The Racist History of Anthropology

 by Maddy Ross

Anthropology is one of those lesser known subjects that people often don’t hear as much about. Yet the study of anthropology is one that has been around for centuries. The interdisciplinary nature of the subject can make it difficult to define especially as the study can be very broad, for example there are different offshoots of the subject such as cultural anthropology, biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology and archaeology. Anthropology in general aims to discover and explain differences and similarities of cultures and societies. It is the study of human behaviour and biology in the past and present. 

Anthropology can be traced back to Ancient Greece with the historian Herodotus. He wrote widely about people from different cultures and wrote about ‘the barbarian people’ to the east and north of the Greek peninsula. Many academics argue that Herodotus lacked the theory and ignored his own bias which would affect his writings but it is clear he was one of the first to examine other cultures methodically. 

The name of the discipline itself dates back to the 16th century, but it was not until the Victorian era that it was used in reference to the academic subject. Anthropology in the 19th century was largely based around the idea of ‘social evolution’- the idea that societies evolve with the end-point being the ideal European Victorian society. This racist idea of societies progressing in a linear fashion to reach the goal of European culture is really not what modern anthropology is about at all. A key part of current anthropology is the idea of ethnocentrism- the evaluation of other cultures according to preconceived ideas and standards of ones own culture. An anthropologist cannot fulfil their job when they still hold the preconceptions from their own background, as the ethnography (the scientific description of peoples and cultures with specifics about their society) they produce will never fully be representative of what it is like to live with that certain culture. 

The flawed theory of evolutionary progress with Western Europe as the pinnacle of progression is found in many academics at the time. Lewis Henry Morgan, trained as a lawyer, significantly contributed to the discipline at the time. His most well known book, Ancient Society, presented three stages of societal evolution: savagery, barbarism and civilisation. These stages were characterised by what tools and technology was used as well as familial relations and political systems. The first two stages were even each divided into 3 sub-categories. 

Societies that did not match the technological capabilities of the West were deemed inherently inferior and less evolved. E.B Tylor another contemporary is regarded as a highly influential academic reinforces this theory in his book Primitive Culture where he often refers to “primitive” cultures as “children”. His student James Frazer, often referred to as the ‘father of anthropology’ wrote The Golden Bough which focuses on the evolutionary theory put forward by Tylor. The book mainly focuses on magic and religion is societies. His broad idea that societies progress through magic, religion and then science is now generally disregarded but his theories on magic and religion are still majorly significant in the field. 

Tylor believed that due to the linear fashion of cultural evolution, ‘primitive’ cultures could be treated as ‘cultural fossils’ and can tell us what developed cultures what used to be: “The condition of modern savages illustrates the condition of ancient stone age peoples, representatives of a stage of culture at once early in date and low in degree.” [Tylor, On the Tasmanians as Representatives of Palaeolithic Man’]

This racist way of treating other cultures as ‘the other’ and as inferior to ones own is against proper anthropological practice today. However academics at the time were so proud of their theory, museum exhibits were set up to show just that. It often happened that researchers would take artefacts and objects from the cultures they were studying and present them to the public in museum exhibits. Stolen objects, often from very different places and times, would be presented in cabinets such to show the evolution of the tools and by extension the cultures that used them, as was done in the Pitt Rivers museum. As of 2019 about 2,000 specimens in the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford are of human body parts that were taken back to Britain very often without permission. 

Franz Boas was one of the first anthropologists to question the racist foundation of the subjects through his revolutionary theory of ‘cultural relativism’. He believed that all cultures were equal and differences between them were due to historical, social and geographical factors. This meant that there is not universal moral truth as our moral standards are dictated by various cultural codes. The academic discipline of anthropology clearly cannot deny its problematic past. Many academics agree that while many Victorian theories significantly influence the subject today, the anthropological method of research by comparing cultures without the bias of ethnocentrism simply wasn’t present in past anthropologists' work.