Ethnology (from the Greek ἔθνος, ethnos meaning "people, nation, race") is the branch of anthropology that compares and analyzes the origins, distribution, technology, religion, language, and social structure of the ethnic, racial, and/or national divisions of humanity.^[1]

Scientific discipline[link]

Compared to ethnography, the study of single groups through direct contact with the culture, ethnology takes the research that ethnographers have compiled and then compares and contrasts different cultures. The term ethnology is credited to Adam Franz Kollár who used and defined it in his Historiae ivrisqve pvblici Regni Vngariae amoenitates published in Vienna in 1783.^[2] Kollár's interest in linguistic and cultural diversity was aroused by the situation in his native multi-lingual Kingdom of Hungary and his roots among its Slovaks, and by the shifts that began to emerge after the gradual retreat of the Ottoman Empire in the more distant Balkans.^[3]

Among the goals of ethnology have been the reconstruction of human history, and the formulation of cultural invariants, such as the incest taboo and culture change, and the formulation of generalizations about "human nature", a concept which has been criticized since the 19th century by various philosophers (Hegel, Marx, structuralism, etc.). In some parts of the world ethnology has developed along independent paths of investigation and pedagogical doctrine, with cultural anthropology becoming dominant especially in the United States, and social anthropology in Great Britain. The distinction between the three terms is increasingly blurry. Ethnology has been considered an academic field since the late 18th century especially in Europe and is sometimes conceived of as any comparative study of human groups.

The 15th century exploration of America by European explorers had an important role in formulating new notions of the Occidental, such as, the notion of the "Other". This term was used in conjunction with "savages", which was either seen as a brutal barbarian, or alternatively, as "noble savage". Thus, civilization was opposed in a dualist manner to barbary, a classic opposition constitutive of the even more commonly-shared ethnocentrism. The progress of ethnology, for example with Claude Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology, led to the criticism of conceptions of a linear progress, or the pseudo-opposition between "societies with histories" and "societies without histories", judged too dependent on a limited view of history as constituted by accumulative growth.

Lévi-Strauss often referred to Montaigne's essay on cannibalism as an early example of ethnology. Lévi-Strauss aimed, through a structural method, at discovering universal invariants in human society, chief among which he believed to be the incest taboo. However, the claims of such cultural universalism have been criticized by various 19th and 20th century social thinkers, including Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, Althusser and Deleuze.

The French school of ethnology was particularly significant for the development of the discipline since the early 1950s with Marcel Griaule, Germaine Dieterlen, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean Rouch.

Scholars[link]

• List of scholars of ethnology

See also[link]

• Anthropology
• Ethnography
• Cultural survival
• Culture
• Ethnocentrism
• Evolutionism
• Indigenous peoples
• Intangible cultural heritage
• Marxism
• Meta-analysis
• Modernism
• Post-Modernism
• Postcolonial
• Primitive culture
• Primitivism
• Racism
• Secondary research
• Society
• Structural anthropology
• Structural functionalism
• Ethnobiology

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Johann Georg Adam Forster Voyage round the World in His Britannic Majesty’s Sloop, Resolution, Commanded by Capt. James Cook, during the Years 1772, 3, 4, and 5 (2 vols), London (1777)
• Lévi-Strauss, Claude, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, (1949), Structural Anthropology (1958)
• Marcel Mauss, originally published as Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés archaïques in 1925, this classic text on gift economy appears in the English edition as The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies.
• Maybury-Lewis, David, Akwe-Shavante society. (1967), The Politics of Ethnicity: Indigenous Peoples in Latin American States (2003)[1].
• Clastres, Pierre, Society Against the State (1974),
• Pop, Mihai and Glauco Sanga, Problemi generali dell'etnologia europea La Ricerca Folklorica, No. 1, La cultura popolare. Questioni teoriche (Apr., 1980), pp. 89–96

External links[link]

• Webpage "History of German Anthropology/Ethnology 1945/49-1990
• Languages describes the languages and ethnic groups found worldwide, grouped by host nation-state.
• Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History - Over 160,000 objects from Pacific, North American, African, Asian ethnographic collections with images and detailed description, linked to the original catalogue pages, field notebooks, and photographs are available online.
• National Museum of Ethnology - Osaka, Japan
• Turkish Ethnology Source (in Turkish)
• Texts on Wikisource:
  • "Ethnology". New International Encyclopedia. 1905. 
  • Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Ethnology and ethnography". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 
  • Beach, Chandler B., ed. (1914). "Ethnology". The New Student's Reference Work. Chicago: F. E. Compton and Co.. Wikisource 
  • "Ethnology". Encyclopedia Americana. 1920. 
  • "Ethnology". Collier's New Encyclopedia. 1921. 

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (March 2010)

Frances Densmore with Blackfoot chief Mountain Chief during a recording session for the BAE

The Bureau of American Ethnology (or BAE, originally, Bureau of Ethnology) was established in 1879 by an act of Congress for the purpose of transferring archives, records and materials relating to the Indians of North America from the Interior Department to the Smithsonian Institution. But from the start, the bureau's visionary founding director, John Wesley Powell, promoted a broader mission: "to organize anthropologic research in America." Under Powell, the bureau organized research intensive multi-year projects; sponsored ethnographic, archaeological and linguistic field research; initiated publications series (most notably its Annual Reports and Bulletins); and promoted the fledgling discipline of anthropology. It prepared exhibits for expositions and collected anthropological artifacts for the Smithsonian United States National Museum. In addition, the BAE was the official repository of documents concerning American Indians collected by the various US geological surveys, especially the Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region and the Geological Survey of the Territories. It developed a manuscript repository, library and illustrations section that included photographic work and the collection of photographs.

In 1897, the Bureau of Ethnology's name changed to the Bureau of American Ethnology to emphasize the geographic limit of its interests, although its staff briefly conducted research in US possessions such as Hawaii and the Philippines. In 1965, the BAE merged with the Smithsonian's Department of Anthropology to form the Smithsonian Office of Anthropology within the United States National Museum (now the Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History). In 1968, the SOA archives became the National Anthropological Archives.

Research[link]

The BAE's staff included some of America's earliest field anthropologists, including Frank Hamilton Cushing, James Owen Dorsey, Jesse Walter Fewkes, Alice Cunningham Fletcher, John N.B. Hewitt, Francis LaFlesche, Cosmos and Victor Mindeleff, James Mooney, John Stevenson, and Matilda Coxe Stevenson. In the 20th century, the BAE's staff included such anthropologists as Neil Judd, John Peabody Harrington (a linguist who spent more than 40 years documenting endangered languages) and William C. Sturtevant. The BAE supported the work of many non-Smithsonian researchers (known as collaborators), most notably Franz Boas, Frances Densmore, Garrick Mallery, Washington Matthews, Paul Radin, Cyrus Thomas and T.T. Waterman.

The BAE had three subunits: the Mounds Survey (1882–1895); the Institute of Social Anthropology (1943–1952), and the River Basin Surveys (1946–1969).

Mounds survey[link]

At the time the BAE was founded, there was intense controversy over the identity of the Mound Builders, the term for the prehistoric people who had built complex, monumental earthwork mounds. Archaeologists, both amateur and professional, were divided between believing the mounds were built by passing groups of people who settled in various places elsewhere, or believing they could have been built by Native Americans. Cyrus Thomas, the Bureau's appointed head of the Division of Mound Exploration, eventually published his conclusions on the origins of the mounds in the Bureau's Annual Report of 1894. It is considered to be the last word in the controversy over the Mound builders' identities. After Thomas' publication, scholars generally accepted that varying cultures of prehistoric indigenous peoples, Native Americans, were the Mound builders.

See also[link]

Indigenous peoples of North America portal

• History of indigenous peoples of North America
• Native American history

References[link]

• Fagan, Brian M. Ancient North America. Thames & Hudson. New York, 2005
• Hinsley, Curtis M. 1994. The Smithsonian and the American Indian: making a moral anthropology in Victorian America. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.
• Hodge, Frederick Webb, and Corinne L. Gilb. 1956. Frederick Webb Hodge, ethnologist. Berkeley, Calif: University of California.
• Judd, Neil Merton. The Bureau of American Ethnology; a partial history. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967.
• Thomas, Cyrus. Report on the mound explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology. Pp. 3–730. Twelfth annual report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1890–91, by J. W. Powell, Director. XLVIII+742 pp., 42 pls., 344 figs. 1894.

External links[link]

• List of Publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology
• National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution
• Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution
• A History of the Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, 1897–1997
• Digitized copies of the BAE Annual Reports at Gallica
• Digitized copies of BAE Bulletins No. 1 – 24
• Digitized copies of BAE Bulletins No. 25 – 200
• Register to the Records of the Bureau of American Ethnology, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution

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