Anthropology

Summary

Anthropology is the scientific study of all aspects of the human species across the whole geographic and temporal span of human existence. It covers languages, customs, family structures, social behavior, politics, morality, health, and biology. As such, possible studies range from comparative analyses of human and chimpanzee family units to historical examinations of how languages change and to neurobiological studies of the roots of altruism in the brain. At its core, anthropology is concerned with what makes human beings who they are and why.

Definition and Basic Principles

Anthropology is concerned with humankind’s origin, evolution, behavior, beliefs, culture, and physical features. Rather than focusing on a single facet of human existence, anthropology is characterized by an inclusive approach that treats each feature of culture and society as interrelated parts of a whole. An anthropological study of psychology, for instance, might place it in the context of language and culture. A study of medicine might include an analysis of politics and human adaptation. This approach is known as holism. Additionally, no matter how large or small the question an anthropologist asks—a research topic might be as specific as the types of wedding ornamentation used in a particular culture or as broad as how language evolved in different societies over millennia—its underlying aim will be to gain a deeper understanding of the species as a whole. Therefore, cross-cultural comparisons, or analyzing the similarities and differences between distinct human communities, is an essential component of anthropological research.

A few other basic principles distinguish anthropology as a science. One is an emphasis on immersion fieldwork, in which the scientist enters the community being studied to observe it from the inside rather than the outside. Greatly influenced by feminism and postmodernism, anthropology breaks down the notion of scientists as objective observers, acknowledging their mental models of the world are bound by their own cultures. In other words, scientists' particular social backgrounds, experiences, and worldviews are inseparable from the perspectives they bring to ethnography. Anthropologists strive to overcome this limitation by consciously applying the principle of cultural relativism, judging each society by its internal system of ethical and social guidelines. For example, an anthropological study of the ancient Chinese practice of foot binding (tightly tying cloth around female babies' feet to keep them small as the girl grows) would refrain from making a moral judgment about the tradition. Instead, it would focus on describing its origins and its rationale within Chinese society.

Background and History

The word anthropology, meaning "study of man," predates the development of anthropology as a modern scientific field. It was first used in the sixteenth century to describe a philosophical or theological examination of the soul. The term was later used by nineteenth-century German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in a sense closer to its modern meaning, to denote the study of physical and psychological aspects of humankind. In the late nineteenth century, the science of anthropology was dominated by an ethnocentric approach that peered at global cultures through the lens of strict Victorian mores and that largely labeled these cultures as primitive curiosities. Early anthropologists believed cultural differences could be traced to genetic variances in the human species that resulted in moral and mental disparities.

German American anthropologist Franz Boas is credited with formulating the principle of cultural relativism at the beginning of the twentieth century. Boas insisted that culture was not passed on from generation to generation through the genes but instead consisted of learned behaviors acquired over time through immersion in a group and eventual habituation to the behavior of others. He rejected the idea that culture developed toward a destination and that any single culture was inherently superior to or more advanced than another. Although anthropology has changed in the years since Boas first laid down his ideas, these principles continue to inform the field as a whole.

Throughout the field's development, the focus has shifted away from broad descriptions of an entire culture or way of life and toward narrower examinations of specific features of community life. Thus, a cultural anthropologist may specialize in studies of topics like music, marriage practices, or taboos.

How It Works

As in other fields of science, empirical research—research based on observed and verifiable data—forms a cornerstone of anthropology. The classic anthropological study is fieldwork—the scientist travels to and lives among a group of people to document their cultural practices. Other archaeological investigation tools common to the four main subfields of anthropology include surveys, interviews, archival research, recordings, and statistical analysis.

Cultural Anthropology. Cultural anthropology is the most widely practiced and well-known subfield of anthropology. It is the study of human thought, knowledge, and practices—any behavioral trait passed on not through genes but through language, art, and ritual. The most important tool of the cultural anthropologist is the ethnographic study. Researchers directly observe group members as they go about their daily lives. They interview subjects, record oral histories, and create detailed reports of all they see and hear. The goal of these observations is to deepen the understanding of the reasoning behind the cultural practices of a given society. For example, it can be difficult for Western minds to apprehend the facial tattooing rituals in many cultures, including the Maori of New Zealand. Rather than seeing these practices as masochistic or stigmatizing, cultural anthropologists seek to uncover the principles that motivate this tradition. In the case of the Maori, tattooing serves as a status symbol—the more complex one's facial tattoos, the higher one's rank—and as a sign of affiliation between group members.

Archaeological Anthropology. Archaeological anthropology is the study of human cultures through the material artifacts they produce, including such objects as mechanical devices, toys, writings, paintings, pottery, religious icons, buildings, and funerary items. Archaeological anthropologists collect, categorize, and describe these artifacts, then use them to piece together plausible theories about the belief systems and traditional practices of the societies from which they came. Anthropologists specializing in societies that have long passed out of existence, such as ancient Greek, Roman, Indian, Egyptian, and Mayan cultures, set up stations known as digs to unearth buried fragments and objects. Those anthropologists interested in the behavior of prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies or even the protohuman ancestors of the human species focus their attention on clues from fossilized skeletons and primitive tools. However, later human cultures provide equally valid subjects for archaeological-anthropological study. Archival maps, photographs, and other historical documents, for instance, can help scientists build a clearer impression of the habits and ways of life practiced in communities such as nineteenth-century American coal miners or rural fishermen in colonial Malaya (modern-day Malaysia).

Linguistic Anthropology. Linguistic anthropologists are concerned with the origin, development, and structure of the roughly six thousand human languages that exist and how language shapes and is shaped by culture. They study technical aspects of language like phonetics, phonology, grammar, syntax, vocabulary, and semiotics. More broadly, researchers investigate how language is used to define social groups and transmit meaning across generations, how the grammatical forms of a community's language affect common patterns of reasoning and thought, and how natural and artificial phenomena are represented or symbolized in language. For example, the vocabulary of some Chinese dialects includes an elaborate set of words describing specific family relations—terms that distinguish older siblings from younger ones, paternal from maternal relatives, and relatives by blood or marriage. Such words reflect an intense focus in Chinese culture on questions of kinship links and rankings.

Other fruitful areas of study include the relationships among languages within and across linguistic families and the question of how the pronunciation and usage of words evolved. Computational linguists, for example, may use software to conduct complex statistical analyses of thousands of instances of a word to reconstruct how different speakers meant and interpreted it. Linguistic anthropologists approach such issues through analyses of written texts and audio and video recordings and seek out language that occurs naturally in social discourse rather than the language used in the context of formal interviews.

Biological Anthropology. Biological anthropology seeks to understand humankind by studying physical anatomy. It examines the origin and evolution of the human brain, body, and nervous system; the physical diversity of individuals and groups within the human species; the place of humankind in relation to other living and extinct animal species within the natural world; and the physiological bases of psychological processes and behaviors. There are various subfields within biological anthropology. Researchers who focus on human evolution conduct comparative analyses of human and nonhuman primates using fossil evidence, DNA studies, and field research of animals in the wild. Medical anthropologists study issues of epidemiology (how diseases and health-related behaviors spread across human populations) and ethnomedicine (how different human societies think about, explain, and treat disease and health).

Applications and Products

Medicine and Public Health. The work of medical anthropologists leads to many useful applications in the world of public health. For example, an anthropologist who spent nearly two years immersed in the daily lives of families with children with the genetic disease cystic fibrosis produced a detailed set of practical clinical guidelines for physicians working with such families. The guidelines help doctors communicate effectively with children and their parents about cystic fibrosis symptoms and treatment. Another common medical application of anthropological research is the development of public health campaigns targeted at the specific worldviews and cultural traditions of a population. For example, anthropologists have worked with community health workers in Malaysia to educate locals about steps they can take to prevent the spread of the deadly virus responsible for dengue fever. Through door-to-door surveys and interviews, the anthropologists determined the Malaysian public's common misconceptions about dengue fever and helped create a more accessible list of recommendations for local inhabitants.

Crime Investigation. Experts in forensic anthropology who apply the tools of anthropological study to skeletal remains such as bones and teeth are indispensable members of any crime investigation team. Since the 1930s, for instance, physical anthropologists employed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, have served as consultants to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on many criminal cases. The anthropologists help with tasks such as recovering physical evidence from the scene of the crime, determining victims' age and gender, and estimating the time and mechanisms of their deaths. One of the most crucial anthropological tools involved in crime investigation is facial reproduction. In facial reproduction, a forensic anthropologist uses computer simulation to reconstruct a picture of a deceased person's facial features that have been degraded by trauma or decomposition. This is done using scientific knowledge about the relationships between the shape of the hard tissue of the skull and the soft tissues that make up the face.

Military Applications. Anthropologists began assisting in military operations in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly following the Cold War. In the United States, for instance, cultural anthropologists working in the Human Terrain Team—a program under the umbrella of the US Army Training and Doctrine Command—travel with soldiers to the field of warfare, interviewing local inhabitants and collecting data about the culture, sentiments, and needs of the people who live in battle zones. Such practices were put to use during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early twenty-first century. These teams' expertise helps the military improve security, target its aid and reconstruction efforts more effectively, work better with local governments and organizations, and conduct better counterterrorism programs.

Army officials have successfully used knowledge gained from the cultural advice of field anthropologists to persuade local tribal leaders to work with the Afghan police. Such assistance, however, comes at a cost. In 2008, two anthropologists lost their lives while working with the military. The American Anthropological Association expressed serious ethical concerns about the use of anthropology as a tool to aid the army in determining specific targets for military operations. Anthropologists specializing in cultural, medical, and family anthropology remain an important part of successful military units.

Social Problems. Anthropological studies are used by governments and various organizations across the globe to analyze and address a variety of social problems, such as malnutrition, poverty, teenage parenthood, unemployment, and drug abuse. For example, anthropological studies of population trends in countries such as Swaziland, also called the Kingdom of Eswatini, have shown that the number of children a woman has is inversely related to the amount of education she receives. Formal education raises women's awareness of birth control, opens doors to new jobs, and reduces their willingness to participate in practices such as arranged marriages and polygyny (two or more wives at the same time). As a result, one simple initiative applied in many developing nations with overpopulation problems is to increase the educational opportunities available to girls and young women.

Similarly, anthropological studies have been conducted on microcredit banks such as India's Grameen Bank. Microcredit agencies lend very small amounts of money to individuals in deep poverty, without requiring collateral, to help fund income-generating activities and housing. Anthropological research reveals that, despite its good intentions, microcredit can lead to the serious problem of debt cycling (paying off previous loans with new ones) among people already experiencing financial difficulty. Anthropological research can thus be essential in evaluating the effectiveness of social programs that have already been put into place and in making recommendations for the future.

Careers and Course Work

A typical anthropology degree at the undergraduate level will involve a comprehensive series of courses in anthropological theories and methodologies, classes on broad topics such as human evolution and migration, and specific coursework in a particular subfield. For example, a student interested in linguistic anthropology might enroll in classes on the structure of language, the neurobiology of language, and the sociological impact of language. No matter the subspecialty, an anthropology student should also gain a strong grounding in research methodologies, statistics, computational analysis, interview skills, and formal writing. Work experience or internships help gain practical experience and make contacts in the field who can serve as professional mentors and advisers later in the student's career. Although such opportunities certainly exist at archaeological digs for those interested in archaeological anthropology, many other placements are also appropriate. For instance, a student might conduct an ethnographic study of breastfeeding among minority mothers at a community health clinic or study the history of the English language in the dictionary department of an academic publishing house.

Once a student has graduated, their training in anthropology serves as an excellent preparation for virtually any career in which the understanding of the principles behind human behavior would be an asset. Possible career paths include archaeology, museum curation, linguistics, forensic science, marketing, human resources, social work, and consulting of all kinds. Anthropologists' ability to place problems within the context of human communities makes them valuable interpreters between organizations (corporations or governments) and the individuals they serve. For example, professionals with anthropology backgrounds have been hired to design more user-friendly software, create public awareness campaigns around pressing health issues, and interview families to discover how they use greeting cards to communicate with one another. Also, government agencies frequently employ anthropologists as policy researchers, program evaluators, planners, and analysts.

Social Context and Future Prospects

In an ever-changing world, anthropology is a means of preserving human communities’ social, artistic, linguistic, and cultural heritage for future generations. The significance of anthropological research, however, is far from merely intellectual. Increasingly, it is as common to find anthropologists engaged in solving practical problems for corporations, hospitals, or government agencies as it is to find them writing academic research papers or studying groups of individuals living in remote locations. For example, the American Anthropological Association has a membership of more than ten thousand professional anthropologists.

Contemporary anthropologists are also more likely than ever to turn their attention toward the beliefs and practices of their own cultures rather than conducting studies far from home. Many researchers have begun turning their focus away from supposedly typical, average citizens of a culture and onto narrower subsets within a culture or society. Examples include anthropological examinations of protest movements, government groups, businesspeople, or even other scientific research communities—areas long seen as in the realm of sociology rather than anthropology. Subfields such as philosophical anthropology and theological anthropology continue to grow and develop. Anthropologists are often employed in market research positions for major corporations, studying the demand for products in a certain population and collecting data through surveys and interviews to inform their research.

Major trends within anthropology tend to follow those within academia as a whole. Along these lines, the early twenty-first century saw a progression toward multidisciplinary research, with scholars acknowledging the complexity of humankind and frequently requiring a cross-discipline perspective no matter the scale of the research. Tackling issues like the American opioid crisis, mapping the genes of Neanderthals, and investigating patterns of health and death are among the popular topics in twenty-first-century anthropology research. 

The line between anthropology and sociology continues to be blurred. Fields like psychology, population genetics, primatology, and others are commonly integrated into contemporary anthropological research. Within subfields of anthropology, another trend is toward ever greater detail in classification systems, including chronologies and geographic regions of study. As fields of study overlap, technology like CT scans is increasingly used, revealing details of ancient societies. Other anthropologists study social media platforms and their impact on human interactions. As more data is gathered from specific cultures and individuals, broader historical classifications often need to be revised and replaced with nuanced understandings of the variety within humankind.

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