Definition
In the late nineteenth century, anthropology was a discipline in its infancy. The first anthropology course at the University of Oxford was taught in 1883 by Sir Edward B. Tylor at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and the university issued its first diploma in the subject in 1905 (Oxford School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography 2021). Victorian anthropologists compiled and compared artifacts and accounts of non-western cultures collected by missionaries, explorers, military personnel, and colonial administrators with the goal of organizing and classifying human cultures into comprehensible types. Victorian anthropology can be distinguished from other contemporary academic disciplines by its explicit focus on understanding human cultural and biological diversity across space and over time.
The preeminent theoretical framework of Victorian anthropology, unilineal cultural evolution, suggested that all cultures were evolving toward “civilization,” which was best represented by...
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Steere, E., Steere, B.A. (2022). Anthropology. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_198-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_198-1
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