Development of Anthropology as a Discipline in the United States Essays

education of Anthropology as a Discipline in the United StatesI. Early score of Anthropology in the United States 1870-1900The roots of anthropology lie in the eye-witness accounts of travelers who have journeyed to lands on the margins of state-based societies and described their cultures and in the efforts of individuals who have analyzed the information collected. In the slow 1960s and early 1970s, a number of anthropologists recognized that the practice of anthropology was close linked to commerce and colonial expansion. (Patterson 1)There were essentially three schools of anthropological thinking by the First World War and after. The frontmost, cultural determinism, maintained by Franz Boas and his students, stress the interrelation of ethnology, linguistics, folklore, archaeology as an autonomous schoolman discipline (Patterson 55). The second was physical anthropology, whose major proponent was Ales Hrdlicka of the National Museum it stressed biology and wanted physica l anthropology to be a distinct academician discipline. The third was the eugenics movement, propagated by Charles B Davenport, it maintained that the status of eugenics, or racial hierarchization, was a legitimate science and asserted the supremacy of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Because of page constraints we will not examine closely physical anthropology, as it is not absolutely vital in a treatment of the increase of anthropology as a discipline, but briefly it is the application of biological info and principles to the study man in society. Anthropology in the United States in the terminus immediately following the Revolution and the drafting of the constitution was used to follow through three purposes (1) forge a national iden... ...f Columbias first instructors in anthropology he used his positions at the American Museum of Natural memorial and Columbia University to train a generation of anthropologists. Boas, by 1932, had instructed a intelligent number of people from these marginalized groups, who were lumped together as savages or inferior races. We must(prenominal) remember however, as Dr. Paterson points out, that, Anthropology was professionalized during a period characterized by intense disagreement against people of color, immigrants, women, and poor folks (65). Works CitedBoas, Franz. Report on the faculty member Teaching of Anthropology. In American Anthropologist, 2141-48, 1919.Kroeber, A.L. The Place of Anthropology in Universities. In American Anthropologist, 56 754-767, 1954.Patterson, Thomas C. A Social History of Anthropology in the United States. Oxford Berg, 2001.