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3 The Rise of Anthropology In the emerging social sciences of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries , Latin America was an important subject of teaching and research mainly in the field of anthropology. As chapter 1 showed, Latin America and especially Mesoamerica had been a major source of interest for nineteenth-century archaeologists and ethnologists.This interest remained keen as the twentieth century began, all the more so as native Americans in the United States seemed to be on the verge of disappearance. In many parts of Latin America, by contrast, there remained not only the physical remains of the vanished civilizations so eloquently described by John Lloyd Stephens but also indigenous peoples who lived in traditional communities seemingly touched only lightly by the forces of modernity. Moreover, these communities were vibrant and healthy and in no danger of dying.1 Archaeological and ethnological research focused on the Americas during this period was shaped by the fact that the two fields were increasingly subsumed under the new discipline of anthropology. In 1900 the American Ethnological Society counted 73 members, but it was soon overshadowed by the American Anthropological Association, which had 172 members at the time of its foundation in 1902. Members of the older society were automatically enrolled in the new association, and the latter’s journal, American Anthropologist, became its organ.2 In the United States anthropology was usually divided into four subfields with often blurred boundaries: archaeology, linguistics, physical anthropology, and ethnology, which evolved into cultural anthropology. It should be noted that only archaeology of the Americas fell within the purview of anthropology departments in colleges and universities. Old World archaeology was included in classics departments or was the province of special institutes. The gap between the two fields was also seen in the trajectory of the Archaeological In- The Rise of Anthropology 53 stitute of America, founded in 1879. Although the institute supported work by Adolph Bandelier and funded a study of Quiriguá, a Maya site in Guatemala, it gradually moved away from American projects to devote itself to Old World archaeology .3 The twentieth century saw leadership in the New World field pass increasingly from museums and similar institutions to academic departments within universities and from autodidacts such as Stephens and Bandelier to universitytrained professionals. Anthropology was formally established in U.S. higher education with the creation in 1885 of Harvard’s chair of American archaeology and ethnology, to which Frederick W. Putnam, curator of Harvard’s Peabody Museum, was appointed. It was not until 1890, however, that a degreegranting department was created. Two years later Clark University awarded the first American doctorate in anthropology to a student of the German-born Franz Boas. By 1930, eighty-one doctorates had been conferred, most of them by a handful of institutions, including Harvard, Columbia, and California, that emerged as leaders of academic anthropology. Ten years later more than 60 percent of 273 institutions surveyed offered undergraduate courses in the field, though the number of anthropology departments remained small.4 With the relative decline of museum leadership came a decreased emphasis on the collection of artifacts. During the same period, governments in Latin America became more protective of their pre-Columbian remains and enacted legislation to regulate archaeological projects and to prevent the removal of antiquities . Mexico created the position of inspector of archaeological monuments in 1875, and legislation enacted in 1897 declared all such monuments to be the property of the nation. The government of Peru issued decrees in 1893 and 1911 declaring that all antiquities were the property of the state and requiring government permits before excavation could be undertaken. These laws were laxly enforced, however, and both natives and foreigners routinely ignored them. Also noteworthy was the erosion of nineteenth-century cultural evolutionism as propounded by Lewis Morgan. Scholars became less inclined to believe that human beings everywhere progressed through the stages of savagery, barbarism , and civilization. The new paradigm, associated primarily with Franz Boas, emphasized the need to study cultures in terms of their environment and historical circumstances and eschewed the ethnocentrism implicit in the evolutionary model. Boas was also active in efforts to professionalize anthropology and to shift leadership from the museum to the university, and his American career illustrates the trajectory of anthropology during the four decades after 1890.5 After a four-year stay at Clark University, Boas was employed by the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and by the American Museum of 54 Chapter 3. Natural History...

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