Page 208 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol I - Abraham to Coal

anthropology 93

As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own
doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more
steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own. • Margaret Mead (1901–1978)

decades of the nineteenth century, as part of a larger because it was held to contradict the biblical account of
process of disciplinary differentiation and institutional- the creation of humankind.The new chronology, by con-
ization. Within this larger process, the composition of trast, offered no such barrier to the idea of independent
anthropology was shaped to a significant degree by “the racial types, and indeed it provided a span of time that
revolution in human time,” itself located at the end of the seemed more than ample for the formation of racial divi-
1850s and beginning of the 1860s. The new under- sions, even if all the races had a common origin.
standing of the length of human existence, as vastly Finally, this pair of new scientific pursuits—the recon-
greater than the biblical chronology of some six thousand struction of human prehistory and the study of human
years, undermined the then active scholarly project of racial differences—were linked in at least two important
reconstructing the complete family tree of humankind, ways. First, they relied on common sources of evidence
from the first begat of the original hetero couple (Adam —archaeological remains and accounts of living “primi-
and Eve) to the distribution of peoples across the entire tives.” This common (evidentiary) denominator did much
globe in the present. to make these areas of research mutually intelligible,
In its place, scholars pursued a “conjectural” account of thereby facilitating their cohabitation in a single disci-
humanity’s “progress” over the vast expanse of human pline. Second, these pursuits were linked by service to a
time, through a singular sequence of generalized stages, common master: Empire. What this facilitated was less
from primordial savagery to the telos of civilization. scholarly communication between these areas of research
Within this new research program, living “primitives” and than their “hybridization,” that is, an ad hoc intermingling
archaeological remains (both skeletal and artifactual) of racial and social evolutionary notions in the common
came to be seen as the best sources of evidence for recon- cause of legitimating conquest and domination.
structing the prehistoric and precivilized segment of this Given the breadth of anthropology as it coalesced in
sequence, given the absence of written records from this these ways, it is not surprising that few, if any,Victorian
period of time-development. scholars were “preadapted” to carry out original research
In the earlier project of reconstructing the complete in all of the discipline’s many branches. It is a great irony,
family tree of all the world’s peoples, the study of lan- however, that one of the very first scholars who was
guage had played a prominent role, in the form of philol- prodigious enough to do so—Franz Boas (1858–1942)
ogy. The latter’s great prestige positioned language as a —was also one of the last. That Boas made significant
significant focus of the new social evolutionary program contributions to all four of anthropology’s “quadrants” is
as well. Within the new research program, however, the a commonplace of introductory courses in anthropology,
interest in language shifted from finding cognates that but what is typically elided in these accounts is that his
demonstrated a common source language (a node on the contributions to biological (or in his terms, physical)
family tree) to establishing an authoritative basis for anthropology were primarily negative. Boas’s painstaking
ranking all languages on a single scale of development. research on racial kinds produced results that, again and
The new understanding of human time contributed in again, raised fundamental questions about the validity of
one other important way to the formation of the new dis- the concept of race. So too, Boas’s work on social evolu-
cipline of anthropology: It opened the door to a vast tion ended up challenging the idea that living others
expansion of research on “the races of mankind.” Within could be seen as exemplars of prehistoric life. This criti-
the tight temporal confines of the biblical chronology, a cal response to social evolutionary theory was particularly
coherent exposition of independent racial types required strong in the case of language, with Boas and his students
the doctrine of polygenism (the idea that each race had providing powerful demonstrations that all observable
been created separately by God), but most scholars in human languages were equally “evolved.” Thus, as much
Europe and North America had rejected this doctrine as Boas played a central role in the building of anthro-