Where Anthropology Comes From

This chapter explores the development of thinking in anthropology in North America and Europe from the Enlightenment in the 1700s to the end of World War II in 1945. Anthropology, like all disciplines of knowledge, is an outcome of centuries of discourse, thought, and debate among different minds. Ideas in the American colonies and later United States, as in Western Europe, originates in the philosophical time period called the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, in contrast, undertook a deliberate project of objectification of the other, and though its initial results are debatable, it did lead to a genuine science of humankind: anthropology as we know it today. The Enlightenment philosophers of the North Atlantic in the eighteenth century believed that utopian society would be in the future, not the past. Their focus ethnographic focus was on Native Americans and their philosophical orientation was progressivism.