Anthropology
9781465683595
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Anthropology is the science of man. This broad and literal definition takes on more meaning when it is expanded to “the science of man and his works.” Even then it may seem heterogeneous and too inclusive. The products of the human mind are something different from the body. And these products, as well as the human body, are the subjects of firmly established sciences, which would seem to leave little room for anthropology except as a less organized duplication. Ordinary political history, economics, literary criticism, and the history of art all deal with the works and doings of man; biology and medicine study his body. It is evident that these various branches of learning cannot be relegated to the position of mere subdivisions of anthropology and this be exalted to the rank of a sort of holding corporation for them. There must be some definite and workable relation. One way in which this relation can be pictured follows to some extent the course of anthropology as it grew into self consciousness and recognition. Biology, medicine, history, economies were all tilling their fields of knowledge in the nineteenth century, some with long occupancy, when anthropology shyly entered the scene and began to cultivate a corner here and a patch there. It examined some of the most special and non utilitarian aspects of the human body: the shape of the head, the complexion, the texture of the hair, the differences between one variety of man and another, points of negligible import in medicine and of quite narrow interest as against the broad principles which biology was trying to found and fortify as the science of all life. So too the historical sciences had preëmpted the most convenient and fruitful subjects within reach. Anthropology modestly turned its attention to nations without records, to histories without notable events, to institutions strange in flavor and inventions hanging in their infancy, to languages that had never been written. Yet obviously the heterogeneous leavings of several sciences will never weld into an organized and useful body of knowledge. The dilettante, the collector of oddities who loves incoherence, may be content to observe to day the flare of the negro’s nostrils, to morrow the intricacy of prefixes that bind his words into sentences, the day after, his attempts to destroy a foe by driving nails into a wooden idol. A science becomes such only when it learns to discover relations and a meaning in facts. If anthropology were to remain content with an interest in the Mongolian eye, the dwarfishness of the Negrito, the former home of the Polynesian race, taboos against speaking to one’s mother in law, rituals to make rain, and other such exotic and superseded superstitions, it would earn no more dignity than an antiquarian’s attic. As a co laborer on the edifice of fuller understanding, anthropology must find more of a task than filling with rubble the temporarily vacant spaces in the masonry that the sciences are rearing.
