Page 209 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol I - Abraham to Coal

94 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most
scientific of the humanities. • Alfred L. Kroeber (1876–1960)

pology, he also animated the discipline’s characteristic anthropological knowledge can, in any simple way, be
centrifugal tendencies. brought into history to provide greater coverage of human
time and space. Such interdisciplinary borrowing must be
World History and alert to the diverse paradigmatic traditions at work in
Anthropology anthropology, as well as their quite different relationships
In the last half century, as world history has emerged in to disciplinary history’s own theoretical schemas.
tension with disciplinary history’s disproportionate focus
Daniel A. Segal
on Europe and the West, world history has looked to
anthropology for two primary reasons: (1) to bring into See also Archaeology; Comparative Ethnology; Cultural
history knowledge of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Ecology; Paleoanthropology; Social Sciences
Native peoples of the Americas, and (2) to gain a signifi-
cant degree of temporal depth, by moving into prehistoric
time. What has been insufficiently recognized, however, Further Reading
is that in consulting anthropology for these reasons, Chakrabarty, D. (2000). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought
and historical difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
world history has drawn on bodies of “anthropological” Segal, D., & Yanagisako, S. (Eds.). (2004). Unwrapping the sacred bun-
knowledge that are shaped by quite different, and often dle: Essays on the disciplining of anthropology. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
antithetical, theoretical schemas or paradigms. Most
Stocking, G. (1968). Race, culture, and evolution: Essays in the history of
Neolithic archaeology, for instance, relies upon and incor- anthropology. New York: Free Press.
porates a social evolutionary framework; as such, this Stocking, G. (1987). Victorian anthropology. New York: Free Press.
Trautmann,T. (1987). Lewis Henry Morgan and the invention of kinship.
body of “anthropological” knowledge supports the per- Berkeley: University of California Press.
ception of there being an overall trajectory to human exis-
tence through time. It thereby complements and
reinforces disciplinary history’s entrenched assumption
that the history of Europe exemplifies a universal passage
from“traditional” to“modern” social forms: a passage that Anthroposphere
will sooner or later occur everywhere else, in much the
same way. By contrast, most post-Boasian cultural anthro- he concept of the anthroposphere, like the concept of
pology incorporates and supports the rejection of social Tthe biosphere from which it is derived, was first intro-
evolutionary models. This body of “anthropological” duced in the natural sciences in the late 1980s and early
knowledge characteristically speaks against the validity of 1990s.The term refers to that part of the biosphere that
such analytic categories as “advancement” and “civiliza- is affected by humans—just as the part of the biosphere
tion,” while encouraging the provincializing of Europe that is affected by elephants could be called the elephan-
and the West (cf. Chakrabarty 2000). When this knowl- tosphere. Such terms are all predicated on the idea that
edge is brought into disciplinary history, it becomes quite there is a two-way relationship between every living
difficult to hold on to a single, coherent narrative of the species and the environment in which it finds itself living.
human career through time. Similarly, if more abstractly, All life is part of an ecosystem, all ecosystems together
the radical relativizing that is characteristic of post- constitute the biosphere—the total configuration of living
Boasian cultural anthropology—its insistent practice of things interacting with one another and with nonliving
doubting the absoluteness of the familiar—discomfits dis- things. Every form of life continuously affects, and is af-
ciplinary history’s common-sense realism. fected by, its ecosystem—and human life is no exception.
In sum, recognizing the complexity of the discipline we “Anthroposphere” is an open concept, containing sug-
call anthropology should caution us against the view that gestions for research and reflection, sensitizing us to the