Anthropology

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Anthropology (from the Greek word ἄνθρωπος, "human" or "person") consists of the study of humanity (see genus Homo). It is holistic in two senses: it is concerned with all humans at all times and with all dimensions of humanity. Anthropology is traditionally distinguished from other disciplines by its emphasis on cultural relativity, in-depth examination of context, and cross-cultural comparisons. More recently, it has also distinguished itself as a leader in culture critique and post-colonialism. Anthropology is methodologically diverse using both qualitative methods and quantitative methods, such as first hand case studies of living cultures, of careful excavations of material remains and interpetations of extinct linguistic practices. In North America and other Western cultures, Anthropology is traditionally broken down into 4 main divisions: physical anthropology, archaeology, cultural anthopology and liguistical anthropology. Each sub-discipline uses different techniques, taking different approaches to study man at all points in time.

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Initiation rite of the Yao people of Malawi

Historical and institutional context

The anthropologist Eric Wolf once described anthropology as "the most scientific of the humanities, and the most humanistic of the sciences." Contemporary anthropologists claim a number of earlier thinkers as their forebears, and the discipline has several sources; Claude Lévi-Strauss, for example, claimed Montaigne and Rousseau as important influences. Anthropology can best be understood as an outgrowth of the Age of Enlightenment, a period when Europeans attempted systematically to study human behavior. The traditions of jurisprudence, history, philology, and sociology then evolved into something more closely resembling the modern views of these disciplines and informed the development of the social sciences, of which anthropology was a part. At the same time, the romantic reaction to the Enlightenment produced thinkers, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and later Wilhelm Dilthey, whose work formed the basis for the "culture concept," which is central to the discipline.

Table of natural history, 1728 Cyclopaedia

Institutionally, anthropology emerged from the development of natural history (expounded by authors such as Buffon) that occurred during the European colonization of the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Programs of ethnographic study have their origins in this era as the study of the "human primitives" overseen by colonial administrations. There was a tendency in late 18th century Enlightenment thought to understand human society as natural phenomena that behaved in accordance with certain principles and that could be observed empirically.[1] In some ways, studying the language, culture, physiology, and artifacts of European colonies was not unlike studying the flora and fauna of those places.

Anthropology grew increasingly distinct from natural history, and by the end of the nineteenth century, it had begun to crystallize into its modern form; by 1935, for example, it was possible for T. K. Penniman to write a history of the discipline entitled "A Hundred Years of Anthropology." Early anthropology was dominated by proponents of unilinealism, who argued that all societies passed through a single evolutionary process, from the most primitive to the most advanced. Non-European societies were thus seen as evolutionary "living fossils," which could be studied in order to understand the European past. Scholars wrote histories of prehistoric migrations that were sometimes valuable but often also fanciful. It was during this time that Europeans, such as Paul Rivet, first accurately traced Polynesian migrations across the Pacific Ocean—though some of them believed those emigrations had originated in Egypt. Finally, concepts of race were developed with a view to better understanding the nature of the biological variation within the Human species, and tools such as Anthropometry were devised as a means of measuring and categorizing this variation, not just within the genus Homo, but in fossil Hominids and primates as well. Unfortunately racialistic concepts were abused by a few and gave rise to theories of Scientific racism.

Anténor Firmin wrote De l'égalité des races humaines (1885) as a direct rebuttal to Count Arthur de Gobineau’s polemical four-volume work Essai sur l'inegalite des Races Humaines (1853–1855), which asserted the superiority of the Aryan race and the inferiority of blacks and other people of color. Firmin’s work argued the opposite, that "all men are endowed with the same qualities and the same faults, without distinction of color or anatomical form. The races are equal" (pp. 450). Firmin grew up in Haiti, and was admitted to the Societé d’ Anthropologie de Paris in 1884 while serving as a diplomat. His persuasive critique and rigorous analysis of many of that society’s leading scholars made him an early pioneer in the so-called vindicationist struggle in anthropology. Many scholars also associate his work with the very first ideas of Pan-Africanism.

Drawing on the methods of the natural sciences and developing new techniques involving not only structured interviews, but unstructured participant observation, and drawing on the new theory of evolution through natural selection, the branches of anthropology proposed the scientific study of a new object: humankind, conceived of as a whole. Crucial to this study is the concept of culture, which anthropologists defined both as a universal capacity and a propensity for social learning, thinking, and acting (which they saw as a product of human evolution and something that distinguishes Homo sapiens—and perhaps all species of genus Homo—from other species), and as a particular adaptation to local conditions, which takes the form of highly variable beliefs and practices. Thus, culture not only transcends the opposition between nature and nurture, but absorbs the peculiarly European distinction among politics, religion, kinship, and the economy as autonomous domains. Anthropology thus transcends the divisions between the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities to explore the biological, linguistic, material, and symbolic dimensions of humankind in all forms.

Academic Branches

Physical Anthropology

Physical Anthropology is the field that considers the biology and physiology of humanity, from our primate ancestors to modern day humans. Beginning with...

Since the primary focus of physical anthropology is with human evolution, primateology is a closely linked sub-field of the discipline. Understanding our current day closest relatives, the primates, helps us to understand the evolutionary process from ape to man. Physical anthropologists are constantly at work in Africa and Asia, unearthing new skeletal and technological remains that contuniully push the antiquity of man back farther and show his earlier achievements as greater than previously thought. Similarly, remains found in the New World have challenged the long held beliefs of when the Americas were emigrated to.

Not all physical anthropologists deal with the far past and hominid variants of the Homo Sapien line. Forensic anthropologists are used around the world to identify the remains of murder and disaster victims. One of the most famous forensic anthropologists, Clyde Snow, has made his career identifying the remains of mass murders and genocide in war torn countries [2] Another emerging sub-discipline is population genetics, which tracks and studies contemporary groups of people and the physical/genetic differences between modern day people, which similar studies had in the early and mid 20th century proved that notions of race were scientifically unsubstantial. One of the major discoveries in the field was of how to track lineage through mitochondria DNA and Y Chromosome, in effect possibly being able to track the origins of the modern population to its Afrian genetic ancestors.

Other sub-fields of the discipline include:

Cultural Anthropology

the primary focus of the branch being the study of human culture. In regards to humanity, culture can deal with a host of subjects, such as religion, mythology, art, music, government systems, social structures and hierarchies, family dynamics, traditions and customs as well as cuisine, economy and relationship to the envirnoment. Any and all of these factors make up important aspects of culture and behavior and are some of the pieces of human history that cultural anthropology tries to put to together into a larger, more comprehensive picture of the human experience.

Interest in other cultures harks back to the 15th Century, when exploration of the world was beginning to blossom with the discovery of America. The rise of colonialism and discovery of the new world brought the long separated cultures of Western Europe and the Americas, along with cultures of Asia, Africa and the Pacific into more frequent contact. Occidental interest in the “other” peoples of the New World, propagated by early, popular and mostly inaccurate travel narratives, gave rise to ethnocentric mentalities of people as "primitive", "savages" or "noble savages". Such perspectives were wide spread in Europe and were sometimes used as the basis for colonial rule. The legacy of cultural anthropology as a pseudo-scientific justification for racial superiority and oppression has been difficult for the discipline to overcome entirely, especially since it was distorted cultural anthropology that led to such atrocities as the forced removal of Native Americans from their land during the Jackson Administration and the philosophy of Aryian superiority during the Third Reich. [2] Even today, when cultural anthropology has become a recognized, legitimate academic discipline, there is still feelings of distrust, such as how some current Native Americans view anthropologists as arrogant and intrusive. Yet, as early as the 19th century, during the peak of anthropological misuse, there were honest academics attempting to scientifically analyze culture so as to understand humanity.

With the rise of history, antiquity and humanities studies, along with the natural sciences, during the 19th century, such scholars as E.B. Taylor and J.G. Frazer began to plant the seeds of cultural anthropology, wondering why people living in different parts of the world sometimes had similar beliefs and practices. This question became the underlying concern of cultural anthropology and distinguished the academic discipline as its own separate branch of anthropological studies. One scholar who tried to answer this question was Grafton Elliot Smith, who argued that different groups must somehow have learned from one another, as if cultural traits were being spread from one place to another, or “diffused”. Others argued that different groups had the capability of inventing similar beliefs and practices independently. Some of those who advocated "independent invention", like Lewis Henry Morgan, additionally supposed that similarities meant that different groups had passed through the same stages of cultural evolution. [edit] The Beginnings of Ethnology

A breakthrough in cultural anthropological methodology happened in Britain following World War I, pioneered by Bronislaw Malinowski’s meticulous process-oriented fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands of Melanesia between 1915 and 1918 and through a theoretical program for systematic comparison that was based on a conception of rigorous fieldwork and the structure-functionalist conception of Durkheim’s sociology, became the basis of ethnography. Other intellectual founders include W. H. R. Rivers and A. C. Haddon, whose orientation reflected the contemporary Volkerpsychologie of Wilhelm Wundt and Adolph Bastian. Although 19th century ethnologists saw "diffusion" and "independent invention" as mutually exclusive and competing theories, most ethnographers quickly reached a consensus that both processes occur, and that both can plausibly account for cross-cultural similarities.

Sub-fields include:

    • Anthropology of art
    • Anthropology of religion
    • Applied anthropology
    • Cross-cultural studies
    • Cyber anthropology
    • Economic anthropology
    • Ecological anthropology
    • Ethnobotany
    • Ethnography
    • Ethnomusicology
    • Ethnozoology
    • Psychological anthropology (also known as culture-and-personality studies)
    • Political anthropology
    • Urban anthropology
    • Visual anthropology


Archaeology

Archaeology studies human cultures through the recovery, documentation, and analysis of material remains and environmental data, including architecture, artifacts, biofacts, human remains, and landscapes. While there are numerous goals pertaining to its various sub-disciplines, the main goal of archaeology is to create the most thorough understanding of how and why both historical and prehistoric people lived, to understand the evolution of human society and civilizations, and to use knowledge of our ancestors’ history to discover insights into our modern day societies. Through such efforts, it is hoped that archaeology will support increased understanding among the various peoples of the world, and thus aid in the growth of peace and harmony among all humankind.

Sub-fields include:


Lingustic Anthropology

Politics of anthropology

American cultural anthropology developed during the first four decades of the 20th century under the powerful influence of Franz Boas and his students and their struggle against racial determinism and the ethnocentrism of 19th century cultural evolutionism. With the additional impact of the Great Depression and World War II, American anthropology developed a pronounced liberal-left tone by the 1950s. However, the discipline's deep involvement with nonwestern cultures put it in a vulnerable position during the campus upheavals of the late 1960s and in the subsequent "culture wars." The "politics of anthropology" has become a pervasive concern since then. Whatever the realities, the notion of anthropology as somehow complicit in morally unacceptable projects has become a significant topic both within the discipline and in "cultural studies" and "post-colonialism," etc. A few of the central elements in this discourse are the following:

  • The claim that the discipline grew out of colonialism, perhaps was in league with it, and derived some of its key notions from it, consciously or not. (See, for example, Gough, Pels and Salemink, but cf. Lewis 2004). It is often assumed that an example of this exploitative relationship can be seen in the relationship between of British anthropologists and colonial forces in Africa, yet this assumption has not been supported by much evidence. (See Asad et al; cf. Desai.)
  • The idea that social and political problems must arise because anthropologists usually have more power than the people they study; it is a form of colonialist theft in which the anthropologist gains power at the expense of subjects (Rabinow, Dwyer, McGrane). Anthropologists, they argue, can gain yet more power by exploiting knowledge and artifacts of the people they study while the people they study gain nothing, or even lose, in the exchange (for example, Deloria). Little critical writing has been published in response to these wide-ranging claims, themselves the product of the political concerns and atmosphere of their own times. (See Trencher for a critique.)
  • It is claimed the discipline was ahistorical, and dealt with its "objects" (sic) "out of time," to their detriment (Fabian). It is often claimed that anthropologists regularly "exoticized 'the Other,'" or, with equal assurance, that they inappropriately universalized "Others" and "human nature." (For references and a response see Lewis 1998.)
  • Other more explicitly political concerns have to do with anthropologists’ entanglements with government intelligence agencies, on the one hand, and anti-war politics on the other. Franz Boas publicly objected to US participation in World War I, and after the war he published a brief expose and condemnation of the participation of several American archeologists in espionage in Mexico under their cover as scientists. But by the 1940s, many of Boas' anthropologist contemporaries were active in the allied war effort against the "Axis" (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan). Many served in the armed forces but others worked in intelligence (for example, Office of Strategic Services [OSS} and the Office of War Information). David H. Price's work on American anthropology during the Cold War provides detailed accounts of the pursuit and dismissal of several anthropologists for their vocal left-wing sympathies. On the other hand, attempts to accuse anthropologists of complicity with the CIA and government intelligence activities during the Vietnam War years have turned up surprisingly little. (Anthropologists did not participate in the stillborn Project Camelot, for example. See Lewis 2005) On the contrary, many anthropologists (students and teachers) were active in the antiwar movement and a great many resolutions condemning the war in all its aspects were passed overwhelmingly at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). In the decades since the Vietnam war the tone of cultural and social anthropology, at least, has been increasingly politicized, with the dominant liberal tone of earlier generations replaced with one more radical, a mix of, and varying degrees of, Marxist, feminist, post-colonial, post-modern, Saidian, Foucaultian, identity-based, and more.
  • Internationally known professor of evolutionary psychology, Kevin B. MacDonald criticized Boasian anthropology as part of a "Jewish strategy to facilitate mass immigration and to weaken the West" (The Culture of Critique, 2002).

Professional anthropological bodies often object to the use of anthropology for the benefit of the state. Their codes of ethics or statements may proscribe anthropologists from giving secret briefings. The British Association for Social Anthropology has called certain scholarships ethically dangerous. The AAA's current 'Statement of Professional Responsibility' clearly states that "in relation with their own government and with host governments... no secret research, no secret reports or debriefings of any kind should be agreed to or given."

More recently, there have been concerns expressed about bioprospecting, along with struggles for self-representation for native peoples and the repatriation of indigenous remains and material culture, with anthropologists often in the lead on these issues.

Other political controversies come from the emphasis in American anthropology on cultural relativism and its long-standing antipathy to the concept of race. The development of sociobiology in the late 1960s was opposed by cultural anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins, who argued that these positions were reductive. While authors such John Randal Baker continued to develop the biological concept of race into the 1970s, the rise of genetics has proven to be central to developments on this front. As genetics continues to advance as a science some anthropologists such as Luca Cavalli-Sforza have continued to transform and advance notions of race through the use of recent developments in genetics, such as tracing past migrations of peoples through their mitochondrial and Y-chromosomal DNA, and ancestry-informative markers.

Anthropological fields and subfields

  • Physical anthropology (also known as biological anthropology)
    • Forensic anthropology
    • Paleobotany
    • Paleopathology
    • Paleozoology
    • Medical anthropology
    • Primatology
    • Paleoanthropology (also known as human paleontology)
  • Cultural anthropology (also known as social anthropology and ethnology)
    • Anthropology of art
    • Anthropology of religion
    • Applied anthropology
    • Cross-cultural studies
    • Cyber anthropology
    • Economic anthropology
    • Ecological anthropology
    • Ethnobotany
    • Ethnography
    • Ethnomusicology
    • Ethnozoology
    • Psychological anthropology (also known as culture-and-personality studies)
    • Political anthropology
    • Urban anthropology
    • Visual anthropology
  • Linguistic anthropology (also known as Anthropological linguistics, related to Linguistics, often employing its methods and techniques)
    • Ethnolinguistics
    • Sociolinguistics
  • Archaeology
    • Archaeobotany
    • Archaeozoology

Footnotes

  1. see, for instance, the writing of Auguste Comte
  2. Haviland, William A. "Anthropology" 9th Ed. Orlando: Harcourt, 2000.

References
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  • Asad, Talal (ed.) 1973. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter.
  • Darnell, Regna. 2001. Invisible Genealogies: A History of Americanist Anthropology.
  • Desai, Gaurav. 2001. Subject to Colonialism: African Self-Fashioning and the Colonial Library.
  • Lewis, Herbert S. 1998. "The Misrepresentation of Anthropology and its Consequences." American Anthropologist, v, 100.
  • Lewis, Herbert S. 2004. "Imagining Anthropology's History." Reviews in Anthropology, v. 33.
  • Lewis, Herbert S. 2005. "Anthropology, the Cold War, and Intellectual History. In R. Darnell & F.W. Gleach (eds.), Histories of Anthropology Annual, Vol. I.
  • Pels, Peter & Oscar Salemink, eds. 2000. Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology.
  • Price, David. 2004. Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists.
  • Rabinow, Paul. 1977. Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco.
  • Trencher, Susan. 2000. Mirrored Images: American Anthropology and American Culture, 1960-1980.

External links

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