THE SCIENCE OF MAN: ANTHROPOLOGICAL THOUGHT AND INSTITUTIONS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

This study employs the methods of intellectual and institutional history in order to elucidate the theoretical development of anthropology in nineteenth-century France and to analyze its organizational structure within learned societies, the university, and other institutions of higher education. The central theme of the work is the attempt by theorists to formulate a general science of man encompassing in one analytical framework the diverse elements of human physical and "moral" nature. It examines the efforts of theorists in competing fields of ethnology, ethnography, and anthropology to formulate coherent explanatory principles and to achieve institutional stability. The study concludes that throughout the nineteenth century the science of man was dominated by theorists who advocated a physicalist, materialist, and determinist approach to the exploration of human nature and history. This was the case, the study demonstrates, both because physical anthropologists exhibited greater theoretical sophistication than those favoring a humanistic approach to the study of man, and because physical anthropologists developed strong institutions in the form of a learned society, school, laboratory, and museum that drew on public and private resources. Nevertheless, the study concludes that because anthropology failed to achieve definitive status within the official system of higher education, its institutional existence became precarious late in the century when scholarly pursuits were becoming increasingly standardized and professionalized within the university structure. This institutional instability coincided with theoretical crises resulting from vehement attacks on the racialist and reductionist principles of the dominant school of French anthropology. Together these developments led to the discipline's fragmentation around 1900 into disparate and sometimes mutually hostile schools, a condition which was remedied only in the 1920s when cultural anthropology became the special preserve of Durkheimian ethnologists, hopes for a general science of man were largely abandoned, and all branches of French anthropology came definitively to accept that split between physical and cultural anthropology which characterizes the modern discipline.