Synth Star

Harris credits the rise of anthropological theory to the Enlightenment(*), despite the fact that anthropology has disavowed this period in Western thought. Kroeber and Kluckhohn defined the concept of culture as a “set of attributes and products of human societies, and therewith of manking,which are extrasomatic and transmissable by mechaninisms other than biological heredity“(9) and credited the concept to the Germanic form Kultur. They also argued that the concept did not exist anywhere piror to 1750. However, this sort of definition and idea of culture can be traced back to John Locke’s An Essay Concernnig Human Understanding in which he argues that the human mind is an empty cabinet that is filled with experiences and are molded by education. “Education” as used by Enlightenment scholars is equivalent to modern concepts of enculutration.

Perhaps why anthropologists are anthropologists reject the Englightenment is becasue scholars of this era blieved that there was one moral parth that all would eventually get on. Though talented, Enlightenment thinker were not relativist, but the concept of culture is there! Harris argues that even before the Enlightenment a de facto concept of culture existed: how can ethnography be conducted without it? Scholars were looking to find the same sorts of laws for the sociocultural world that scholars had found for the natural world (e.g. Newtonian physics), but were faced with the paradox of free will (human behavior) and natural law (determinism). This eventually led to materialist models in which scholars seperated their studies from the Divine, thus, situated man as being within nature(#). This was a step towards a science of culture. Modern anthropology has been mostly dedicated to untangling the conditions and process which makes a group’s decisions predictable.

The philosophes began to think that the future could be as knowable as the past and present. This led to a very old idea: Evolution. The Enlightenment notion of it though challenged the orthodox European outlook in 2 ways:

1. It contradiced the Bible’s stated origins and development of institutions.
2. It regarded the mechanism of sociocultural change as a natural expression of cause-effect relationships.

The philosophes offered a universal history independent of the Bible and evolutionary stages were proposed: nomadic→pastoral→urbanism. Curiously, and early form of relativism was present in the writing of Turgot and Ferguson who were cautious not to evaluate earlier stages by modern standards. With a theoretical context now in place, a methodoloby could be applied. William Robertson (Scottish) was the most impressive attempt; he used archaelogical evidence to justify the evolutionary stages (^). Evolution is a term that hardly appears during Enlightenment literature though, but like culture, it is evident that the conept is there! Tragically, evolution was confused with progress: a sense of moral satisfaction with evolutionary trends (37). Deciding if a change is progress requires 2 steps:

1. A judgement by arbitrary criteria must be rendered to evaluated whether the change is good or bad.
2. An expression of approval or disapproval.

This is fine for the physical world, but vague when applied to the sociocultural world; only Marx was aware of how culture-bound progress was. Harris argues that evolution has yet to recover from it childhood afflictions of progress (ibid). There was a general belief that the prime force in social change was rationalization (39): men had thought their way to civilization! The main problem was that this ignored material conditions, thus provided no proof (or rationale) for mental decisions. There were attempts at geographical determinism but these still did not negate freel will and created the classic Enlightenment paradox. Nonetheless, thinkers of this time were on the “threshold of cultural materialism” and Claude Helvetius came closest to it though still resorting to the mind→culture→mind tautology (44). Enlightenment scholars did see that material conditions limited our rationale individual decisions, but this as a piece in a larger puzzle that was complicated by individual decisions. Millar can be hailed as the tour de force of the 18th century (1700’s) for being the most consistent in using a techno-environmental analysis and, at time, abandoning the era’s reliance on man’s mind. But as long as there was emphasis on conscious, rational choice as the prime explanation of sociocultual differences, they were cut off from a genuine understanding of the systematic and adaptive nature of social organization (51). In conclusion, we see the pieces for a materialist approach in the Enlightenment, though not fully put together.

Notes:

*The Enlightenment roughly spans 100 years; from the publishing John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) to the outbreak of the French Revolution.

#See J.O. de la Mettire and d’Holbach for examples of this approach.

^Others in this category are Millar who attempted to traced the evolution of the family. Aslo, Condorcet who observed 10 stages of evolution; although his stages were very Eurocentric, they later influenced Malthus, and consequently, Spener and Darwin.

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From: Harris, Marvin. 2001 [1968]. The Rise of Anthropological Theory: a history of theories of culture. Updated edition. Lanham: Alta Mira Press.