The Politics of Anthropology

1988 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 290-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernest Gellner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life History ◽  
Meaning Of Life ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Human History ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
Cumulative Change ◽  
Great Chain Of Being ◽  
Jacob's Ladder

ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY ORIGINALLY FOUND THEIR more immediate inspiration in an evolutionary or Jacob's Ladder vision of human societies, the idea of Progress. Social forms were seen as located along some great Chain of Being, which eventually leads to this-worldly salvation by this-worldly means. But there the resemblance ends. Sociology was rooted in a primarily historical evolutionism, in the perception, by the generation of Condorcet and Hegel, that human history is a story of cumulative change, and in the hope that the pattern of this change was the key to the meaning of life. History was to reveal the inner potential and destiny of human society. By contrast, the evolutionism which somewhat later, around the middle of the nineteenth century, gave birth to anthropology, was markedly biological, and came to be much influenced by Darwin.

scholarly journals Offspring fertility and grandchild survival enhanced by maternal grandmothers in a pre-industrial human society

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon N. Chapman ◽  
Mirkka Lahdenperä ◽  
Jenni E. Pettay ◽  
Robert F. Lynch ◽  
Virpi Lummaa
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life History ◽  
Human Evolution ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Maternal Grandmother ◽  
Helping Behaviour ◽  
Paternal Grandmother ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractHelp is directed towards kin in many cooperative species, but its nature and intensity can vary by context. Humans are one of few species in which grandmothers invest in grandchildren, and this may have served as an important driver of our unusual life history. But helping behaviour is hardly uniform, and insight into the importance of grandmothering in human evolution depends on understanding the contextual expression of helping benefits. Here, we use an eighteenth-nineteenth century pre-industrial genealogical dataset from Finland to investigate whether maternal or paternal grandmother presence (lineage relative to focal individuals) differentially affects two key fitness outcomes of descendants: fertility and survival. We found grandmother presence shortened spacing between births, particularly at younger mother ages and earlier birth orders. Maternal grandmother presence increased the likelihood of focal grandchild survival, regardless of whether grandmothers had grandchildren only through daughters, sons, or both. In contrast, paternal grandmother presence was not associated with descendants’ fertility or survival. We discuss these results in terms of current hypotheses for lineage differences in helping outcomes.

Franz Unger and plant evolution: Representations of plants through time

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry B. Collins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life History ◽  
Transition Period ◽  
Plant Evolution ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Unique Contribution ◽  
Deep Time ◽  
Earth History ◽  
Fossil Evidence

ABSTRACT This chapter will highlight a series of lithographs produced by Franz Unger and Josef Kuwasseg that emphasize how Unger used plants to represent different periods of earth history. While Henry De la Beche is credited with the first depiction of ancient life through art (Duria antiquior), Unger’s work was the first to illustrate how plants could be used as indicators of changes in life history. In collaboration with artist Josef Kuwasseg, he embarked on a project entitled The Primitive World in Its Different Periods of Formation that consisted of 14 lithographs that were published in 1851. The title was unique in that it combined the concepts of a “primitive world,” or the widely accepted contemporary idea of undifferentiated deep time, with our modern concept of different periods of earth history. Unger selected periods for this project based upon major strata, but his botanical roots led him to emphasize the importance of plants in each lithograph. The series begins with the “Transition Period,” or the strata that contain the most fossil evidence to develop a reconstruction, and ends with a depiction of the arrival of man in a plant-filled world. This series of lithographs offers a unique contribution to the history and philosophy of geology as Unger recognized the importance of plants to our understanding of geology and deep time in the nineteenth century.

Society, Nature, Emancipation

Why History? ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 154-190
Author(s):  
Donald Bloxham
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Vicarious Experience ◽  
Human History ◽  
Speculative Philosophy ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
National Differences ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
History Of

This chapter is predominantly concerned with the thought tendencies grouped under the heading ‘the Enlightenment’, with regulation caveats about variations in character, national and otherwise, of the intellectual traditions denoted by the term: the French, Scottish, and German cases are each given separate attention. The governing concern is with the most theoretically self-conscious attempts to establish the utility of History as a way of understanding the human experience in light of influential concepts like Volksgeist, circonstance, esprit général, represéntations, and even ‘relations of production’, that elucidated human diversity across time and place. When explaining the broad sweep of human history providential accounts were replaced by secular ones, though in some instances the latter were structurally similar to the former and so had some of the character of History as Speculative Philosophy. On the whole the scholarship under examination evinced a liberal spirit as regards confessional and national differences, though it was frequently marked by a partiality to occidental civilization. Overall, we see a shift away from the study of religious and political institutions and towards—or back towards, insofar as there was some crossover with the French ‘new History’ of the sixteenth century—civic morals, culture, and the structural conditions of social life. History expanded further from being an instruction in statecraft for public men to proffering more rounded edification in the form of vicarious experience of different spheres of life.

ENVIRONMENTAL, ECONOMIC, AND MORAL DIMENSIONS OF SUSTAINABILITY IN THE PETROLEUM INDUSTRY IN AUSTRIAN GALICIA

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-191
Author(s):  
ALISON FRANK
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Oil Spills ◽  
Petroleum Industry ◽  
Oil Industry ◽  
Ecological Sustainability ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Social Harmony ◽  
Material Wealth ◽  
Moral Dimensions

Fears about the sustainability of oil-rich communities and hopes that petroleum would fuel financial, social, and moral renewal have accompanied the oil industry since its inception in the mid-nineteenth century. With each successive ecological disaster caused by oil spills, debates over the industry's ecological sustainability sharpen. Discussions about the geological sustainability of the petroleum industry intensify when oil supplies tighten, and dissipate when they increase. Although concerns about the moral viability of communities dependent on oil have become radically unfamiliar since the late nineteenth century, these, too, were once central to debates about the effects of oil on human society. In the nineteenth century, the progress that oil promised to bring was to be measured not only in material wealth, but in the attainment of social harmony and the attenuation of political strife.

“Big History” Old and New: Presuppositions, Limits, Alternatives

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 306-326 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan Megill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Innovative Approach ◽  
Human History ◽  
Comparative History ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Big History

In recent years David Christian and others have promoted “Big History” as an innovative approach to the study of the past. The present paper juxtaposes to Big History an old Big History, namely, the tradition of “universal history” that flourished in Europe from the mid-sixteenth century until well into the nineteenth century. The claim to universality of works in that tradition depended on the assumed truth of Christianity, a fact that was fully acknowledged by the tradition’s adherents. The claim of the new Big History to universality likewise depends on prior assumptions. Simply stated, in its various manifestations the “new” Big History is rooted either in a continuing theology, or in a form of materialism that is assumed to be determinative of human history, or in a somewhat contradictory amalgam of the two. The present paper suggests that “largest-scale history” as exemplified in the old and new Big Histories is less a contribution to historical knowledge than it is a narrativization of one or another worldview. Distinguishing between largest-scale history and history that is “merely” large-scale, the paper also suggests that a better approach to meeting the desire for large scale in historical writing is through more modest endeavors, such as large-scale comparative history, network and exchange history, thematic history, and history of modernization.

scholarly journals Solidarity: The Social History of an Idea in Nineteenth Century France

1959 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. E. S. Hayward
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Grand Nombre ◽  
Human History ◽  
The Social ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
History Of

The survival of a concept is generally only secured at the price of an intellectual odyssey in the course of which it is transformed out of all recognition. The nineteenth century fortunes of the idea of solidarity exemplify this axiom only too strictly. It became the victim of a multiplicity of ingenious puns and metaphors as well as outright malicious distortions that rendered a simple, technical word, drawn from the sphere of jurisprudence, at once emotive and obscure, influential and diffuse. As the eminent and caustic critic of the twentieth century, Julien Benda, formulated this vital problem of the fate of concepts, “pour l'historien des idées des hommes, la réalité ce n'est point ce qu'ont été les idées dans l'esprit de ceux qui les ont inventées, mais ce qu'elles ont été dans l'esprit de ceux qui les ont trahies… car il est clair qu'une doctrine se propage d'autant plus largement qu'elle est apte à satisfaire un plus grand nombre de sentiments divers.” This pessimistic view has been all too frequently verified in human history.

scholarly journals Inclusive fitness and differential productivity across the life course determine intergenerational transfers in a small-scale human society

2015 ◽  
Vol 282 (1803) ◽  
pp. 20142808 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul L. Hooper ◽  
Michael Gurven ◽  
Jeffrey Winking ◽  
Hillard S. Kaplan
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Inclusive Fitness ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Intergenerational Transfers ◽  
Essential Element ◽  
Life History Evolution ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Extended Lifespan ◽  
The Life Course

Transfers of resources between generations are an essential element in current models of human life-history evolution accounting for prolonged development, extended lifespan and menopause. Integrating these models with Hamilton's theory of inclusive fitness, we predict that the interaction of biological kinship with the age-schedule of resource production should be a key driver of intergenerational transfers. In the empirical case of Tsimane’ forager–horticulturalists in Bolivian Amazonia, we provide a detailed characterization of net transfers of food according to age, sex, kinship and the net need of donors and recipients. We show that parents, grandparents and siblings provide significant net downward transfers of food across generations. We demonstrate that the extent of provisioning responds facultatively to variation in the productivity and demographic composition of families, as predicted by the theory. We hypothesize that the motivation to provide these critical transfers is a fundamental force that binds together human nuclear and extended families. The ubiquity of three-generational families in human societies may thus be a direct reflection of fundamental evolutionary constraints on an organism's life-history and social organization.

scholarly journals The Creation of Adam and the Biblical Origins of Race in The Slave’s Friend (1836–1838)

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (10) ◽  
pp. 860
Author(s):  
Kerry M. Sonia
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human History ◽  
Red Clay ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
Racial Theory ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Book Of Genesis ◽  
Racial Hierarchies

The creation of Adam out of dust is a familiar tradition from the Book of Genesis. In abolitionist literature of the nineteenth century, this biblical narrative became the basis for a theory about the origins of race, arguing that because Adam was formed from red clay, neither he nor his descendants were white. This interpretation of Genesis underscored the value of non-white ancestors both in the biblical narrative and in human history and undermined popular theological arguments that upheld color-based racial hierarchies that privileged whiteness in the United States. This article examines the creation of Adam in Genesis 2 and its use in racial theory and abolitionist rhetoric, focusing on the children’s anti-slavery periodical The Slave’s Friend, published from 1836 to 1838.

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