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?