Introduction
Welcome to your Anthropology textbook!
In it, we aim to communicate the strengths of the contemporary discipline – its focus on our shared humanity, its reliance on diverse voices, and its insistence on seeing other cultures from their own perspective rather than one imposed from outside – to a broad audience and to future specialists.
When we decided to create this textbook for use in our (and your!) classes, we had a few broad goals for the project. The first goal was to provide a text that is more inclusive to the students in our classes, and more representative of anthropology as a discipline. This textbook seeks to highlight the diverse voices of contemporary anthropology, emphasizing that anthropology works best amidst diversity. We hope that all students will feel more engaged when they see themselves reflected in the people, examples, and stories of contemporary anthropology, which has been profoundly improved by the inclusion of diverse, global perspectives over the past several decades. Ultimately we hope that more students from more backgrounds can see themselves as anthropologists.
We also wanted to better present anthropology as it is today, across all of its disciplines. We had found that textbooks rarely provided good coverage of all four of anthropology’s subfields: biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology. This textbook aims to remedy that failing, providing substantial sections for each subfield. Additionally, the creation of this textbook has enabled us to highlight up-to-date research and relevant cross-cultural examples of topics, replacing dated sections from other available texts.
Finally, we wanted to reduce costs for everyone. Relatively expensive textbooks for introductory classes create a barrier to entry and inclusion for many students. We want to remove that barrier and make anthropology, the study of humans, accessible to all (you are humans after all!).
We hope you enjoy the text and come to engage with our discipline!