Introduction

• Human beings are one of the world’s most adaptable animals.

• All humans share basic biological and behavioral characteristics that make such extraordinary adaptability possible.

• Yet, as a species, we exhibit tremendous variation in environmental adaptations, physical appearance, language, beliefs, and social organization.

• Earlier generations of people had myriad explanations for this variation. They often imposed value judgments on human differences, usually with their own ways of living deemed best.

• Sometimes the resulting cultural misunderstandings created hostility or conflict. Most of the time, however, people have found ways to get along. Trade and alliances, for example, made cooperation more desirable.

  • In the latter case, a practical understanding of human variation became essential.

• Marco Polo, Confucius, and Herodotus took the first steps toward this understanding. They were pioneers in the study of human variation, but they were NOT anthropologists, and the discipline of anthropologists did not emerge until the 19th century.

• This chapter focuses on what is anthropology, and how is it relevant in today’s world?

• Anthropology - the study of human beings, their biology, their prehistory and histories, and their changing languages, cultures, and social institutions.

  • Provides a framework for asking questions about and grasping the complexity of human experience, both past, and present.

  • Provides knowledge that helps solve human problems today.

How Did Anthropology Begin?

• Anthropology emerged during the 19th century as an academic discipline devoted to the observation and analysis of human variation.

• Three key concerns shaped the foundation of professional anthropology in the 1850s:

  • Disruptions caused by industrialization in Europe and America

  • The rise of theories of evolution

  • The spread of European colonialism

The Disruptions of Industrialization

• Industrialization - the economic process of shifting from an agricultural economy to a factory-based one.

  • Disrupted American and European societies by bringing large numbers of rural people into towns and cities to work in factories.

    • Asking questions about how European villages and cities were structured and how they perpetuated their cultures ultimately led to questions about how all sorts of non-Western societies worked as well.

The Theory of Evolution

• A second key influence on the development of anthropology was the rise of evolutionary theory to explain biological variation between and within species.

• Evolution - the adaptive changes organisms make across generations

• Charles Darwin developed natural selection, a theory of evolution

• Natural selection - is the process through which certain inheritable traits are passed along to offspring because they are better suited to the environment.

• Darwin believed that the question of the origin of species was not a religious one but an empirical one.

  • Empirical - verifiable through observation rather than through logic or theory

• Though Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was controversial when first published, evolution by natural selection is no longer scientifically controversial,

• Nearly all anthropologists and biologists accept evolution as a factual explanation of the diversification of plant and animal life and the origin of modern humans.

• A third driving force behind anthropology was colonialism - the historical practice of more powerful countries claiming possession of less powerful ones.

• Europeans and Americans began developing methods for studying the indigenous peoples of their colonies.

  • Colonists justified their actions through the process of othering - defining colonized people as different from, and subordinate to, Europeans in terms of their social, moral, and physical norms.

  • Into the 1920s, anthropologists pursued the salvage paradigm approach, which held that it was important to observe indigenous ways of life, interview elders, and assemble collections of objects made and used by indigenous peoples before they disappeared.

• By the end of the 19th century, anthropology was already an international discipline, whose practitioners were mainly based in western Europe and the United States. Today, anthropology is a truly global discipline, with practitioners in countries around the world.

What Are the Four Subfields of Anthropology, and What Do They Share in Common?

• Traditionally, anthropology has been divided into four subfields: cultural anthropology, archaeology, biological anthropology, and linguistic anthropology.

• Cultural anthropology - the study of the social lives of living communities

  • Prior to the 1970s, most cultural anthropologists conducted anthropological fieldwork in non-Western communities.

• Archaeology - the study of past cultures, by excavating sites where people lived, worked, farmed, or conducted some other activity

  • Some archaeologists study prehistory (the time period before written records). Two themes have been traditional concerns of prehistoric archaeology:

    • The transition from foraging to farming

    • The rise of complex cities and states

      • Another branch of archaeology is historical archaeology - archaeologists excavate sites occupied during historical times. Such excavations explore perspectives not recorded in historical documents.

• Biological (physical) anthropology - the study of the biological aspects of the human species, past and present, along with those of our closest relatives, the non-human primates

  • Biological anthropologists explore human evolution, health and disease, and the behavior of nonhuman primates.

  • They also work in the relevant areas of human genetics, diet and nutrition, and the impact of social stress on the body.

• Linguistic anthropology - the study of how people communicate with one another through language and how language use shapes group membership and identity.

  • Traditionally seeks to understand the linguistic categories used by study populations and how they order their natural and cultural environments.

• By nature, anthropology is an interdisciplinary field. Its subfields are intertwined with many other social and natural sciences. All anthropologists recognize the importance of the following concepts: culture, cultural relativism, diversity, change, and holism.

• Culture - the taken-for-granted notions, rules, moralities, and behaviors within a social group that feel natural and suggest the way thinking should be

• Ethnocentrism - assuming one’s own way of doing things is correct, while simply dismissing other people’s assumptions as wrong or ignorant.

• Anthropologists must be mindful of these assumptions because they can provoke intolerance and make cross-cultural understanding impossible.

  • To avoid that, they emphasized cultural relativism - the moral and intellectual principle that one should seek to understand cultures on their own terms and withhold judgment about seemingly strange or exotic beliefs and practices

• Diversity - the sheer variety of ways of being human around the world

  • Defined anthropologically: multiplicity and variety, which is not the same as difference.

• Anthropologists in each subfield are specialists in studying human change.

• Anthropology provides powerful tools for understanding the whole human experience in context by uniting the study of human prehistory, social life, language, and biology in one broad discipline.

• Holism - the effort to synthesize these distinct approaches and findings into a single comprehensive explanation

How Do Anthropologists Know What They Know?

• They employ a wide of methodologies (systematic strategies for collecting and analyzing data, including the scientific method). The goal is to develop, test, and disprove hypotheses.

• Scientific method - the most basic pattern of scientific research.

  • Observation of a fact (a verifiable truth)

  • Construction of a hypothesis (a testable explanation for the facts)

  • The hypothesis is tested with experiments (further observations or measurements)

  • If the data (information the tests produce) show that the hypothesis is wrong, the scientist develops a new hypothesis and then tests it.

    • If the new tests and the data they produce support the hypothesis, the scientists write up a description of what he/she did find and share it with other scientists.

  • Other scientists then attempt to reproduce those tests or devise new ones, with the goal of disproving the hypothesis.

  • Scientific Method: Observations → Explanation → Testing

    • The process is circular, not linear.

  • The goal is to devise, test, and disprove hypotheses.

• In science, theories are tested and repeatedly supported hypotheses, not “guesses” as the word is popularly used.

• Theories - key elements of the scientific method.

  • Not only explain things but also help guide research by focusing on the researchers’ questions and creating a constructive framework for their results.

• Anthropologists use a range of techniques for gathering and processing data. Some of these use quantitative methods, which classify features of a phenomenon, count or measure them, and construct mathematical and statistical models to explain what is observed.

  • Take place in mostly biological/physical anthropology and archaeology, and some cultural and linguistic anthropology

• They also employ qualitative methods, in which they aim to produce an in-depth and detailed description of social behaviors and beliefs.

  • Interviews with and observations of people

  • Come in the form of words, images, or objects

  • Does not use surveys or questionnaires

  • The research instrument is the research itself.

  • The ethnographic method involves prolonged and intensive observation of and participation in the life of a community.

    • A qualitative methodology and

    • A hallmark of cultural anthropology

• The comparative method allows anthropologists to derive insights from careful comparisons of two or more cultures or societies.

• Not all anthropologists consider their work to be science. Describing people and their actions requires an understanding of their lives and beliefs that cannot be accounted for in the scientific method.

• Anthropologists aim to see things from multiple perspectives, but they’re humans themselves. Thus, their interpretations of cultural practices remain partial and situated in important aspects.

How Is Anthropology Put to Work in the World?

• Anthropological research suggests practical solutions to many real-world social problems.

  • Applied anthropology - anthropological research commissioned to serve an organization’s need

  • Practicing anthropology - the broadest category of anthropological work, in which the anthropologist not only performs research but also gets involved in the design, implementation, and management of some organization, process, or product.

  • In all subfields, anthropologists have effectively put their discipline to work addressing difficult social, health, and educational problems.

What Ethical Obligations Do Anthropologists Have?

• Ethics in anthropology - the moral principles that guide anthropological conduct

  • Are originally connected to what it means to be a good anthropologist

  • As in medicine, “Do no harm” is a foundational principle of the American Anthropological Association’s Code of Ethics.

    • Anthropologists must explain to the people involved in their research the potential risks of participation, and obtain “informed consent.”

    • Anthropological publications avoid sharing confidential information and often disguise informants’ identities, in case those individuals could be targeted for harm because of what they say.

  • The primary ethical responsibility of anthropologists is to the people, species, or artifacts that they study. Anthropologists are expected to side with their subjects and should take whatever reasonable action is possible when their subjects are threatened.

  • An important ethical question in anthropology is who should control anthropological data and knowledge.

    • Communities have challenged anthropologists to provide them with research skills and information from the research so they can use them for their benefit after the anthropologist leaves.

Key Terms

1. Anthropology - the study of human beings, their biology, their prehistory and histories, and their changing languages, cultures, and social institutions

2. Applied anthropology - anthropological research commissioned to serve an organization’s needs

3. Archaeology - the study of past cultures by excavating sites where people lived, worked, farmed, or conducted some other activity

4. Biological anthropology - the study of the biological aspects of the human species, past and present, along with those of our closest relatives, the nonhuman primates

5. Colonialism - the historical practice of more powerful countries claiming possession of less powerful ones

6. Comparative method - a research method that derives insights from a systematic comparison of aspects of two or more cultures or societies

7. Cultural anthropology - the study of the social lives of living communities

8. Cultural relativism - the moral and intellectual principle that one should seek to understand cultures on their own terms and withhold judgment about seemingly strange or exotic beliefs and practices

9. Culture - the taken-for-granted notions, rules, moralities, and behaviors within a social groups

10. Diversity - the sheer variety of ways of being human around the world

11. Empirical - verifiable through observation rather than through logic or theory

12. Ethics - moral questions about right and wrong and standards of appropriate behavior

13. Ethnocentrism - the assumption that one’s own way of doing things is correct, and that other people’s practices or views are wrong or ignorant

14. Ethnographic method - a research method that involves prolonged and intensive observation of and participation in the life of a community

15. Evolution - the adaptive changes organisms make across generations

16. Holism - efforts to synthesize distinct approaches and findings into a single comprehensive interpretation

17. Industrialization - the economic process of shifting from an agricultural economy to a factory-based economy

18. Linguistic anthropology - the study of how people communicate with one another through language and how language use shapes group membership and identity

19. Othering - defined colonized peoples as different from, and subordinate to, Europeans in terms of their social, moral, and physical norms

20. Practicing anthropology - anthropological work involving research as well as involvement in the design, implementation, and management of some organization, process, or product

21. Qualitative method - a research strategy that produces an in-depth and detailed description of social behaviors and beliefs

22. Quantitative method - a methodology that classifies features of a phenomenon, counting or measuring them, and constructing mathematical and statistical models to explain what is observed

23. Salvage paradigm - the paradigm that held that it was important to observe indigenous ways of life, interview elders, and assemble collections of objects made and used by indigenous peoples.

24. Scientific method - the standard methodology of science that begins from observable facts, generates hypotheses from these facts and then tests these hypotheses

25. Theory - a tested and repeatedly supported hypothesis