AN101 Lecture Notes - Current Anthropology, Anthropology Today, Evolutionism
Document Summary
Stayed 2 years among the trobiand people. Records audio material such as interviews, myths and songs. Why was his approach revolutionary at the time: it went against the current anthropology ways and evolutions theories, he saw the flaws in anthropology for those two reasons. Worked with materials collected by others (missionaries, traders, explorers, or colonial officials. ) Focus on the sensationalist and the spectacular. Satisfy westerns expectation on the exotic other: A problematic theory that stipulates that all human groups follow the same stages of cultural evolution. All human groups and aligned in a single evolution line from the most primitive to most civilized. Anthropologists would place themselves at the top of the evolutionary scale, and everyone else below them. Anthropologists start criticizing tis theory at the beginning of the. In anthropology today, this theory is considered obsolete and very ethnocentric. At the beginning of the 20th century, the methodology of fieldwork allowed anthropologists, such as malinowski, to criticize evolutionist theories.
