2 - Precursors of the Anthropological Tradition

Summary

While modern anthropology began in the late nineteenth century, we can place the origins of the subject to much earlier. Seventeenth-century figures include Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke, and Hobbes. Also, the definition of humanity was changing. Were feral children fully human, and what about the ‘Orang Outang’? This chapter explores these figures, as well as Montesquieu, Rousseau, and others in anthropology and in the sociological tradition. It also looks at the ideas of polygenesis and monogenesis.