Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

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University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964 - 523 páginas

Although social sciences such as anthropology are often thought to have been organized as academic specialties in the nineteenth century, the ideas upon which these disciplines were founded actually developed centuries earlier. In fact, the foundational concepts can be traced at least as far back as the sixteenth century, when contact with unfamiliar peoples in the New World led Europeans to create ways of describing and understanding social similarities and differences among humans.

Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries examines the history of some of the ideas adopted to help understand the origin of culture, the diversity of traits, the significance of similarities, the sequence of high civilizations, the course of cultural change, and the theory of social evolution. It is a book that not only illuminates the thinking of a bygone age but also sheds light on the sources of attitudes still prevalent today.

Dentro del libro

Contenido

The Medieval Prologue
15
The Classical Heritage
17
The Ethnology of the Medieval Encyclopedists
49
Ethnology Trade and Missionary Endeavor
78
The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
109
or the Cabinet of Curios
111
Modes of Classification and Description
162
The Ark of Noah and the Problem of Cultural Diversity
207
Similarities and Their Documentary Properties
295
The Problem of Savagery
354
The Place of the Savage in the Chain of Being
386
The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
431
From Hierarchy to History
433
Aftermath
478
Index
517
Derechos de autor

Diffusion Degeneration and Environmentalism
254

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Términos y frases comunes

Acerca del autor (1964)

Margaret T. Hodgen is author of The Doctrine of Survivals: A Chapter in the History of Scientific Method in the Study of Man and Change and History: A Study of the Dated Distributions of Technological Innovations in England.

Información bibliográfica