ANTHROP 3AS3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Indian Claims Commission, William Duncan Strong, Thomas Robert Malthus
16 Apr 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Origins in plato, aristotle; developed in medieval europe, most thoroughly applied in 1800s. Succession of stages along a unilinear path, leading to the pinnacle (just below celestial levels) of victorian english society. Unilineal cultural development and inevitable progress: core ideas heavily built on armchair speculation and ethnocentrism. It wasn"t enough to rank humans to animals, plants, etc. but to other humans culture; inevitable progress. Among other issues, led to preoccupations with defining stages without actually explaining mechanisms for passing into successive stages descriptive, not really explanatory. Supported imperialistic pursuits eugenics, manifest destiny, colonization, and subjugation from the south pacific to africa to east asia to north america. Culture and nature: legacies of the enlightenment period. Archaeology itself was an outgrowth of the enlightenment, and the discovery of human antiquity. While intellectually transformative, certain enlightenment concepts and assumptions held back understanding of the deep history of interaction between h. sapiens and our environment.
