Histories of American Physical Anthropology in the Twentieth Century

Histories of American Physical Anthropology in the Twentieth Century
Author: Michael A. Little
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2010
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9780739135112

Histories of American Physical Anthropology in the Twentieth Century chronicles the history of physical anthropology--or, as it is now known, biological anthropology--from its professional origins in the late 1800 up to its modern transformation in the late 1900s. In this edited volume, 13 contributors trace the development of people, ideas, traditions, and organizations that contributed to the advancement of this branch of anthropology that focuses today on human variation and human evolution. Designed for upper level undergraduate students, graduate students, and professional biological anthropologists, this book provides a brief and accessible history of the biobehavioral side of anthropology in America.

The History of Anthropology

The History of Anthropology
Author: Regna Darnell
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 497
Release: 2021-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1496228731

In The History of Anthropology Regna Darnell offers a critical reexamination of the Americanist tradition centered around the figure of Franz Boas and the professionalization of anthropology as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focused on researchers often known as the Boasians, The History of Anthropology reveals the theoretical schools, institutions, and social networks of scholars and fieldworkers primarily interested in the anthropology and ethnography of North American Indigenous peoples. Darnell's fifty-year career entails seminal writings in the history of anthropology's four fields: cultural anthropology, ethnography, linguistics, and physical anthropology. Leading researchers, theorists, and fieldwork subjects include Edward Sapir, Daniel Brinton, Mary Haas, Franz Boas, Leonard Bloomfield, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Stanley Newman, and A. Irving Hallowell, as well as the professionalization of anthropology, the development of American folklore scholarship, theories of Indigenous languages, Southwest ethnographic research, Indigenous ceremonialism, text traditions, and anthropology's forays into contemporary public intellectual debates. The History of Anthropology is the essential volume for scholars, undergraduates, and graduate students to enter into the history of the Americanist tradition and its legacies, alternating historicism and presentism to contextualize anthropology's historical and contemporary relevance and legacies.

CULTURE AS HISTORY

CULTURE AS HISTORY
Author: Warren Susman
Publisher: Pantheon
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2012-10-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307826147

Bringing together for the first time the best of twenty-five years of unique critical work, Warren Susman takes us on a startling tour through the conflicts and events which have transformed the social, political, and cultural face of America in this century. Probing a rich panoply of images from the mass media and advertising, testing prevalent intellectual and economic theories, linking the revolutions in communications and technology to the rise of a new pantheon of popular heroes. Susman documents and analyzes the process through which the older, Puritan-republican, producer-capitalist culture has given way to the leisure-oriented, consumer society we now inhabit: the culture of abundance.

History of Physical Anthropology

History of Physical Anthropology
Author: Frank Spencer
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 652
Release: 1997
Genre: Physical anthropology
ISBN: 9780815304906

The comparative study of humans as biological organisms, their evolution, and their physiological and anatomical functions and ecology of primates surveys the entire field and summarizes and organizes the basic knowledge, fundamental principles and development.

Gods of the Upper Air

Gods of the Upper Air
Author: Charles King
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 482
Release: 2020-07-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0525432329

2020 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winner Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award From an award-winning historian comes a dazzling history of the birth of cultural anthropology and the adventurous scientists who pioneered it—a sweeping chronicle of discovery and the fascinating origin story of our multicultural world. A century ago, everyone knew that people were fated by their race, sex, and nationality to be more or less intelligent, nurturing, or warlike. But Columbia University professor Franz Boas looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong. Racial categories, he insisted, were biological fictions. Cultures did not come in neat packages labeled "primitive" or "advanced." What counted as a family, a good meal, or even common sense was a product of history and circumstance, not of nature. In Gods of the Upper Air, a masterful narrative history of radical ideas and passionate lives, Charles King shows how these intuitions led to a fundamental reimagining of human diversity. Boas's students were some of the century's most colorful figures and unsung visionaries: Margaret Mead, the outspoken field researcher whose Coming of Age in Samoa is among the most widely read works of social science of all time; Ruth Benedict, the great love of Mead's life, whose research shaped post-Second World War Japan; Ella Deloria, the Dakota Sioux activist who preserved the traditions of Native Americans on the Great Plains; and Zora Neale Hurston, whose studies under Boas fed directly into her now classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Together, they mapped civilizations from the American South to the South Pacific and from Caribbean islands to Manhattan's city streets, and unearthed an essential fact buried by centuries of prejudice: that humanity is an undivided whole. Their revolutionary findings would go on to inspire the fluid conceptions of identity we know today. Rich in drama, conflict, friendship, and love, Gods of the Upper Air is a brilliant and groundbreaking history of American progress and the opening of the modern mind.

Darwinism, Democracy, and Race

Darwinism, Democracy, and Race
Author: John P Jackson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2017-07-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351810774

Darwinism, Democracy, and Race examines the development and defence of an argument that arose at the boundary between anthropology and evolutionary biology in twentieth-century America. In its fully articulated form, this argument simultaneously discredited scientific racism and defended free human agency in Darwinian terms. The volume is timely because it gives readers a key to assessing contemporary debates about the biology of race. By working across disciplinary lines, the book’s focal figures--the anthropologist Franz Boas, the cultural anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, and the physical anthropologist Sherwood Washburn--found increasingly persuasive ways of cutting between genetic determinist and social constructionist views of race by grounding Boas’s racially egalitarian, culturally relativistic, and democratically pluralistic ethic in a distinctive version of the genetic theory of natural selection. Collaborators in making and defending this argument included Ashley Montagu, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Lewontin. Darwinism, Democracy, and Race will appeal to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and academics interested in subjects including Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, Sociology of Race, History of Biology and Anthropology, and Rhetoric of Science.

A Companion to Biological Anthropology

A Companion to Biological Anthropology
Author: Clark Spencer Larsen
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 608
Release: 2010-02-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781444320046

An extensive overview of the rapidly growing field of biologicalanthropology; chapters are written by leading scholars who havethemselves played a major role in shaping the direction and scopeof the discipline. Extensive overview of the rapidly growing field of biologicalanthropology Larsen has created a who’s who of biologicalanthropology, with contributions from the leadingauthorities in the field Contributing authors have played a major role in shaping thedirection and scope of the topics they write about Offers discussions of current issues, controversies, and futuredirections within the area Presents coverage of the many recent innovations anddiscoveries that are transforming the subject

Constructing Race

Constructing Race
Author: Tracy Teslow
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2014-07-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107011736

This book explores how physical anthropologists struggled to understand variation in bodies and cultures in the twentieth century, how they represented race to professional and lay publics, and how their efforts contributed to an American formulation of race that has remained rooted in both bodies and cultures, as well as heredity and society.

History of Theory and Method in Anthropology

History of Theory and Method in Anthropology
Author: Regna Darnell
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 438
Release: 2022-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1496232240

Regna Darnell offers a critical reexamination of the theoretical orientation of the Americanist tradition, centered on the work of Franz Boas, and the professionalization of anthropology as an academic discipline in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. History of Theory and Method in Anthropology reveals the theory schools, institutions, and social networks of scholars and fieldworkers primarily interested in the ethnography of North American Indigenous peoples. Darnell's fifty-year career entails foundational writings in the four fields of the discipline: cultural anthropology, ethnography, linguistics, and physical anthropology. Leading researchers, theorists, and fieldwork subjects include Claude Lévi-Strauss, Franz Boas, Benjamin Lee Whorf, John Wesley Powell, Frederica de Laguna, Dell Hymes, George Stocking Jr., and Anthony F. C. Wallace, as well as nineteenth-century Native language classifications, ethnography, ethnohistory, social psychology, structuralism, rationalism, biologism, mentalism, race science, human nature and cultural relativism, ethnocentrism, standpoint-based epistemology, collaborative research, and applied anthropology. History of Theory and Method in Anthropology is an essential volume for scholars and undergraduate and graduate students to enter into the history of the inductive theory schools and methodologies of the Americanist tradition and its legacies.

Mildred Trotter and the Invisible Histories of Physical and Forensic Anthropology

Mildred Trotter and the Invisible Histories of Physical and Forensic Anthropology
Author: Emily K. Wilson
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2022-04-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000557480

In the wake of World War II, anatomist and anthropologist Mildred Trotter left the Midwest for a temporary post as the forensic anthropology expert for the Army in the Territory of Hawaii. Her formidable task was to identify the remains of war dead in order to return them to their families, in a national effort that continues to this day. Mildred Trotter and the Invisible Histories of Physical and Forensic Anthropology is the first, long overdue biography on this woman of immense stature in her field. She was the first woman to serve as President of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists and the first woman to be full professor at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. While primarily a biography of Trotter, this book also examines aspects that are so often left out of retrospectives of science and scientific figures. This includes scientific error, the historical experiences of the few women and individuals from other marginalized groups active in the discipline, sexism, and scientific and social racism. This book also provides novel historical context regarding her major and now well-known tibia mismeasurement. Mildred Trotter and the Invisible Histories of Physical and Forensic Anthropology is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of science and women in science, and for all practicing and aspiring biological and forensic anthropologists.