Looking at anthropology from a biological point of view: A. C. Haddon's metaphors on anthropology

Roldán, Arturo Alvarez

doi:10.1177/095269519200500402

Cited by 25 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Bartlett's theory of cultural dynamics was a further development of diffusionist anthropology, especially as it was practiced by his Cambridge mentors William Haddon and WHR Rivers (see also Rosa, 1996). Haddon (1894Haddon ( , 1895 explored the variations and development of decorative art forms with an analogy to how Darwin had looked at the spread and evolution of species (Rolda´n, 1992). However, in contrast to Darwin, Haddon also believed there was a tendency to move from concrete figurative motifs to abstract, geometrical ones.…”

Section: Bartlett's Constructivist Approach: Between Anthropology Andmentioning

confidence: 99%

What makes memory constructive? A study in the serial reproduction of Bartlett’s experiments

Wagoner

2017

Culture & Psychology

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The claim that memory is constructive or reconstructive is no longer controversial in psychology. However, in the last decades it has generally been taken to mean that our memories are inaccurate or distorted. In the locus classicus of the constructive memory idea-Bartlett's Remembering-we find a different meaning: Constructive is there understood as a future-oriented and adaptive characteristic of remembering, which can also lead to accuracy. His notion of constructiveness was even earlier elaborated in relation to group dynamics in his book Psychology and Primitive Culture. How did we get from one meaning of constructive to another? This question is explored through a serial reproduction analysis of experiments purporting to replicate Bartlett's study. The focus is on the transformation of terminology used to describe qualitative changes introduced by subjects into reproductions. In this history a diversity of terms, coming from different intellectual sources, is gradually subsumed under the single term 'distortion'. Thus, psychologists have reconstructed Bartlett's work based on their own background, other influences and their own project for the discipline, illustrating the very constructive processes Bartlett theorized.

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Section: Bartlett's Constructivist Approach: Between Anthropology Andmentioning

confidence: 99%

What makes memory constructive? A study in the serial reproduction of Bartlett’s experiments

Wagoner

2017

Culture & Psychology

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“…The apparent conversion of Haddon from zoology to ethnology was nothing but the transference of a great part of the techniques, instruments, theories, models and points of view of biology to the study of anthropology. (Roldán, 1992: 23)One of the drivers of the expedition was thus of a methodological character: how to collect ethnographic facts by making use of several academic disciplines (Herle and Rouse, 1998: 15). Haddon's interdisciplinary team was very well equipped with technological instruments as befitted modern science, notably camera and cinématographe, underscoring the fact of vision being a central question of the expedition, and producing ethnography of ‘high visual quality’ (Grimshaw, 2001: 20).…”

Section: The Expedition – Then and Nowmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Expedition – Then and Nowmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moving facts in an Arctic field: The expedition as anthropological method

2016

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This article reflects on the merits of the expedition as an anthropological method on the basis of a recent cross-disciplinary experience, involving biologists, archaeologists and anthropologists working together in High Arctic Greenland. True to the term, the expedition had chartered a vessel from where the team could go ashore in places that would otherwise have been difficult to access, and where the individual perspectives could cross-fertilize each other in actual practice. It is argued that anthropology itself is a mode of experimentation in practice, which enables new trains of thought, and an engagement with other disciplinary practices. The gain of our cross-disciplinary experiment was therefore not only to know more about the makings of a particular landscape in a multi-disciplinary perspective, but also to understand how anthropology makes sense of inherently moving facts.

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“…This would become the Cambridge Torres Strait Anthropological Expedition of 1898, seen as a watershed in the move from the armchair to the field. From the start Haddon used biology as the model for anthropological research (Roldan ), sensing that anthropological research needed a more solid scientific footing. On the eve of the Torres expedition he published The Study of Man, an odd mix of manifesto and physical and cultural anthropology.…”

Section: The Torres Strait 1898 Psychological Expedition and The Disamentioning

confidence: 99%

Why the Armchair in the First Place? Then Why Get up from It? (And Why Did Some Remain Seated?)

Kenny

2016

Oceania

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Charles Lyell advised young geologists that to discover the nature of the bigger world required travel. In the field of the natural science this had its exemplars inspired by Humboldt, Darwin, Wallace, Joseph Hooker; in the field of geography it had the model of Cook's explorations. Yet by the midcentury even in the discipline of geography it was the armchair theorist who held sway. British anthropology came into being at the time the armchair was at its zenith, when the theorists in their studies understood that those out there on the ground could not see the forest for the trees. It claimed the perspective of the centre was required to bring order to all the observations. This article argues that the discoveries of the eighteenth century and nineteenth century existentially challenged the European view of humanity and that the aim of stay-at-home British ethnological research was to retrieve a history of being human. However out on the colonial frontier, the prerogative of the ethnographer became increasingly the Indigenous presence they confronted. The trees were more important than the forest. The information they sent back, backed by the authority of contact undermined the authority of the long perspective of the armchair, which was increasingly riven by contradictions and absurdities until it looked like no perspective at all. But the metropole still claimed ascendency as Alfred Haddon's expedition of 1898, laden down with the instruments of the psychology laboratory set out to confirm grand theories. It found instead that effective method in anthropology was to seek familiarity with a people, the method already employed by the colonial ethnographers.

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Looking at anthropology from a biological point of view: A. C. Haddon's metaphors on anthropology

Cited by 25 publications

References 5 publications

What makes memory constructive? A study in the serial reproduction of Bartlett’s experiments

What makes memory constructive? A study in the serial reproduction of Bartlett’s experiments

Moving facts in an Arctic field: The expedition as anthropological method

Why the Armchair in the First Place? Then Why Get up from It? (And Why Did Some Remain Seated?)

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