• doctrine of the middle ages
• attempt to reconcile science and religion
• scholarly "commentators" opportunistically interpreted the writings of Aristotle and church fathers

• coined by Thomas Aquinas, 13th c.
• early theological conception of "primitive" peoples as innately imperfect and subservient to Europeans
• attempt to reconcile slavery, etc. with Christian theology

• assumption that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now have always operated in the past and apply everywhere
• "present is the ket to the past"
• James Hutton - refined by John Playfair - popularized by Charles Lyell [Principals of Geology]

• use of extant primitive peoples to represent extinct primitive peoples
• classical cultural evolution
• Jean Jaques Rousseau - speculations on past using living natives as models
• Tylor's "survivals"

• idea that we know the world through categories - reduces variability to manageable proportions
• culturally engrained systems of classification/typology

• medieval philosophical schema that ranked all cosmic and earthly elements, including people, in a single ascending line of importance
• traditional creationism
• Linnaeus - taxonomic hierarchy, strongly creationist

• Portuguese term for "barbarian", originates in Greece
• used to describe "uncivilized"/non-European people
• "natural slaves" - incapable of reason by nature
• dehumanization of what lies beyond the bounds of the world

• myth of wild men living in forests, "other"/unknown
• solitary, outside civil society, unable to communicate, ate raw foods, lacked law, after women
• Merlin

• encyclopedic collections in Renaissance Europe
• objects with undefined categorical bounds
• Sir Hans Sloane - English physician in Jamaica, collected natural & artificial [cultural] curiosities

• 17th c. chronology of the history of the worl, formulated from a literal reading of the bible
• James Ussher
• contribution to the theological debate on the age of the Earth
• attacked by uniformitarianists

• modern emphasis by medieval scholastic thinkers
• Enlightenment - Bacon & Voltaire argue for removing appeal to suernatural forces from investigation of the natural world
• laws of nature operate in the universe, as opposed to supernatural ones

• Michel-Robin Trouillot - Haitian revolution
• paradox of Enlightenment thought - debated universal human rights, while engaging in oppression and slavery
• some groups more human than others
• African slaves & descendents "could not envision freedom"
• therefore Haitian revo. was "unthinkable"

• civilization - generic term for human progress & cumulative achievement
• human hist. as a progressive process
• Lew Henry Morgan - progress from savagery to barbarianism to civilization

• Eric Wolf - 1982
• European assumption that the "other" was static and unchanging, without a history

• James Hutton - 18th c.
• geologic time scale is vast because it is old
• contradicts Christian theology

universalism

[+ how does this combine with exclusionary practice?]

• philosophical doctrine claiming that universal facts can be discovered [opposite to relativism]
• Englightment thinkers - rights as universal
• BUT exclusionary - everyone has universal rights, but not everyone is considered a full person [slavery!]

• m. = human existence determines human conciousness
• i. = human conciousness determines human existence
• Marx & Engels - m. in Communist Manifesto & Capital

• all peoples have the same fundamental capacity for change
• 19th c.; embraced by classical cultural evolutionists
• formulated by Adolf Bastian

• "laws" of human history sought out by Enlightement thinkers/universal historians
• stages of h. development through which h. experience accumulates as culture
• Giambattista Vico - The New Science - humanity passes through 3 stages of Gods, heroes, and man

• cultural evolution proceeds along the same lines everywhere
• classical cultural evolutionism
• Julian Steward - believed in mulitlineal evo., branded 19th c. view as unilineal evo.

• groups give eople a sense of social identity - therefore world is divided into "us" and "them"
• the "us" group discriminates against the "them" group

• 19th c. philosophy of Auguste Comte, Course of Positive Philosopy
• study of social change [dynamics] and social stability [statics]
• comprehensive scientific prespective on social phenomena

• post-medieval historical period, moving from feudalism to capitalism, industrialization, & the nation-state
• Marxism, exixtentialism, formal establishment of social sciences
• "age of ideology" - Marx, Durkheim, & Webber all offered views of modernity

• Comte de Buffon
• races can degenerate into primitive forms
• evn. control can convert savage races back to caucasian
• somewhat based on Lamarck - degenerate behavior = acquired characteristics

• Marxims [Karl Marx]
• all societies progress through the dialectic of class struggle
• conflict between ownership class controlling production and lower class providing the labor

• developed by Herbert Spencer - The Social Organism
• viewed society as an organic entity/organism
• evolved from simple & undifferentiated to complex & differentiated
• progression

• late 19th c. perversion of Darwin's ideas/concepts
• seeks to apply evolutionary theory to sociology & politics
• uses the concept of "survival of the fittest" [Spencer] to justy social policies [eugenics, etc.]

• applied to science/bio-social movement advocating practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population
• Sir Francis Galton - influenced by Darwin's Origins of Species

• p. = human races = separate species/separate origins/innate differences
• m. = single sprecies/common origin/common differences
• desire to reconcile natural observations [of the "other"] with Christian theology