Victorian Anthropology


Book Description

In this fascinating and erudite work, George Stocking, America's most renowned historian of anthropology, probes the Victorian origins of contemporary thought on human social and cultural evolution. George Stocking examines the portrayal of primitive peoples by Victorian travellers and missionaries. He shows how their attitudes towards the dark-skinned savages corresponded to their view of the proletarian masses produced by the Industrial Revolution.




Cultivating Belief


Book Description

This book explores how a group of Victorian literary writers - including George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Matthew Arnold - became interested in the emerging anthropology of religion, which sought to explain religion not in terms of doctrines or beliefs but as a function of race or ethnicity.




The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature


Book Description

The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature offers 45 chapters by leading international scholars working with the most dynamic and influential political, cultural, and theoretical issues addressing Victorian literature today. Scholars and students will find this collection both useful and inspiring. Rigorously engaged with current scholarship that is both historically sensitive and theoretically informed, the Routledge Companion places the genres of the novel, poetry, and drama and issues of gender, social class, and race in conversation with subjects like ecology, colonialism, the Gothic, digital humanities, sexualities, disability, material culture, and animal studies. This guide is aimed at scholars who want to know the most significant critical approaches in Victorian studies, often written by the very scholars who helped found those fields. It addresses major theoretical movements such as narrative theory, formalism, historicism, and economic theory, as well as Victorian models of subjects such as anthropology, cognitive science, and religion. With its lists of key works, rich cross-referencing, extensive bibliographies, and explications of scholarly trajectories, the book is a crucial resource for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, while offering invaluable support to more seasoned scholars.




Race, Culture, and Evolution


Book Description

"We have, at long last, a real historian with real historical skills and no intra-professional ax to grind. . . . All these pieces show the virtues one finds missing in . . . nearly all of anthropological history work but [Stocking's]: extensive and critical use of archival sources, tracing of real rather than merely plausible intellectual connections, and contextualization of ideas and movements in terms of broader social and cultural currents. Stocking writes very clearly; attacks important topics—race and evolution, the influence of scientism, the interaction between anthropology and other disciplines; and is methodologically very sophisticated. Though his main theme is the development of racialism and of opposition to it, his book bears on a range of issues very much alive in anthropology. . . . I would think no apprentice anthropologist ought to be pronounced a journeyman until he or she has absorbed what Stocking has to say."—Clifford Geertz, The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton




Primitive Marriage


Book Description

Marriage is the novel's traditional subject matter. But what happens to the novel when another genre of writing lays claim to the novel's traditional material? Primitive Marriage: Victorian Anthropology, the Novel, and Sexual Modernity shows how the foundational ideas of the new discipline of anthropology gave late-Victorian novelists and social scientists ways of rethinking heterosexual romance by referring to a new kind of history, one in which marriage systems, sexual behavior, and reproductive practices were temporalized and given historical agency. Temporalizing sexual relations, locating them in evolutionary and historical time, anthropologists and the novelists who wrote after them began to think modernity in sexual terms. This transformation of politics into sexual politics put sexuality and gender at the center of liberal stories of progress. The Victorian theorists responsible for this transformation—from well-known figures like Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud to lesser-known writers like John McLennan and Henry Maine—and the novelists who engaged them—Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Henry James, Sarah Grand, H. Rider Haggard, Thomas Hardy—not only helped produce sexually modern subjects, but also the theories about sexuality, time, and politics that we still draw upon to think modernity today.




Human Evolution and Fantastic Victorian Fiction


Book Description

Following the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Victorian anthropology made two apparently contradictory claims: it distinguished "civilized man" from animals and "primitive" humans and it linked them though descent. Paradoxically, it was by placing human history in a deep past shaped by minute, incremental changes (rather than at the apex of Providential order) that evolutionary anthropology could assert a new form of human exceptionalism and define civilized humanity against both human and nonhuman savagery. This book shows how fantastic Victorian and early Edwardian fictions—utopias, dystopias, nonsense literature, gothic horror, and children’s fables—untether human and nonhuman animal agency from this increasingly orthodox account of the deep past. As they imagine worlds that lift the evolutionary constraints on development and as they collapse evolution into lived time, these stories reveal (and even occupy) dynamic landscapes of cognitive descent that contest prevailing anthropological ideas about race, culture, and species difference.




After Tylor


Book Description

"This impressively solid, judicious, and authoritative text will surely serve the profession for a long time to come."--Michael Young, Journal of theHistory of the Behavioral Sciences




Victorian Fetishism


Book Description

Victorian Fetishism argues that fetishism was central to the development of cultural theory in the nineteenth century. From 1850 to 1900, when theories of social evolution reached their peak, European intellectuals identified all "primitive" cultures with "Primitive Fetishism," a psychological form of self-projection in which people believe everything in the external world—thunderstorms, trees, stones—is alive. Placing themselves at the opposite extreme of cultural evolution, the Victorians defined culture not by describing what culture was but by describing what it was not, and what it was not was fetishism. In analyses of major works by Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Edward B. Tylor, Peter Melville Logan demonstrates the paradoxical role of fetishism in Victorian cultural theory, namely, how Victorian writers projected their own assumptions about fetishism onto the realm of historical fact, thereby "fetishizing" fetishism. The book concludes by examining how fetishism became a sexual perversion as well as its place within current cultural theory.




Delimiting Anthropology


Book Description

All but two of the 16 essays have been previously published, and Stocking (anthropology, U. of Chicago) wrote all of them in response to invitations to give a lecture, present a paper at a scholarly meeting, contribute to an edited volume, introduce a volume he edited, or respond to a specific moment of archival discovery. They meander through Boasian culturalism, British evolutionaries, institutions in national traditions, and mesocosmic reflections. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR




How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain


Book Description

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.