George W. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (1987)

I read this extremely learned and (for me) fairly accessible book by one of the authorities on the history of anthropology for my project on scientific history. Most broadly, Stocking traces the shift from James Prichard's early 19th century "ethnology" to the post-Darwinian social evolutionism. The former was primarily an ethically motivated (intending to protect "savages" in the face of European colonialism) and Biblically influenced study that aimed to demonstrate humanity's common monogenesis. The latter, represented by figures such as Herbert Spencer and Edward Tylor, either assumed a monogenetic origin and tried to explain the great dicversity of cultures and cultural levels, or argued for polygenesis. My summer reading for my science of history project included this book; Daniel Moses, Prophet of Progress; Stephen Gaukroger, The Natural & the Human; and Frederick Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition. All of them illuminated, from different angles, the question of what I'll call, as shorthand, the "science of man." I've taken notes on each, but here I want to memorialize some of my own tentative conclusions. I come away especially from Beiser and Stocking thinking that many of the ingredients were in place for what I would consider scientific history, above all competing explanations of key questions and a norm-bound community of scholars. Of course, at the same time there were also deep challenges, having to do with individuality, the widespread belief that humans were sui generis, etc. In the case of German historicists, unfortunately, there was a turn away from these ingredients - away from common questions, away from explanation, and, as nationalism gained momentum, away from a single community. As I suggest in my notes, Ranke and others' "source criticism" may have preserved a veneer of scientificness, while really misunderstanding how science worked. And "common sense" may have added a further apparently indubitable warranty. In the case of evolutionary anthropologists, people like Tylor basically got it right, I think. However, as Carl Degler has shown in In Search of Human Nature, this approach was rejected from roughly 1900 to 1960, and supplanted by Boasian cultural relativism, largely for moral and political reasons. Since the 1960s and evolutionary - and theory-comparative - approach has made a big come back.