ANT 2000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 61: Magical Thinking, Polytheism, Trobriand Islands
Document Summary
"anthropology: an introduction to the study of man and civilization" first anthropology textbook. First professor of anthropology at oxford university. Believed museums would teach people that "evolution, not revolution, was nature"s way" Donated artifacts to oxford university--> displayed collection by function/form/type (not age or origin) Critic of "evolutionism" of tylor (and his diea that all cultures progress through similar stages) Cultural relativism- cultures cannot be ranked as higher or lower all humans see the world through the lens of their own culture. Created the four-field organization of american anthropology. Loius leakey obtained research funding from the national geographic society for jane goodall. Leakey was interested in using information from wild apes to reconstruct the behavior of human ancestors. Two distantly-related descendants sharing one behavior = behavior present in last common ancestor (lca) 39 behaviors of chimpanzees are cultural behaviors. Tai forest shows greater variety of cultural behavior than any other study site.
