Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Anniversary Collection) - Softcover

Hodgen, Margaret T.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 081221014X ISBN 13: 9780812210149

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection, 1971

Synopsis

Although social sciences such as anthropology are often thought to have been organized as academic specialties in the nineteenth century, the ideas upon which these disciplines were founded actually developed centuries earlier. In fact, the foundational concepts can be traced at least as far back as the sixteenth century, when contact with unfamiliar peoples in the New World led Europeans to create ways of describing and understanding social similarities and differences among humans.

Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries examines the history of some of the ideas adopted to help understand the origin of culture, the diversity of traits, the significance of similarities, the sequence of high civilizations, the course of cultural change, and the theory of social evolution. It is a book that not only illuminates the thinking of a bygone age but also sheds light on the sources of attitudes still prevalent today.

About this title

Review:

"Writing with erudition and a broad grasp of the history of social thought, Hodgen demonstrates the debt owed to the period of the late Renaissance and even the centuries prior to that."—American Anthropologist

From the Author:

Margaret T. Hodgen is author of The Doctrine of Survivals: A Chapter in the History of Scientific Method in the Study of Man and Change and History: A Study of the Dated Distributions of Technological Innovations in England.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection
• Publication date: 1971
• ISBN 10: 081221014X
• ISBN 13: 9780812210149
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 528