Anthropology in Nineteenth Century

It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that anthropology began to take shape as a separate field of study. It came together from many different directions, with roots in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and even humanistic disciplines like history and folklore. By end of the nineteenth century, anthropology had clearly narrowed its focus to four main areas:

1. Studies of physical aspects of the human species, including human biology and evolution.

2. Studies of language, mainly the diversity of the world’s spoken and written languages

3. Archaeologists studies of past civilizations

4. Studies of the cultural similarities and differences among existing societies, particularly those of non western world.

These four fields are still at the core of anthropology, and today every anthropologist is expected to be acquainted with them.

But it is interesting to look at the way these seemly diverse approaches were brought together as anthropology develop into a formal discipline and defined its boundaries its regards to other social sciences.

In the nineteenth century physical anthropology was perhaps most directly concerned with the concept of race, especially in the United States, where the tensions that led to Civil War fostered scientific investigating of racial differences.

The root of physical anthropology can be found in the natural sciences of that period, including biology, botany, and zoology.

These fields had a long tradition of recording all the diverse species of animals and plants discovered in different parts of the world and trying to figure out the relationship among them , as well as they had grown apart, and changed – other words, their evolution.
Anthropology in Nineteenth Century

Anthropology and people ll

In Western Europe the age of exploration and discovery that followed the decline of the middle ages created greater interest in the variety of peoples and customs on other parts of the world.

European explorers, adventurers, missionaries, and travelers came into contact with societies whose people behaved on ways that the Europeans found very strange.

In letters and journals they described these societies in the utmost details. The more contact they had with different cultures, the more information was collected and published, creating even greater interest in the study of other people.

Although some of the early attempts at scientific analysis of foreign customs and peoples of radically different appearance were quite naive – still they were the first step toward development of anthropology as a science.

Are these strange peoples in the far corners of the earth related to each other and to us? How do their customs compare with ours?

And how can we explain such a wide range behavior? These were the kind of questions asked by early anthropologists.
Anthropology and people ll

Language Evolution

Language Evolution
Chimps are capable if using a rudimentary humanlike language, even though they cannot speak. This tells us two very important facts about human evolutions.

First, our pre human ancestors probably were intelligent enough to engage in some kind of symbolic communication, however limited.

Second, the ability to speak is crucial in that it allows for much more communication about many more topics, and at a greater speed. Anthropologists are currently debating the questions of what stage if a human evolution was the one in which speech became possible.

According to some, reconstructions of the vocal apparatus and oral structure of Neanderthal skeletons indicate that Neanderthals could not pronounce many of the sounds commonly found in the modern languages.

Others disagree claiming that the cultural advances of the Neanderthals could have been achieved only with the us of speech, which could have been needed in order to organize and carry out the cooperatives hunting venture that were the main source of food for some groups.

While this debate may never really end , we do now that only through speech have we been able to reach present levels of technological and cultural advancements.
Language Evolution

Culture and Definition

As anthropologist use the term, culture is the way of life shared by a group of people.

It is what makes people similar to one another and unites them as a group, overcoming individual differences in personality. Culture is acquired behavior; it is learned rather than inherited genetically.

Culture is passed on from one generation to the next through the process known as socialization.

Although the methods of teaching children the appropriate behavior patterns may vary from one society to another, all societies engage in some form of child training.

It is assume that early childhood experiences will last effect on an individual, and insofar as the same basic experiences are shared by most children in a society, a general personality pattern will be shared among most adults in that society.
Culture and Definition

Kalervo Oberg (1901 -1973) – anthropologist who introduced the term ‘culture shock’

Kalervo Oberg (1901 -1973) – anthropologist who introduced the term ‘culture shock’
He was born in British Columbia to Finnish parents in 1901. Kalervo Oberg was known as a world renowned anthropologist. He was a civil servant and a teacher.

He graduated from University of British Columbia with Bachelor of Economics before proceed to Master of Economics from University of Pittsburgh. He earned his doctorate from University of Chicago with dissertation, the Social Economy of the Tlingit Indians of Alaska.

He loved with his fieldwork and his extensive and wide ranging fieldwork was his biggest accomplishment. Oberg then worked in various government postings overseas, including the Institute of Inter-American Affairs, forerunner of the U.S. Agency for International Development, with assignments including Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, and Surinam.

He traveled the world and wrote about the experiences so others could enjoy them as well. He was a world-renowned applied anthropologist. He was the first to introduce the term "Culture shock" and he was the best known coined for the idea in 1954. He found that all human beings experience the same feelings when they travel to or live in a different country or culture.

He found that culture shock is almost like a disease: it has a cause, symptoms and a cure. Kalervo Oberg died in 1973.
Kalervo Oberg (1901 -1973) – anthropologist who introduced the term ‘culture shock’

Famous Cultural Anthropologist: Ralph Linton (1893 – 1953)

Famous Cultural Anthropologist: Ralph Linton (1893 – 1953)
Ralph Linton began his career as an archeologist, but later turn to cultural anthropology.

His ethnographic fieldwork took him to Polynesia and Madagascar, as well as on archeological expeditions in Latin America and the United States.

He developed the concepts of status and role in his classic book The Study of Man (1936). Linton was a leading figure in the development of the subfield of psychological anthropology in the 1930s and 1940s, and published widely on the topic of culture and personality.

He also was instrumental in promoting the study of culture change, and published several studies on the acculturation of Native Americans.

Ralph Linton was born in Philadelphia on February 27, 1893 was on of the best known American anthropologists of the time.

Graduated from University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, he joined Field Museum at Chicago as Curator of American Indian.

In 1946, Linton was appointed as Sterling Professor of Anthropology at Yale University and at the same time as President of the American Anthropological Association. He died due to heart attack in 1953.
Famous Cultural Anthropologist: Ralph Linton (1893 – 1953)