Talk:Big man (anthropology)

Article creation
This article has been split from Big man (political science). Also, a disambiguation page now exists for the terms "big man" and "bigman". The anthropology article needs some work though, so I've thrown up the tag. Chupper 14:27, 11 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks Chupper for creating this page GautamDiscuss 19:31, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

The article seems to have been written by an Englishman, hence the UCP reference. The term Big Man is first seen in Parkinson (1907, self published). Univ Hawaii is the current publisher of this book. The term has been widely used since then, in lots of Australian lit dealing with PNG. Esp. in ASOPA lit. I remember sitting in my Suva flat eating cooked nautilus shell fish, and reading some 1970s English text insisting that no living example of a nautilus has ever been found.27.33.245.147 (talk) 02:41, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Expansion of article
There are more case studies of Big Men to look at, which can help to explain the concept for a general audience as well as an anthropological one. GautamDiscuss 19:31, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

Missing the important part
The most important aspect of this topic is not the Polynesian-anthropology origination of the concept, but the dispute in cultural anthropology and ethnology about extending it beyond that very localized cultural milieu. Even by the mid 1980s it was already undergraduate anthropology textbook material: people tried to analogize the concept universally, and this meshed easily with notions among traditional historians that most of history is generated by charismatic "movers and shakers", leading to a view which anthropology rejects because idea discounts cultural momentum. I.e., the "big man hypothesis" suggests that the American war of independence would not have happened if not for the individuals who signed the Declaration of Independence, and that Nazi Germany only happened because of Hitler personally, and so on.

Googling around turns up some stuff, but some basic anthro texts are probably the most likely sources on this. The fact that modern anthro treats the big man hypothesis as about as apocryphal and unscientific as modern linguistics treats the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is such common knowledge in the field that people don't actually write about it in journals, but just write "big man" hypothesis in "scare-quotes" to mock it. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:56, 3 August 2018 (UTC)