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ASA09: Anthropological and archaeological imaginations: past, present
and future
Bristol, UK
(P07)
Re-visiting Victorian anthropology? Imagining the past through a
unifying science
Location TBA
Date and Time TBA
Convenors
Chris Wingfield (University of Oxford) [log in to unmask]
Chris Gosden
Mail All Convenors
Short Abstract
Victorian Anthropology was widely promoted as a unifying science of
the human past. Today questions of the past and of science once again
loom large and papers in this session will address what we share, as
well as what we do not, with these re-discovered ancestors from
before 1922.
Long Abstract
In 1987 George Stocking published Victorian Anthropology, bringing
light to the development of the subject in a period often ignored or
dismissed by disciplinary histories of British Social Anthropology.
Victorian Anthropology was promoted by E.B. Tylor, the 'father of
anthropology', as a 'unifying science' that could connect ' into a
more manageable whole the scattered subjects of an ordinary
education.' Unlike the more specialized discipline of Social
Anthropology in the twentieth century, Victorian Anthropology was as
an umbrella subject drawing on a range of sources, including
archaeology, to re-construct the long-term human past. Although self-
consciously historicist, Stocking's work has inevitably influenced
anthropology and related subjects over the last two decades.
Recent research at the Pitt Rivers Museum, including a three year
ESRC research project: The Other Within: An Anthropology of
Englishness, has sought to confront the inheritances involved in the
museum's legacy as an institution founded by Victorian
Anthropologists. We hope that papers in this session will similarly
attempt to re-visit Stocking's work, as well as Victorian
anthropology itself, in the light of current research. We expect
papers not only to attempt an understanding of the work of Victorian
anthropologists in terms of the questions with which they grappled,
but to also ask how those questions relate to those we ask ourselves
today: in particular questions about how anthropology deals with the
past, as well as its scientific foundations. The session should
address both the similarities and the profound differences between
our current situation and that of these re-discovered Victorian
ancestors.
Propose a paper
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