Guardian | Anthropology was born of an evolutionary model by which 19th-century men such as Lewis Henry Morgan and Herbert Spencer,
who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest", envisioned societies
as stages in a linear progression of advancement, leading, as they
conceived it, from savagery to barbarism to civilisation.
Each of these phases of human development was correlated, in their
calculations, with specific technological innovations. Fire, ceramics
and the bow and arrow marked the savage. With the domestication of
animals, the rise of agriculture and the invention of metalworking, we
entered the level of the barbarian. Literacy implied civilisation. Every
society,
it was assumed, progressed through the same stages, in the same
sequence. The cultures of the world came to be seen as a living museum
in which individual societies represented evolutionary moments captured
and mired in time, each one a stage in the imagined ascent to
civilisation. It followed with the certainty of Victorian rectitude that
advanced societies had an obligation to assist the backward, to
civilise the savage, a moral duty that played well into the needs of
empire.
Oddly, it took a physicist to challenge and in time shatter this orthodoxy. Frans Boas,
trained in Germany a generation before Einstein, was interested in the
optical properties of water, and throughout his doctoral studies his
research was plagued by problems of perception, which came to fascinate
him. In the eclectic way of the best of 19th-century scholarship,
inquiry in one academic field led to another. What was the nature of
knowing? Who decided what was to be known? Boas became interested in how
seemingly random beliefs and convictions converged into this thing
called "culture", a term that he was the first to promote as an
organising principle, a useful point of intellectual departure.
Far
ahead of his time, Boas believed that every distinct social community,
every cluster of people distinguished by language or adaptive
inclination, was a unique facet of the human legacy and its promise. He
became the first scholar to explore in a truly open and neutral manner
how human social perceptions are formed, and how members of distinct
societies become conditioned to see and interpret the world. Boas
insisted that his students conduct research in the language of place,
and participate fully in the daily lives of the people they studied.
Every effort should be made to understand the perspective of the other,
to learn the way they perceive the world, the very nature of their
thoughts. Such an approach demanded, by definition, a willingness to
step back from the constraints of one's own prejudices and
preconceptions.
This ethnographic orientation, distilled in the
concept of cultural relativism, was a radical departure, as unique in
its way as was Einstein's theory of relativity in the field of physics.
It became the central revelation of modern anthropology. Cultures do not
exist in some absolute sense; each is but a model of reality, the
consequence of one particular set of intellectual and spiritual choices
made, however successfully, many generations before. The goal of the
anthropologist is not just to decipher the exotic other, but also to
embrace the wonder of distinct and novel cultural possibilities, that we
might enrich our understanding of human nature and just possibly
liberate ourselves from cultural myopia, the parochial tyranny that has
haunted humanity since the birth of memory.
Boas lived to see his
ideas inform much of social anthropology, but it wasn't until more than
half a century after his death that modern genetics proved his
intuitions to be true. Studies of the human genome leave no doubt that
the genetic endowment of humanity is a single continuum. Race is a
fiction. We are all cut from the same genetic cloth, all descendants of a
relatively small number of individuals who walked out of Africa some
60,000 years ago and then, on a journey that lasted 40,000 years, some
2,500 generations carried the human spirit to every corner of the
habitable world.
It follows, as Boas believed, that all cultures
share essentially the same mental acuity, the same raw genius. Whether
this intellectual capacity and potential is exercised in stunning works
of technological innovation, as has been the great historical
achievement of the West, or through the untangling of the complex
threads of memory inherent in a myth – a primary concern, for example,
of the Aborigines of Australia – is simply a matter of choice and
orientation, adaptive insights and cultural priorities. There is no
hierarchy of progress in the history
of culture, no Social Darwinian ladder to success. The Victorian notion
of the savage and the civilised, with European industrial society
sitting proudly at the apex of a pyramid of advancement that widens at
the base to the so-called primitives of the world, has been thoroughly
discredited – indeed, scientifically ridiculed for the racial and
colonial notion that it was, as relevant to our lives today as the
belief of 19th-century clergymen that the Earth was but 6,000 years old.
