Disciplines

<p> </p> <p>This chapter explores the aims and activities of university-based educators who, like Macalister and Stirling, were instrumental in the disciplinary formation of anthropology during the second half of the nineteenth century. It first briefly explains why contextual scrutiny of these early anthropologists’ creation and uses of artefacts such as plaster copies of the crania of Indigenous peoples provides valuable insights not only into how they envisaged the discipline as an all-embracing rigorously empirical science of the human condition, but also how anthropological ideas and arguments were to influence other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapter then explores in some contextual detail how the nascent discipline of anthropology was seen by its practitioners as creating this new “science of man” by focusing on close, comparative study of biologically inscribed variations in physical form and behavior between peoples indigenous to different parts of the world, convinced that this would set the discipline on truly scientific foundations. In doing so, the chapter draws particular attention to how the first university-based anthropologists, who were also founders of learned societies serving the emerging discipline, pursued this goal in the belief that they could parallel the natural sciences in establishing the nature, extent, and possibly the origins of racial human variation through the use of instrumentation and technologies which, by the generation of numeric data, and creation of evidentiary artefacts in the form of plaster casts of bodily structures, would disclose the peculiar physical and psychological attributes of different peoples. </p>