a generation, so 'race' could not be a stable biological determinant of culture.

Stranded in the Trobriand Islands in WWI, he replaced 'veranda anthropology' with immersive participant observation — living in the village, learning Kiriwina, staying two years.

To grasp 'the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world' (*Argonauts of the Western Pacific*, 1922).

Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Edward Sapir, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alfred Kroeber.