Development of Anthropology as a Discipline in the United States Essays

Development of Anthropology as a Discipline in the United StatesI. Early History of Anthropology in the United States 1870-1900The roots of anthropology falsehood 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 canvass the information collected. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a turning of anthropologists recognized that the practice of anthropology was intimately linked to commerce and colonial expansion. (Patterson 1)thither were essentially three schools of anthropological thinking by the First human War and after. The first, cultural determinism, kept up(p) by Franz Boas and his students, stressed the interrelation of ethnology, linguistics, folklore, archaeology as an autonomous academic discipline (Patterson 55). The second was physical anthropology, whose study proponent was Ales Hrdlicka of the National Museum it stressed biology and w anted 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 asseverate the supremacy of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Because of page constraints we will not ensure closely physical anthropology, as it is not absolutely vital in a treatment of the development of anthropology as a discipline, but presently it is the application of biological data and principles to the study man in society. Anthropology in the United States in the blockage immediately following the Revolution and the draft of the constitution was used to fulfill three purposes (1) forge a bailiwick iden... ...f Columbias first instructors in anthropology he used his positions at the American Museum of Natural History and Columbia University to train a coevals 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, Anthropology was professionalized during a period characterized by intense discrimination against people of color, immigrants, women, and poor folks (65). flora CitedBoas, Franz. Report on the Academic Teaching of Anthropology. In American Anthropologist, 2141-48, 1919.Kroeber, A.L. 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.