Digital Reading Room 2.0 -- ANTH 434: The History of Anthropological Thought (Rev. C4 & C5)

ANTH 434: The History of Anthropological Thought (Rev. C4 & C5) Report a Broken Link

Anthropology 434: The History of Anthropological Thought is a three-credit, senior-level course that examines the range of responses to the fact of human diversity through the ages, with emphasis on modern and postmodern anthropology.

Unit 1: Anthropological Thought to the Nineteenth Century

Rowe, John Howland. “The Renaissance Foundations of Anthropology.” American Anthropologist 67, no. 1 (1965): 1–20.

Unit 2: Nineteenth-Century Evolutionary Thought

Tylor, Edward B. “The Spirit-World.” In Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization, 342–372. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1898.

Morgan, Lewis H. “Ethnical Periods.” In Ancient Society, 3–18. Palo Alto: New York Labor News, 1877, 1998.

Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer: Fieldwork. London: CTE Carlton, 1990.

Unit 3: Race

Stocking, George W., Jr. “The Dark-Skinned Savage: The Image of Primitive Man in Evolutionary Anthropology.” In Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology, 110–132. New York: The Free Press, 1968.

Burke, John G. “The Wild Man’s Pedigree: Scientific Method and Racial Anthropology.” In The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, edited by Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak, 259–280. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972.

Pandian, Jacob. “The Mythology of the Black Other in the Western Tradition.” In Anthropology and the Western Tradition: Toward an Authentic Anthropology, 70–84. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1985.

Unit 4: The Formation of General Theories

Berlin, Isaiah. “Historical Materialism.” In Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, 3rd ed., 122–158. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963.

Reading begins on page 128 of the PDF.

Unit 5: Boas and His Students

Boas, Franz. “The Methods of Ethnology.” American Anthropologist 22, no. 4 (1920): 311–321.

Benedict, Ruth. “The Integration of Culture.” In Patterns of Culture, 45–56. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934.

Franz Boas: The Shackles of Tradition. London: CTE Carlton, 1985.

Margaret Mead and Samoa (1988). YouTube video, 51.13. Posted March 28, 2011.

Unit 6: Functionalism/Structural Functionalism

Layton, Robert. “Functionalism.” In An Introduction to Theory in Anthropology, 27–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Bronislaw Malinowski: Off the Veranda. London: CTE Carlton, 1985.

William Rivers: Everything Is Relatives. London: CTE Carlton, 1985.

Unit 7: Structuralism

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth.” In Structural Anthropology, translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, 206–231. New York: Basic Books, 1963.

Unit 8: Change and Conflict

Gluckman, Max. “Ethnographic Data in British Social Anthropology.” Sociological Review 9, no. 1 (1961): 9–17.

Unit 9: Materialist Explanations of Culture Change

White, Leslie A. “Energy and the Evolution of Culture.” American Anthropologist 45, no. 3 (1943): 335–356.

Harris, Marvin. “Cultural Materialism Is Alive and Well and Won’t Go Away until Something Better Comes Along.” In Assessing Cultural Anthropology, edited by Robert Borofsky, 62–74. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994.

Unit 10: The Individual and Society

Barth, Fredrik. “On the Study of Social Change.” American Anthropologist 69, no. 6 (1967): 661–669.

Geertz, Clifford. “The Struggle for the Real.” In Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia, 90–98. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968.

Reading begins on page 99 of the PDF.

Turner, Victor. “Liminality and Communitas.” In The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, 94–130. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969.

Reading begins on page 103 of the PDF.

Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard: Strange Beliefs. London: CTE Carlton, 1990.

Unit 11: Postmodernism, Feminist Theory

Rosaldo, Renato. “Introduction: Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage.” In Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis, 1–12. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.

Clifford, James. “Introduction: Partial Truths.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 1–26. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Kapoor, Priya. “Between Fact and Fiction: Can There Be a Postcolonial Feminist Ethnography?” Women’s Studies International Forum 60 (2017): 58–68.