What is anthropology?

If you follow all the links on this page, you'll have a basic understanding of what anthropology is.

Humans did not live at the same time as the dinosaurs.

Traditional Views (How and why anthropology arose, some key concepts, the concept of race)

The Four Subfields: Archaeology, Physical Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology & Linguistics

History and Development of Cultural Anthropology (Boas, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, fieldwork, "primitive")

Some Traditional Views on Anthropology

The point of view on anthropology taken here is that of mainstream American anthropology, as represented by mainstream textbooks. Obviously, anthropologists differ among themselves about the exact nature of their discipline. Anthropology is the science and study of human beings. It is primarily a descriptive science. It contains, however, as most sciences do, room for intuition, art, interpretation and semantic discourse of all kinds. One side of anthropology (biologic) is an empirical science, like biology. Another side of anthropology is much more philosophical in nature (cultural). Since the behaviors, thoughts and deeds of human beings (so far) elude purely physical description, anthropology reflects this tension, the tension between nature and nurture, or biology and culture.

It comes from two Greek words: anthropos (humanity) and logos (account).

Some say that anthropology began with the Greeks, with Herodotus, who wrote extensively about other cultures some 2,500 years ago. But they never used the word "anthropology". Herodotus and Hesiod considered themselves historians, not anthropologists. The notion of anthropology as a separate branch of history, struggled into existence in the late 1800's, but I don't think anthropology, as an academic discipline, emerged until 1900's and 1910's, beginning with the fieldwork of Franz Boas and emerging as an paid academic profession with the hiring of Malinowski and Radcliffe Brown at the University of London. While anthropology has always placed strong emphasis on biology in understanding humans (Darwin's ideas had been incorporated throughout the sciences by the time anthropology arose), the central work of early anthropologists was around culture. There is something about our human ability to create complex culture that makes humans distinctive. Culture is also essential to human life (and has been, it turns out, for over two million years). It is a further hallmark of anthropology to approach various cultures without moral prejudgment. (This viewpoint holds true only so far for most anthropologists, see my remarks on absolute cultural relativism) .

In the early decades of the twentieth century, cultural anthropology and archaeology joined together to make academic departments of Anthropology, a merger that ran counter to the increasing specialization in other departments. More than anything, anthropology is a series of university and college departments, wherein nearly all professional anthropologists are trained and many are eventually employed. It is the most general of all academic disciplines, with co-teaching assignements in other disciplines ranging from Literary Criticism to Philosophy, Semiotics to Business, International Relations to Education. In other words, anthropologists are everywhere, interested in everything.

What distinguished the anthropology of Boas, Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown from earlier attempts to study other civilizations and cultures was simple.

Unlike earlier attempts by anthropology (by such illuminaries as Sir James Frazer, Spencer, Bachofen, Marx and Engels, and Freud), Boas, Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown went into the field. They were the first anthropological fieldworkers. Like archaeologists, they travelled far away and "dug" or sifted through cultural facts, attempting to describe and understand an exotic people. The books they published as a result were called ethnographies.

Earlier attempts to place "primitive" people into a modern scheme of history had relied on "facts" brought back by reputable, and unfortunately, not so reputable observers. Explorers, traders, slavers, priests, missionaries and eccentrics had travelled to Africa, Asia, the Pacific and the New World and brought back some sketchy facts about "savages." These "facts" were borrowed by thinkers like John Locke, who made much of them in his own philosophical argumentation.

Anthropologists go into the field, and they live among the people they study. They try to do this in specific ways, so as to minimize the observer effect. The study of our own methods is important to us, we even do fieldwork among ourselves, trying to make ourselves more disciplined and clear in what we say about other folks. The entire area of method in cultural anthropology is a fascinating story, but most people (like yourself, perhaps) come to anthropology looking for The Human Story.

We won't disappoint you.

Many people, on hearing the word "anthropology" think of archaeology, one of its important subfields. Like cultural anthropology, there were "non-professional" attempts at archaeology throughout the ages. In this case professional doesn't imply that famous men like and were not archaeologists, only that when one is paid by an institution (and has a boss to answer to, even if it's only a collective of one's colleagues), the results are different.

Archaeology involves Digging. I'm asked over and over, when I say I'm an anthropologist, what I've dug up. I'm a cultural anthropologist and a very amateur digger, so the answer, actually, is very little (urban archaeologists dig through people's trash and so on - I've done that). At least not anything tangible.

Archaeology is interested in the distant past, and the reconstruction of that past by the excavation and study of material culture (especially technology). Eventually, archaeology spun off a new subdiscipline: physical anthropology (the excavation and study of ancient human fossils) which in turn encompasses many smaller sub-subdisciplines. Together, physical anthropology and archaeology give us a longterm view of humanity, going back 4.6 million years.

Anthropology, then, is supposed to be the study of human beings.

What is a human being? Today, we would probably use a DNA (or genetic) based definition, although even that eludes us. Anthropology asserts that all people living in the world today are human beings, they share a human nature. They have the same genome (gene map). They share human universals. In general, anhthropologists share the (now) common sense notion of what a human being: an animal that looks a lot like a primate (is, in fact, a primate), but walks upright, speaks a phonetic language, makes and uses tools, etc.

In the 16^th and 17^th centuries (from the Age of Exploration to the Enlightenment), there were explorers, thinkers, theologians and others who questioned whether people found in faraway places were fully human. Anthropology answers an emphatic yes. Our closest relatives are the chimpanzees. If you are not a chimpanzee, and you are a very smart, tool-using primate: you are a human.

As you may be sensing, anthropology arose in a colonial context, and was primarily a European and American venture. Europeans were exploring and colonizing the planet from the 15th century onward. Europeans struggled to place non-Europeans in an intellectual framework. But no matter how hard they tried, most early writers on non-European cultures found the rest of the world savage or barbaric. Predominant, mainstream thinking (among intellectuals and in the universities) subscribed to various versions of the "Great Chain of Being" theory up until (and in some cases, even after) the Enlightenment. Even after Europeans began to challenge their own assumptions about the "savageness" of other peoples, eurocentrism lingered long in academic. One of the main goals of early anthropology was to combat eurocentrism.

Eurocentrism is a subtype of a larger phenomenon known as ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism, briefly put, is the practice of judging other cultures by the standards and practices of one's own culture. It is not the same as racism. In fact, some anthropologists would say that everyone is ethnocentric, but not everyone is racist. This is a fine distinction, one of many that are important in anthropology and deserves a larger discussion. If a person is ethnocentric, that means that deep inside, s/he prefers her own culture. This is true of most people (although personally, I'm not sure it's true of all people). But for most of us, we prefer our own ways of preparing food, courtship, entertainment, etc. We may look with appreciation (as tourists) on the curious practices of others, but once we're home, we're glad to practice our own customs again. Ethnocentrism contains a sense of "being home," which most humans find comforting. While ethnocentrism can lead to judgmental thinking (those people are rude; those people are lazy, those people are dirty), it is much less pernicious than racism.

Racism, on the other hand, depends on a concept of race. Anthropologists don't believe in the concept of race. This could involve a VERY length discussion ( any good introductory rtextbook on physical anthropology will devote at least a chapter to the question, and that's just for beginners) but I'll attempt to be brief here. A belief in race is the belief that people differ from each other systematically according to the color of their skin. Most racists depend, first of all, on an untenable and unscientific approach to skin color as a human variable. I don't know about your family, but my family (if I count out to my first and second cousins) contains people with a wide variety of skin colors, from very dark to light beige. Most Europeans, of course, are not "white." but are a light to medium beige (and some are light to medium brown). Most Africans, of course, are not "black," but are very dark brown to medium beige (like my family, and our ancestors haven't been in Africa for, I believe, nearly 2 million years!) You may know that all people originated in Africa, and that today's Europeans probably didn't leave Africa all that long ago (more recently than Asians or the root stock of most Pacific Islanders). While anthropologists agree that skin color is ultimately rooted in biology (specifically the amount of melanin in the skin, which is controlled by genes), the amount of difference in the genetic coding (and the amount of melanin) between the world's darkest human beings (some of whom are Caucasian, living in India) and the world's lightest (albinos, who occur in all popultions) is tiny (a mere 1/16 of a milligram of melanin). And that tiny difference in melanin correlates with no known behavioral, cultural, intellectual or any other phenomenon (except the incidence of skin cancers and related diseases: darker people appear to have some immunity). Go listen to some phnools on the sci.anthropology usenet group discuss their views on race, to see an alternate (and racist) viewpoint. So not only is there not a good definition of what it means to be a "black" person or a "white person," (African-descent Northern-European descent may be more in keeping with what is often meant), each group of similarly colored people exhibits a wide range of capacities, behaviors, and cultures. This is not to say that ethnicity (a sense of belonging to a particular biological/cultural entity) is not important to most people. But ethnicity, rather than race, is the preferred term of the anthropologist. A sense of belonging to the group (which is part of a learned identity) is very different from either a biological notion of belonging (I'm born a certain color and I automatically feel related to all people of that color) or being assigned by others to a supposed biologically based category. Note that in this discussion on race and ethnicity, it made sense to talk about "white" and "black" people. But if we start to talk about other groups (variously called Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, Asians, Latinos, Hispanics, Eskimo, Aborigines, etc.), it becomes clear there are problems with classifications based on skin color. What color are Asians? The classic response (yellow) is simply absurd. I've never met a yellow person, although I've met people with yellowish undertones in their otherwise beige, brown or dark brown skin. Similarly, I've never met a red person, and "brown" people are obviously in the middle, between dark brown and whitish-beige. Instead, people begin to pull in other variables (like degree of curliness in the hair, or eye shape). And when we revisit the data, we find that some people of African descent (otherwise to be classified as "black"?) actually have almond shaped eyes. Native Americans frequently have "Asian" features. It's absurd, irrational, unintelligent, and unscientific.

But what, then, to make of all the differences among human beings? Why did some folks get control over electricity while others were still living in the late Stone Age? Why do some humans possess very few tools and others possess so many? Why do some humans live in local bands of less than one hundred people, and others in vast, complex societies of millions? Why do some cultures produce distinctive dancers while others do nto? Why do some speak English and others Cantonese? Why do some have light skin and others have dark skin? How did all the different humans come to be where they are? Who got where first? These (and dozens of others) are the basic, early questions of traditional anthropology. As these questions have been answered (at least to my satisfaction - more about that later), a new kind of anthropology has arisen: contemporary (or post-modern for some) anthropology. But, that's a different page. Or an entire book. (For partial answers, see The Great Diaspora - my article on how the world was peopled.)

To understand more about the scope of anthropology, visit the virtual Reading Room and scope out the shelves there. Or, take a look at my anthromap (a quick text guide to anthropological interests). The next part of this series on general anthropology focuses on the History and Development of Cultural Anthropology (lecture 2), and gives some specific ideas about to read to learn more about basic cultural anthropology.

Quiz on lecture 1

On to lecture 2

Back To: Main Page	Archaeology	To: History and Development of Cultural Anthropology (Lecture 2)
	Physical Anthropology	My Views on Anthropology
Definitions	Cultural Anthropology	Anthropology Reading Room (with links and resources in archaeology, physical anthropology, linguistics, cultural anthropology and other subfields)
	Linguistics	Earlier, proto-anthropologists