Development of Anthropology as a Discipline in the United States Essays

Development of Anthropology as a Discipline in the United States I. Early History of Anthropology in the United States 1870-1900 â€Å"The roots of anthropology lie in the eye-witness accounts of travelers who have journeyed to lands on the margins of state-based societies and described their cultures and in the efforts of individuals who have analyzed the information collected. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, a number of anthropologists recognized that the practice of anthropology was intimately linked to commerce and colonial expansion.† (Patterson 1) There were essentially three â€Å"schools† of anthropological thinking by the First World War and after. The first, cultural determinism, maintained by Franz Boas and his students, stressed the interrelation of â€Å"ethnology, linguistics, folklore, archaeology as an autonomous academic discipline† (Patterson 55). The second was physical anthropology, whose major proponent was Ales Hrdlicka of the National Museum; it stressed biology and wanted physical anthropology to be a distinct academic discipline. The third was the eugenics movement, propagated by Charles B Davenport, it maintained that the status of eugenics, or racial hierarchization, was a legitimate science and asserted the supremacy of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Because of page constraints we will not examine closely physical anthropology, as it is not absolutely vital in a treatment of the development of anthropology as a discipline, but briefly it is the application of biological data and principles t o the study man in society. Anthropology in the United States in the period immediately following the Revolution and the drafting of the constitution was used to fulfill three purposes: (1) forge a national iden... ...f Columbia’s first instructors in anthropology; he used his positions at the American Museum of Natural History and Columbia University to train a generation of anthropologists. Boas, by 1932, had instructed a sizeable number of people from these marginalized groups, who were lumped together as savages or inferior races. We must remember however, as Dr. Paterson points out, that, â€Å"Anthropology was professionalized during a period characterized by intense discrimination against people of color, immigrants, women, and poor folks† (65). Works Cited Boas, Franz. â€Å"Report on the Academic Teaching of Anthropology.† In American Anthropologist, 21:41-48, 1919. Kroeber, A.L. â€Å"The Place of Anthropology in Universities.† In American Anthropologist, 56: 754-767, 1954. Patterson, Thomas C. A Social History of Anthropology in the United States. Oxford: Berg, 2001.