Anthropology For Dummies. Cameron M. Smith
often judged — with Western civilization’s basic biblical approach — what had been observed. This was a common error that took decades to overturn, so anthropology could understand each culture in its own unique context.
Colonialist ethnographies had some distinctive characteristics:
Racism: Particularly, the idea that non-Western people were inferior to Westerners and therefore had to be educated to the best of the colonial powers’ ability (but would always remain inferior to Westerners).
Social Darwinism: Particularly, the idea that non-Western people either were destined to be Westernized (in which case they should be helped to achieve Westernization — for example, by having their customs banned and replaced with Western customs) or were doomed to extinction (in which case not much could be done for them but to document them like living museum exhibits before they became extinct).
Ethnocentrism: The idea that Western civilization was at the pinnacle of human evolution, and that all other ways of life were inferior; note that this view isn’t exclusive to Western civilization — many cultures worldwide believe it as well.
Although early anthropology was colored by its involvement with colonialism, by the 1950s many anthropologists recognized that ethnographies being produced under the colonialist paradigm weren’t as objective as they could be, and they began to question the old concept of clear-cut races; in 1969, the American Anthropological Association formed a Committee on Ethics. By the mid-1970s, guidelines for ethical ethnography were being published, and today graduate students undergo ethical and human-relations training before doing fieldwork.
Although anthropologists still must consider plenty of ethical issues when doing research among other human beings, I’m confident that most ethnographic anthropologists today don’t work for colonialist efforts or efforts counter to the interest of the people they study. In fact, my impression is that most ethnographers today do the opposite: They work in the interest of the folks they study. This approach can have its own pitfalls, if the researcher glorifies the people she’s studying, so remaining an impartial, scientific observer is a constant challenge. At the same time, most anthropologists — in one way or another — are working to answer some of the basic questions we looked at in the section “Getting to the Heart of Anthropology” earlier in this chapter.
Antiquarianism
You can find the roots of archaeology (the branch of anthropology studying the ancient past) in a distinctly nonscientific interest in the past. Many motivations initially drove this antiquarian (prescientific) interest. For example, ancient Sumerian royalty commissioned excavations that could show their connections to mythical culture heroes. In another example, 16th-century French traders could sell curios (unusual articles, often ancient ones of mysterious function) to royal families across Europe, and 19th-century eligible English bachelors could clutter their parlors with artifacts meant to demonstrate their owners’ high education and interest in the esoteric. Having a “cabinet of curiosities” full of ancient objects (pottery, flint axes, and so on) was a great way to get ahead socially, because it was evidence of your wealth and the fact that you had the luxury of time to study. Only in the 1850s did appreciable numbers of investigators — who began to call themselves archaeologists — start to carefully document what they excavated, treating artifacts not just for their monetary or social value, but for their scientific value.
OLE WURM AND THE CIRCUS STRONGMAN
The roots of modern scientific archaeology are in Europe, where, from the 1650s to the 1850s, all manner of men (yes, it was mostly men for a long time) sought to find and bring home antiquities and curios of the ancient world. This checkered crew included genuine naturalists, such as Danish prehistorian Ole Wurm, legions of vaguely interested wealthy British bachelors, and Giovanni Belzoni, the Italian-born charlatan, circus strongman, and explorer of the Egyptian pyramids.
Wurm (1588–1654) was a Danish professor of medicine with an interest in, well, everything. Paying students to collect objects and curios any time they traveled abroad, Wurm assembled an impressive collection of artifacts, skeletons, fossils, rocks, ancient statuary, artifacts, and other bric-a-brac. Working under the impression that the world was just a few thousand years old, Wurm organized the objects in his museum not according to age (as we would today), but by how much they resembled one another. This was a start at systematically organizing the many new objects being discovered by explorers, but it was different from today’s archaeology because it lacked an understanding of the actual age of the Earth and humanity.
By the time he was 25, Belzoni (1778–1823) had fled from a monastic school in Rome and started a 12-year career as a strongman in an English circus. Traveling to Egypt in 1815, he quickly began an extraordinary new career as an “Antiquarian.” Within a few years he had sent many ancient Egyptian relics back to London’s British Museum, including multi-ton stone statues. In 1818 he used what some called his engineering genius to locate a passage into the Great Pyramid at Gizeh; although he found that it had already been looted, his dramatically publicized adventures were enough to excite the public with tales of treasure-hunting and relics from past ages. Though he wasn’t a professional scholar, Belzoni is credited with encouraging the public to take an interest in the ancient world.
Like colonialist ethnography, antiquarian archaeology had some distinctive characteristics:
A focus on large, visible archaeology: In particular, large ruins — such as the walled city of Troy, the pyramids of Egypt, or the Parthenon — that were relatively easy to find and analyze. (This propensity for size also led to a focus on the royal families of the ancient world because they were associated with these large monuments, whereas common people were buried elsewhere and essentially ignored by archaeologists until the 1960s.)
A focus on the Western world: Early archaeologists largely believed that the West was at the pinnacle of evolution, and all other societies were either going to become Western or become extinct.
A focus on monetary value: Many sought antiquities not for their value as knowledge but as items that could be sold.
A concept of shallow time: Until the 1860s, many believed that the Earth was only a few thousand years old and that most explanations of the ancient world were in the Christian Bible.
Although archaeology began without distinctively scientific goals, by the early 1900s people knew that the Earth was very ancient and that evolution had shaped humanity as early as millions of years ago, and archaeologists had begun to make very careful records of what they found. You can check out more about modern archaeological methods in Chapter 3. For the moment, you just need to know that although the study began in antiquarianism, it developed into a modern science that has revealed a great deal about the human past.
Scientism
By the 1930s, anthropology was underway as a distinctive academic field worldwide, with anthropologists trying — in different ways — to examine some of the basic questions outlined in the section “Getting to the Heart of Anthropology” earlier in this chapter. Bodies of theory even developed, each a different lens through which to interpret the cultures worldwide (which were being documented by ethnographers). Essentially, a scientific approach was applied to the study of humanity. The key feature of the scientific approach is objectivity (the idea that one can learn about the universe impartially). For example, in prescientific times, humanity and the Earth were quite