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Jour. Anth. Inst.
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Historical SummaryThe employment of the microscope instead of the telescope and spectroscope has enabled the biologists to push exploration to the other extreme, in the direction of the examination of the life and behavior of invisible and parasitic forms of existence, and this direction of research, which originally seemed also quite irrelevant to the problem of the human universe, has eventually reacted very positively on the control of human diseases. Thus, to take a single example, malaria is caused by a parasite which must develop its life cycle in two unrelated hosts, the earlier stages in the stomach of a mosquito and the later stages in the red blood corpuscles of humans. Humans bitten by infected mosquitoes contract malaria, and sound mosquitoes biting infected humans are infected, and a vicious circle is thus established. But if mosquitoes are unable to bite humans the parasites cannot be propagated and malaria disappears. Similarly, experiments with garden peas, guinea pigs and fruit flies have thrown a light on human heredity not directly obtainable from humans. It is well known also that the theory of evolution as formulated by Darwin and his contemporaries had a profound influence upon the development of all the social sciences and more particularly on anthropology and sociology. Darwin also went outside the immediate situation and examined comparatively the modification of life on the morphological side during the whole of geological time, and fixed what Huxley later called "man’s place in nature," which was, in fact, among the animals. The years following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species were, of course, an exciting period, and a formative one for anthropology. A new and vivid interest was aroused for those great groups of mankind called "savages,""primitives,""uncivilized," "lower races," "natural races," and recently by Faris "preliterates,"and for about seventy years these groups have been studied with increasing intensity and improved techniques, partly from the standpoint of the antiquity of man and the derivation of his varieties and partly from that of the evolution of human institutions. At the present moment all the social sciences have become more or less concerned with the problem of human behavior, especially in its relation with the problems of education, the intercourse of nationalities, the contacts of races, delinquency, crime, insanity, etc., and more generally with reference to the progressive unstabilization of society, and there is a renewed and wider interest in the comparative examination of the specific cultural systems of racial and national groups and the behavior of individuals in the specific cultural situations, corresponding again with Professor Shapley’s dictum that the more we learn about other systems directly the more we shall learn about our own system indirectly. Historically the study of primitive societies has been prominently associated with the three following points of view: 1. That cultural evolution, as shown in social institutions, would be found to emerge and proceed in a regular order and invariable unilinear sequence, the same steps being taken in the same order by each and every division of mankind in so far as they were taken at all. Tylor, who was prominent in the foundation of modern anthropology, emphasized the theory of the unilinear development of cultures and illustrated it by a comparison drawn from geology:
The institutions of man are as distinctly stratified as the earth on which he lives. They succeed each other in series substantially uniform over the globe, independent of what seem the comparatively superficial differences of race and language, but shaped by similar human nature acting through successively changed conditions in savage, barbaric, and civilized life.1
1Tylor, E.B.n/an/an/an/a, "On a Method of Investigating the Development of Institutions. . .," , 18: 269.
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Chicago: "Jour. Anth. Inst.," Jour. Anth. Inst. in Primitive Behavior: An Introduction to the Social Sciences, ed. Thomas, William I. (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1937), Original Sources, accessed November 22, 2024, http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=GXSY32J8QHH4RBC.
MLA: . "Jour. Anth. Inst." Jour. Anth. Inst., Vol. 18, in Primitive Behavior: An Introduction to the Social Sciences, edited by Thomas, William I., New York, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1937, Original Sources. 22 Nov. 2024. http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=GXSY32J8QHH4RBC.
Harvard: , 'Jour. Anth. Inst.' in Jour. Anth. Inst.. cited in 1937, Primitive Behavior: An Introduction to the Social Sciences, ed. , McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., New York. Original Sources, retrieved 22 November 2024, from http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=GXSY32J8QHH4RBC.
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