Vol. 78/No. 40      November 10, 2014

BY EVELYN REED
Anthropology, like everything else in this world, was born in and through struggle. It emerged as a branch of science about a hundred years ago through a series of colossal battles against religious dogmas and petrified ideas.

The first major dispute centered around the antiquity of humankind. Theologians had established the duration of humanity in accord with the Bible at some six thousand years. Even the great French biologist Cuvier adhered to this orthodox view and argued that fossilized bones of men antedating this time did not exist. However, another Frenchman, Boucher de Perthes, exploded this prejudice by his discoveries of ancient stone axes in French deposits which paleontological tests proved were much older. His book published in 1846, demonstrating that fossil men and their tools dated back tens of thousands of years, was greeted with skepticism and scorn.

Continued discoveries of ancient human fossils and tools soon settled this question beyond dispute. …

The second great battle was waged around the animal origin of humankind. It began with the publication in 1859 of [Charles] Darwin’s Origin of Species, followed in 1871 by his Descent of Man. Darwin’s proof that humanity arose out of the animal world, more specifically out of the anthropoid species, was a direct blow to the Adam-and-Eve myth. This was a more serious challenge to the divine origin of humanity than simply pushing the birth of mankind farther back in time. Yet, despite the hostility it encountered, Darwin’s view became the point of departure for the first scientific study of the formation of humanity. A biologist applying materialist methods had cleared the road for linking anthropology to natural science. …

The third major struggle unfolded over two interrelated basic distinctions between the institutions of modern and primitive society: the question of the matriarchy versus the patriarchy, and the question of the clan versus the family. In his book Das Mutterrecht, published in 1861, [Johann Jakob] Bachofen, using literary sources as evidence, set forth the proposition that an epoch of matriarchy had preceded the patriarchal form with which we are so familiar. Bachofen noted that one of the most striking features of primitive life was the high social status and exceptional authority enjoyed by primitive women in contrast to their inferior status in the subsequent patriarchal epoch. He believed that this epoch of “mother right” which preceded “father right” resulted from the fact that fathers were unknown and the primitive group identified themselves exclusively through the maternal line.

The question of matriarchy was inextricably linked with the clan group of primitive times as contrasted with the individual family of modern times. Lewis Morgan, in his book Ancient Society, published in 1877, disclosed that the unit of primitive society was not the individual family but the gens, or clan.

[Frederick] Engels believed that Morgan’s discovery was as important to the study of the primitive social structure as the discovery of the cell was to biology, or as Marx’s concept of surplus value was to economics. Given the unit of the gens, or clan, the road was opened for anthropologists to investigate and reconstruct the formation and organization of tribal life. As a result of his pioneer work, Morgan is hailed as the founder of American anthropology.

Morgan believed that the family, as it is constituted today, did not exist in ancient society and is essentially a product of civilized conditions. Before the family came the clan, which was composed not of fathers and mothers but of kinsmen and kinswomen, or clan “brothers and sisters.” Morgan also indicated that the clan structure was matriarchal. Thus the dispute around the historical priority of the matriarchy over the patriarchy became inseparable from the controversy around the historical priority of the clan over the individual family.

The fourth and most persistent struggle unfolded around the sharp contrast between the basic economic and social relations of primitive and civilized society. Morgan demonstrated that modern society, founded upon the private ownership of the means of production and divided by class antagonisms between the propertied and nonpropertied, is the opposite of the way primitive society was organized. In the primitive community, the means of production were communally owned and the fruits of their labor equally shared. The clan was a genuine collective in which every individual was provided for and protected by the entire community, from the cradle to the grave.

This most basic feature of primitive life was characterized by Morgan and Engels as “primitive communism.” But this collectivist social system as well as its matriarchal aspects were frowned upon and discounted by those who wished to perpetuate the dogma that the modern system of private property and class distinctions have persisted without essential change throughout the whole history of humankind.

The struggles around these four major issues, which arose through the researches of the nineteenth-century pioneer thinkers, gave birth to the science of anthropology. Although many questions remained unanswered, the classical school of anthropologists provided the keys for opening a series of hitherto closed doors into the recesses of ancient society. They were founders of the scientific investigation.  
 
 
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