Читать книгу Anthropology For Dummies - Cameron M. Smith - Страница 26
-Isms and the Making of Anthropology
ОглавлениеLike most scholarly disciplines, anthropology wasn’t just tidily invented overnight; I think of it as a Frankenstein’s monster of ideas and questions culled from other disciplines, cobbled and stitched together into a more-or-less functional whole. (You can read more about the various subdisciplines of anthropology in Chapter 3.)
But even before anthropology existed as a discrete academic field, its foundations were being laid by people doing other things that would later be called anthropology (or act as guidelines for building anthropology). Herodotus, a 6th-century Greek scholar, described the peoples and antiquities of Egypt, and Julius Caesar described the people he encountered in France (the Gauls) and southern England (the Britons) in the 50s BC. And the ancient Egyptians wrote about their neighbors to the North (in the Near East) and to the South (the Nubians of modern-day Sudan); clearly, people have been interested in other people for a long time. But these reports were often curios, or passages written as political statements, and they were largely descriptive. They showed what was (more or less) but didn’t go into too much detail about why. As descriptions, they were often quite accurate — but they offered few systematic explanations for human diversity.
It wasn’t until the 19th and 20th centuries AD that people systematically went out from the centers of Western civilization (in Europe and North America) with the specific goal of studying other people. (Although there are anthropologists in just about every country today, the discipline really was a 19th-century AD invention of Europe and North America.) Rather than explaining other (non-European) people with ancient legends, or religious explanations, early anthropologists attempted a degree of objectivity, using the scientific method. It was far from perfect, and some things went wrong early in anthropology, but the seed of anthropology was watered, and a new discipline began to grow.