1 Chapter 1: Introduction to Anthropology
Introduction to Anthropology
Nancy Phaup
By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:
- Define anthropology and concepts central to the field
- Describe the origins and early development of anthropology.
- Identify the four subdisciplines of anthropology and specify the focus of each one.
What is Anthropology?
The word anthropology is derived from Greek, with “anthropos” meaning “human” and “logy” referring to the “study of.” Therefore anthropology by definition, is the study of humans. It is about our history, our prehistory before written records, our biology, our language, the distribution of peoples all over the planet, and the cultural and social aspects of our existence. The methods we use on this journey of self-discovery are varied and eclectic—it’s an unusual discipline. What is perhaps unique about anthropology is its global quality, its comparative potential, and its integrative possibilities, which result from its examination of histories, biologies, languages, and socio-cultural variations. As a discipline, it is unusual because it is both soft and hard, including science as well as the humanities, between nature and culture, the past and the present, searching for new ways to understand the human condition. We are an academic discipline with porous boundaries that has refused to specialize and as a result can claim to have made enormous contributions to understanding what it means to be human. But this is a journey that has not always been perfect. At its beginning as an academic discipline anthropology focused on “the study of others,” meaning foreign cultures, but using the term “others” imposed false thoughts of “civilized versus savagery.” These dualistic views have often caused discrimination, wars, or even genocide. Now, anthropologists strive to uncover and better understand the mysteries of all cultures and eliminate the prejudice that it first created.
A Brief History of Anthropological Thinking
Imagine you are living several thousand years ago. Maybe you are a wife and mother of three children. Maybe you are a young man eager to start your own family. Maybe you are a prominent religious leader, or maybe you are a respected healer. Your family has, for as long as people can remember, lived the way you do. You learned to act, eat, hunt, talk, pray, and live the way you do from your parents, your extended family, and your small community. Suddenly, you encounter a new group of people who have a different way of living, speak strangely, and eat in an unusual manner. They have a different way of addressing the supernatural and caring for their sick. What do you make of these differences? These are the questions that have faced people for tens of thousands of years as human groups have moved around and settled in different parts of the world.
One of the first examples of someone who attempted to systematically study and document cultural differences is Zhang Qian (164 BC – 113 BC). Born in the second century BCE in Hanzhong, China, Zhang was a military officer who was assigned by Emperor Wu of Han to travel through Central Asia, going as far as what is today Uzbekistan. He spent more than twenty-five years traveling and recording his observations of the peoples and cultures of Central Asia. The Emperor used this information to establish new relationships and cultural connections with China’s neighbors to the West. Zhang discovered many of the trade routes used in the Silk Road and introduced several new cultural ideas, including Buddhism, into Chinese culture.
Another early traveler and documenter of culture of note was Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Battuta, known most widely as Ibn Battuta, (1304-1369). Ibn Battuta was an Amazigh (Berber) Moroccan Muslim scholar. During the fourteenth century, he traveled for a period of nearly thirty years, covering almost the whole of the Islamic world, including parts of Europe, Africa, India, and China. Upon his return to the Kingdom of Morocco, he documented the customs and traditions of the people he encountered in a book called Tuhfat al-anzar fi gharaaib al-amsar wa ajaaib al-asfar (A Gift to those who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Traveling), a book commonly known as Al Rihla, which means “travels” in Arabic. This book became part of a genre of Arabic literature that included descriptions of the people and places visited along with commentary about the cultures encountered. Some scholars consider Al Rihla to be among the first examples of early pre-anthropological writing.
Later, from the 1400s through the 1700s, during the so-called “Age of Discovery,” Europeans began to explore the world, and then colonize it. Europeans exploited natural resources and human labor in other parts of the world, exerting social and political control over the people they encountered. New trade routes along with the trade of enslaved Africans fueled a growing European empire while forever disrupting previously independent cultures. European ethnocentrism—the belief that one’s own culture is better than others—was used to justify the subjugation of non-European societies on the alleged basis that these groups were socially and even biologically inferior. Indeed, the emerging anthropological practices of this time were ethnocentric and often supported colonial projects.
As European empires expanded, new ways of understanding the world and its people arose. Beginning in the eighteenth century in Europe, the Age of the Enlightenment was a social and philosophical movement that privileged science, rationality, and experience, while critiquing religious authority. This crucial period of intellectual development planted the seeds for many academic disciplines, including anthropology. It gave ordinary people the capacity to learn the “truth” through observation and experience: anyone could ask questions and use rational thought to discover things about the natural and social world. For example, geologist Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875) observed layers of rock and argued that the earth’s surface must have changed gradually over long periods of time. He disputed the Young Earth theory, which was popular at the time and used Biblical information to date the earth as only 6,000 years old, Charles Darwin (1809-1882), a naturalist and biologist, observed similarities between fossils and living specimens, leading him to argue that all life is descended from a common ancestor. Philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) contemplated the origins of society itself, proposing that people historically had lived in relative isolation until they agreed to form a society in which the government would protect their personal property.
These radical ideas about the earth, evolution, and society influenced early social scientists into the nineteenth century. Philosopher and anthropologist Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), inspired by scientific principles, used biological evolution as a model to understand social evolution. Just as biological life evolved from simple to complex multicellular organisms, he postulated that societies “evolve” to become larger and more complex. Anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) argued that all societies “progress” through the same stages of development: savagery—barbarism—civilization. Societies were classified into these stages based on their family structure, technologies, and methods for acquiring food. So-called “savage” societies, ones that used stone tools and foraged for food, were said to be stalled in their social, mental, and even moral development.
Ethnocentric ideas like Morgan’s were challenged by anthropologists in the early twentieth century in both Europe and the United States. During World War I, Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942), a Polish anthropologist, became stranded on the Trobriand Islands located north of Australia and Papua New Guinea. While there, he started to develop participant-observation fieldwork: the method of immersive, long-term research that cultural anthropologists use today. By living with and observing the Trobriand Islanders, he realized that their culture was not “savage,” but was well-suited to fulfill the needs of the people. He developed a theory to explain human cultural diversity: each culture functions to satisfy the specific biological and psychological needs of its people. While this theory has been critiqued as biological reductionism, it was an early attempt to view other cultures in more open-minded ways.
Around the same time in the United States, Franz Boas (1858-1942), widely regarded as the founder of American anthropology, developed cultural relativism, the view that while cultures differ, they are not better or worse than one another. This idea has become a cornerstone principle of contemporary anthropology. In his critique of ethnocentric views, Boas insisted that physical and behavioral differences among racial and ethnic groups in the United States were shaped by environmental and social conditions, not biology. In fact, he argued that culture and biology are distinct realms of experience: human behaviors are socially learned, contextual, and flexible, not innate. Further, Boas worked to transform anthropology into a professional and empirical academic discipline that integrated the four subdisciplines of cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, archaeology, and biological anthropology.
What Sets Anthropology Apart?
Anthropology is a vast field of study—so vast, in fact, that anthropology is interested in everything. Anthropology is unique in its enormous breadth and its distinctive focus. Consider other disciplines. In the arts and sciences, each discipline focuses on a discrete field of social life or physical phenomena. Economists study economics. Religious scholars study religion. Environmental scientists study the environment. Biologists study living organisms. And so on. Anthropologists study all of these things, every possible realm of human experience, thought, activity, and organization. Human as we are, we can only engage in social and natural worlds through our human minds and human bodies. Even engagement with non-human realms such as astronomy and botany is conditioned by our human senses and human cognition and thus varies across different societies and different time periods.
A Cultural Focus
A key theme throughout all of the diverse aspects of anthropological research is a focus on the concept of culture. Culture is a concept that often invokes thoughts of a Monet, a Mozart symphony, or ballerinas in tutus dancing Swan Lake. In the popular vernacular culture often refers to the arts. A person that is cultured has knowledge of and is a patron of the arts. Then there is pop culture; what trends are current and hip. Within anthropology these things are simply aspects of culture. To understand the anthropological culture concept, we need to think broader and holistically.
Anthropologists have long debated an appropriate definition of culture. Even today some anthropologists criticize the culture concept as oversimplifying and stereotyping cultures. The first anthropological definition of culture comes from 19th-century British anthropologist Edward Tylor, “Culture…is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” (Tylor 1920 [1871]: 1). This is probably the most enduring definition of culture even though it relates more to the specifics, or particulars, of culture groups. As Bohannan and Glazer comment in High Points in Anthropology (1988: 62), “…[it is the definition] most anthropologists can quote correctly, and the one they fall back on when others prove too cumbersome.” Over time, anthropologists learned that including specifics into the definition of culture limited that definition. In other words, the definition would not apply to all cultures. A general definition of culture that can be applied to all cultures is patterns of behavior that are common within a particular population of people.
Holism
Anthropologists are interested in holism, in the whole of humanity, in how various aspects of biological or cultural life intersect. One cannot fully understand what it means to be human by studying a single aspect of our complex bodies or societies. By using a holistic approach, anthropologists ask how different aspects interact with and influence one another. For example, a biological anthropologist studying monkeys in South America might consider the species’ physical adaptations, foraging patterns, ecological conditions, and interactions with humans in order to answer questions about their social behaviors. By understanding how non-human primates behave, we discover more about ourselves: after all, as you will learn in this book, humans are primates! A cultural anthropologist studying marriage in a small village in India might consider local gender norms, existing family networks, laws regarding marriage, religious rules, and economic requisites in order to understand the particular meanings of marriage in that context. By using a holistic approach, anthropologists appreciate the complexity of any biological, social, or cultural phenomenon.
An easier understanding of holism is to say that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Individual human organisms are not just x percent genes and y percent culture added together. Rather, human beings are what they are because of mutual shaping of genes and culture and experiences living in the world produces something new, something that cannot be reduced to the materials used to construct it.
Fieldwork
Throughout this book, you will read examples of anthropological fieldwork that will take you around the world. Anthropologists do not only work in laboratories, libraries, or offices. To collect data, they go to where their data lives, whether it is a city, village, cave, tropical forest, or desert. At their field sites, anthropologists collect data which, depending on subdiscipline, may be interviews with local peoples, examples of language in use, skeletal remains, or material culture remains like potsherds or stone tools. While anthropologists ask an array of questions and use diverse methods to answer their research questions, they share this commitment to conducting their research in the field.
Anthropologists as Scientists
Many anthropologists use the scientific method as a way of learning about the world around them. Often people think of science as taking place in a sterile laboratory, and sometimes it does, but it also occurs many other places, such as at a research station in Romania, a field site in Tanzania, or a town in El Salvador. To understand how information is established, it is important to recognize what science is (and is not) as well as understand how the scientific method actually works.
Science combines our natural curiosity with our ability to experiment so we can understand the world around us and address needs in our communities. Thanks to science, meteorologists can predict the weather, it takes only a relatively small number of farmers to grow enough food to feed our large population, our medicine continues to improve, and over 90% of Americans have a cell phone.
The goal of scientists is to identify a research question and then identify the best answer(s) to that question. For example, an excavation of a prehistoric cemetery may reveal that many of the people buried there had unhealed fractures when they died, and the lead anthropologist may ask, “Why did this population experience more broken bones than their neighbors?” There might be multiple explanations to address this question, such as a lack of calcium in their diets, participation in dangerous work, or violent conflict with neighbors; these explanations are considered hypotheses. In the past, you might have learned that a hypothesis is an “educated guess,” but in science, hypotheses are much more than that. A scientific hypothesis reflects a scientist’s knowledge-based experiences and background research. A hypothesis is better defined as an explanation of observed facts; hypotheses explain how and why observed phenomena are the way they are.
What are the Four Subfields?
Because human experiences are varied and complex, we need a diversified tool kit to study them. Anthropology therefore comprises four subdisciplines: Some are more scientific (like biological anthropology), while others are more humanistic (like cultural anthropology). The scientific subdisciplines tend to use the scientific method to develop theories that explain human origins, evolution, material remains, or behaviors. The humanistic subdisciplines tend to use observational methods and interpretive approaches to understand human beliefs, languages, behaviors, cultures, and social organization. But in truth all of the subfields combine both scientific and humanistic approaches in studying humans. Findings from all four subdisciplines contribute to a multifaceted appreciation of human bio-cultural experiences, past and present.
Archaeology
Archaeology focuses on the material past: the tools, food, pottery, art, shelters, seeds, and other objects left behind by people. Archaeologists recover and analyze these materials to reconstruct the lifeways of past societies. They ask specific questions like: How did people in a particular area live? What did they eat? What happened to them? They ask general questions about humankind: When and why did humans first develop agriculture? How did cities first develop? What type of interactions did prehistoric people have with their neighbors?
One key method that archaeologists use to answer their questions is excavation—a method of careful digging and removing of dirt and stones to uncover material remains while recording their context. Archaeological research spans millions of years from human origins to the present. For example, Kathleen Kenyon (1906–1978), a British archaeologist, was one of few women working in this field in the 1940s. While excavating at Jericho (which dates back to 10,000 BCE), she discovered city structures and cemeteries built during the Early Bronze Age (3,200 yBP in Europe). Based on her findings, she argued that Jericho is the oldest city continuously occupied by different groups of people (Kenyon 1979).
Cultural Anthropology
Cultural anthropology focuses on similarities and differences among living societies. The cultural anthropologist suspends their own sense of what is “normal” in order to understand the perspectives of the people they study (cultural relativism). They learn these perspectives through participant-observation fieldwork: a method that involves living with, observing, and learning from the people one studies. Beyond describing another way of life, cultural anthropologists ask broader questions about humankind: Are human emotions universal or culturally specific? Does globalization make us all the same or do we maintain cultural differences? For cultural anthropologists, no aspect of human life is outside their purview: They study art, religion, healing, natural disasters, video gaming, even pet cemeteries. While many cultural anthropologists are intrigued by human diversity, they realize that people around the world share much in common.
One famous American cultural anthropologist, Margaret Mead (1901–1978), conducted several cross-cultural studies of gender and socialization practices. In the early twentieth century in the United States, people wondered if the emotional turbulence of American adolescence was caused by the biology of puberty (and was thus natural and universal) or something else. To find out, Mead famously set off for the Samoan Islands, where she lived for several months getting to know Samoan teenagers. According To Mead, she learned that Samoan adolescence was not angst-ridden (like it was in the United States), but rather a relatively tranquil and happy life stage. Upon returning to the United States, Mead wrote Coming of Age in Samoa, a best-selling book that was both sensational and scandalous (Mead 1928). In it, she critiqued U.S. parenting as overly restrictive, and contrasted it to Samoan parenting, which allowed teenagers to freely explore their community and even their sexuality. Ultimately, she argued that nurture (i.e., socialization) more than nature played a key role in the experience of child development.
Cultural anthropologists do not always travel far to provide insight into human experience. In the 1980s, American anthropologist Philippe Bourgois (1956–) wanted to understand how pockets of extreme poverty persist amid the wealth and overall high quality of life in the United States. To answer this question, he lived with Puerto Rican crack dealers in East Harlem, contextualizing their experiences both historically (in terms of socioeconomic dynamics in Puerto Rico and in the United States) and presently (in terms of social marginalization and institutional racism). Rather than blame crack dealers for their poor choices or blame our society for perpetuating inequality, he argued that both individual choices and social inequality can trap people in the overlapping worlds of drugs and poverty (Bourgois 2003).
Biological Anthropology
Biological anthropology is the study of human origins, evolution, and physical variation. Some biological anthropologists focus on our closest living relatives: monkeys and apes. They examine the biological and behavioral similarities and differences between non-human primates and human primates (us!). For example, Jane Goodall has devoted her life to studying wild chimpanzees (Goodall 1996). Not all biological anthropologists study primates. Other biological anthropologists study fossilized remains in order to chart the evolution of early hominins, the evolutionary ancestors of modern humans, asking questions like: What did our ancestors look like? What did they eat? When did they start to speak? And, how did they adapt to new environments? In this field of study, anthropologists consider the emergence and migration of the various species in the hominin family tree as well as the conditions that promoted certain biological and cultural traits.
Some biological anthropologists examine the genetic makeup of contemporary humans in order to learn how certain genes and traits are distributed in human populations across different environments. For instance, Nina Jablonski (2012) asks why darker skin pigmentation is more prevalent in high ultraviolet (UV) contexts (like Central Africa), while lighter skin pigmentation is more prevalent in low UV contexts (like Nordic countries). Others examine human genetics looking for clues about the relationships between early modern humans and other hominins, such as Neanderthals.
Linguistic Anthropology
Linguistic anthropology focuses on language. Linguistic anthropologists view language as a primary means by which humans create and interact with their diverse cultures. Language combines biological and social elements. Some linguistic anthropologists study the origins of language, asking how language emerged in our biological evolution and sociocultural development and what aspects of language might have given early hominins an evolutionary advantage. Other linguistic anthropologists are interested in how language shapes our thinking processes and our views of the world. In addition to its cognitive aspects, language is a powerful tool for getting things done. Linguistic anthropologists also study how people use language to form communities and identities, assert power, and resist authority.
Linguistic anthropologists frequently conduct the same kinds of long-term, immersive research that cultural anthropologists do. Christopher Ball spent a year living and traveling with the Wauja, an indigenous group in Brazil (2018). He describes the many routine and ritualized ways of speaking in this community and how each kind of talk generates specific types of social action. “Chief speech” is used by leaders, while “bringing the spirits” is used for healing the sick. Ceremonial language is used for giving people names and for conducting exchanges between different indigenous groups. Ball, like many linguistic anthropologists, also examined public speeches, such as the ones delivered by Wauja leaders to protest a dam on a nearby river. Ball also analyzed the forms of language used by state officials and development workers to marginalize and subordinate indigenous groups such as the Wauja.
Language is central to the way we conceptualize ourselves and our lives. Anthropologist Summerson Carr examined an addiction treatment program for homeless women in the midwestern United States, looking at the role of language in the therapeutic process (2011). After observing therapy sessions and self-help meetings, she describes how addiction counselors promote a certain kind of “healthy talk” that conveys deep cultural notions about personhood and responsibility. As patients master this “healthy talk,” they learn to demonstrate progress by performing very scripted ways of speaking about themselves and their addiction.
Applied Anthropology
Sometimes considered a fifth subdiscipline, applied anthropology involves the practical application of anthropological theories, methods, and findings to solve real-world problems. Applied anthropologists are employed outside of academic settings, in both the public and private sectors, including business or consulting firms, advertising companies, city government, law enforcement, the medical field, nongovernmental organizations, and even the military. Applied anthropology draws upon each of the four subfields.
Working across Cultures toward Common Goals
Stepping back for a moment, consider the problems facing us as humans on our shared planet. Climate change threatens the survival of humanity and the biodiversity of plants and animals. Forms of deeply entrenched inequality fuel racial, ethnic, and class conflicts within and between nations. These are global problems, transnational problems, cross-cultural problems. Human beings need to find a way to communicate and cooperate across the sociocultural boundaries that divide us, always recognizing the power dynamics involved in that process.
How can we do this? Anthropology teaches us that we may never understand exactly how it feels to be a member of a different culture or group within our own culture. But if we want to work together with people of different sociocultural backgrounds to solve these pressing global issues, we have to try. Long-term fieldwork and cross-cultural collaboration are not perfect solutions to the challenges of cross-cultural understanding, but these methods give us a place to begin. And anthropological methods and insights can be transformative, making possible the kinds of empathy and dialogue necessary to solve our global problems.
The goal of this anthropology textbook is to guide you in this process of transformation as you learn about the cultural lives of the various peoples with whom you share this planet.
Terms You Should Know
Study Questions
- This chapter emphasizes how broad the discipline of anthropology is and how many different kinds of research questions anthropologists in the four subdisciplines pursue. What do you think are the strengths or unique opportunities of being such a broad discipline? What are some challenges or difficulties that could develop in a discipline that studies so many different things?
- Cultural anthropologists focus on the way beliefs, practices, and symbols bind groups of people together and shape their worldview and lifeways. Thinking about your own culture, what is an example of a belief, practice, or symbol that would be interesting to study anthropologically? What do you think could be learned by studying the example you have selected?
References
Ball, Christopher. 2018. Exchanging Words: Language, Ritual, and Relationality in Brazil’s Xingu Indigenous Park. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Beals, Kenneth L., Courtland L. Smith, Stephen M. Dodd, J. Lawrence Angel, Este Armstrong, Bennett Blumenberg, Fakhry G. Girgis, et al. 1984. “Brain Size, Cranial Morphology, Climate, and Time Machines [and Comments and Reply].” Current Anthropology 25 (3): 301‒330.
Bohannan, Paul and Glazer, Mark. 1988. High Points in Anthropology, 2nd edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc.
Bourgois, Phillippe. 2003. In Search of Respect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carr, E. Summerson. 2011. Scripting Addiction: The Politics of Therapeutic Talk and American Sobriety. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Farmer, Paul. 2006. AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Goodall, Jane. 1996. My Life With the Chimpanzees. Aladdin Press.
Jablonski, Nina. 2012. Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kenyon, Kathleen. 1979. Archaeology in the Holy Land. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Malotki, Ekkehart. 1983. Hopi Time. The Hague: Mouton.
Mead, Margaret. 1928. Coming of Age in Samoa. Oxford: Morrow.
Tylor, Edward Burnett. 1871 [1920]. Primitive Culture. New York: J.P. Putnam’s Sons.
A derivative work from:
Brown, Nina, McIlwraith, Thomas and Tubelle de González, Laura. 2020. Perspectives: An Open Introduction to Cultural Anthropology.
Evans. 2020. Cultural Anthropology. Lumen Learning
Hasty, Jennifer, Lewis, David G. and Snipes, Marjorie M. 2022. Introduction to Anthropology.
Shook, Beth, Aguilera, Kelsie, and Braff, Lara. 2023. Explorations: An Open Invitation to Biological Anthropology, 2nd Edition.
Anthropology is the study of what makes us human.
the tendency to view one’s own culture as most important and correct and as the stick by which to measure all other cultures.
a type of observation in which the anthropologist observes while participating in the same activities in which her informants are engaged.
the idea that we should seek to understand another person’s beliefs and behaviors from the perspective of their own culture and not our own.
a set of beliefs, practices, symbols and patterns of behavior that are learned and commonly shared within a particular population of people.
how the elements of human life are bound together to form distinctive cultures.
an anthropological research method that that takes place away from the laboratory, office, or classroom.
an idea that proposes a tentative explanation about a phenomenon or a narrow set of phenomena observed in the natural world.
the field of anthropology that relies on the excavation of artifacts and fossils to explore how environmental and historical conditions have produced a diversity of human cultures.
a method in archaeology of careful digging to uncover material remains while recording their context
the field of anthropology devoted to describing and understanding the wide variety of human cultures. Cultural anthropologists focus on such things as social thought, action, ritual, values, and institutions.
an American cultural anthropologist and writer.
the field of anthropology that focuses on the earliest processes in the biological and sociocultural development of human beings as well as the biological diversity of contemporary humans. Biological anthropologists study the origins, evolution, and diversity of our species.
the field of anthropology that explores the central role of language in human cultural life. Linguistic anthropologists study the origins of language, how language shapes thought, and how language operates as a tool of power.
the field of anthropology that focuses on the practical application of anthropological theories, methods, and findings to solve real-world problems.
a type of observation in which the anthropologist observes while participating in the same activities in which her informants are engaged.
