Why I love learning the history of Anthropology

"If we were to select the most intelligent, imaginative, energetic, and emotionally stable third of mankind, all races would be present." -Franz Boas

Early Anthropology tends to get this bad rap of being a bunch of racist white guys touting White Man's Burden and Social Darwinism. And while that kind of nasty colonial thinking was partially the result of E. Tylor, Tylor himself was radically forward-thinking. He campaigned for a monogenic theory of human origins and what he called the "psychic unification of mankind." Which sounds really new agey, but doesn't actually mean what it sounds like.

Basically, Tylor/Evolutionism/Et all says that all humans are descended from one parent population and have the same mental capability. This was RADICAL at a time when most scientists were saying that the Chinese were descended directly from H. Erectus and therefore "less evolved" and "less intelligent."

Basically, the more you recognize the similarities between yourself and the bush tribe from Papua New Guinea, the closer you are to understanding the differences. And they're not, for the most part, going to be found in your DNA.

And if Boas, one of the founding fathers of anthropology, could say this around the start of the 20th century, then why are people still having trouble with the idea of all "races" (race being an inaccurate term to describe ethnicities and cultures, really) being, on some primary level, equal?

In other news the Anthropology Major Fox meme is my life and I am slowly evolving into a pretentiousosaurus.