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Marvin Harris, a historian of anthropology, begins The Rise of Anthropological Theory with the statement that anthropology is "the science of history". [10] He is not suggesting that history be renamed to anthropology, or that there is no distinction between history and prehistory, or that anthropology excludes current social practices, as the general meaning of history, which it has in ...
The darwinian anthropology (and other sociobiological) perspectives, arising in the early 1970s, had not unreasonably assumed that the genealogical conceptions of human kinship, in place since Morgan's early work [19] in the 1870s, were still valid as a universal feature of humans. But they emerged at precisely the time that anthropology, being ...
Human beings, writes social anthropologist Ernest Gellner, are not genetically programmed to be members of this or that social order. You can take a human infant and place it into any kind of social order and it will function acceptably. What makes human society so distinctive is the fabulous range of quite different forms it takes across the ...
Boasian anthropology was based on the four-field model of anthropology uniting the fields of cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, physical anthropology, and archaeology under the umbrella of anthropology. It was based on an understanding of human cultures as malleable and perpetuated through social learning, and understood behavioral ...
Academic skepticism, which maintained that knowledge of things is impossible. Ideas or notions are never true; nevertheless, there are degrees of truth-likeness, and hence degrees of belief, which allow one to act. The school was characterized by its attacks on the Stoics and on the Stoic dogma that convincing impressions led to true knowledge.
The earliest evidence of religious thought is based on the ritual treatment of the dead. Most animals display only a casual interest in the dead of their own species. [54] Ritual burial thus represents a significant change in human behavior. Ritual burials represent an awareness of life and death and a possible belief in the afterlife.
While the history of evolutionary thinking with regard to humans can be traced back at least to Aristotle and other Greek philosophers, early sociocultural-evolution theories – the ideas of Auguste Comte (1798–1857), Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) and Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) – developed simultaneously with, but independently of ...
In everyday life, morality is typically associated with human behavior rather than animal behavior. The emerging fields of evolutionary biology, and in particular evolutionary psychology, have argued that, despite the complexity of human social behaviors, the precursors of human morality can be traced to the behaviors of many other social animals.