The Anthropology of the Enlightenment

by Wolff, Larry

• ISBN13: 9780804752039
• ISBN10: 0804752036
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-09-30
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

The modern enterprise of anthropology, with all of its important implications for cross-cultural perceptions, perspectives, and self-consciousness emerged from the eighteenth-century intellectual context of the Enlightenment. If the Renaissance discovered perspective in art, it was the Enlightenment that articulated and explored the problem of perspective in viewing history, culture, and society. If the Renaissance was the age of oceanic discoverymost dramatically the discovery of the New World of Americathe critical reflections of the Enlightenment brought about an intellectual rediscovery of the New World and thus laid the foundations for modern anthropology. The contributions that constitute this book present the multiple anthropological facets of the Enlightenment, and suggest that the character of its intellectual engagementsacknowledging global diversity, interpreting human societies, and bridging cultural differencemust be understood as a whole to be fundamentally anthropological.

Author Biography

Larry Wolff is Professor of History at New York University. His books include Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, 1994), and Venice and the Slavs: The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford, 2001). Marco Cipolloni is Professor and Chair of Spanish Language and Culture at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. His works include Il sovrano e la corte nelle "cartas" della Conquista(1991), Tra memoria apostolica e racconto profetico: Il compromesso etnografico francescano e le "cosas" della Nuova Spagna, (1994), and the critical edition of the Teatro completo of Miguel Angel Asturias (2003).

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xi
Contributors	p. xv
Introduction
Discovering Cultural Perspective: The Intellectual History of Anthropological Thought in the Age of Enlightenment	p. 3
Philosophical History and Enlightened Anthropology
Barbarians and the Redefinition of Europe: A Study of Gibbon's Third Volume	p. 35
The Immobility of China: Orientalism and Occidentalism in the Enlightenment	p. 50
Doux Commerce, Douce Colonisation: Diderot and the Two Indies of the French Enlightenment	p. 65
Adam Smith and the Anthropology of the Enlightenment: The "Ethnographic" Sources of Economic Progress	p. 85
Beyond the Savage Character: Mexicans, Peruvians, and the "Imperfectly Civilized" in William Robertson's History of America	p. 103
Herder's India: The "Morgenland" in Mythology and Anthropology	p. 119
Ethnography and Enlightened Anthropology
The German Enlightenment and the Pacific	p. 141
Persian Letters from Real People: Northern Perspectives on Europe	p. 172
Russia and Its "Orient": Ethnographic Exploration of the Russian Empire in the Age of Enlightenment	p. 185
Love in the Time of Hierarchy: Ethnographic Voices in Eighteenth-Century Haiti	p. 209
Human Nature and Enlightened Anthropology
The Dreaming Body: Cartesian Psychology, Enlightenment Anthropology, and the Jesuits in Nouvelle France	p. 239
The Anthropology of Natural Law: Debates About Pufendorf in the Age of Enlightenment	p. 252
"Animal Economy": Anthropology and the Rise of Psychiatry from the Encyclopedie to the Alienists	p. 262
Metamorphosis and Settlement: The Enlightened Anthropology of Colonial Societies	p. 277
Conclusion
The Old Wor(l)d and the New Wor(l)ds: A Discursive Survey from Discovery to Early Anthropology	p. 295
Notes	p. 333
Index	p. 407
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