HUMAN SCIENCE IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN: ANTHROPOLOGY IN INSTITUTIONAL AND DISCIPLINARY FORMATION, 1863-1908

Recent studies in the history of science have paid especial attention to the history of disciplines and the role played by institutional structures in their development. Study of disciplinary development within the social sciences, however, is less advanced than in the natural sciences. This thesis, as a case study, analyzes the influence of institutional settings upon British anthropology during a formative period of its history. The assumption is that institutions play an integral role in the development of a discipline, moulding its internal definition and influencing the choice of research problems. This is true for anthropology in later Victorian and Edwardian Britain. From 1863 to 1908, British anthropology underwent a development that expanded its institutional setting from one confined to a metropolitan scientific society to that which embraced museums and universities. The science of man was represented both within museum collections and the educational curriculum at Oxford and Cambridge Universities by 1908. Professional positions had opened up in museums and universities, and a majority of the leadership of the Anthropological Institute occupied career niches in anthropology or related subjects. Resolution of competition between two London based anthropological societies in 1871 set the institutional tone and context for the pursuit of science in Victorian Britain. The Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, result of an 1871 amalgamation of the competing societies, was dominated by a circle of scientific professionals who avoided explicit political controversy and promoted the study of biological and social evolution. They united antiquarianism, philology, folklore, somatology, ethnology, and archeology under an embracive evolutionary paradigm that researched and illuminated man\u27s physical and cultural history. Anthropology subsequently took its place in the British Association as an accepted facet of British scientific culture. Members of the Anthropological Institute made recurrent efforts to enlist public support for anthropology through funding of national anthropometric surveys and ethnographic bureaus. . . . (Author\u27s abstract exceeds stipulated maximum length. Discontinued here with permission of school.) UM