ANTHRO 2A Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Scientific Racism, Evolutionism, Ethnocentrism
Document Summary
F-288 scantron: critique of unilinear social evolutionism: Has to get savagery first then barbarism, and then civilization. Critique: this way is not used anymore because of problems: empirical problems: the data was 2nd hand evidence and were mixing theories, sociocultural evolution is multilinear: people don"t change in the same ways. Each person has his or her own speed and rate of change: histories of societies are interdependent: cultural diffusion. Progress is a value laden term: rank ordering is ranked on a specific criterion. Treat this ranking as a sequence of events. o o. Ethnocentrism: taking ones own culture and achievement as the one and the only. It is the only natural way of doing stuff. o. Problem of perspective: tend to celebrate the achievement of our own society and avoid the achievement of the other societies . Survival of the fittest: coined by herbert spencer. The common view: getting to a certain point, biologically, and then culture takes over.
