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Race, Culture, and Evolution

Essays in the History of Anthropology

"We have, at long last, a real historian with real historical skills and no intra-professional ax to grind. . . . All these pieces show the virtues one finds missing in . . . nearly all of anthropological history work but [Stocking’s]: extensive and critical use of archival sources, tracing of real rather than merely plausible intellectual connections, and contextualization of ideas and movements in terms of broader social and cultural currents. Stocking writes very clearly; attacks important topics—race and evolution, the influence of scientism, the interaction between anthropology and other disciplines; and is methodologically very sophisticated. Though his main theme is the development of racialism and of opposition to it, his book bears on a range of issues very much alive in anthropology. . . . I would think no apprentice anthropologist ought to be pronounced a journeyman until he or she has absorbed what Stocking has to say."—Clifford Geertz, The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

408 pages | 5-1/2 x 8 | © 1982

Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology

Table of Contents

Preface to the Phoenix Edition
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. On the Limits of "Presentism" and "Historicism" in the Historiography of the Behavioral Sciences
2. French Anthropology in 1800
3. The Persistence of Polygenist Thought in Post-Darwinian Anthropology
4. Matthew Arnold, E. B. Tylor, and the Uses of Invention
5. "Cultural Darwinism" and "Philosophical Idealism" in E. B. Tylor
6. The Dark-Skinned Savage: The Image of Primitive Man in Evolutionary Anthropology
7. From Physics to Ethnology
8. The Critique of Racial Formalism
9. Franz Boas and the Culture Concept in Historical Perspective
10. Lamarckianism in American Social Science, 1890-1915
11. The Scientific Reaction Against Cultural Anthropology, 1917-1920
Appendix: A Note on Sources
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Index

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