Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity and of human culture. It is unique among the social sciences in that it focuses on all societies and all aspects of human physical, social, and cultural life. Anthropologists investigate culture, the strategies for living that people learn and share as members of social groups.
Anthropologists also examine the characteristics that human beings share as members of a single species and the diverse ways that people live in different environments. They also analyze the products of social groups—both material objects and less material creations, such as beliefs and values.
Like other social scientists, anthropologists look systematically for general patterns in human behavior. They develop theories and use scientific methods to test them. Anthropologists study and try to understand cultures different from their own, and describe them to members of their own society.
Anthropologists are interested in understanding all human societies. Their research is cross-cultural, meaning that they focus on those aspects of human experience found in all cultures. But anthropology is also comparative, meaning that anthropologists are interested in how the particular features of cultures are alike and how they are different. For example, marriage in Western societies is a union between one man and one woman. But marriages are quite different in other parts of the world. In many African and Islamic societies, a man may be married to more than one woman at the same time. Among the Nyinba people and other groups of Nepal, however, a woman typically marries several men who are brothers.
Another important feature of anthropology is its emphasis on an insider’s view of a society. Anthropologists try to determine how people who share a culture view their world. Anthropology can make major contributions to international harmony because it helps provide an understanding of various cultures.
Because different cultures and societies have different habits and customs, anthropologists use the term cultural relativism to describe and understand different cultures. This concept suggests that one culture is not better or worse than any other—it is merely different.
The concept of cultural relativism in anthropology is closely related to the concept of ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism refers to the idea that one’s own culture is inherently superior to a different culture. Such an assertion is a form of racism, and anthropologists strive to show that racist claims have no scientific proof. They are instead a form of ethnocentrism. See Ethnocentrism.
Branches of anthropology
The chief branches of anthropology include physical anthropology, archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and social anthropology, also called cultural anthropology. These branches often overlap. For example, archaeologists and cultural anthropologists study many of the same cultural features. But archaeologists concentrate on past civilizations, and cultural anthropologists work mainly on present ones.
Physical anthropology,
also called biological anthropology or bioanthropology, is the study of human physical characteristics. Physical anthropologists, called paleoanthropologists, search for fossil remains from prehistoric times to trace the development of human physical characteristics. They also seek remains, such as stone tools and evidence of fires, to analyze the links among physical characteristics and cultural development.
Some physical anthropologists study primates—the animals that are most closely related to human beings, including chimpanzees and other apes. By observing these animals, the scientists try to understand what our prehuman ancestors were like and how human beings have changed through millions of years. Advances in the study of human and animal genes help scientists discover how closely different species and different groups of people are related to one another.
Other physical anthropologists study physical differences among human beings, including blood types, skin colors, and hereditary diseases. They also analyze the effect of nutrition and environmental factors, such as altitude and climate, on human growth and development. For example, studies have shown that people who spend their entire lives in the high-altitude Andes Mountains have larger hearts and lungs compared to people who live at lower altitudes. The enlarged organs are an adaptation to the lower oxygen concentration of high-altitude environments.
Archaeology
is the study of objects left by earlier peoples, including artwork, buildings, clothing, pottery, and tools. Archaeologists trace the development of cultures by studying the things those people made and used. Such objects help them determine what early social life may have been like. For example, the size of houses and the number of cooking hearths may show how many people lived together in a household. Differences in the number and value of objects put in graves may indicate differences in social class. Animal bones and plant pollen show whether people raised animals or hunted them and whether they grew crops or gathered wild plants for food. See Archaeology.
Linguistic anthropology
analyzes the ways that language is used by people of different societies. Anthropological linguists try to find connections between people’s language and other aspects of their culture. In the Indonesian language, for example, many statements include a reference to the social status of the person addressed. Houses and other objects have various names, depending on the rank of the listener. This use of language reflects the great importance of social class in Indonesian culture.
Other topics of study for anthropological linguists include formal and informal speech, forms of address, insults, and jokes. These experts also analyze the structure of unwritten languages. Some anthropological linguists study how words and their definitions and classifications reflect people’s views of their environment and society. The Nuer, a herding people of eastern Africa, have many words for the colors and markings of cattle. Their vocabulary shows the importance of livestock in their way of life.
The ways that different cultures classify such things as animals, plants, and relatives show how they view the world. The English language uses the same word—uncle—for a mother’s brother, a father’s brother, and the husband of either parent’s sister. But some languages have a word for each of these relatives. Such words suggest differences in the roles and behavior expected of such relatives.
Cultural anthropology
is the study of human culture. Cultural anthropologists study the artwork, houses, tools, and other material products of a culture. They also study a culture’s nonmaterial creations, including its music, religious beliefs, symbols, and values.
Some anthropologists specialize in various fields of cultural anthropology. Ecological anthropologists investigate the way a society fits into its environment and how the environment affects the society’s culture. Psychological anthropologists study how individual personalities are shaped by different cultures and how children learn to share in their culture. Medical anthropology examines the ways in which different people and cultures experience, describe, and understand illness.
Social anthropology
deals with social relationships in human groups. Such relationships include marriage, family life, authority, and conflict. Social anthropologists devote much research into how social life is organized in different societies. A researcher might study a community to determine how people are divided into groups within it and to learn about relationships among these groups.
Many studies examine such human characteristics as age, sex, and kinship, which are universal but have different functions in various societies. In some communities, these characteristics determine what society expects from an individual. In others, such characteristics as education, income, and occupation help define how people are expected to behave.
Early social anthropologists often studied an entire community, including all aspects of its life. Today, however, these scientists practice several specialties. For example, economic anthropologists concentrate on how food and other goods are produced and distributed. Political anthropologists analyze how decisions are made and how conflicts are resolved within communities.
Social and cultural anthropologists do not study only non-Western societies. Many anthropologists also work in Europe and North America. They point out that no human society is isolated from other societies.
How anthropologists work
The primary method used by anthropologists to collect and understand information on different human cultures is known as fieldwork. The first anthropological researchers worked in isolated societies about which little was known. They attempted to describe the culture of the people they studied as completely as possible. The research and description of a culture, called ethnography, describes details on the people’s values, daily life, material culture, and social relationships. See Ethnography.
To study societies, anthropologists developed a method called participant observation. The researcher, called a participant-observer, learned about a people by living among them and taking part in their daily lives. Although it is impossible to record information on every aspect of a culture during fieldwork, anthropologists try to learn all that they can from local people. Today, participant observation is still the most characteristic technique of anthropology, but anthropologists use many other methods as well.
Like all scientists, anthropologists begin their research by asking questions and formulating possible answers called hypotheses. Then they collect evidence with which to evaluate the hypotheses.
Entering the community.
Most anthropologists have interests in a particular geographic area of the world but also look to answer specific questions about human culture. For example, in the 1930’s, the British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard lived among the Nuer in present-day South Sudan. At the time, the Nuer did not have chiefs or kings or any kind of government. Evans-Pritchard studied the problem of how a society without a political system could hold together and work.
Before anthropologists begin their fieldwork, they read about and try to gain knowledge about the region where they will conduct their research. If possible, they learn the language that is spoken there before they arrive at a fieldwork site.
After arriving at a field site, the anthropologist must find a place to live and try to blend into the local society. Local people often take in and house such researchers and befriend them. After time, the scientist begins to learn the language, values, sentiments, and other norms (standards) of the culture. Fieldwork usually takes at least one year. It is important for an anthropologist to see how seasonal changes affect the way people live and what they do to gain their livelihood.
At first, the researcher gathers information mainly through observation and conversations with members of the community. Many researchers conduct a community census to collect basic information. Most field workers take notes every day and type them up at night. Some anthropologists revisit the same community many times over many years, while others carry out fieldwork in a number of different societies.
Developing hypotheses.
An anthropologist must decide what information he or she wishes to gather about the community. Then the researcher asks questions and forms hypotheses to answer them. Many new questions will arise from what the scientist has already learned about the community.
Collecting evidence.
After developing specific hypotheses, the anthropologist gathers information to test them. The researcher may conduct a survey by distributing questionnaires to everyone in the community or to a selected group of individuals. He or she may take inventories of household possessions or obtain life histories from a number of people. An anthropologist may record interviews, music, or special events, and make motion pictures or photographs of various activities.
Drawing conclusions.
The researcher must organize all the information that has been collected so it can be used easily and efficiently. The anthropologist, like other scientists, may use a computer to analyze large amounts of information. Finally, the researcher evaluates the hypotheses that have been formulated and writes up his or her conclusions for scientific journals or in books.
History
Early anthropological thought.
As long as human beings have been aware of other human beings, they have compared one society to another. In the past, myth and imagination often inspired the observation of other people’s. Some European travelers in the 1600’s and 1700’s reported that they had seen human beings with one eye, with four legs, or with three heads in different parts of the world. Many people were not even aware that there was a single species of human being.
Anthropology did not become a separate area of study until the mid-1800’s. In 1859, the British naturalist Charles R. Darwin presented some key ideas in The Origin of Species, one of the most influential science books ever written. In it, Darwin explained his theory of natural selection, the process in nature by which the people, other animals, and plants best adapted to their environment tend to leave the most offspring. The theory of natural selection helped explain the workings of evolution, the process by which all living things developed from a few simple forms of life through a series of changes.
Early anthropologists came to the conclusion that all members of the human species shared a common past. They tried to determine how different societies were related and how they had evolved. They viewed the history of human culture as a process of evolution from lower to higher forms. For example, the American scholar Lewis Henry Morgan imagined that all human societies evolved through a fixed series of stages, from savagery, to barbarism, to civilization.
According to Morgan and other early anthropologists, this process climaxed with the cultures of Europe and North America. So-called primitive peoples, whose technology was less advanced than that of the West, supposedly represented earlier stages of development.
Development of field research.
By the late 1800’s, many anthropologists began to criticize the evolutionary theories of Morgan and others. To support their criticism, such anthropologists as Adolf Bastian of Germany, Franz Boas of the United States, and William H. R. Rivers of the United Kingdom organized expeditions to observe the cultures of other societies firsthand.
In 1899, at Columbia University in New York City, Boas founded the first major department for the teaching of anthropology. His students included Ruth F. Benedict, Alfred L. Kroeber, Robert H. Lowie, and Margaret Mead, all of whom became famous anthropologists. Boas trained them to conduct intensive eyewitness studies of individual cultures. The resulting field studies highlighted many differences among societies.
The early 1900’s.
During the 1920’s, the Polish-born British anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski developed an approach called functionalism. Functionalism stressed the ways that different cultural traits function to satisfy basic human needs, both biological and psychological. Malinowski’s students included the prominent British anthropologists E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Raymond Firth, Max Gluckman, and Isaac Schapera, and an American, Hortense Powdermaker.
By the late 1920’s, anthropologists from Europe and North America had carried out fieldwork throughout the world. The results of their research changed the nature of anthropology and also revolutionized the Western view of primitive people. The new method of participant observation questioned and dramatically changed the idea that such people were less highly evolved than European or American society.
Anthropologists realized that every society had its own history, and that these histories did not conform to the evolutionary schemes of Morgan and others. Fieldwork demonstrated that human cultures grew, changed, and adapted through human invention and creativity, and through contact with different cultures. Many anthropologists recognized that peoples throughout the world had been dramatically affected by contact with Europeans over the past 300 years. The scientists felt that information about various groups should be gathered before the cultures of those groups were further transformed by contact with the West.
The middle and late 1900’s.
Rapid and extensive changes in many societies during the middle and late 1900’s stimulated a shift in anthropological thought. Instead of studying a society at a specific point in time, anthropologists began to study the culture at intervals. They wanted to learn how the society had changed and to analyze the process of change itself. For example, Clifford J. Geertz of the United States studied economic development in Indonesia. Abner Cohen of the United Kingdom investigated the changing role of religion among the Hausa cattle traders of Africa.
Nearly all early anthropologists were Europeans or North Americans who studied societies in Africa or other distant areas. During the mid-1900’s, African and Asian anthropologists began to study societies in the West that formerly had sent researchers to their countries. The Nigerian anthropologist John Ogbu investigated a suburban school in California. Another Nigerian anthropologist, E. U. Essien-Udom, studied the Nation of Islam, also known as the Black Muslims, a religious group in the United States.
Modern anthropology.
Early anthropologists mainly studied small communities in technologically simple societies. But modern anthropologists work in a wide range of settings. An anthropologist may study how a small community responds to contact with modern society, as George Foster of the United States did in the Mexican village of Tzintzuntzan.
Anthropologists continue to find new problems and topics to study as societies continue to change throughout the world. Today, many anthropologists are interested in issues related to globalization and a growing population of people termed transnationals. These are people who are born in one part of the world but later migrate to a different region and live in a different culture. Such people carry with them elements of two different cultures.
Careers in anthropology
Most careers in anthropology require either a master’s degree or a doctoral degree. Many anthropologists teach and carry out research in colleges and universities. Some collect and supervise the display of items for museums. An increasing number of anthropologists enter the growing field of applied anthropology, the use of anthropological research to achieve a practical goal. They may work for government-sponsored development projects or relief agencies helping to assist refugee populations throughout the world. Applied anthropologists also work in advertising and other corporate jobs, where they can apply their knowledge about social systems to specific problems.
