SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE: AN EVALUATION OF HIS POETRY (With Text)

AN INTRODUCTION TO ANTHROPOLOGY is an elementary textbook for college students who are beginning to work in anthropology. It attempts to present, as simply as possible, the basic materials and ideas of modern anthropology. Its purpose is twofold: to give a well-rounded view of the discipline to students who take only an introductory course, and to provide, for those who plan to concentrate in anthropology, the necessary groundwork for further study. As in the first edition, two major themes dominate the text. The first is the origin, development, and differentiation of man as a biological organism, the second is the concept of culture, its structure and development. Culture, in all its diversity, is best understood against the background of man’s biological inheritance and make-up. Though cultures are remarkably diverse and offer an almost unlimited number of solutions to common human problems, all of them are in the end limited by the fact that they must serve basic biological imperatives, or the societies that live under them will cease to exist. Culture, in the opinion of many modern anthropologists, is probably limited in its variations in time and space by pan-human regularities in man’s biology and psychology, and by regularities inherent in the processes of social interaction. In treating the field of physical anthropology we have emphasized as far as possible the modern genetic approach. Important as this approach may be, however, it evidently does not yet provide a comprehensive picture of man’s biological evolution or an adequate classification, in biological terms, of ancient or modern populations. Consequently we have found it necessary to include much of the older data on racial history, the criteria of race, and racial classifications, if only to provide the student with a key to what is still widely discussed in modern writings on physical anthropology. We emphasize, however, that these data, based as they are on phenotypic characters, yield only tentative conclusions. The whole concept of race, as it is traditionally defined, may be profoundly modified or even dropped altogether, once the genetic approach has been fully exploited. Though the text is intended for courses covering both physical and cultural anthropology, we believe that it may also be used in courses devoted primarily to cultural anthropology.

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