Agenda

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Agenda

• Take out your homework
• Foundations of Anthropology Power Point
• HW
• Study for Quiz

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Foundations of Anthropology

• Ms. Hernandez

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Accounts of Others PeopleAnthropology as a
notion

• Works of AntiquityAncient Greece and Africa

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Herodotus- Greek Historian (5th Century BC)

• Father of History
• Known for his work entitled Histories.
• Histories is the story of the rise of Persian
  power and the friction between Persia and Greece.
  
• Histories also contained information having to do
  with the history, geography, and ethnography of
  Egypt.
• Fascinated by the differences between Egyptian
  and Greek culture.
• Wrote about how the Egyptians did things
  backwards in relation to the Greeks. (i.e.,
  Observations he made describe how the Egyptians
  wrote from right to left, instead of left to
  right).

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Arab Ibn Khaldon- North African Scholar (14th
Century A.D.)

• Considered the Father Cultural History and is
  viewed as one of the forerunners of modern
  economics.
• Wrote Muqaddimah, which is considered one of the
  first works of modern sociology
• Muqaddimah includes thorough criticism of the
  mistakes regularly committed by his fellow
  historians and the difficulties which await the
  historian in his work. Including
• Partisanship towards a creed or opinion...
• Over-confidence in one's sources...
• The inability to place an event in its real
  context
• Common desire to gain favor of those of high
  ranks, by praising them and spreading their
  fame...
• Ignorance of the laws governing the
  transformation of human society

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Age of Reason- Enlightenment

• Anthropology can be understood as an outgrowth of
  the Age of Reason, a period when Europeans
  attempted systematically to study human behavior.
• Influence by the works of
• Jean Jacques Rousseau Enlightenment thinker who
  saw a fundamental divide between society and
  human nature
• Contended that man was neither inherently good
  nor bad when in a state of nature but is
  corrupted by society.
• Georges-Louis Comte de Buffon
• Naturalists who considered the similarities
  between humans and apes, and the possibility of a
  common ancestry.
• His views influenced the next 2 generations of
  naturalists including Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and
  Charles Darwin).

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Development of Anthropology as a discipline

• Complex as human history

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Anthropology as a field

• Anthropology as a distinct field of inquiry is a
  relatively recent product of Western
  civilization.
• In the United States, the 1st course in
  anthropology to carry credit was not offered
  until 1879 (University of Rochester)
• If people have always been concerned about
  themselves and their origins, why then did it
  take such a long time for a systematic discipline
  of anthropology to appear?

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Why so slow?

• Limits of human technology
• Geographic separation
• Limitations in travel and transportation
• Human biases
• Long history of human segregation
• Europeans considered societies that did not share
  fundamental cultural values as savage or
  barbarian
• Growth in interest to understand human diversity
  rather than reject it is a relatively new concept
  

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Anthropology and the other sciences

• Not the 1st discipline to attempt to analyze
  human behavior and diversity
• Share objectives with other social sciences
  (psychology, economics, sociology, biology)
• Anthropology looks at broad basis of human ideas
  and practices without limiting to any single
  social or biological aspect
• Inclusive overview of complex biological and
  cultural organism