The Philosophical Roots of Anthropology (Volume 86)

by William Y. Adams

Anthropologists claim to have made mankind aware of its own prehistory and its importance to human self-understanding. Yet, anthropologists seem hardly to have discovered their own discipline's prehistory or to have realized its importance. William Y. Adams attempts to rectify this myopic self-awareness by applying anthropology's own tools on itself and uncovering the discipline's debt to earlier thinkers.

Like most anthropologists, Adams had previously accepted the premise that anthropology's intellectual roots go back no further than the moral philosophy of the Enlightenment, or perhaps at the earliest to the humanism of the Renaissance. In this volume, Adams recognizes that many good ideas were anticipated in antiquity and that these ideas have had a lasting influence on anthropological models in particular. He has chosen five philosophical currents whose influence has been, and is, very widespread, particularly in North American progressivism, primitivism, natural law, German idealism, and "Indianology". He argues that the influences of these currents in North American anthropology occur in a unique combination that is not found in the anthropologies of other countries. Without neglecting the anthropologies of other countries, this work serves as the basis for the explanation of the true historical and philosophical underpinnings of anthropology and its goals.

Genres: Anthropology

450 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1998

About the author

William 'Bill' Yewdale Adams, Ph.D. (Anthropology, University of Arizona, 1957; B.A., Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley) was Emeritus Professor of anthropology at the University of Kentucky. The death of his father, historian William Forbes Adams, led the family (including his older brother Ernest W. Adams) to relocate to a Navajo Reservation where the experience of Navajo culture first sparked young Bill's interest in anthropology.

Professor Adams was the winner of the 1978 Herskovits Prize for his history of Nubia, and in 2005 he was awarded Sudan's highest civilian honor, the Order of the Two Niles, for his contributions to Nubian history.

Reviews

[Riversue]

The author chose to focus on American Anthropology but did also cover British, German and French. He also touched on many smaller versions of the discipline. I loved the way he closed the topic by looking at personality types and the various paradigms and subfields. Fascinating/