Anthropology: An Encyclopedic Guide to Human Nature, Society, and the Past

Introduction to Anthropology and the Field Experience

• Definition of Anthropology: It is a scholarly discipline that aims to describe, in the broadest possible sense, what it means to be human. It is the integrated (holistic) study of human nature, human society, human language, and the human past.
• Anecdote: The Termite Experience in Cameroon ($1976$):     * Researchers: Robert H. Lavenda and Emily A. Schultz.     * Location: The town of Guider in northern Cameroon, western Africa.     * Event: During the dry season, the anthropologists were reading on an unscreened veranda at night. When the rains began, swarms of winged termites (fat, $2 ext{-inch}$ abdomens) were attracted to the light.     * The Guard's Interaction: The house guard approached with an empty powdered milk tin and asked for the insects. While Lavenda and Schultz swatted termites with rolled-up copies of $Newsweek$, the guard caught them by hand, squeezed them gently, and filled his tin. They cleared the air in about $10 ext{-minutes}$.     * Culinary Exchange: The next evening, the guard brought two dishes prepared by his wife: $nyiri$ (a stiff, grainy red sorghum paste) and termite paste (the insects killed the night before, having a speckled, salt-and-pepper appearance).     * Observation: Despite initial hesitation based on North American middle-class dietary norms (where insects are seen as fit only for eccentrics), the anthropologists ate the meal to avoid insulting their hosts. They found the termite paste tasted mild, like chicken.     * Conclusion: A home economist friend later noted that termites are an excellent source of clean protein. This story illustrates the "shock of the unfamiliar becoming familiar" and vice versa.

Defining Anthropology and Its Unique Methodology

• Four Distinctive Characteristics of the Anthropological Perspective:     * Holistic: Describes how anthropology tries to integrate all that is known about human beings and their activities at the highest and most inclusive level. It emphasizes that all aspects of human life intersect in complex ways.     * Comparative: Requires anthropologists to study similarities and differences across the widest possible range of human societies before generalizing about human beings and their activities.     * Field-based: Data collection occurs away from the office and involve direct contact with people, sites, or animals. Fieldwork connects anthropologists to lived experiences.     * Evolutionary: Places observations in a temporal framework that considers change over time. This includes both biological evolution (physical features, genetics, human origins) and cultural evolution (beliefs, behaviors, and material objects).

The Concept of Culture and the Biocultural Perspective

• Culture: Sets of learned behavior, ideas, and material goods that human beings share as members of society. Humans use culture to adapt to and transform the world.
• Learning and Survival: Humans are more dependent on learning than any other species because we lack instincts for automatic protection, food, or shelter. Childhood is notably longer in humans to facilitate this learning.
• Biocultural Organisms: Human beings are organisms whose defining features are co-determined by biological and cultural factors.     * Biological Endowment: Our brain, nervous system, and anatomy make culture possible.     * Cultural Requirement: Our survival as biological organisms depends on learned ways of thinking and acting (finding food, shelter, rearing children).
• Cross-Disciplinary Nature: Anthropology spans the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities.

Biological Anthropology: From Racial Classification to Diversity

• Historical Origins: Developed to study humans as living organisms to compare them to other animals. Early efforts were tied to exploration and colonial expansion.
• The Concept of Race: Social groupings that allegedly reflect biological differences.     * Carolus Linnaeus ($1707$-$1778$): Classified humans into four races: Amerindian (reddish), Caucasian (white), Asian (yellow), and Negro (black).     * $19 ext{th}$-Century Scientists: Louis Agassiz ($1807$-$1873$), Samuel George Morton ($1799$-$1851$), Francis Galton ($1822$-$1911$), and Paul Broca ($1824$-$1880$) ranked populations by skull size, asserting the biological superiority of "white" Europeans.
• Racism: The systematic oppression of one or more socially defined "race" by another, justified by supposed inherent biological superiority/inferiority.
• The Rejection of Race: Franz Boas ($1858$-$1942$) and his students debunked racist stereotypes. After World War II, Sherwood Washburn ($1911$-$2000$) promoted the "new" physical anthropology, focusing on variation and adaptation rather than classification.
• Sub-specialties:     * Primatology: The study of non-human primates, our closest living relatives.     * Paleoanthropology: The study of human fossils and associated remains.     * Human Skeletal Biology: Measuring and comparing morphology (shapes and sizes) of bones and teeth.     * Forensic Anthropology: Using skeletal anatomy to help law enforcement or human rights investigations (e.g., in Bosnia and Herzegovina).

Cultural Anthropology: Studying Society and Globalization

• Definition: Shows how variation in beliefs and behaviors is shaped by culture (learned behaviors/acquired ideas).
• Subjects of Study:     * Kinship: Relatedness based on birth, marriage, and nurturance.     * Gender: The culturally constructed roles assigned to males or females (different from biological sex).     * Material Life: Clothing, housing, technologies, and patterns of consumption.
• Methodology:     * Fieldwork: Extended period of close involvement with a group.     * Participant Observation: Gaining insight by participating in social activities while observing as an outsider.     * Collaborators: Terms like "informants" are being replaced by "respondents," "teachers," "collaborators," or "friends" to imply equality.     * Ethnography: A systematic study/description of a particular culture.     * Ethnology: The comparative study of two or more cultures.
• Globalization: The reshaping of local conditions by powerful global forces on an ever-intensifying scale. Cultural anthropologists study the movement, mixture, and linkages of people across borders.

Linguistic Anthropology and Language Revitalization

• Language: A system of arbitrary vocal symbols used to encode experience of the world.
• Indigenous Language Crisis in Canada: The residential school program had a devastating impact. Today, only $25/100$ ($25\%$) of Indigenous people in Canada speak their traditional language. Only three (Cree, Inuktitut, and Ojibwe) are considered to have enough speakers for secure future transmission.
• Language Revitalization: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Call to Action number $14$ urges the government to enact an Aboriginal Languages Act, funded for revitalization and preservation.
• Constructed Languages (Conlangs):     * Christine Schreyer: A Canadian linguistic anthropologist (UBC Okanagan) who developed the written form of Kryptonian for the $2013$ film "Man of Steel."     * Research: She studies conlang communities (e.g., Na'vi from "Avatar," Klingon) to see how they use social media and IT to build user communities.     * Prestige: Conlangs gain prestige from their fictional lore; minority languages draw prestige from tradition and belonging.

Archaeology: Reconstructing the Human Past

• Remnants of the Past: Includes everything from piles of bones/stones to great cities like Teotihuacan in Mexico.
• Artifacts: Portable objects created or modified by humans (e.g., pottery, stone tools).
• Dating and Surveys: Archaeologists establish timelines and distribution maps to hypothesize about social contact and change.
• Canadian Examples: Owen Beattie's work on the $1845$ "lost" Franklin expedition in the Arctic.
• Stewardship and Ethics: Archaeologists are stewards of the past, accountable to the public for preservation.
• Cultural Resource Management (CRM): Also known as salvage archaeology; assessing sites before industrial development.
• Archaeogaming: The study of immaterial space and culture created through video games. Shawn Graham (Carleton University) argues that games allow for "historical thinking" and deep learning (flow).

Applied Anthropology and Contemporary Issues

• Core Goal: Using information from other specialties to solve practical cross-cultural problems.
• Indigenous Issues in Canada: Collaboration with Indigenous communities is a unique hallmark of Canadian anthropology (James Bay hydroelectric dam negotiations, land rights defense).
• Case Study: Kwdąy Dąn Ts’ĩnchj ("Long Ago Person Found"):     * Discovery: $1999$ in northern BC; remains of a man dated between $1720$ and $1850\,AD$.     * Researcher: Treena Swanston (MacEwan University).     * Pathogen Analysis: DNA of $Helicobacter\,pylori$ was found in the stomach tissue, $98\%$ similar to modern strains in Alaska, confirming the relationship to local communities.     * $Mycobacterium\,tuberculosis$ (MTB): Found in lung tissue as a latent infection (not infectious to others).

Medical Anthropology: Health and Biculturalism

• Key Focus: Concerned with human health, factors contributing to disease/illness, and how populations deal with them.
• Terminology:     * Biomedicine: Western forms of medical knowledge/practice.     * Disease: Biological impairment identified by biomedicine.     * Sickness: Classifications of distress recognized by a specific cultural community (includes culture-bound syndromes).     * Illness: A suffering person's own understanding of their distress.
• Indigenous Health Cases:     * Emőke Szathmary ($1986$): Linked high diabetes rates in the Dene to the introduction of processed Westernized foods.     * Leslie Dawson (MacEwan University): Tracked Tlicho birth practices.         * Birth on the Land: Ritualized, female body seen as powerful.         * Missionized Birth: Hospital setting at Fort Rae ($1940$); labour seen as the "curse of Eve."         * Evacuated Birth: Current policy requiring women to evacuate to Yellowknife at $36$ to $38\, ext{weeks}$; pregnancy treated as "high risk."
• Critical Medical Anthropology: Links health to social inequality, class, and global political processes. Dr. Sandra Hyde studied HIV/AIDS in China. Adam Kersch noted vaccine hesitancy among Tlingit in Alaska due to a history of medical abuses.

The Promise of Anthropology and Identity Studies

• Cross-Cultural Tolerance: Anthropology prepares individuals to deal with people of different backgrounds in a less threatened manner.
• Identity Research: Michel Bouchard (UNBC) studies how identity is formulated ("Us" vs. "Other").     * Case: In Falher, Alberta, it is "natural" to speak French to babies/dogs, but English is used around unilingual speakers for "politeness."     * Métis Ethnogenesis: Studying how the Métis identity emerged from the earlier Canadien identity of the $17 ext{th}$ century.