♪ Music ♪ In this lecture on foundations and debates in anthropology, Dr. Paige West presents the history of anthropological ideas and investigations. She first defines epistemology as a framework for what we know and how we produce knowledge. She highlights how European exploration of the world led to the systematic inquiry of societies and cultures and she notes that ideas about cultural evolution and the progression of social systems reflect enlightenment ideals. She then focuses on the material and intellectual impacts of colonialism and imperialism which were oriented toward bringing resources and knowledge from the world back to the Metropol. Critiques of these approaches to understanding cultures led to the ethnographic turn in anthropology which studies cultures in their own context. She ends with critiques of the concepts of culture and cultural evolution to highlight the epistemological differences between colonial and anti-colonial anthropology. Today I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the foundational ideas behind both the discipline of anthropology, but also some of the taken for granted ideas about culture and human behavior that anthropologists hear other people talk about that drive us crazy. And one of the reasons that I decided to do this lecture when I was thinking about what I wanted to talk to you all about, I work with natural scientists a lot and have for a very long time and have these conversations where I'm asked questions, sort of as Michael was saying earlier, I'm asked questions about the Aztecs, I'm asked questions about archaeology, but I'm also asked questions about culture and human social behavior that are grounded in a very particular European history of ideas about otherness. And so I want to just give us a kind of genealogy to work from because it helps us understand some of the taken for granted ideas about others that we have as people that are kind of children of the European Enlightenment, but also helps us to understand some of the basis of anthropology and what the discipline of anthropology and its many, many guises has been pushing back against for a long time now. So for as long as there've been written records people have been going out to other places and interacting with other people and these are very old, so think about Gilgamesh, think about Herodotus, think about these very old narratives of discovery and exchange. European exploration begins in earnest in about the 11th century with a Christian Crusades to Africa in the Middle East and I'll talk later on about Edward Said and his brilliant book Orientalism and how that refocused the discipline of anthropology and many other disciplines and he's really beginning at that moment, so stories about and images of other people began to seep back into what is now Europe. In the 13th century you have the Mongols conquering the Holy Roman Empire in Central and Eastern Europe and in the 13th century you have Marco Polo spending 17 years in China in the court of Kubla Khan. All of this brings information, what we might think of as an early kind of data set about others back to Europe and Europeans start trying to make sense of it. 1499 Vasco da Gama finds his way around Africa to India sailing and in 1492 Columbus sailed to what gets called The New World. 1513 Balboa sailed around South America and discovered the Pacific Ocean and in 1552 Magellan circumnavigates the globe. So for a really long time Europeans have been going out into the rest of the world and they've been bringing back images and stories and in many cases captives with them to Europe. They also as we all know took diseases all over the world with them, so in some ways these forays by famous men are at the heart of the history of anthropology that I kind of want to explode for us today. So people from and in other places have always traveled also, but when we think about where the anthropology that we're engaging with comes from, we're thinking about a very European history of movement, of travel, of desire, and of the production of knowledge. These forays put Europeans in contact with different kinds of people and these different kinds of people, these others really became the object of anthropological study, they became the object of anthropological discipline as it emerged. These explorers all had lots of other kinds of people on their ships; they had people that were missionaries, they had people that were naturalists, they had lots of people that were writing things, so again there's this amassing of this huge amount of data about others. When Europeans go out into the wide, wide world and encounter people not like them, these people present a bunch of challenges to Europeans, to their understandings of the relationships between themselves, God, and nature and the people that they encountered and described seemed extraordinarily different, they seemed primitive, they seemed savage and these are the words that were used to describe them initially and Europeans had a lot of trouble seeing how the early Europeans had a lot of trouble seeing how they could fit these people into the single kind of family of God's creation. And so this starts really early on, think about Sir Thomas Aquinas, 13th century. 13th century he pronounces that all non-European peoples are imperfect humans and that they're therefore natural slaves to Europeans and this follows from his ideas following Aristotle about natural law, so natural law is this very early philosophy that certain rights and values are inherent by the virtue of human nature, that they're universally cognizable through human reason. People thought about this for a while this idea of natural slaves and it seemed plausible, but then some problems arise and they think well how could these imperfect natural slaves have the mental and moral capacity for free agency and conscious choice and you have to have free agency and conscious choice if you want to be converted to Christianity and since part of the project was to convert to Christianity, they have to be refigured, people have to be figured out again, so Christian theology would either have to change to fit these non-Europeans in or non-Europeans would have to be fit into Christian theology. So fast forward to the 16th century, you have two Spanish theologians Bartolomé de las Casas and Jose de Acosta. These guys, they're both living in what is now Latin America and they're redefining the idea of natural slaves again drawing on Aquinas and Aristotle, they redefined the idea of natural slaves and they say well no look, the indigenous people of the Americas are not natural slaves, they're actually more like natural children, they're more like natural children and in thinking about them this way, they were afforded the ability to be converted to Christianity and afforded the ability to be brought into the emerging capitalist system of the Americas. So this redefinition follows the logic, but the natives were like children, they were simple, they were not fully formed and that Europeans should and would bring them into the light of both God and capitalism by saving them, that Europeans had a mandate to help these folks along to a modern kind of existence, so, but then this causes all sorts of other problems. Europeans begin to ask well if the natives are just like us only in this childlike state, how could this be? Are people historically connected? Are these people degenerative? Did they degenerate from a higher kind of position to a lower kind of position? And from the 16th through the 18th centuries, Europeans worked out tons of schemes to show how these people were historically related to non, to Europeans right, so there's this kind of elaboration; you still have all of this material that we would think about in some ways as a dataset as empirical material that is coming back into Europe from the 16th to the 18th century you have the very beginnings of anthropology in European philosophy and theology that is trying to figure out how come these people are different and because they're so different, how do they fit in relation to Europeans? So a key point here is that the kind of epistemological genealogy that I'm drawing out for you here, others are always defined in an opposition to what is European and that's a really key thing, I mean, one of the things when I talk to my students about this, I do this lecture for the undergraduates every year and for the journalism students every year, think about the way that this stuff that I'm talking about, this very old stuff crops up in representations of indigenous people globally today. The idea of people being child-like, the idea of people having a mandate to bring these folks in to the modern world. So early on, most of these debates are philosophers and theologians. From the 16th to 18th century, these schemes become more scientific. This is also, as you all know, the development of the modern disciplinary sciences, the time of that development. People begun to, began to debate monogenesis and polygenesis, right, so there are debates about monogenesis, which is the idea that all humans constitute a single biological species with a common origin and physical differences that are produced by natural agents over time and then polygenesis, the idea that human races constitute distinct species with separate origins and the physical differences are unalterable and racially innate. Bonnie alluded to a little bit of this when she was talking at the beginning about the development of American Cultural Anthropology pushing back against some of this. At the time there's also an emerging belief in orthogenesis, something that all of you that are Darwinian sort of legacy scientists, have pushed back against too in your disciplines, but orthogenesis when it comes to human beings, so orthogenesis is the kind of obsolete biological hypothesis that organisms have an innate tendency to evolve in a uni-linear fashion due to some internal mechanism or driving force, that there is something inside that pushes in an already defined direction. Beginning in the mid-16th century, you have the Scientific Revolution, so this really marks a movement from this kind of medieval thinking five theologians into more modern times. So this is when we have the with Descartes we have the idea of deduction, with Francis Bacon we have the idea of induction, the former, kind of leading to French rationalism, the latter leading to British empiricism. All of this is important because it's leading up to the Enlightenment and the Enlightenment is the period where you really get the solidifying of these kind of piecemeal theories about human culture and change over time solidifying in a much more scientific way, so the Enlightenment, as you know, is the period, the name that's given to the period of intellectual history in Europe from the 18th century, from about the publication of the Principles of Mathematics, Newton's Principles of Mathematics to the French Revolution. So Enlightenment intellectuals were enamored with the philosophy of Newton and they tried to extend it from the natural to the social realm and this is incredibly important because of Newton's idea of mechanical philosophy. This is the idea that the universe is a complex machine with fine-tuned interacting parts. The machine is always moving and it's the scientists task to learn how it moved, so Newton still kind of right at the beginning of the Enlightenment thinks that it's kind of God as a clockmaker, God made the machine and it's the scientists task to unlock it and understand how the parts interact. This leads to a sense that there are closed systems that we still see today; that there're closed systems and if we can just understand the interlocking parts, we can pick them apart and we can understand the closed systems; it's also as we all know an incredibly important sort of genealogical moment in the splitting of the disciplines; this idea that the biophysical world can be split into multiple interlocking parts and hydrologists can understand some, ecologists can understand some, animal behaviorists can understand some, anthropologists can understand some. Another major Enlightenment figure that we need to think about a little bit because we'll come back tomorrow in my lecture and talk about dispossession and sovereignty is John Locke. John Locke's another major Enlightenment figure, British philosopher. He wrote an essay concerning human understanding in 1690 and in that book or in that essay Locke gives us the idea that the mind of each newborn person is a blank slate. It's a blank slate to be written upon by life and this is him kind of reviving something from the stoic philosophers, but it's incredibly important because it's a kind of philosophy of experience and it's indispensable for the emergence of the culture concept because prior to that, there had been debates about whether culture was passed on biologically or whether culture was passed on through learned experience, extra-somatically and so with Locke we get the idea that culture is passed to pass-through, passed from person to person through a transmission process that is not biological, so not through genetics. During the Enlightenment you have lots of people drawing on Locke and Newton to organize and analyze the information of peoples that was brought back on the boy Joseph discovery. One of these people is Rousseau, we all know Rousseau because of the social contract and his notion of noble savagery, so Rousseau, French philosopher, wrote lots and lots of things; he's pushing back against his own society; he's critiquing what's wrong with him, his society and as one of the origins of what I think of as cultural critique, but the answer he has about what's wrong with his own society is that it's fallen from grace; that we can look back to this kind of ethnological record from the age of discovery, look at other people in other parts of the world, and we can see them in a state of noble savagery, we can see them living the way that our ancestors lived, we can see them living in a way that is pure and well without the worries of the modern time. And he saw natives elsewhere in the world as still living in this noble state and again this comes back to us over and over and over again in the representations contemporarily of indigenous people. Another set of thinkers to think about are people that are kind of grouped as the universal historians, and these are guys who again following on Aquinas who was following on Aristotle, they're still trying to discover the laws of human history, the laws of human historical change and they propose a series of stages of human development during which humans experience was understood to have accumulated into the culture of their day, so one of them is Turgot, he's French and he really thinks about humanity passing through three stages; he postulates that humanity goes from hunting and gathering societies to pastoral societies to farming societies and that this is a sort of, although he does not use the language of evolution, yet, he argues that this is this kind of natural law or progression, that everybody was a hunter then they became a pastoralist then they become a farmer and then ultimately what do they become? Agriculturalists who sell things for the market, because in all of this is the inherent ideology that European political economy and social structure is the pinnacle of social evolution. You also have William Robertson, so that's important - hunting, pastoralism, and farming, right, this kind of trajectory and for these guys, for Turgot, there's no going off that trajectory. If you are a hunting and gathering society, it's just cause you're stalled, you're going to move forward. Then you have someone like Robertson who's Scottish and he stresses technology, he says well, so technology is kind of what moves people through these stages and he postulates that people move from savagery to barbarism to civilization. Savagery, barbarism, civilization. Alright. So you see all of these kinds of fantasies of progression that seemed to end with, well the late 1700s social and economic configurations that are the beginnings or the sort of early life of contemporary capitalism. And they're all based on a sort of shared idea that there's something called human reason, there's something called progress, and there's something called perfectibility. Human reason, so there's an idea that human intellect unfettered by faith, religion, etc. pushes forward in a direction. Progress, the idea that there's a positive direction of historical change; people are not degenerate, people are moving forward or they're either stalled. And then perfectibility, that there is steady improvement in the human condition over time. So all of this, in addition to leading to this kind of genealogy that gives rise to anthropology, also leads to a push for social reform in the late 18th century and this becomes a rallying cry for the French Revolution, which I'm going to do in 10 seconds. French Revolution, the goal was to overthrow the Bourbon regime and the associated system of upper class privilege; it lasted a decade, it was a mess, it was a really bloody disaster. 1799 Napoleon assumed control of France and in a move that was a betrayal of all of the ideas of the Revolution, he made himself emperor, then he went out to conquer the world. After this happens, there's a sort of mass depression across Europe, right, all these ideals are being kind of destroyed by this and so when the revolution has failed, when it's gone badly, European intellectuals turn their back on these ideals and there's a kind of conservativism that grows. Fundamentalist Christianity or what we would now think of as fundamentalist Christianity grows, nationalism grows, and then romanticism and arts and literature a kind of push back against the move towards a less romantic system of representations. You also see the growth of conservatism in the natural sciences and what's becoming the Natural Sciences and this is where we see the growth of positivism. So we all know we trace positivism to Comte, French intellectual, wrote a book called The Course on the Positive and this is basically, in this he argues that philosophy and science, all disciplines move through three stages; they move from a theological stage where phenomena are explained in terms of deities, a metaphysical stage where phenomena are explained in terms of abstract concepts, and then a positive phase where phenomena are explained in terms of other phenomena. People believe that the sciences had already moved through this stage, but that the social sciences just emerging then needed to move to this positive stage. There was a sense that the social sciences lagged behind, that they had passed through the theological stage into the metaphysical stage where things were explained with abstract concepts like reason, but it was now time to move forward and to be more truly scientific. So for Comte, science was a search for generalizations; generalizations in particular about social dynamics, so about social change and social statics about social stability and this is really, sets the stage for what we think of as the classical cultural evolutionist of the 19th century, so these are a group of people that are more solidly or squarely in what become anthropology departments all over Europe and this happens in Germany, it happens in Britain, it happens to some extent in the United States. These early 19th century cultural evolutionists, many of them are working with Darwinian ideas about evolution and they're thinking about how it is that societies change over time and they really entrench this idea that society evolves in a particular direction, so they're drawing upon Darwin, they're drawing upon this Enlightenment thought, this kind of genealogy I've just laid out for you, and they're drawing on all of this kind of cross-cultural material that is coming back to Europe in the 19th century. I'm going to talk and I'm separating out in a really artificial way, colonialism and imperialism. I'm going to talk about that in a second, but there's this enormous dataset, another dataset that's coming back into Europe because of colonialism and imperialism and people are struggling in the very new social sciences to figure out how to fit all of this together. Theories of social evolution become the way that most people fit all of this data together. These theories developed rival schemes for the overall social and cultural progress as well as for the origins of specific institutions. This is where you see, again, think about that the whole and the different parts; people begin to think about society or culture, society in Britain, culture in North American anthropology, but this kind of mass that is human beings in the world, they begin to think of it as this interlocking set of institutions and so we begin to see an elaboration of focus on institutions like religion, marriage, the family, technology, and all of these kinds of institutions become these little thought worlds in and of themselves, so there's a brilliant anthropologist named Talal Asad who's written extensively about religion as this artifact of this process of creating the institutions of society and Talal Asad argues that religion is religion because anthropologists and others say it is, that you and I could go out into the world and ask people with this kind of enlightenment background, we see a set of social practices and we think 'oh that's religion,' right, that's, they're doing this, they're worshipping, there, they have certain kinds of chants that they're doing, they have certain kinds of rituals that they're doing, 'oh that's religion' and he argues that that sort of very terming of this set of practices in the world through this institution that has this genealogy disallows for objectivity. That we are actually bringing religion to a set of practices that may or may not be like other sets of practices that we call religion. So all of these institutions become, they become kind of markers for the cultural and they're sought after to show culture and how it evolves over time, so I'll mention a couple of these early kind of evolutionary thinkers within anthropology. The first one's E.B. Tylor, British, wealthy, well-traveled, his father was very, very, very rich and he was sickly, he had consumption as one did back in the day. He went to Cuba and Mexico, he needed to go to warmer climates, but he kind of couldn't handle it, perhaps the earliest anthropologist who got a tropical disease, so he's sickly, he goes back home and he, because he has experienced a little bit of the world and seeing things that he doesn't understand, he becomes one of the most important thinkers in this 19th century notion of cultural evolution. He maintains that culture evolves from the simple to the complex, so he's the one that gives up this kind of architectural language of simple to complex, right, that so if you are a hunter-gatherer that's really simple, it's simple technology, it's simple belief systems, it's simple socio-political organization, but if you're living in Europe in the 1900s, that's complex, its complex political systems. He gives us the language and ideology of simple to complex. He also thinks that there's progress and that everyone again can move from one stage to another. He believes that simple people can be moved, so he also gives us the sense that there is a possibility of intervention to move from the simple to the complex and when we think about our colleagues who work in international development, we often see this kind of ideology that there is both the desire to move people from the simple to complex, but also a kind of moral imperative from the simple to the complex, we can trace that back to him. So what did he do with data that didn't fit? He said well, so in some of the cultures that we're looking at you have survivals, you have complex cultures that have survivals of simpler kinds of institutions, so what we see with him is the first sort of falling apart of the system, this dataset not fitting together, this sense that oh wait a minute there may actually be different historical trajectories for the same sorts of socio-cultural institutions in different places, but instead of thinking that he said no, no you have these survivals, you have things, earlier customs that survive into the present day. He also is someone who believed in the psychic unity of man, parallel evolutionary sequences in different cultural traditions, and he also noted that cultural traits may spread from one society to another through diffusion and I think this is going to come back when we talk about cultural ecology and environmental anthropology. Alright, so fast forward one more, Lewis Henry Morgan. So Lewis Henry Morgan is another 19th century proponent of uniform and progressive cultural evolution; he's the first American to show up in my lecture. He was born in 1818, died in 1881, lived in New York or lived in upstate New York and he was a lawyer. He became really interested in the Iroquois when he defended their reservation and land grant case. There's a lot to be said about Morgan, I'm going to bracket it all off and tell you guys to read a book called Mohawk Interruptus which is by Audra Simpson who's an Iroquois scholar and she is rethinking Morgan's legacy in this really profound way, but Morgan's most important work for our purposes is a book called Ancient Society that was written in 1877. Morgan takes these basic stages of evolution, the basic three stages - savagery, barbarism, and civilization - and he divides them into upper, middle, and lower and so what he does is make it even more elaborate, so you have upper, you have upper savagery, middle savagery, and lower savagery and in this segmentation, he begins to pick and choose from the ethnological record to show what form exists in this, right, so you see this system getting much more elaborate and much more kind of scientific. He also took up the idea of technology, so he says that with each stage you can see the stages as distinguished by technological development and that technology always correlates with subsistence, marriage, family, and political organization. I'm not going to talk about Marx today, but I think you guys read Marx for your sociology, right, so we're going to think a little bit tomorrow in my lecture about political ecology about Marx and Marxism, but Marx and Engels are reading Morgan and Morgan is reading Marx and Engels and they're all thinking about evolution together, so we can see in this a kind of parallel to some Marxist ideas about base and superstructure and technology. So technological achievement, each stage has a kind of benchmark that you can identify, so for instance, middle savagery is marked by the acquisition of a fish diet and the discovery of fire, upper savagery by the bow and arrow, lower barbarianism by pottery, so it just becomes more and more and more elaborate in ancient society, so one of the things that Morgan was particularly interested in was family organization and he was, within family organization, he was interested in patrilineal societies and matrilineal societies. He talked about people in lower savagery, living in hordes of primitive promiscuity and then he traces the way that family organization changes are evolved over time. This is important when we come back to Boas because this is one of the things that Franz Boas pushes back against in the development of American cultural anthropology which early on is in direct opposition to the idea of cultural evolution. So why is it important to think about colonialism when we think about this lecture that I've just given, but also American cultural anthropology and the legacy of anthropology that we're all living today. So when I think about colonialism, I think about it as a kind of form of domination and hegemony. Colonialism is the movement of people and ideologies out of Europe to the rest of the world in a systematic process of domination that is meant to bring resources back to the metropol. When I think about imperialism, I think more about the metropol and what the metropol, what the European nations are getting out of these forays. These forays are initially meant to bring resources back in terms of material objects, in terms of wool, in terms of cotton, in terms of timber, in terms of gold, and they're meant through early mercantilism to bring money back to the metropol, so the metropols can compete at home. As colonialism develops over time it becomes about much more, it becomes about land, it becomes about actually securing territory in the colonies, and it becomes about moving people to colonies to create sources to bring things back to the metropol, but it also becomes about enslaving native populations to add to that economic system; it's all tied up also with the growth of capitalism in Europe; important things to think about with colonialism and anthropology; the first is that colonialism is a moment in global history when we see these ideas that I've been talking about made manifest, so we see the kinds of oppressions that we've heard about with colonialism for as long as we've all known about colonialism, we see them justified through the same ideologies that I've been talking about - natural slaves, natural children, people that are living in savagery that can be moved through missionization or eventually in the 19th and early 20th century through development into the light of the modern world. We see these ideologies in practice. We see these ideologies in practice in part through the work of early anthropologists. Some of the first anthropological data to come back to the metropol that was not in the age of exploration, that was not sort of piecemeal collecting of empirical data and bringing it back, it's because anthropologists worked for these colonial governments. Anthropologists worked for them, anthropologists collected data for them, anthropologists attempted to help with the colonial project. One of the people that I mentioned earlier is Talal Asad and in addition to writing about ritual and religion, Talal Asad has written quite a bit about colonialism and he wrote a book called Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. I'm going to leave us with a couple of thoughts from that book. What he argues in that book is that anthropology is, ideologically it is, in its empirical or not empirical, in its epistemic basis it is colonialism, it's part and parcel to colonialism, that you can't separate the two out, the ideologies that created them are the same ideologies, but that also you have anthropologists that are working as colonial agents that are meant to be changing the places that they're going to work. This, so Talal publishes that book in 1991, Edward Said's Orientalism published in 1976, so from about 1976 to about 1991 you have this massive crisis in anthropology where anthropologists feel so much guilt because of the role of anthropology and colonialism that many of them become silenced and I think this is a lot of the fighting that you see in anthropology departments happens in this time period from the 70s to the early 90s. Anthropologists, to some extent, one body of anthropology kind of known as the ethnographic turn moves away from the idea that we can actually represent anything faithfully, so this is a group of thinkers mostly boys actually, they're all in California, they're, and that's important because we're reading Lila Abu-Lughod, she's a woman who was also thinking about how to push back against this; these guys with ethnographic turn, they're not siting women, they're not talking to women, so interesting gender politics in the field, but the ethnographic turn really kind of takes anthropology and says anthropological text and ethnography are nothing more than a representation of the mind of the ethnographer, that there is no objectivity, it's all subjectivity, so when we're writing, the process of writing is that which, that through which we make the world and it's this interesting, but pretty bad moment in anthropological, bad in some ways, good in some ways, this moment in anthropological history where you have a turning away from working with others, you have a turning away from working with people, it's also the moment when you have a kind of theoretical turn within anthropology and you get much more anthropology influenced by philosophy, this is where I'll talk about Foucault tomorrow, this is where Michel Foucault's work comes in really strongly, but you have a kind of turning inward and a backing off from wanting to do anything applied. You have anthropologists who think, oh this terrible legacy of the discipline, we don't want to get mired down in telling anybody what they should or shouldn't do, but you also at the same time have the development of a group of scholars within anthropology who leave the Academy, they go out and they work for development organizations, they work for conservation organizations, they take understanding this very vexed history and they say well, so how can we do this better, how can we move anthropology into a place where we understand others in a way that doesn't allow for the kinds of evils of colonialism to happen again in development projects and in conservation projects. And I think that's where I'll leave us and ask for questions, but you have this sort of turn and I think in the next lecture we'll go back to the 1950s and think more about how American cultural anthropology develops, but that's it. ♪ Music ♪