ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we examine perspectives on human differences that originated well before the formal origins of anthropology. While some of these ideas can be readily dismissed today, others (mostly dating from the Enlightenment) have been so influential as to form the basis of all of today’s social sciences. As a formal academic discipline devoted to the study of cultural differences, anthropology had emerged in Great Britain and the United States by the 1870s. In recent decades, as anthropologists have looked more critically at the discipline’s history, they have often noted how the field arose in conjunction with colonialism. The consolidation of European empires in Africa and Asia during the nineteenth century, and consignment of North American Indians to reservations during the same time, provided the first opportunities for anthropologists to conduct field research among colonized peoples. As we will see, in some instances, anthropologists worked hand in hand with colonial authorities in providing information to better administer and control native populations. But while anthropology as a formal discipline owes its origins to colonialism, the questions that have motivated anthropologists extend far back into classical antiquity, if not before. Probably as long as people have been aware of others unlike themselves there have been efforts to account for those differences.
