ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the development of thinking in anthropology in North America and Europe from the Enlightenment in the 1700s to the end of World War II in 1945. Anthropology, like all disciplines of knowledge, is an outcome of centuries of discourse, thought and debate among different minds. North American anthropology, like European anthropology, originates in the philosophical time period called the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, in contrast, undertook a deliberate project of objectification of the other, and though its initial results are debatable, it did lead to a genuine science of humankind. The Enlightenment philosophers of the North Atlantic in the eighteenth century believed that utopian society would be in the future, not the past. Many Anglo-Americans living in the 13 colonies thought the Indians were descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, an idea that laid the groundwork for the religion of Mormonism.
