The History of Anthropological Theory 

The basic idea behind the discipline of anthropology is deceptively simple. Anthropology is devoted to the holistic study of human cultures and societies. We can accomplish this goal through the dispassionate collection of data about what people do and think, or have done and thought throughout history. Our job is done when we place that data in its proper explanatory context, linking what people do and think with their history and environment.what could be easier?

But what is the proper explanatory context? For that matter, what data are relevant in any given situation? If there is a connection between marriage patterns and subsistence strategies in one society, will we find similar connections in another society? Are food taboos related to ecology or to the assertion of group identities? Can we discern patterns of social evolution across cultures or does each society follow a unique pattern of development? Is it possible to develop a science that accounts for all human behavior or is the very idea of a unified science tied to the biases of Western cultures? This is where theory enters the picture, providing the tools we use to determine what data to collect, the context in which we make our observations and the framework for making sense of those observations.

In this course you will be introduced to many of the major schools of thought and theorists that have contributed to the development of anthropology. You will become familiar with the basic ideas behind nineteenth century evolutionary theory, historical particularism, structural-functionalism, psychological anthropology, ethnoscience, symbolic and interpretive anthropology, historical materialism, structuralism, and a variety of postmodern challenges to the representation of cultures. You will be able to place these and other approaches to the study of human cultures and societies in their historical context. You will learn about the debates that have motivated anthropologists to adopt or reject different approaches. Rather than develop one theoretical perspective that can replace all of these, our objective will be to take what we can from the history of the discipline to develop our own theoretical toolkit.

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UNO Anthropology

http://fs.uno.edu/dberiss/history/
Revised  08/26/2005