Given that Christianity tended to view history as progressive, and Christ's sacrifice and the event of Christendom being the ultimate apex of earlier civilization, the past was often seen as an inferior precursor to the present in a particularly judgmental light -- hence the persecution of certain groups as infidels and outsiders. It is the historian and the anthropologist's duty to unpack such cultural assumptions and to view the world through a less morally-clouded and self-justifying lens.
References
Episode 2: Conquest. (2005). Guns, Germs & Steel. PBS. Retrieved May 31, 2011 at http://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/show/episode2.html
Anthropological research project: Celebrating women anthropologists
URL: http://anthropology.usf.edu/women/index.html
This website catalogues the research of famous women anthropologists throughout the ages. It has a specifically feminist slant, and details the research these women engaged in, along with their personal struggles for recognition in the field. While most people are familiar with the work of Margaret Mead in Samoa, Zora Neale Hurston's cataloging of African-American folklore and Dian Fosse and her work with primates, the accomplishments of other pioneering female anthropologists have often been forgotten.
Even during the 19th century, women such as Alice Cunningham Fletcher studied other cultures from an objective anthropological lens. Fletcher...
Ellen Irene Diggs, an anthropologist who studied with W.E.B. DuBois researched, proofread and footnoted DuBois' work Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. She was one of the first anthropologists to study the relationship of African and Cuban history and heritage.
Mary Nichol Douglas Leakey, a biological anthropologist, had no formal university training. Yet she discovered the skull of Proconsul africanus in Kenya 1947-48, the skull of an early human prototype Zinjanthropus in Olduvai Gorge in 1959, and 3.5 million-year-old footprints in Laetoli in 1976. These discoveries made major contributions to the understanding of the development of humanity. Leakey's work and the work of other women is testimony to the fact that even when denied a full range of opportunities to practice their craft, female anthropologists have used the opportunities they have been given to shine and make major contributions to the advancement of knowledge. Women anthropologists, as reflective of their marginalized place in society, have also been apt to fuse social activism with their discipline. They have used knowledge as a method of advocacy, and made education of the public a means to restore dignity and justice to the social perceptions of marginalized peoples.
