Denaturalizing Social Anthropology: Biological Reasoning and Social Inquiry, 1859-1926

在执行这一项目时，首席调查员将完成一本书的研究，该书将详细说明功能主义人类学理论和方法背后的理由。功能主义模式于20世纪20年代在英国形成，影响了世界各地各种类型的社会科学家。它的重要性的一个重要原因是它在美国社会科学家中的受欢迎程度，二战后，美国社会科学家在全球的声望大幅上升，其中效仿英国模式的功能主义理论在20世纪60年代之前一直是占主导地位的范式。然而，人们对功能主义的历史知之甚少。对于功能主义者来说，社会人类学是一项独立的事业，而他们的前辈将其与自然科学研究联系在一起。这位研究人员此前曾表明，功能主义者对他们计划的出现的描述是修正主义的历史--人类学历史学家错误地接受了这一点。功能主义源于自然科学提供的信息--达尔文生物地理学和能量生理学。达尔文主义的戒律表明，澳大利亚地区是人类学研究的战略地点--其中最重要的是对托雷斯海峡岛民和澳大利亚中部原住民的研究，分别是在A.C.哈登和鲍德温·斯宾塞(两位训练有素的生物学家)的鼓动下进行的--这一结论矛盾地导致人类学家争辩说，人类物种的生物变异与行为变异无关。能量生理学启发了W·H·R·里弗斯定义的田野研究方法，这位最杰出的科学家参与了哈登的托雷斯海峡探险，他的方法论指导方针得到了广泛的接受，同时他的人类学家作为一种具体工具的模型(将个体发生学与系统发生学联系起来的方案的变种)被忽略了。从个人和机构的档案收藏中，调查者将重建从19世纪中叶到20世纪头几十年连接社会人类学家和其他博物学家的社会和智力网络。她的新书应该包括人类学家和历史学家，就像她之前的作品一样。他们可能会觉得这个项目很有趣，因为它描述了关于先天和后天在决定人类行为方面的相对重要性的经典辩论的一个解决方案，这场辩论最近变得和一个世纪前一样激烈--特别是对人类学家来说，这场辩论承载着对研究的规范意义。

In carrying out this project the Principal Investigator will complete the research for a book that will specify the reasoning underlying the theory and method of functionalist anthropology. Formulated in Britain in the 1920s, the functionalist model influenced social scientists of all types throughout the world. Not least of the reasons for its importance was its popularity among American social scientists, whose global prestige rose dramatically after World War II, among whom functionalist theory patterned after the British model was the dominant paradigm until the 1960s. Functionalism's history has been poorly understood, however.For functionalists, social anthropology was an autonomous enterprise, whereas their predecessors had coupled it to natural scientific inquiry. The investigator has previously shown that functionalists' account of the emergence of their scheme was revisionist history -- which historians of anthropology have mistakenly accepted. Functionalism derived from inquiries informed by natural science -- by both Darwinian biogeography and energetic physiology. Darwinian precepts suggested that the Australian region was a strategic site for anthropological investigations -- the most important of these being studies of the Torres Straits Islanders and the Aborigines of central Australia conducted at the instigation of A. C. Haddon and Baldwin Spencer (both trained biologists) respectively -- the conclusions of which, paradoxically, led anthropologists to argue that biological variations within the human species were unrelated to behavioral variations. Energetic physiology informed the field research method defined by W. H. R. Rivers, the most distinguished scientist who participated in Haddon's Torres Straits Expedition, whose methodological guidelines gained wide acceptance at the same time as his model of the anthropologist as an embodied instrument (a variant of the scheme that linked ontogeny to phylogeny) was disregarded.From individual and institutional archival collections, the investigator will reconstruct the social and intellectual networks that linked social anthropologists and other naturalists from the middle of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth. Her new book should reach an audience that includes both anthropologists and historians, as has her previous work. They will likely find this project interesting because it describes one resolution of the classic debate over the relative importance of nature and nurture in the determination of human behavior, a debate which has recently grown as intense as it was a century ago -- and which for anthropologists in particular is freighted with prescriptive implications for research.