If anthropology is (somewhat anachronistically) understood to have developed as ‘the study of simple and stable societies that are radically different from the complex and changing West’ (Carrier 1995:1), then it has a long prehistory, and dates (at the latest) from the earliest encounters of European imperialists with non-Western peoples. Anthropologists are, however, no different from other scholars: their work is intellectually collaborative—defined by a community determined to reach consensus. Thus, a narrative of the history of British anthropology per se commences in the nineteenth century, with the formal organization of a self-referential body of scholars. The enterprise became a coherent pursuit between roughly 1843 and 1871, a period bracketed by the foundation dates of the Ethnological Society of London and of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (after 1907 the Royal Anthropological Institute).
In the name of science
The Anthropological Institute reunited the Ethnological Society with a group that had seceded from it in 1863, the Anthropological Society of London. The ethnologicals were †monogenists, holding that all human races derived from a single creation, a position initially founded in a religious worldview and associated with anti-slavery agitation. Anthropologicals were †polygenists, maintaining that diverse physical types of humankind were distinct species, a view especially congenial to those who supported *slavery and argued that supposedly congenitally inferior peoples would learn elevated habits only if compelled to do so.
The creation of the Anthropological Institute signalled the triumph of monogenism as anthropological orthodoxy, attesting to the power of †Darwinian argument in the latter part of the century: all humans were members of a single (if differentiated) species. But monogenism had been redefined in quasipolygenist terms: because Darwinian reasoning (and its antecedents) rested on the presumption that the earth and its lifeforms were of an age far older than that which had once been calculated from biblical chronology, the races of humankind were conceptualized as long-persistent sub-types. In sum, the Institute had succeeded in resolving intellectual conflict, and had in the process moderated the political tone of anthropological debate—conveying, as the society’s founders intended, that anthropology was a strictly scientific pursuit (see Stocking 1971). Indeed, the Institute has remained a force in the discipline because it has remained an ecumenical organization, hospitable to persons of diverse theoretical convictions and to every anthropological sub-field.
Thus, anthropology achieved considerable intellectual coherence prior to its recognition by the universities at the end of the nineteenth century, when faculty positions were created and it became a degree subject for undergraduates and postgraduates in turn. Because anthropologists have been wont to represent the campaign for inclusion in university curricula as extraordinarily heroic (see Leach 1984), we should note that the universities were no more reluctant to admit anthropology than such subjects as psychology and English literature, and that in the nineteenth century learned societies rather than universities were the institutional sites of much of British scientific activity (Kuklick 1992:52–5). But though late nineteenth-century anthropologists were able both to define problems for collective inquiry and to agree on standards for the resolution of disputes—functioning as members of a scientific community that approached †Thomas Kuhn’s ideal type—their conception of their enterprise was quite different from that which has prevailed since the second third of the twentieth century (see Stocking 1965).
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