Giants and pygmies in the morning of time: Developmentalism and degeneration in English -Canadian anthropology, ca. 1850--1940

This study constitutes an examination of the intellectual history of English-Canadian anthropology over the first century of its institutional existence beginning with the appointment of Daniel Wilson at the University of Toronto in 1853. Prehistoric relics (in a wide variety of forms) acted as discursive sites upon which various models of human development and degeneration could be advanced. By the last half of the nineteenth century, for instance, the image of 'primitive man' had been well-established as the antithesis to the western 'civilized' ideal. This 'prehistoric relic' could be interpreted in various ways: as an example of the absolute unity of humanity; as a decayed remnant from a previous 'golden age'; as a stagnant representative of a previous stage in the linear advance of humanity; or as an offshoot from a line that otherwise led toward western 'man' and Anglo-Canadian society. In each case, varying models of development or degeneration played a determinate role in the emergence of various (and competing) anthropological theories. By the late Victorian era, as the case studies of David Boyle and Charles Hill-Tout indicate, racial evolution (in its various forms) had emerged as the dominant model for explaining human development. In inventing a 'virtual history' for different racial groups, some groups were predictably assigned a superior status, while others were assigned a lower status from which variation was unlikely. Anthropological theory, however, is never static. In the early twentieth century, separate anthropological traditions emerging in the United States and Britain explicitly challenged long-held beliefs about 'primitive man' and his status in the hierarchy of races. In Canada, Harland I. Smith and Thomas McIlwraith, in particular, represented these two traditions and sought to replace various evolutionary models of human development with culture-based studies of pre-historic relics and aboriginal peoples. Thus, despite efforts from government and universities, the establishment of a 'Canadian' anthropology remained deeply dependent upon wider currents of intellectual trends within the North Atlantic triangle.