ANTH essay

Anthropology 150

Spring 2020

Lecture 1: The Nature of Anthropology

The Anthropological Perspective

If is difficult to say if, in the first third of the 21st century, there is still something that we

can call an anthropological perspective. There are many people who maintain that the project of

anthropology is falling apart due in part to a loss of something that is uniquely anthropological to

study and in part to the trends in research toward hyper-specialization and loss of broad

perspective. On many campuses the sub-disciplines of anthropology are fragmenting and the

tensions are especially strong between physical anthropology and the rest of the field.

Nonetheless, I for one still believe in anthropology. Call me a sentimental fool, if you

will, but I believe that somebody in academia has to synthesize things and integrate. And I think

that anthropology is the discipline best situated to that task.

For me, there is one central question to anthropology and that is: What does it mean to be

human? Obviously that’s a big question. Necessarily, there are many approaches to the

problem, some are philosophical and abstract; some are empirical and concrete. But these

disparate approaches aren’t necessarily contradictory, and one isn’t necessarily more valid than

another. For me. the issue is to recognize that different approaches can be equally valid; they

can all yield knowledge and understanding. One must also realize that different types of

knowledge require different methodologies.

What I like about anthropology is that it takes that question, “What does it mean to be

human? “ and it asks it of people in all places and all times. Sometimes we even look at

monkeys and apes to get a broader perspective. I don’t know of any other discipline that is so

broad and attempts to synthesize so much. Sociologists tend to look only at modern societies.

Historians sometimes get close, but they don’t look at prehistory. Psychology? Forget it. I was

a psych major as an undergraduate; believe me, psychologists don’t have a clue about what

makes people work.

It turns out that there are an amazingly large number of ways to be human, physically,

emotionally, philosophically, economically, and politically. There is a lot of variation in the

world today, although perhaps less cultural variation than there used to be as little as twenty

years ago. In the distant past there was much, much more diversity than at present.

So anthropology really has two dimensions of interest. The first is synchronic variation,

how different are people now? The second is temporal variation: how different are people

through time?

It is interesting to note that historically, it was the interest in temporal variation that

resulted in the intellectual tradition that led to anthropology. I will address that issue in Lecture

2, when I discuss the history of anthropology

The Branches of Anthropology

In your text Kottak tells you that there are two main branches of anthropology, physical

and socio-cultural. This isn’t true. That position makes some sense, but doesn’t reflect the actual

situation.

Everyone else in the world recognizes 4 distinct branches of anthropology: Socio-

cultural, physical, archaeological, and linguistic. In reality, there may be five, because Medical

Anthropology has recently emerged as a sub-field that is distinct from both Cultural

Anthropology and Physical Anthropology.

Physical Anthropology

Physical (or biological ) anthropology is concerned with biological diversity, including

the origins and evolution of the genus Homo. Physical anthropologist are the people you see in

khaki shorts (it’s a uni-sex look) wandering around Olduvai, Omo, and other places in Africa

looking for early humans who lived millions of years ago. But they also work with a number of

other problems, such as emergence of anatomically modern humans about 150,00 years ago.

They work with problems of how humans adapt to different environments and the physical and

genetic changes that take place as a result. They may even be forensic anthropologists and study

crimes that result in physical trauma, such as bullet wounds, broken bones, and the like.

Primatology is also generally considered part of physical anthropology. Primatology is

the study of non-human primates, such as monkeys and apes. Originally primatology began as

an effort to build a comparative base for human study, that is, to seek generalties about all

primates that would include human behavior. It hasn’t worked out that way, but people keep

studying them anyway.

Socio-Cultural Anthropology

Socio-cultural Anthropology is concerned mainly with modern diversity of social and

cultural forms. The social part comes from British social anthropology. The concept of culture

is emphasized in North American approaches, and was placed at the center of American

anthropology by Franz Boas and his students.

Socio-cultural anthropology was and is considered by many to be the heart of the

discipline, and in most departments they make up the bulk of the members. Originally the

central project of socio cultural anthro was to study non-european peoples. More recently,

however, this branch of anthropology has re-focused on the concept of culture as its central

theme and now studies culture and cultural products in non-traditional settings. Socio-cultural

anthropologists now study how people of different cultures act when they come together, say in a

place like Los Angeles. They study corporate cultures, military cultures, gay culture. Any place

where people get together to form groups that have distinct ways of thinking and acting, you’ll

find an anthropologist there to study them.

Let me beg off on defining the concept of culture for just a bit more. I’ll come back to it

after I finish my laundry list of sub-fields within Anthropology.

Anthropological Archaeology

Archaeology is concerned with the analysis of human societies and cultures via material

culture. Most archaeologists work in prehistory, that it, before written records. Many, however,

also deal with societies that had writing. The branch called historical archaeology is concerned

mostly with the very recent past.

Prehistoric archaeology deals with the documentation of the past using material culture,

the things that people made, and their garbage. As we’ll discuss next time, prehistory makes up

the overwhelming majority of human experience, over 90%. People have been writing for only a

very short time, and only recently have written records dealt with anything more than very

limited range of activities. So if you really want to know about different ways of being human,

you have to look at the past.

Prehistorians are interested in documenting ways of life that existed only in the past.

They are also interested in how modern societies came to be what they are. How and why did

people go from living in small groups subsisting by hunting game and collecting wild plants to

living in cities and subsisting by agriculture and animal husbandry? That transition is often

called cultural evolution (a deceptive phrase) and is the central focus for much archaeological

research.

A quick aside: there are many archaeologists who are not anthropologists: Egyptologists,

classical archaeologists, etc. There are many departments of archaeology in Europe and a few in

the US.

Linguistic Anthropology

Linguistic anthropology, as you might suspect, is concerned with language and speech. As

with socio-cultural anthropology, the core project of this discipline used to lie in the study of

non-European languages. But in recent years this branch of anthropology has re-focused itself

around the concept of culture and cultural differences in speech, and on other forms of symbolic

communication.

Language is in many ways the quintessential anthropological product because it is

produced by a blend of physiology and culture. Physiologically, all humans are programmed to

communicate symbolically. The capacity for speech has evolved over millions of years and

human children are programmed to learn speech and other forms of symbolic communication to

a much higher degree than other species of primates, not to mention other mammals.

The forms of speech that people use, however, are cultural. Particular words, grammar

and syntax are learned. They are passed from one generation to the next.

Medical Anthropology

In recent years another branch of study has emerged in anthropology and it has grown so

quickly that it now deserves to be called the fifth branch of anthropology. That field is medical

anthropology.

Medical anthropology is in some ways a meld of physical anthropology and socio-

cultural. There are two distinct ways of doing it. The first is a type of medical practice, where

one studies physical differences among different ethnic or racial groups and the medical

consequences of those differences. The second type of medical anthropology looks more at the

medical consequences of culture and cultural behavior. For instance, if one were to examine

Central American attitudes toward homosexuality and its consequences for public health policy,

that would be a medical anthropological study. If one were to look at emigrant Vietnamese

communities in the Silicon Valley and the situational preferences for traditional medical

treatment, which is to say herbalism and shamanism, versus visits to the local HMO, that would

also be medical anthropology.

Applied Anthropology?

Some scholars define Applied Anthropology as a distinct discipline, but I do not.

Applied anthropology is any aspect of the field that can be applied to solving real-world

problems, as opposed to academic discourse. In my view, all of anthropology has applied

dimensions.

The Concept of Culture

The four (or five) sub-fields of anthropology are very diverse, and many today think that

they are kept together only for the convenience of academic administration. I, however, think

there is a deeper connection, which is a concern with the human condition. If socio-cultural

anthropologists can be broad-minded enough to admit that there is some biological basis to

culture, and if physical anthropologist can admit that not all behavior is biologically determined,

the field can survive, and thrive.

In my mind the concept that unifies all of anthropology is that of culture. For the

moment, let me just define culture as “that which is learned, shared and transmitted.” Culture is

learned behavior, as opposed to biologically determined (or instinctual). At the same time,

however, the capacity for culture, that is, the ability to be cultural, is biologically based.

In the portion of the course that deals with biological evolution, I’ll emphasize that the

capacity to be cultural was one of the principal outcomes of hominid evolutionary history. There

were selective pressures what brought about a brain that was large enough and complex enough

to develop language, complex technology, and a capacity to symbolically understand the world.

At the same time however, culture cannot be simplistically reduced to biology, because the

symbolic dimension of culture transcends the physical world.

Anthropology as a Cultural Product

It is important to recognize that anthroplogy itself is a cultural product and exists in an

intellectual tradition that stretches back hundreds of years. Specifically, anthropology was

formed as part of the European intellectual tradition and grew through the attempts of Europeans

to understand the relationship between themselves, other peoples, and other animals. In Lecture

2, I’ll discuss the origins of anthropology and how its intellectual history shapes how it views the

world today.