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

在执行该项目时，首席研究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推理。功能主义模型于20世纪20年代在英国形成，影响了全世界所有类型的社会科学家。其重要性的一个重要原因是它在美国社会科学家中很受欢迎，他们的全球声望在第二次世界大战后急剧上升，直到20世纪60年代，在他们中间，模仿英国模式的功能主义理论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，社会人类学是一项自主的事业，而他们的前辈则把它与自然科学研究结合在一起。研究者之前已经表明，功能主义者对他们的方案出现的描述是修正主义的历史——这是人类学历史学家错误地接受的。功能主义源于自然科学的研究——达尔文的生物地理学和能量生理学。达尔文学说认为，澳大利亚地区是人类学研究的战略要地——其中最重要的是分别在a.c.哈登（a.c. Haddon）和鲍德温·斯宾塞（Baldwin Spencer）（两人都是训练有素的生物学家）的鼓动下对托雷斯海峡岛民和澳大利亚中部土著人进行的研究——自相矛盾的是，这些研究的结论导致人类学家认为，人类物种内部的生物变异与行为变异无关。能量生理学为w.h.r.里弗斯（w.h.r. Rivers）所定义的实地研究方法提供了依据。里弗斯是哈登托雷斯海峡探险队（Haddon’s Torres Straits Expedition）中最杰出的科学家，他的方法论指导方针获得了广泛接受，与此同时，他将人类学家作为一种具身工具的模型（将个体发生与系统发生联系起来的方案的一种变体）却被忽视了。从个人和机构的档案收藏中，研究者将重建社会人类学家和其他博物学家从19世纪中叶到20世纪头几十年之间的社会和知识网络。正如她之前的作品一样，她的新书应该会吸引包括人类学家和历史学家在内的读者。他们可能会发现这个项目很有趣，因为它描述了一种经典辩论的解决方案，即在决定人类行为的过程中，先天和后天的相对重要性，这一辩论最近变得和一个世纪前一样激烈，尤其是对人类学家来说，它承载了对研究的规范性影响。

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.