Typology

• A system of classification, in this case, based on forms of human society

Ethnocentrism

• The opinion that one’s own way of life is natural or correct, and indeed, is the only true way of being fully human.

Five sub-fields:

• Biological anthropology

• Cultural anthropology

• Linguistics

• Archaeology

• Applied anthropology

Biological Anthropology

• Oldest specialty in the discipline.

• It developed in the 19th c. as a by-product of centuries of European exploration and colonial expansion.

• People who were being dominated were seen as different from “white” Europeans because they had a different skin colour and because of their different languages and customs, and their simpler technology.

Herbert Spencer

• Social Darwinism

Biological Determinism

• The idea that our biology determines, or is at the root, of all the complex events of human life.

Races

• Social groups that allegedly reflect biological differences.

Racism

• The systematic oppression of members of a socially defined race by another socially defined race.

• Justified in terms of the supposed inherent biological superiority of the rules and the supposed inferiority of those they rule.

Race is not a meaningful biological classification

Franz Boas

• A German Jew who in the early 1900s founded the first department of Anthropology in the United States, at Columbia University.

Biological Anthropology

• Today: Pays attention to patterns of variation within the species as a whole.

Unilineal Cultural Evolutionism

• A theory that classified all world societies according to their place in the supposed stages of societal evolution.

Search for wonders

Search for wealth

Political Economy

• The use of power (politics) to protect and enhance material interests (economy) considered central by a society.

Technological developments: The caravel

Social developments: Population growth

Banking classJoint stock culture

Missions

Enculturation

• Process through which a human being adopts the practices and beliefs of a new cultural group.

Francisco Pizarro

World System

• A global system in which nations are economically and politically interdependent.

Joint Stock Company

• A firm that is managed by a centralized board of directors, but owned by shareholders.

Dutch East India Company (VOC)

• Founded in 1602

• Model for joint stock companies

• Chartered by the Dutch government to hold the monopoly of all Dutch trade with the societies of the Indian and Pacific oceans.

• The VOC was accountable only to its shareholders.

• For two centuries, the VOC distributed profits of 15% to 50%.

• Direct control of many islands in the Indian Ocean.

Indonesia

Colonialism is tied to the rise of capitalism

Capitalism

• An economic system dominated by the supply-demand-price mechanism called the market.

• An economic system where commodities are produced for sale, as opposed to being produced only for their use value.

• Main goal is to maximize profits.

In small-scale societies

• Traditional social obligations protected members from poverty.

Colonialism

• A social system in which political conquest of one society of another leads to cultural domination with enforced social change.

• Involves the active possession of a foreign territory and the maintenance of political domination over that territory.

Ways of extracting labour power:

• Forced labour: One of the key elements of European expansion. Its most extreme form was African slavery.

• Peonage: The practice of holding a person in bondage or partial slavery in order for them to work off a debt or to serve a prison sentence.

European enslavement of African peoples

• Between the 15th and 19th centuries, around 12 million slaves were exported from Africa to the Americas.

• Anywhere from one to five deaths are calculated for each slave that actually got to the Americas.

Economic effects

• Profits made by slave shippers and plantation owners.

• Impoverishment of areas from which slaves were drawn.

Neocolonialism

• The persistence of profound social and economic entanglements linking former colonial territories to their former colonial rules despite political sovereignty.

• What struck you the most from what you have read so far?