"Anthropology at Chicago" by George W. Stocking, Jr.

Case 3: The Australians as Paleolithic Men

The intellectual atmosphere in which academic anthropology emerged was heavily conditioned by the assumptions of late nineteenth-century evolutionism. Although clearly an ideological affirmation of the power and values of Victorian culture, cultural evolutionism may be viewed also as a solution to problems posed by Darwin's doctrine of natural selection, the simultaneous realization of the great antiquity of man, and the consequent abandonment of biblical views of human history. Called upon by Darwin's traditionalist critics to demonstrate that the human capacity for culture could have developed by purely natural processes over an indefinite time period, Darwinians like John Lubbock resurrected the comparative method of the eighteenth century in order to reconstitute Prehistoric Times on the basis of the customs and manners of modern "savages." In a Darwinian milieu, however, the inferiority of savages was not merely cultural; they were in fact assumed to represent biologically intermediate forms between white European man and the higher primates. In this context, pre-Darwinian "ethnology" was transformed into a more "scientifically" oriented discipline in which contemporary physical, linguistic, and culturatvariation was encompassed within the broader evolutionary development of the genus homo - Anthropology, as it had come to be called in the Anglo-American tradition by the time Edward Burnett Tylor's classic textbook appeared in 1884.

In the hands of Herbert Spencer, who had developed the doctrine independently of Darwin, evolutionism provided a frame both for the comparative presentation of a large amount of cross-cultural data and for the analysis of human social order in its static and developmental aspects. Like other evolutionists, Spencer saw human culture in utilitarian terms as a series of directly adaptive solutions to problems posed by the natural world: "primitive" men - exemplified by such living "representatives" of the Paleolithic as the contemporary Australian aborigines - did as well as their smaller brains and more limited intelligence would allow. As the leading American evolutionary anthropologist, Lewis Henry Morgan, described it in the early 1870s, human cultural evolution was on the one hand a regular sequence of subsistence modes and on the other a regular growth of a series of universal ideas: the idea of government, the idea of language, etc.

By the end of the century the combined influence of more systematic empirical investigations and changing intellectual trends had begun to call into question the assumptions of "classical" evolutionary anthropology. Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen's study of the Arunta of central Australia was the stimulus for more than a decade of anthropological debate about the principles of "primitive' social and religious organization, culminating in 1912 with the publication of Emile Durkheiiris Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Durkheim s own extended critical reevaluation of Spencerian assumptions provided much of the theoretical basis for the modern British tradition of synchronic functional analysis. Although still viewed in positivistic terms within a broadly evolutionary framework, primitive (and by extension, civilized) cultural forms were interpreted as complex manifestations of the "collective consciousness" of distinctive social groups.

During the same period a more radically relativistic critique of evolutionary assumptions was undertaken in the United States by the German immigrant anthropologist Franz Boas. Over several decades beginning in 1886, Boas carried on extended ethnographic fieldwork in the Canadian Northwest, working most extensively among the Kwakuitl Indians of Vancouver Island - a group of whom camped on the Midway at the Chicago Columbian Exposition in 1893. Between 1894 and 1911 Boas published a series of essays calling into question the assumption that civilizational achievement was an indicator of racial capacity, and that contemporary human cultural manifestations could be arranged in regular sequences of evolutionary development. Arguing that there was no evidence to sustain the view that any living group of non-European men represented an intermediate form between man and some primate ancestor, he insisted that the formulation of scientific laws of cultural development must wait upon the detailed historical reconstruction of the development of particular human cultures. As brought together in The Mind of Primitive Man, Boas' critique of evolutionism laid the basis for the modern anthropological concept of culture. Human cultures are conceived not simply as utilitarian responses to the pressures of environment, but in pluralistic relativistic terms as different worlds of thought in terms of which the external world is interpreted. Despite its antievolutionism, Boas' anthropology retained a natural historical orientation which embraced all facets of human variety - in sharp contrast to the purely social theoretical approach of the Durkheimian tradition. Having achieved by World War I a dominant position within the profession of American anthropology, Boas was the most powerful single intellectual influence on its methodological and theoretical development until his death in 1942.

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