anthropology meaning essay

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What Is Anthropology?

What is anthropology ? The word “anthropology” literally means “the science of humanity.” Lots of disciplines could lay claim to the same highfalutin title, from anatomists to historians to psychologists. Yet there is something about the anthropological study of “everything human” that makes anthropologists different and, in my opinion, gives us the primary right to the phrase “we study people.”

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Perhaps the most obvious thing that distinguishes anthropologists from other scholars is the way we approach our task. Definitions of anthropology tend to focus on the methods we’re famous for: ethnography , involving immersion in a particular community; participant observation , which entails taking part in activities we want to understand; and excavation , the focused examination of materials humans and their ancestors have left behind.

In North America, anthropology includes four major fields of study: archaeology , biological anthropology , cultural anthropology , and linguistic anthropology .

Anthropologists use these and other approaches to study all aspects of human existence, past and present. We include in our numbers archaeologists , who study people (but not dinosaurs) from the material traces they leave; linguistic anthropologists, who understand humans from the ways they use language ; and biological anthropologists  and paleoanthropologists , who understand them from their long history and immense physical variety. We also include sociocultural anthropologists , who document the meanings humans make of the different worlds they inhabit.

Anthropologists do research  in laboratories ,  on farms ,  in U.N. agencies , on football fields , and in virtual worlds . We  dig , we  count , we interview , and we map . We run experiments on pottery production and primate locomotion . We join groups, from religious sects to country-western bands . We study social movements —from #MeToo to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign .

The goal of anthropology is to understand what it means to be human in all our wondrous diversity and complexity. Anthropologists aspire to approach humans holistically, seeing ourselves as products of our histories lying at the intersection of biology and culture.

In U.S. universities, we are housed in the same departments; elsewhere, we are scattered across campuses. Many more anthropologists escape disciplinary boundaries by working outside the academy in “applied” settings—documenting heritage sites before their destruction, advocating for humane immigration policies , improving space travel , or fighting an Ebola outbreak . We study many different human things, in stunningly different ways.

“No one ever tells you, ‘That’s not an anthropological question,’” the U.S. sociocultural anthropologist Kathleen Stewart  once told me.

Given this variety , fuzzy lines surround the discipline: An anthropologist in one country or institution may be labeled a historian or sociologist in another. But there is another important thing that sets us apart from similar fields: Anthropologists typically sacrifice breadth for depth.

A psychologist might administer a survey involving hundreds of individuals to learn something generalizable about the human mind. We are less interested in the mind in general than in  specific minds , studied intensively, a few at a time. Anthropologists, like other social scientists, compare: We compare species, populations, and societies, past and present. But, as we compare, we insist on the importance of context—on the who , what , where , and when that shape what we observe.

Anthropology provides a lens for seeing your world in new and different ways. It frames humans as the result of evolution over millions of years, with both a common humanity and wide diversity. It can help you decipher the news, tracing power dynamics and how knowledge is used as power .

It challenges you to rethink your assumptions of childhood , gender , nation , body , and much more. It can help identify the roots of real-world problems such as racism or in institutions such as health care and educational systems. Anthropology is a tool for understanding there are many ways of being in the world—all so different while also contributing to the whole of the human story.

This is true for sociocultural anthropologists, who aren’t just interested in human cognition or volition (otherwise known as will or desire), but in how certain people think and what they value , given the circumstances in which they live . It also holds for linguistic anthropologists, who are less concerned with grammar than with the way particular people communicate  and how language shapes their place in the world. Archaeologists not only try to describe past trends, they also attempt to re-create past lives . For biological anthropologists, the human is not a model organism like a fruit fly or a mouse. They’re not in search of the general principles of evolution; they want to know  how humans became the kind of animals we are.

Anthropologists know that our findings on the human condition  are provisional . Because we insist on the distinct size and shape of the pieces we add to the puzzle of human existence, our conclusions are rarely one-size-fits-all. When we generalize, we do so modestly, with a sense of adventure. We are constantly looking for new ways to tell tales that ring true.

Anthropology matters because what it means to be human—our art , communication , emotions , food , health , identity , memory , politics , relationships , religion , violence , and much more—are unsolved mysteries. Anthropology is a unique and powerful tool for understanding where we came from, who we are today, and what may happen to us in the future.

Of course, there’s a lot more to say about our quirky discipline: about our penchant for poaching theories and methods from other fields; about our past, when anthropology gave a pseudoscientific veneer to colonialism and racism , and how we are grappling with this legacy ; about the growing number of Indigenous and Black anthropologists joining the ranks.

But I think I’ve hit upon what makes us special. Anthropologists study people—particular people, in particular times and places—and what makes them human in their own distinctive ways.

Danilyn Rutherford is the president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, which funds SAPIENS. Previously, she was an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago and, more recently, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Raiding the Land of the Foreigners , Laughing at Leviathan , and Living in the Stone Age .

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What is Anthropology?

Anthropology is the study of what makes us human..

To understand the full sweep and complexity of cultures across all of human history, anthropology draws and builds upon knowledge from the social and biological sciences as well as the humanities and physical sciences.

Anthropology takes a broad approach to understanding the many different aspects of the human experience. Some anthropologists consider what makes up our biological bodies and genetics, as well as our bones, diet, and health. Others look to the past to see how human groups lived hundreds or thousands of years ago and what was important to them. Around the world, they observe communities as they exist today, to understand the practices of different groups of people from an insider’s perspective. And they study how people use language, make meaning, and organize social action in all social groups and contexts.

In the community of anthropologists in the United States, these four fields—human biology, archaeology, cultural anthropology, and linguistics—are understood to be the pillars on which the whole discipline rests. Any individual anthropologist will probably specialize in one or two of these areas but have general familiarity with them all.

We understand these varied approaches to complement one another and give a well-rounded picture not only of what we all share as humans, but also of our rich diversity across time, space, and social settings. For example, everyone needs to eat, but people eat different foods and get food in different ways, so anthropologists look at how different groups of people get food, prepare it, and share it. They look at the meaning of different food traditions, such as what makes a dish appropriate for a special occasion. They focus on the intersection of culture and biology to understand what food is available in a community, why people make the choices they do, and how these choices relate to health and well-being. They compare these practices with others around the world, as well as what they can learn from the ancient archaeological record. And they use these insights to work toward a world where everyone has enough to eat and traditional foodways are celebrated and maintained.

The video below highlights a few anthropologists who have done very different kinds of things with their anthropological knowledge and approach. We highlight the diverse fields of technology innovation, urban planning, historic preservation, communications strategy, and forensic investigation to illustrate how, whatever people are doing, it’s all anthropology .

History and Branches of Anthropology

Anthropology is the study of the origin and development of human societies and cultures.

Anthropology, Archaeology, Sociology, Earth Science, Geology, Geography, Human Geography, Social Studies, Ancient Civilizations, World History

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Anthropology  is the study of the origin and development of human societies and cultures . Culture is the learned behavior of people, including their languages , belief systems, social structures, institutions, and material goods. Anthropologists study the  characteristics of past and present human communities through a variety of techniques. In doing so, they investigate and describe how different peoples of our world lived throughout history. Anthropologists aim to study and present their human subjects in a clear and un biased way. They attempt to achieve this by observing subjects in their local environment. Anthropologists then describe interactions and customs, a process known as  ethnography . By participating in the everyday life of their subjects, anthropologists can better understand and explain the purpose of local institutions, culture, and practices. This process is known as  participant-observation . As anthropologists study societies and cultures different from their own, they must evaluate their interpretations to make sure they aren’t biased. This bias is known as  ethnocentrism , or the habit of viewing all groups as inferior to another, usually their own, cultural group. Taken as a whole, these steps enable anthropologists to describe people through the people's own terms. Subdisciplines of Anthropology Anthropology’s diverse topics of study are generally categorized in four subdisciplines. A subdiscipline is a specialized field of study within a broader subject or discipline. Anthropologists specialize in cultural or social anthropology ,  linguistic anthropology , biological or physical anthropology, and archaeology . While subdisciplines can overlap and are not always seen by  scholars as  distinct , each tends to use different techniques and methods. Cultural Anthropology Cultural anthropology, also known as social anthropology, is the study of the learned behavior of groups of people in specific environments. Cultural anthropologists base their work in ethnography, a research method that uses field work and participant-observation to study individual cultures and customs. Elizabeth Kapu'uwailani Lindsey is a National Geographic Fellow in anthropology. As a doctoral student, she documented rare and nearly lost traditions of the  palu , Micronesian navigators who don’t use maps or instruments. Among the traditions she studied were the chants and practices of the Satawalese, a tiny cultural group native to a single coral  atoll  in the Federated States of Micronesia. Cultural anthropologists who analyze and compare different cultures are known as ethnologists. Ethnologists may observe how specific customs develop differently in different cultures and interpret why these differences exist. National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis is an ethnobotanist . He spent more than three years in Latin America , collecting and studying plants that different indigenous groups use in their daily lives. His work compares how these groups understand and use plants as food, medicine, and in religious ceremonies. Linguistic Anthropology Linguistic anthropology is the study of how language influences social life. Linguistic anthropologists say language provides people with the intellectual tools for thinking and acting in the world. Linguistic anthropologists focus on how language shapes societies and their social networks, cultural beliefs, and understanding of themselves and their environments. To understand how people use language for social and cultural purposes, linguistic anthropologists closely document what people say as they engage in daily social activities. This documentation relies on participant-observation and other methods, including audiovisual recording and interviews with participants. Lera Boroditsky, a  cognitive scientist , studies forms of communication among the Pormpuraaw, an Aboriginal community in Australia. Boroditsky found that almost all daily activities and conversations were placed within the context of  cardinal directions . For example, when greeting someone in Pormpuraaw, one asks, “Where are you going?” A response may be: “A long way to the south-southwest.” A person might warn another, “There is a snake near your northwest foot.” This language enables the Pormpuraaw to locate and navigate themselves in landscapes with extreme precision, but makes communication nearly impossible for those without an absolute knowledge of cardinal directions. Linguistic anthropologists may document native languages that are in danger of  extinction . The Enduring Voices Project at National Geographic aimed to prevent language extinction by embarking on expeditions that create textual, visual, and auditory records of threatened languages. The project also assisted indigenous communities in their efforts to revitalize and maintain their languages. Enduring Voices has documented the Chipaya language of Bolivia, the Yshyr Chamacoco language of Paraguay, and the Matugar Panau language of Papua New Guinea, among many others. Biological Anthropology Biological anthropology, also known as physical anthropology, is the study of the  evolution  of human beings and their living and  fossil  relatives. Biological anthropology places human evolution within the context of human culture and behavior. This means biological anthropologists look at how physical developments, such as changes in our skeletal or genetic makeup, are interconnected with social and cultural behaviors throughout history.

To understand how humans evolved from earlier life forms, some biological anthropologists study  primates , such as monkeys and apes. Primates are considered our closest living relatives. Analyzing the similarities and differences between human beings and the “ great apes ” helps biological anthropologists understand human evolution. Jane Goodall , a primatologist , has studied wild chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes ) in Tanzania for more than 40 years. By living with these primates for extended periods of time, Goodall discovered a number of similarities between humans and chimpanzees. One of the most notable of Goodall’s discoveries was that chimpanzees use basic tools, such as sticks. Toolmaking is considered a key juncture in human evolution. Biological anthropologists link the evolution of the human hand, with a longer thumb and stronger gripping muscles, to our ancient ancestors ’ focus on toolmaking. Other biological anthropologists examine the skeletal remains of our human ancestors to see how we have adapted to different physical environments and social structures over time. This specialty is known as human paleontology , or  paleoanthropology . Zeresenay Alemseged, a National Geographic Explorer, examines  hominid  fossils found at the Busidima-Dikika anthropological site in Ethiopia. Alemseged’s work aims to prove that a wide diversity of early hominid species existed three million to four million years ago. Paleoanthropologists study why some hominid species were able to survive for thousands of years, while others were not. Biological anthropology may focus on how the biological characteristics of living people are related to their social or cultural practices. The Ju/’hoansi, a foraging society of Namibia, for example, have developed unique physical characteristics in response to cold weather and a lack of high-calorie foods. A thick layer of fat protects vital organs of the chest and abdomen , and veins shrink at night. This reduces the Ju/’hoansi’s heat loss and keeps their core body temperature at normal levels. Archaeology Archaeology is the study of the human past using material remains. These remains can be any objects that people created, modified, or used. Archaeologists carefully uncover and examine these objects in order to interpret the experiences and activities of peoples and  civilizations throughout history. Archaeologists often focus their work on a specific period of history. Archaeologists may study  prehistoric  cultures—cultures that existed before the invention of writing. These studies are important because reconstructing a prehistoric culture’s way of life can only be done through interpreting the  artifacts they left behind. For example, macaw eggshells, skeletal remains, and ceramic imagery recovered at archaeological sites in the United States Southwest suggest the important role macaws played as exotic trade items and objects of worship for prehistoric peoples in that area. Other archaeologists may focus their studies on a specific culture or aspect of cultural life. Constanza Ceruti, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer, is a high-altitude archaeologist specializing in artifacts and features of the Incan Empire. Along with archaeological evidence, Ceruti analyzes historical sources and traditional Andean beliefs. These data help her reconstruct what ancient sites looked like, the symbolic meaning behind each artifact, and how ceremonies took place. History of Anthropology Throughout history, the study of anthropology has reflected our evolving relationships with other people and cultures. These relationships are deeply connected to political,  economic , and social forces present at different points in history. The study of history was an important aspect of ancient Greek and Roman cultures, which focused on using reason and  inquiry  to understand and create just societies.  Herodotus , a Greek historian, traveled through regions as far-flung as present-day Libya, Ukraine, Egypt, and Syria during the fifth century B.C.E. Herodotus traveled to these places to understand the origins of conflict between Greeks and Persians. Along with historical accounts, Herodotus described the customs and social structures of the peoples he visited. These detailed observations are considered one of the world’s first exercises in ethnography. The establishment of exchange routes was also an important development in expanding an interest in societies and cultures. Zhang Qian was a diplomat who negotiated trade agreements and treaties between China and communities throughout Central Asia, for instance. Zhang’s  diplomacy  and interest in Central Asia helped spur the development of the  Silk Road , one of history’s greatest networks for trade, communication, and exchange. The Silk Road provided a vital link between Asia, East Africa, and Eastern Europe for thousands of years. Medieval scholars and explorers, who traveled the world to develop new trading partnerships, continued to keep accounts of cultures they encountered. Marco Polo, a Venetian  merchant , wrote the first detailed descriptions of Central Asia and China, where he traveled for 24 years. Polo’s writings greatly elaborated Europe’s early understandings of Asia, its peoples, and practices. Ibn Battuta traveled much more extensively than Marco Polo. Battuta was a Moroccan scholar who regularly traveled throughout North Africa and the Middle East. His expeditions, as far east as India and China, and as far south as Kenya, are recorded in his memoir, the  Rihla .

Many scholars argue that modern anthropology developed during the  Age of Enlightenment , a cultural movement of 18th century Europe that focused on the power of reason to advance society and knowledge. Enlightenment scholars aimed to understand human behavior and society as  phenomena  that followed defined  principles . This work was strongly influenced by the work of natural historians, such as Georges Buffon. Buffon studied humanity as a  zoological  species—a community of  Homo sapiens  was just one part of the  flora  and  fauna  of an area. Europeans applied the principles of natural history to document the inhabitants of newly  colonized territories and other indigenous cultures they came in contact with. Colonial scholars studied these cultures as “human primitives,” inferior to the advanced societies of Europe. These studies justified the colonial agenda by describing foreign territories and peoples as needing European reason and control. Today, we recognize these studies as racist. Colonial thought deeply affected the work of 19th century anthropologists. They followed two main theories in their studies:  evolutionism  and  diffusionism . Evolutionists argued that all societies develop in a predictable, universal sequence . Anthropologists who believed in evolutionism placed cultures within this sequence. They placed non-Eurocentric colonies into the “ savagery ” stage and only considered European powers to be in the “civilizations” stage. Evolutionists believed that all societies would reach the civilization stage when they adopted the traits of these powers. Conversely, they studied “savage” societies as a means of understanding the primitive origins of European civilizations. Diffusionists believed all societies stemmed from a set of “ culture circles ” that spread, or diffused , their practices throughout the world. By analyzing and comparing the cultural traits of a society, diffusionists could determine from which culture circle that society derived. W.J. Perry, a British anthropologist, believed all aspects of world cultures— agriculture ,  domesticated animals, pottery, civilization itself—developed from a single culture circle: Egypt. Diffusionists and evolutionists both argued that all cultures could be compared to one another. They also believed certain cultures (mostly their own) were superior to others. These theories were sharply criticized by 20th-century anthropologists who strived to understand particular cultures in those cultures’ own terms, not in comparison to European traditions. The theory of  cultural relativism , supported by pioneering German-American anthropologist Franz Boas , argued that one could only understand a person’s beliefs and behaviors in the context of his or her own culture. To put societies in cultural context, anthropologists began to live in these societies for long periods of time. They used the tools of participant-observation and ethnography to understand and describe the social and cultural life of a group more fully. Turning away from comparing cultures and finding universal laws about human behavior, modern anthropologists describe particular cultures or societies at a given place and time. Other anthropologists began to criticize the discipline’s focus on cultures from the developing world. These anthropologists turned to analyzing the practices of everyday life in the developed world. As a result, ethnographic work has been conducted on a wider variety of human societies, from university hierarchies to high school sports teams to residents of retirement homes. Anthropology Today New technologies and emerging fields of study enable contemporary anthropologists to uncover and analyze more complex information about peoples and cultures. Archaeologists and biological anthropologists use  CT scanners , which combine a series of  X-ray  views taken from different angles, to produce  cross-sectional images of the bones and  soft tissues inside human remains. Zahi Hawass, a former National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, has used CT scans on ancient Egyptian mummies to learn more about patterns of disease, health, and mortality in ancient Egypt. These scans revealed one  mummy  as an obese, 50-year-old woman who suffered from tooth decay. Hawass and his team were able to identify this mummy as Queen Hatshepsut, a major figure in Egyptian history, after finding one of her missing teeth in a ritual box inscribed with her name. The field of  genetics  uses elements of anthropology and biology. Genetics is the study of how characteristics are passed down from one generation to the next. Geneticists study  DNA , a chemical in every living cell of every organism. DNA studies suggest all human beings descend from a group of ancestors, some of whom began to  migrate  out of Central Africa about 60,000 years ago. Anthropologists also apply their skills and tools to understand how humans create new social connections and cultural identities. Michael Wesch, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer, is studying how new media platforms and digital technologies, such as Facebook and YouTube, are changing how people communicate and relate to one another. As a “digital ethnographer,” Wesch’s findings about our relationships to new media are often presented as videos or interactive web experiences that incorporate hundreds of participant-observers. Wesch is one of many anthropologists expanding how we understand and navigate our digital environment and our approach to anthropological research.

Margaret Mead One of the most famous and controversial anthropologists of the 20th century is Margaret Mead. Mead was an American scientist who gained popular and academic success following the publication of her first book,  Coming of Age in Samoa , in 1928. Mead lived and interacted with the people of Tau, Samoa, for her research. She documented an open-minded society where young women and men regularly engaged in casual sex. This was troubling to many Westerners, who had much more conservative attitudes. However,  Coming of Age in Samoa  remains the most popular anthropology book ever published. Since her death in 1978, anthropologists have questioned Margaret Meads’ methods. Some of her conclusions may have been more a product of the time in which she studied, rather than an unbiased look at a unique culture. Some of the women interviewed for  Coming of Age in Samoa  accuse Mead of coaxing them in what to say. Meads problematic methodology has put many of her anthropological conclusions into doubt.

Cultural Variety Anthropology has dozens of specialties. Some sections listed by the American Anthropological Association are:

• Africanist Anthropology
• Anthropology and the Environment
• Anthropology of Food and Nutrition
• Anthropology of Religion
• Feminist Anthropology
• Medical Anthropology
• Museum Anthropology
• Political and Legal Anthropology
• Queer Anthropology

Zora Neale Hurston The short stories and novels of Zora Neale Hurston are an integral part of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement among African Americans during the 1920s and 1930s. Hurston was also an important anthropologist. Hurston graduated from Barnard College, where she was the only black student, before being awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship and conducting field work throughout the Caribbean and Central America. Their Eyes Were Watching God , considered to be Hurston’s masterpiece, was written while she was conducting anthropological field work in Haiti.

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1 Introduction to Anthropology

Katie nelson, inver hills community college [email protected] http://kanelson.com/, lara braff, grossmont college [email protected].

Learning Objectives

Identify the four subfields of anthropology and describe the kinds of research projects associated with each subfield.

Define culture and the six characteristics of culture.

Describe how anthropology developed from early explorations of the world through the professionalization of the discipline in the nineteenth century.

Discuss ethnocentrism and the role it played in early attempts to understand other cultures.

Explain how the perspectives of holism, cultural relativism, comparison, and fieldwork, as well as both scientific and humanistic tendencies make anthropology a unique discipline.

Evaluate the ways in which anthropology can be used to address current social, political, and economic issues.

The first time I (Katie Nelson) heard the word anthropology, I was seventeen years old and sitting at the kitchen table in my home in rural Minnesota. My mother was stirring a pot of chili on the stove. My dog was barking (again) at the squirrels outside. Her low bawl filtered through the screen door left open on the porch. It was the summer before I was to start college and I had a Macalester College course catalog spread out in front of me as I set about carefully selecting the courses that would make up my fall class schedule. When I applied to college, I had indicated in my application that I was interested in studying creative writing, poetry specifically. But I also had a passion for languages and people: observing people, interacting with people and understanding people, especially those who were culturally different from myself. I noticed a course in the catalog entitled “Cultural Anthropology.” I did not know exactly what I would learn, but the course description appealed to me and I signed up for it. Several weeks later, I knew what my major would be– anthropology!

Like Katie, I (Lara Braff) started college with a curiosity about people but no clear major. In my second year, without knowing what anthropology was, I enrolled in an anthropology course called “Controlling Processes.” Throughout the semester, the professor encouraged us to question how social institutions (like the government, schools, etc.) affect the ways we think and act. This inquiry resonated with my upbringing: my mother, who had immigrated to the United States in her twenties, often questioned U.S. customs that were unfamiliar to her. At times, this was profoundly disappointing to me as a child. For example, she could not understand the joyous potential of filling up on candy at Halloween, a holiday not celebrated in her country. Yet, her outsider perspective inspired in me a healthy skepticism about things that others take to be “normal.” As I took more anthropology courses, I became intrigued by diverse notions of normality found around the world.

If you are reading this textbook for your first anthropology course, you are likely wondering, much like we did, what anthropology is all about. Perhaps the course description appealed to you in some way, but you had a hard time articulating what exactly drove you to enroll. With this book, you are in the right place!

WHAT IS ANTHROPOLOGY?

Derived from Greek, the word anthropos means “human” and “logy” refers to the “study of.” Quite literally, anthropology is the study of humanity. It is the study of everything and anything that makes us human. [1] From cultures, to languages, to material remains and human evolution, anthropologists examine every dimension of humanity by asking compelling questions like: How did we come to be human and who are our ancestors? Why do people look and act so differently throughout the world? What do we all have in common? How have we changed culturally and biologically over time? What factors influence diverse human beliefs and behaviors throughout the world?

You may notice that these questions are very broad. Indeed, anthropology is an expansive field of study. It is comprised of four subfields that in the United States include cultural anthropology, archaeology, biological (or physical) anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. Together, the subfields provide a multi-faceted picture of the human condition. Applied anthropology is another area of specialization within or between the anthropological subfields. It aims to solve specific practical problems in collaboration with governmental, non-profit, and community organizations as well as businesses and corporations.

It is important to note that in other parts of the world, anthropology is structured differently. For instance, in the United Kingdom and many European countries, the subfield of cultural anthropology is referred to as social (or socio-cultural) anthropology. Archaeology, biological anthropology, and linguistic anthropology are frequently considered to be part of different disciplines. In some countries, like Mexico, anthropology tends to focus on the cultural and indigenous heritage of groups within the country rather than on comparative research. In Canada, some university anthropology departments mirror the British social anthropology model by combining sociology and anthropology. As noted above, in the United States and most commonly in Canada, anthropology is organized as a four-field discipline. You will read more about the development of this four-field approach in the Doing Fieldwork chapter (chapter three).

WHAT IS CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY?

The focus of this textbook is cultural anthropology, the largest of the subfields in the United States as measured by the number of people who graduate with PhDs each year. Cultural anthropologists study the similarities and differences among living societies and cultural groups. Through immersive fieldwork, living and working with the people one is studying, cultural anthropologists suspend their own sense of what is “normal” in order to understand other people’s perspectives. Beyond describing another way of life, anthropologists ask broader questions about humankind: Are human emotions universal or culturally specific? Does globalization make us all the same, or do people maintain cultural differences? For cultural anthropologists, no aspect of human life is outside their purview. They study art, religion, healing, natural disasters, and even pet cemeteries. While many anthropologists are at first intrigued by human diversity, they come to realize that people around the world share much in common.

Cultural anthropologists often study social groups that differ from their own, based on the view that fresh insights are generated by an outsider trying to understand the insider point of view. For example, beginning in the 1960s Jean Briggs (1929-2016) immersed herself in the life of Inuit people in the central Canadian arctic territory of Nunavut. She arrived knowing only a few words of their language, but ready to brave sub-zero temperatures to learn about this remote, rarely studied group of people. In her most famous book, Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family (1970), she argued that anger and strong negative emotions are not expressed among families that live together in small iglus amid harsh environmental conditions for much of the year. In contrast to scholars who see anger as an innate emotion, Briggs’ research shows that all human emotions develop through culturally specific child-rearing practices that foster some emotions and not others.

While cultural anthropologists traditionally conduct fieldwork in faraway places, they are increasingly turning their gaze inward to observe their own societies or subgroups within them. For instance, in the 1980s, American anthropologist Philippe Bourgois sought to understand why 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, New York. He contextualized their experiences both historically in terms of their Puerto Rican roots and migration to the U.S. and in the present as they experienced social marginalization and institutional racism. Rather than blame the crack dealers for their poor choices or blame our society for perpetuating inequality, he argued that both individual choices and social structures can trap people in the overlapping worlds of drugs and poverty (Bourgois 2003). For more about Bourgois, please see the interview with him in the learning resources, Anthropology in Our Moment in History .

WHAT IS CULTURE?

Cultural anthropologists study all aspects of culture, but what exactly is “culture”? When we (the authors) first ask students in our introductory cultural anthropology courses what culture means to them, our students typically say that culture is food, clothing, religion, language, traditions, art, music, and so forth. Indeed, culture includes many of these observable characteristics, but culture is also something deeper. Culture is a powerful defining characteristic of human groups that shapes our perceptions, behaviors, and relationships.

One reason that culture is difficult to define is that it encompasses all the intangible qualities that make people who they are. Culture is the “air we breathe:” it sustains and comprises us, yet we largely take it for granted. We are not always consciously aware of our own culture.

Furthermore, cultural anthropologists themselves do not always agree on what culture is. In defining culture, some anthropologists emphasize material life and objects (e.g. tools, clothing, and technologies); others emphasize culture as a system of intangible beliefs; and still others focus on practices or customs of daily life. We propose a broad definition of culture. [2]

Culture is a set of beliefs, practices, and symbols that are learned and shared. Together, they form an all-encompassing, integrated whole that binds people together and shapes their worldview and lifeways.

To say that a group of people shares a culture does not mean all individuals think or act in identical ways. One’s beliefs and practices can vary within a culture depending on age, gender, social status, and other characteristics. Yet, members of a culture share many things in common. While we are not born with a particular culture, we are born with the capacity to learn any culture. Through the process of enculturation , we learn to become members of our group both directly, through instruction from our parents and peers, and indirectly by observing and imitating those around us.

Culture constantly changes in response to both internal and external factors. Some parts of culture change more quickly than others. For instance, in dominant American culture, technology changes rapidly while deep seated values such as individualism, freedom, and self-determination change very little over time. Yet, inevitably, when one part of culture changes, so do other parts. This is because nearly all parts of a culture are integrated and interrelated. As powerful as culture is, humans are not necessarily bound by culture; they have the capacity to conform to it or not and even transform it.

In the definition above, b elief refers not just to what we “believe” to be right or wrong, true or false. Belief also refers to all the mental aspects of culture including values, norms, philosophies, worldview, knowledge, and so forth. Practices refers to behaviors and actions that may be motivated by belief or performed without reflection as part of everyday routines.

Much like art and language, culture is also symbolic. A symbol is something that stands for something else, often without a natural connection. Individuals create, interpret, and share the meanings of symbols within their group or the larger society. For example, in U.S. society everyone recognizes a red octagonal sign as signifying “stop.” In other cases, groups within American society interpret the same symbol in different ways. Take the Confederate flag: Some people see it as a symbol of pride in a southern heritage. Many others see it as a symbol of the long legacy of slavery, segregation, and racial oppression. Thus, displaying the Confederate flag could have positive or, more often, negative connotations. Cultural symbols powerfully convey either shared or conflicting meanings across space and time.

This definition of culture – shared, learned beliefs, practices, and symbols – allows us to understand that people everywhere are thinkers and actors shaped by their social contexts. As we will see throughout this book, these contexts are incredibly diverse, comprising the human cultural diversity that drew many of us to become anthropologists in the first place.

While culture is central to making us human, we are still biological beings with natural needs and urges that we share with other animals: hunger, thirst, sex, elimination, etc. Human culture uniquely channels these urges in particular ways and cultural practices can then impact our biology, growth, and development. Humans are one of the most dynamic species on Earth. Our ability to change both culturally and biologically has enabled us to persist for millions of years and to thrive in diverse environments.

Characteristics of Culture

Culture is a set of beliefs, practices, and symbols that are learned and shared. Together, they form an all-encompassing, integrated whole that binds groups of people together and shapes their worldview and lifeways. Additionally:

Humans are born with the capacity to learn the culture of any social group. We learn culture both directly and indirectly.

Culture changes in response to both internal and external factors.

Humans are not bound by culture; they have the capacity to conform to it or not, and sometimes change it.

Culture is symbolic; individuals create and share the meanings of symbols within their group or society.

The degree to which humans rely on culture distinguishes us from other animals and shaped our evolution.

Human culture and biology are interrelated: Our biology, growth, and development are impacted by culture.

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 (Wood 2004). 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 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, sub-Saharan 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 (Mackintosh-Smith 2003: ix). 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. [3]

Later, from the 1400s through the1700s, 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 slave trade fueled a growing European empire while forever disrupting previously independent cultures in the Old World. 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. 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.

THE (OTHER) SUBFIELDS OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Biological Anthropology

Biological anthropology is the study of human origins, evolution, and variation. Some biological anthropologists focus on our closest living relatives, monkeys and apes. They examine the biological and behavioral similarities and differences between nonhuman primates and human primates (us!). For example, Jane Goodall has devoted her life to studying wild chimpanzees (Goodall 1996). When she began her research in Tanzania in the 1960s, Goodall challenged widely held assumptions about the inherent differences between humans and apes. At the time, it was assumed that monkeys and apes lacked the social and emotional traits that made human beings such exceptional creatures. However, Goodall discovered that, like humans, chimpanzees also make tools, socialize their young, have intense emotional lives, and form strong maternal-infant bonds. Her work highlights the value of field-based research in natural settings that can help us understand the complex lives of nonhuman primates.

Other biological anthropologists focus on extinct human species, asking questions like: What did our ancestors look like? What did they eat? When did they start to speak? How did they adapt to new environments? In 2013, a team of women scientists excavated a trove of fossilized bones in the Dinaledi Chamber of the Rising Star Cave system in South Africa. The bones turned out to belong to a previously unknown hominin species that was later named Homo naledi . With over 1,550 specimens from at least fifteen individuals, the site is the largest collection of a single hominin species found in Africa (Berger, 2015). Researchers are still working to determine how the bones were left in the deep, hard to access cave and whether or not they were deliberately placed there. They also want to know what Homo naledi ate, if this species made and used tools, and how they are related to other Homo species. Biological anthropologists who study ancient human relatives are called paleoanthropologists . The field of paleoanthropology changes rapidly as fossil discoveries and refined dating techniques offer new clues into our past.

Other biological anthropologists focus on humans in the present including their genetic and phenotypic (observable) variation. For instance, Nina Jablonski has conducted research on human skin tone, asking why dark skin pigmentation is prevalent in places, like Central Africa, where there is high ultraviolet (UV) radiation from sunlight, while light skin pigmentation is prevalent in places, like Nordic countries, where there is low UV radiation. She explains this pattern in terms of the interplay between skin pigmentation, UV radiation, folic acid, and vitamin D. In brief, too much UV radiation can break down folic acid, which is essential to DNA and cell production. Dark skin helps block UV, thereby protecting the body’s folic acid reserves in high-UV contexts. Light skin evolved as humans migrated out of Africa to low-UV contexts, where dark skin would block too much UV radiation, compromising the body’s ability to absorb vitamin D from the sun. Vitamin D is essential to calcium absorption and a healthy skeleton. Jablonski’s research shows that the spectrum of skin pigmentation we see today evolved to balance UV exposure with the body’s need for vitamin D and folic acid (Jablonski 2012).

Archaeology

Archaeologists focus on the material past: the tools, food, pottery, art, shelters, seeds, and other objects left behind by people. Prehistoric archaeologists recover and analyze these materials to reconstruct the lifeways of past societies that lacked writing. They ask specific questions like: How did people in a particular area live? What did they eat? Why did their societies to change over time? They also ask general questions about humankind: When and why did humans first develop agriculture? How did cities first develop? How did prehistoric people interact with their neighbors?

The method that archaeologists use to answer their questions is excavation—the 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, British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon (1906-1978), was one of few female archaeologists in the 1940s. She famously studied the city structures and cemeteries of Jericho, an ancient city dating back to the Early Bronze Age (3,200 years before the present) located in what is today the West Bank. Based on her findings, she argued that Jericho is the oldest city in the world and has been continuously occupied by different groups for over 10,000 years (Kenyon 1979).

Historical archaeologists study recent societies using material remains to complement the written record. The Garbage Project, which began in the 1970s, is an example of a historic archaeological project based in Tucson, Arizona. It involves excavating a contemporary landfill as if it were a conventional archaeology site. Archaeologists have found discrepancies between what people say they throw out and what is actually in their trash. In fact, many landfills hold large amounts of paper products and construction debris (Rathje and Murphy 1992). This finding has practical implications for creating environmentally sustainable waste disposal practices.

In 1991, while working on an office building in New York City, construction workers came across human skeletons buried just 30 feet below the city streets. Archaeologists were called in to investigate. Upon further excavation, they discovered a six-acre burial ground, containing 15,000 skeletons of free and enslaved Africans who helped build the city during the colonial era. The “ African Burial Ground ,” which dates dating from 1630 to 1795, contains a trove of information about how free and enslaved Africans lived and died. The site is now a national monument where people can learn about the history of slavery in the U.S. [4]

Linguistic Anthropology

Language is a defining trait of human beings. While other animals have communication systems, only humans have complex, symbolic languages—over 6,000 of them! Human language makes it possible to teach and learn, to plan and think abstractly, to coordinate our efforts, and even to contemplate our own demise. Linguistic anthropologists ask questions like: How did language first emerge? How has it evolved and diversified over time? How has language helped us succeed as a species? How can language convey one’s social identity? How does language influence our views of the world? If you speak two or more languages, you may have experienced how language affects you. For example, in English, we say: “I love you.” But Spanish speakers use different terms— te amo , te adoro , te quiero , and so on—to convey different kinds of love: romantic love, platonic love, maternal love, etc. The Spanish language arguably expresses more nuanced views of love than the English language.

One intriguing line of linguistic anthropological research focuses on the relationship between language, thought, and culture. It may seem intuitive that our thoughts come first; after all, we like to say: “Think before you speak.” However, according to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (also known as linguistic relativity), the language you speak allows you to think about some things and not others. When Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941) studied the Hopi language, he found not just word-level differences, but grammatical differences between Hopi and English. He wrote that Hopi has no grammatical tenses to convey the passage of time. Rather, the Hopi language indicates whether or not something has “manifested.” Whorf argued that English grammatical tenses (past, present, future) inspire a linear sense of time, while Hopi language, with its lack of tenses, inspires a cyclical experience of time (Whorf 1956). Some critics, like German-American linguist Ekkehart Malotki, refute Whorf’s theory, arguing that Hopi do have linguistic terms for time and that a linear sense of time is natural and perhaps universal. At the same time, Malotki recognized that English and Hopi tenses differ, albeit in ways less pronounced than Whorf proposed (Malotki 1983).

Other linguistic anthropologists track the emergence and diversification of languages, while others focus on language use in today’s social contexts. Still others explore how language is crucial to socialization: children learn their culture and social identity through language and nonverbal forms of communication (Ochs and Schieffelin 2012).

Applied Anthropology

Sometimes considered a fifth subdiscipline, applied anthropology involves the application of anthropological theories, methods, and findings to solve practical 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 anthropologists span the subfields. An applied archaeologist might work in cultural resource management to assess a potentially significant archaeological site unearthed during a construction project. An applied cultural anthropologist could work at a technology company that seeks to understand the human-technology interface in order to design better tools.

Medical anthropology is an example of both an applied and theoretical area of study that draws on all four subdisciplines to understand the interrelationship of health, illness, and culture. Rather than assume that disease resides only within the individual body, medical anthropologists explore the environmental, social, and cultural conditions that impact the experience of illness. For example, in some cultures, people believe illness is caused by an imbalance within the community. Therefore, a communal response, such as a healing ceremony, is necessary to restore both the health of the person and the group. This approach differs from the one used in mainstream U.S. healthcare, whereby people go to a doctor to find the biological cause of an illness and then take medicine to restore the individual body.

Trained as both a physician and medical anthropologist, Paul Farmer demonstrates the applied potential of anthropology. During his college years in North Carolina, Farmer’s interest in the Haitian migrants working on nearby farms inspired him to visit Haiti. There, he was struck by the poor living conditions and lack of health care facilities. Later, as a physician, he would return to Haiti to treat individuals suffering from diseases like tuberculosis and cholera that were rarely seen in the United States. As an anthropologist, he would contextualize the experiences of his Haitian patients in relation to the historical, social, and political forces that impact Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere (Farmer 2006). Today, he not only writes academic books about human suffering, he also takes action. Through the work of Partners in Health , a nonprofit organization that he co-founded, he has helped open health clinics in many resource-poor countries and trained local staff to administer care. In this way, he applies his medical and anthropological training to improve people’s lives.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES

Anthropologists across the subfields use unique perspectives to conduct their research. These perspectives make anthropology distinct from related disciplines — like history, sociology, and psychology — that ask similar questions about the past, societies, and human nature. The key anthropological perspectives are holism, relativism, comparison, and fieldwork. There are also both scientific and humanistic tendencies within the discipline that, at times, conflict with one another.  

Anthropologists are interested in the whole of humanity, in how various aspects of life interact. One cannot fully appreciate what it means to be human by studying a single aspect of our complex histories, languages, bodies, or societies. By using a holistic approach, anthropologists ask how different aspects of human life influence one another. For example, a cultural anthropologist studying the meaning of marriage in a small village in India might consider local gender norms, existing family networks, laws regarding marriage, religious rules, and economic factors. 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 nonhuman primates behave, we discover more about ourselves (after all, humans are primates)! By using a holistic approach, anthropologists reveal the complexity of biological, social, or cultural phenomena.

Anthropology itself is a holistic discipline, comprised in the United States (and in some other nations) of four major subfields: cultural anthropology, biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology. While anthropologists often specialize in one subfield, their specific research contribute to a broader understanding of the human condition, which is made up of culture, language, biological and social adaptations, as well as human origins and evolution.  

Cultural Relativism (versus Ethnocentrism)

The guiding philosophy of modern anthropology is cultural relativism—the idea that we should seek to understand another person’s beliefs and behaviors from the perspective of their culture rather than our own. Anthropologists do not judge other cultures based on their values nor do they view other ways of doing things as inferior. Instead, anthropologists seek to understand people’s beliefs within the system they have for explaining things.

The opposite of cultural relativism is ethnocentrism, the tendency to view one’s own culture as the most important and correct and as a measuring stick by which to evaluate all other cultures that are largely seen as inferior and morally suspect. As it turns out, many people are ethnocentric to some degree; ethnocentrism is a common human experience. Why do we respond the way we do? Why do we behave the way we do? Why do we believe what we believe? Most people find these kinds of questions difficult to answer. Often the answer is simply “because that is how it is done.” People typically believe that their ways of thinking and acting are “normal”; but, at a more extreme level, some believe their ways are better than others.

Ethnocentrism is not a useful perspective in contexts in which people from different cultural backgrounds come into close contact with one another, as is the case in many cities and communities throughout the world. People increasingly find that they must adopt culturally relativistic perspectives in governing communities and as a guide for their interactions with members of the community. For anthropologists, cultural relativism is especially important. We must set aside our innate ethnocentric views in order to allow cultural relativism to guide our inquiries and interactions such that we can learn from others.

Anthropologists of all the subfields use comparison to learn what humans have in common, how we differ, and how we change. Anthropologists ask questions like: How do chimpanzees differ from humans? How do different languages adapt to new technologies? How do countries respond differently to immigration? In cultural anthropology, we compare ideas, morals, practices, and systems within or between cultures. We might compare the roles of men and women in different societies, or contrast how different religious groups conflict within a given society. Like other disciplines that use comparative approaches, such as sociology or psychology, anthropologists make comparisons between people in a given society. Unlike these other disciplines, anthropologists also compare across societies, and betweeen humans and other primates. In essence, anthropological comparisons span societies, cultures, time, place, and species. It is through comparison that we learn more about the range of possible responses to varying contexts and problems.  

Anthropologists conduct their research in the field with the species, civilization, or groups of people they are studying. In cultural anthropology, our fieldwork is referred to as ethnography, which is both the process and result of cultural anthropological research. The Greek term “ethno” refers to people, and “graphy” refers to writing. The ethnographic process involves the research method of participant-observation fieldwork: you participate in people’s lives, while observing them and taking field notes that, along with interviews and surveys, constitute the research data. This research is inductive : based on day-to-day observations, the anthropologist asks increasingly specific questions about the group or about the human condition more broadly. Oftentimes, informants actively participate in the research process, helping the anthropologist ask better questions and understand different perspectives.

The word ethnography also refers to the end result of our fieldwork. Cultural anthropologists do not write “novels,” rather they write ethnographies, descriptive accounts of culture that weave detailed observations with theory. After all, anthropologists are social scientists. While we study a particular culture to learn more about it and to answer specific research questions, we are also exploring fundamental questions about human society, behavior, or experiences.

In the course of conducting fieldwork with human subjects, anthropologists invariably encounter ethical dilemmas: Who might be harmed by conducting or publishing this research? What are the costs and benefits of identifying individuals involved in this study? How should one resolve competing interests of the funding agency and the community? To address these questions, anthropologists are obligated to follow a professional code of ethics that guide us through ethical considerations in our research. [5]

Scientific vs Humanistic Approaches

As you may have noticed from the above discussion of the anthropological sub-disciplines, anthropologists are not unified in what they study or how they conduct research. Some sub-disciplines, like biological anthropology and archaeology, use a deductive , scientific approach. Through hypothesis testing, they collect and analyze material data (e.g. bones, tools, seeds, etc.) to answer questions about human origins and evolution. Other subdisciplines, like cultural anthropology and linguistic anthropology, use humanistic and/or inductive approaches to their collection and analysis of nonmaterial data, like observations of everyday life or language in use.

At times, tension has arisen between the scientific subfields and the humanistic ones. For example, in 2010 some cultural anthropologists critiqued the American Anthropological Association’s mission statement, which stated that the discipline’s goal was “to advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all its aspects.” [6] These scholars wanted to replace the word “science” with “public understanding.” They argued that some anthropologists do not use the scientific method of inquiry; instead, they rely more on narratives and interpretations of meaning. After much debate, the word “science” remains in the mission statement and, throughout the United States, anthropology is predominantly categorized as a social science.

WHY IS ANTHROPOLOGY IMPORTANT?

As we hope you have learned thus far, anthropology is an exciting and multifaceted field of study. Because of its breadth, students who study anthropology go on to work in a wide variety of careers in medicine, museums, field archaeology, historical preservation, education, international business, documentary filmmaking, management, foreign service, law, and many more. Beyond preparing students for a particular career, anthropology helps people develop essential skills that are transferable to many career choices and life paths. Studying anthropology fosters broad knowledge of other cultures, skills in observation and analysis, critical thinking, clear communication, and applied problem-solving. Anthropology encourages us to extend our perspectives beyond familiar social contexts to view things from the perspectives of others. As one former cultural anthropology student observed, “I believe an anthropology course has one basic goal: to eliminate ethnocentrism. A lot of issues we have today (racism, xenophobia, etc.) stem from the toxic idea that people are ‘other’ We must put that idea aside and learn to value different cultures.” [7] This anthropological perspective is an essential skill for nearly any career in today’s globalized world.

Some students decide to major in anthropology and even pursue advanced academic degrees in order to become professional anthropologists. We asked three cultural anthropologists – Anthony Kwame Harrison, Bob Myers, and Lynn Kwiatkowski – to describe what drew them to the discipline and to explain how they use anthropological perspectives in their varied research projects. From the study of race in the United States, to health experiences on the island of Dominica, to hunger and gender violence in the Philippines, these anthropologists all demonstrate the endless potential of the discipline.

Anthony Kwame Harrison, PhD Cultural Anthropologist, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

I like to tell a story about how, on the last day of my first year at the University of Massachusetts, while sitting alone in my dorm room waiting to be picked up, I decided to figure out what my major would be. So, I opened the course catalogue—back then it was a physical book—and started going through it alphabetically.

On days when I am feeling particularly playful, I say that after getting through the A’s, I knew Anthropology was for me.  In truth, I also considered Zoology.  I was initially drawn to anthropology because of its traditional focus on exoticness and difference. I was born in Ghana, West Africa, where my American father had spent several years working with local artisans at the National Cultural Centre in Kumasi.  My family moved to the United States when I was still a baby; and I had witnessed my Asante mother struggle with adapting to certain aspects of life in America.  Studying anthropology, then, gave me a reason to learn more about the unusual artwork that filled my childhood home and to connect with a faraway side of my family that I hardly knew anything about.

Looking through that course catalogue, I didn’t really know what anthropology was but resolved to test-the-waters by taking several classes the following year.  As I flourished in these courses—two introductory level classes on cultural anthropology and archeology, a class called “Culture through Film,” and another on “Egalitarian Societies”—I envisioned a possible future as an anthropologist working in rural West Africa on topics like symbolic art and folklore.  I never imagined I would earn a Ph.D. researching the mostly middle-class, largely multi-racial, independent hip-hop scene in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Through my anthropological training, I have made a career exploring how race influences our perceptions of popular music. I have written several pieces on racial identity and hip hop—most notably my 2009 book, Hip Hop Underground: The Integrity and Ethics of Racial Identification . I have also explored how race impacts people’s senses of belonging in various social spaces—for instance, African American participation in downhill skiing or the experiences of underrepresented students at historically white colleges and universities. In all these efforts, my attention is primarily on understanding the complexities, nuances, and significance of race. I use these other topics—music, recreation, and higher education—as avenues through which to explore race’s multiple meanings and unequal consequences.

Where a fascination with the exotic initially brought me to anthropology, it is the discipline’s ability to shed light on what many of us see as normal, common, and taken-for-granted that has kept me with it through three degrees (bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D.) and a fifteen-year career as a college professor. I am currently the Gloria D. Smith Professor of Africana Studies at Virginia Tech—a school that, oddly enough, does not have an anthropology program. Being an anthropologist at a major university that doesn’t have an anthropology program, I believe, gives me a unique perspective on the discipline’s key virtues.

One of the most important things that anthropology does is create a basis for questioning taken-for-granted notions of progress. Does the Gillette Fusion Five Razor, with its five blades, really offer a better shave than the four-bladed Schick Quattro?  I cannot say for sure, but as I’ve witnessed the move from twin-blade razors, to Mach 3s, to today (there is even a company offering “the world’s first and only” razor with “seven precision aligned blades)” there appears to be a presumption that more, in this case, razor-blades is better. I’ll admit that the razor-blade example is somewhat crude. Expanding out to the latest model automobile or smartphone, people seem to have a seldom questioned belief in the notion that newer technologies ultimately improve our lives.  Anthropology places such ideas within the broader context of human lifeways, or what anthropologists call culture . What are the most crucial elements of human biological and social existence? What additional developments have brought communities the greatest levels of collective satisfaction, effective organization, and sustainability?

Anthropology has taught me to view the contemporary American lifestyle that I grew up thinking was normal through the wider frame of humanity’s long history.  How does our perspective change upon learning that for the vast majority of human history—some say as much as ninety-nine percent of it—people lived a foraging lifestyle (commonly referred to as “hunting and gathering”)?  Although I am not calling for a mass return to foraging, when we consider the significant worldwide issues that humans face today—such things as global warming, the threat of nuclear war, accelerating ethnic conflicts, and a world population that has grown from one billion to nearly eight billion over the past two hundred years—we are left with difficult questions about whether 10,000 years of agriculture and a couple hundred years of industrialization have been in humanity’s best long-term interests. All of this is to say that anthropology offers one of the most biting critiques of modernity, which challenges us to slow down and think about whether the new technologies we are constantly being presented with make sense.  Similarly, the anthropological concept of ethnocentrism is incredibly useful when paired with different examples of how people define family, recognize leadership, decide what is and is not edible, and the like. To offer just one example, many of my students are surprised to learn that among my (matrilineal) family in Ghana, I have a distinctly different relationship with cousins who are children of my mother’s brother as compared with cousins who are children of her sister.

Using my own anthropological biography as an illustration, I want to stress that the discipline does not showcase diverse human lifeways to further exoticize those who live differently from us. In contrast, anthropology showcases cultural variation to illustrate the possibilities and potential for human life, and to demonstrate that the way of doing things we know best is neither normal nor necessarily right. It is just one way among a multitude of others. “Everybody does it but we all do it different”; this is culture.

Bob Myers, PhD, M.P.H. Cultural Anthropologist, Alfred University

My undergraduate experience significantly shaped my attitudes about education in general and anthropology in particular. At Davidson College in North Carolina I completed a German major, minored in Biology and took many courses in English Literature. I also spent one year studying abroad at Philipps Universität in Marburg, Germany, and saved some “me time” for hitchhiking and traveling around Europe. This led me to pursue graduate work in anthropology despite the fact that I had taken only one anthropology course in college. While in graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I became fascinated with Caribbean history and migration and spent almost two years doing doctoral fieldwork and research on the island of Dominica. After finishing my PhD, I had a one-year post-doc in biostatistics in Chapel Hill before I took my first job at Davidson College where I taught for several years. [8]

Observations of an impoverished health system in Dominica and family health experiences with dysentery during fieldwork led me toward medical anthropology and public health and so I completed a M.P.H. degree at the Harvard School of Public Health before receiving a Fulbright Fellowship to go to Benin University in southern Nigeria. There, a coup and other circumstances turned my one-year fellowship into a two-year experience/adventure. I probably learned more anthropology in Nigeria than in all of graduate school, including examples of the power of a traditional kingdom and the ways large families enable members to manage in distressing economic conditions. Then I went back to the U.S. and taught for two years at Long Island University before moving to rural Alfred University in western New York, where I now work. Alfred is a diverse university with a world class engineering program, a nationally ranked BFA/MFA program, small business, school psychology, and liberal arts and sciences programs, and no anthropology other than what I’ve been teaching for 32 years. To offset the absence of other anthropologists, colleagues in religious studies and I created a major called Comparative Cultures and later, with colleagues in modern languages, environmental studies, and political science, a Global Studies major, a perfect multi-disciplinary setting for anthropology.

Anthropology is the broadest, most fundamental of academic subjects and should be at the core of a modern undergraduate education. I’m convinced that an anthropology major is not necessary for our discipline to play a significant role in students’ understanding of the messy, amazingly diverse, interconnected world after graduation. An anthropological perspective is.

To me, an anthropological perspective combines a comparative (cross-cultural), holistic view with a sense of history and social structure, and asks functional questions like what effect does that have? How does that work? How is this connected to that? An anthropological perspective also draws from many other disciplines to examine patterns, and, of course, requires one to engage with people by talking to them (something that’s become harder than ever for many students). All this contributes to the theme I stress that everything is culturally constructed. Everything! I tell students during the first week of classes that one of my goals is to convince them that much of what they’ve learned about many familiar topics (race, sex and gender, kinship, marriage, languages, religion, evolution, social media, and globalization) is biased, or incomplete. Using an anthropological perspective, there’s no issue which cannot be better understood. Every Friday I encourage my students to “Have an anthropological weekend” and ask them on Monday to describe how this happened. Students’ examples range from describing conversations with international students, exploring the cultural and economic history of tea and coffee, to seeing an evangelical church service in a new light. This encourages students to appreciate that anthropology happens all around them and isn’t something that can only be studied in a faraway society.

Another goal I have in my teaching is to illustrate that an anthropological view is useful for better coping with the world around us especially in our multi-culture, multi-racial society where ethnic diversity and immigration are politically charged and change is happening at a pace never before experienced. I stress themes of storytelling and interpretation throughout the semester. To this end, in my introductory cultural anthropology course, we view and critically discuss at length several famous films ( Nanook of the North , parts of A Kalahari Family , The Nuer , and sometimes Ishi , the Last Yahi , among others), but also Michael Wesch’s Anthropological Introduction to YouTube . One of the most effective writing exercises I give students allows them to examine an essential part of their lives, their cell phones. The assignment “Tell me the story of your relationship with your cell phone” has resulted in some of the best papers I have ever received. Students have described how their personal relationships evolved as their phone types changed; how social media connections reduced isolation by enabling them to find like-minded friends; one described a journey exploring gender, another how the new technology expanded his artistic creativity. I use Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook in different ways including Daniel Miller’s Why We Post studies to show that anthropology isn’t just about the past or the exotic. To illustrate how thoroughly we are globalized, my students do an exercise called “The Global Closet” in which they go through everything in (or near) their closet, reading tags to see where the item was made. Most are surprised at the far-flung origins of what they wear. Yes, anthropology helps to see the familiar in a new light.

I oftentimes use non-anthropologists’ work in my classes to anchor our discipline in liberal education. At the beginning of each course we read environmental historian William Cronon’s “‘Only Connect’…The Goals of a Liberal Education” (he has a great discussable list—be able to talk to anyone, read widely, think critically, problem solve—at the end) because anthropology is about breadth and making connections (with others, and seeing patterns). We listen to and discuss the late writer David Foster Wallace’s “ This is Water ” commencement address emphasizing empathy and awareness because anthropology fosters these qualities as well. Lots of what we do in class stays with students beyond graduation. For all of these reasons, studying anthropology is the most broadly useful of undergraduate disciplines.

Lynn Kwiatkowsk Cultural Anthropologist, Colorado State University

Living in societies throughout the world, and conducting research with people in diverse cultures, were dreams that began to emerge for me when I was an undergraduate student studying anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in the early 1980s. After graduating from college, I served as a Peace Corps volunteer where I worked in primary health care in an upland community in Ifugao Province of the Philippines. Following my Peace Corps experience, I entered graduate school in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Berkeley and became a cultural anthropologist in the mid-1990s, specializing in medical anthropology.

While I was a graduate student, I returned to the community in which I lived in Ifugao Province to conduct research for my dissertation which focused on malnutrition, particularly among women and children. I studied ways that hunger experienced by Ifugao people is influenced by gender, ethnic, and class inequality, global and local health and development programs, religious proselytization, political violence, and the state. I lived in Ifugao for almost four years. I resided in a wooden hut with a thatched roof in a small village for much of my stay there, as well as another more modern home, made of galvanized iron. I also periodically lived with a family in the center of a mountain town. I participated in the rich daily lives of farmers, woodcarvers, hospital personnel, government employees, shopkeepers, students, and other groups of people. I conducted interviews and surveys and also shared daily and ritual experiences with people to learn about inadequate access to nutritious food, and social structural sources of this kind of health problem. Participant observation research allows anthropologists to obtain a special kind of knowledge that is rarely acquired through other, more limited research methods. This type of research takes a great amount of time and effort but produces a uniquely deep and contextual type of knowledge. I published an ethnography about my research in Ifugao, titled Struggling with Development: The Politics of Hunger and Gender in the Philippines .

Influenced by my study of gender power relations surrounding hunger and malnutrition in the Philippines, and also by the political violence I witnessed by the Philippine government and the Communist New People’s Army, I took up a new research project that focuses on gender violence. I am exploring the impacts of this violence on the health and well-being of women and the intersecting global and local sociocultural forces that give meaning to and perpetuate gender violence in Vietnam. To address these issues, I am researching the abuse of women by their husbands, and in some cases their in-laws as well, in northern Vietnam. I also explore the ways in which abused women, and other Vietnamese professionals and government workers, contest this gender violence in Vietnamese communities. In Vietnam, I have had the opportunity to live with a family in a commune in Hanoi, and in nearby provinces. I learned about the deep pain and suffering experienced by abused women, as well as the numerous ways many of these women and their fellow community members have worked to put an end to the violence. Marital sexual violence is an important but understudied form of domestic violence in societies throughout the world, including in Vietnam.

In recent decades, anthropologists have been reflecting on the significance and relevance of anthropological research. This has included anthropologists who are working in each of anthropology’s four subfields. Some anthropologists have called for greater efforts to share our anthropological findings with the public in order to try to solve significant historical, social, biological, and environmental problems. Examples of these problems include the impacts of climate change on the health and welfare of diverse peoples throughout the globe; and social structural reasons for nutritional problems, as well as cultural meanings people give to them, such as undernutrition, and illnesses related to increasing weights of people in societies globally. I hope my research on wife abuse will contribute to the emergence of a deeper understanding of the social and cultural sources of gender violence in order to end this violence, and greater awareness of its scope and its negative effects on women.

Through their research, anthropologists contribute unique and important forms of knowledge and information to diverse groups, including local communities, nations, and global social movements, such as feminist, racial, indigenous, environmental, LGBTQ, and other social movements. Cultural anthropologists’ research is unique because it often involves analysis of the intersection of global social, political and economic forces and the everyday experiences of members of a cultural group. The fieldwork and participant observation research methods provide cultural anthropologists the opportunity to live with a group of people for several months or years. They learn about the complexities of people’s lives intimately, including their social relationships, their bodily and emotional experiences, and the powerful institutional forces influencing their lives. Applying the results of our ethnographic research and making our research accessible to our students and the public can make the research of anthropologists useful toward alleviating the problems people face in our society, and in countries globally.

The particular way that cultural anthropologists do their research is important to our results. Through my research experiences I have participated in the rich daily lives of farmers, woodcarvers, hospital personnel, government employees, shopkeepers, students, and other groups of people. I conducted interviews and surveys and also shared daily and ritual experiences with people to learn about inadequate access to nutritious food, and social structural sources of this kind of health problem. Participant observation research allows anthropologists to obtain a special kind of knowledge that is rarely acquired through other, more limited research methods. This type of research takes a great amount of time and effort, but produces a uniquely deep and contextual type of knowledge. Ethnographic research can help us to understand the extent of a global problem such as gender violence, the everyday experiences of those facing abuse, and the struggles and accomplishments of people actively working to improve their societies.

Discussion 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?
• Discuss the definition of culture proposed in this chapter. How is it similar or different from other ideas about culture that you have encountered in other classes or in everyday life?
• In this chapter, Anthony Kwame Harrison, Bob Myers, and Lynn Kwiatkowski describe how they first became interested in anthropology and how they have used their training in anthropology to conduct research in different parts of the world. Which of the research projects they described seemed the most interesting to you? How do you think the participant-observation fieldwork they described leads to information that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to learn?

Cultural relativism : 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. Deductive : reasoning from the general to the specific; the inverse of inductive reasoning. Deductive research is more common in the natural sciences than in anthropology. In a deductive approach, the researcher creates a hypothesis and then designs a study to prove or disprove the hypothesis. The results of deductive research can be generalizable to other settings. Enculturation : the process of learning the characteristics and expectations of a culture or group. Ethnocentrism : the tendency to view one’s own culture as most important and correct and as the stick by which to measure all other cultures. Ethnography : the in-depth study of the everyday practices and lives of a people. Hominin : Humans (Homo sapiens) and their close relatives and immediate ancestors. Inductive : a type of reasoning that uses specific information to draw general conclusions. In an inductive approach, the researcher seeks to collect evidence without trying to definitively prove or disprove a hypothesis. The researcher usually first spends time in the field to become familiar with the people before identifying a hypothesis or research question. Inductive research usually is not generalizable to other settings. Paleoanthropologist : biological anthropologists who study ancient human relatives. Participant-observation : a type of observation in which the anthropologist observes while participating in the same activities in which her informants are engaged.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Katie views teaching and learning as central to her practice as an anthropologist and as mutually reinforcing elements of her professional life. She is the former chair of the Teaching Anthropology Interest Group (2016–2018) of the General Anthropology Division of the American Anthropological Association and currently serves as the online content editor for the Teaching and Learning Anthropology Journal . She has contributed to several open access textbook projects, both as an author and an editor, and views the affordability of quality learning materials as an important piece of the equity and inclusion puzzle in higher education. [9]

Lara’s concern about the social inequality has guided her research projects, teaching practices, and involvement in open access projects like this textbook. In an effort to make college more accessible to all students, she serves as co-coordinator of Grossmont College’s Open Educational Resources (OER) and Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) initiatives.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berger, Lee R., Hawks, John, de Ruiter, Darryl J., Churchill, Steven E., Schmid, Peter, Delezene, Lucas K., Kivell, Tracy L., Garvin, Heather M., and Scott A. Williams. 2015. “ Homo naledi , A New Species of the Genus Homo from the Dinaledi Chamber, South Africa.” eLife 4:e09560. doi: 10.7554/eLife.09560.

Bourgois, Philippe. In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Briggs, Jean. Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family . Cambridge: President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1970.

Farmer, Paul. AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Goodall, Jane. My Life with the Chimpanzees . New York: Aladdin Paperbacks, 1996.

Harrison, Anthony Kwame. Hip Hop Underground: The Integrity and Ethics of Racial Identification. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009.

Jablonski, Nina. Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

Kenyon, Kathleen. Excavations at Jericho – Volume II Tombs Excavated in 1955-8 , London: British School of Archaeology, 1965.

Kwiatkowski, Lynn. Struggling with Development: The Politics of Hunger and Gender in the Philippines . Boulder: Westview Press, 1998.

Malotki, Ekkehart. Hopi Time: A Linguistic Analysis of the Temporal Concepts in the Hopi Language . Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs. 20. New York: Mouton Publishers, 1983.

Mackintosh-Smith, Tim, ed. The Travels of Ibn Battutah . London: Picador, 2003.

Ochs, Elinor, and Bambi B. Schieffelin. 2012. “The Theory of Language Socialization.” In The Handbook of Language Socialization edited by Alessandro Duranti, Elinor Ochs, and Bambi Schieffelin, 1–21. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

Rathje, William and Cullen Murphy. Rubbish: The Archaeology of Garbage . New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf . Edited by J.B. Carroll. Cambridge: M.I.T Press, 1956.

Wood, Frances. The Silk Road: Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

• Some of this chapter is adapted from the introduction to Explorations: An Open Invitation to Biological Anthropology : www.explorations.americananthro.org ↵
• See chapter two, The Culture Concept, for a history of the culture concept in anthropology. ↵
• Lahcen Mourad (Arabic scholar) in discussion with Katie Nelson, December, 2018. ↵
• https://www.nps.gov/afbg/index.htm ↵
• See the American Anthropological Association’s Code of Ethics: http://ethics.americananthro.org/category/statement/ ↵
• See: American Anthropological Association Statement of Purpose: https://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=1650 ↵
• This quote is taken from a survey of students in an Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course at the Community College of Baltimore County, 2018. ↵
• The statue I'm standing next to in the photograph remembers the awful story of the Inuit High Arctic Relocations in the early 1950s, a textbook case of the ways Canada has abused Native peoples. Inuit from Inukjuak (formerly Port Harrison) in northern Quebec and Pond Inlet on Baffin Island were forced to move to Resolute and Grise Fiord in the High-Arctic territory that is now called Nunavut. The government’s promises of good conditions were deceptive and the Inuit struggled with a lack of shelter and food resources. Following the eventual public hearings in 1996, the Inuit were awarded a Can$10 million settlement. For more information see Melanie McGrath's The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic . New York: Knopf, 2007.   ↵
• See: http://perspectives.americananthro.org/ and https://textbooks.opensuny.org/global-perspectives-on-gender/ ↵

Perspectives: An Open Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, 2nd Edition Copyright © 2020 by American Anthropological Association is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Writing is key in anthropology, as one of its main modes of communication. Teaching, research, publications, and outreach all build on, or consist of, writing. This entry traces how anthropological writing styles have evolved over time according to changing politics in the discipline. It starts out in the late nineteenth century, showing how early writings in the discipline aimed to be objective. While writing anthropology in a literary mode goes a long way back, it was not until the 1970s that writing began to be collectively acknowledged as a craft to be cultivated in the discipline. This led to a boom of experimental ethnographic writing from the 1980s, as part of the ‘writing culture’ debate. The idea behind experimental narratives was that they might convey social life more accurately than conventional academic writing. Today, literary production and culture continue to be a source of inspiration for anthropologists, as well as a topic of study. Anthropological writing ranges from creative nonfiction to memoirs, journalism, and travel writing. Writing in such non-academic genres can be a way to make anthropological approaches and findings more widely known, and can inspire academic writing to become more accessible. Recent developments in anthropological writings include collaborative text production with interlocutors and artists. However, the tendency for experimentation is also held in check, as publishing in academic publication formats and featuring in citation indices is crucial for anthropologists’ careers. Still, as our writing moves increasingly online, there is a growth of flexible formats for publishing, including online books, essays on current affairs, and conversations in journals.

Introduction

Writing is essential in anthropology. As a major way of communication, teaching, research, and outreach all draw on, or result in writing. But it was not until long after anthropology emerged in the late nineteenth century that writing was first recognised as a crucial craft that required careful training. This entry spans the changing politics of writing anthropology from the late nineteenth century, when Victorian natural science notions about texts as objective was the model for scholarship, to the 1970s, when a sensitivity to style was identified, developing into a movement in the 1980s around the idea of experimental ethnographic writing as initiated by the 'writing culture’ debate (Clifford & Marcus 1986). The protagonists of that debate argued in favour of more detailed accounts of research processes, including the role of the fieldworker in the composition of anthropological writing. Moving on to the twenty-first century, this entry suggests that the understanding that anthropologists are also writers has brought a new emphasis on writing in the discipline. It includes both writing accessible academic anthropology and writing in different genres, ranging from creative nonfiction to memoir, anthropological journalism, and travel writing. Anthropology has existed in a literary mode for quite some time, but as it underwent a ‘literary turn’ (Scholte 1987), literature has become an even stronger resource for the discipline: certainly as an influence to enhance writing styles, but also as a topic for research into literary production and culture. This is made obvious by increasing requests for writing workshops for students and young scholars. Yet, writing remains constrained insofar as publishing is a must when making an anthropological career. Here it is governed by academic publication formats, readership, and citation indices. This entry is organised chronologically, discussing the changing politics of writing academic anthropology over time in terms of styles, publishing, and careers, including the impact of the ‘literary turn’, which leads to a consideration of anthropological writing genres and more recent writings for digital channels.    

Changing politics of writing anthropology  

Classic anthropological monographs, written as the discipline was getting established, were influenced by lingering natural scientific notions of objectivity. These monographs generally left the anthropologist outside the text, at least when it came to personal experiences and feelings, such as revelations, which were assumed to inhibit their scientific value. This applies to the works by founding anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas. Malinowski’s academic work stands in particularly stark contrast to his controversial private diaries from fieldwork in New Guinea and the Trobriand Islands in 1914-1915 and 1917-1918 (Malinowski 1967). Published posthumously by his widow, the diaries revealed his personal prejudice against interlocutors as well as other problematic attitudes.

But it was the ideal of objectivity, with what would be regarded as its constrained style, that eventually provoked anthropologists to find freer forms of writing, hoping to provide more precise reflections of the richness and complexity of fieldwork. This entailed a shift to taking writing seriously, as identified in the introduction to the volume The anthropologist as writer (Wulff 2016: 1). Prefigured by the interest in narratives of Victor Turner and Edward Bruner in the 1950s and 1960s, a careful consideration of writing became a major feature of anthropology in the 1970s with Clifford Geertz’s work, especially The interpretation of cultures (1973). It was Geertz who developed the concept of ‘thick description’ for a detailed and engaging mode of writing that provides an understanding of human action in a wider context. Geertz’s seminal essay on this topic describes a cockfight in Bali and opens as follows: ‘Early in April of 1958, my wife and I arrived, malarial and diffident, in a Balinese village we intended, as anthropologists, to study’. In this uneasy stage, as newcomers among people who did not acknowledge their presence, they learn after about ten days that ‘a large cockfight was held in the public square’. Geertz goes on to note that cockfights are mostly illegal in Bali:

In this case, however, perhaps because they were raising money for a school that the government was unable to give them, perhaps because raids had been few recently, perhaps, as I gathered from subsequent discussion, there was a notion that necessary bribes had been paid, they thought they could take a chance on the central square and draw a larger and more enthusiastic crowd without attracting the attention of the law. They were wrong...A truck full of policemen armed with machine guns roared up (Geertz 1973b: 412-15). 

The policemen ‘began to swing their guns around like gangsters in a motion picture, though not going so far as to actually fire them’. People ran, and so did the Geertzes, who found themselves hiding from the police in a courtyard with a local couple, which was what made them accepted by the villagers. It is most likely the captivating style, built with suspense and surprise, that explains why this essay has become classic, and the way the Geertzes are included in the story as protagonists who are experiencing potential danger together with locals, but then are rescued by a local couple. This turned out to be an efficient way of conveying how an ethnographic event such as an illegal cockfight could be analysed as a kind of play that mirrored major power struggles in the village.

In the 1980s, a debate known as the ‘writing culture’ debate arose, which argued for more detailed accounts of the research process, including the role of the fieldworker, in anthropological writings than what had previously been the case (Clifford & Marcus 1986). There was an expectation that the fieldwork process should include great and intimate details, including the fieldworker’s feelings and relationships, as that promised to produce a more exact account of fieldwork. A critique levelled against ‘writing culture’ was that its proponents focused too much on the activities of fieldworkers rather than on the people the research is about. The legacy of that debate is a heightened awareness of the intellectual impact of writing style, the politics of representation, and the partial truth of any account. Connected to the ‘writing culture’ debate was the idea of anthropological writing as ‘cultural critique’. It suggested that anthropology should identify alternative ways of considering what is often taken for granted in society. Anthropological writing should be part of ‘a strategy for discovering diversity in what appears to be an ever more homogenous world’ and ‘making visible to others the critical perspectives and possibilities for alternatives that exist’ (Marcus & Fischer 1987: 133). Some of those alternatives concerned the role of women in social life – insisting, for instance, that women should be given opportunities for education and careers that had of course not always been regarded as a matter of importance. Supported by the second wave of feminism, the book Women writing culture (Behar & Gordon 1995) explored issues of identity and difference in relation to sexual politics, racial history, and moral predicaments of anthropology. But its mission was a direct critique of the claim by James Clifford and George E. Marcus (1986), that feminist anthropologists had not written in interesting and experimental ways. The volume challenged the male dominance in the discipline at the time (see also Abu-Lughod 1993).

What proponents of experimental forms of writing share is that a sensitivity to style and an openness to other writing genres may produce more than just a pleasant turn of phrase. ‘Narrative and related writing genres may actually offer more accurate – hence, more scientific – means for us as scholars to convey the full range of the human experience’ (Gottlieb 2015: 742) than conventional academic writing. A defining feature of experimental writings today is their argument for accessibility, even though this was not necessarily a characteristic of all different stages of this movement. There is a growing understanding that even anthropological texts about complicated issues can preferably be phrased in a lucid way, as exemplified by Ulf Hannerz (1992) and Thomas Hylland Eriksen (2018), among many others. This goes against the traditional academic norm to write in a convoluted style which can still be regarded as a marker of prestige, more so than being straight-forward. While some very complicated issues do require a more complex writing style and specialised vocabulary, many academic topics do not. This insight is gaining ground, but it also leads to the need for (re)training academics to write in a more transparent manner. Clarity and captivating narratives are more useful both in teaching and research than the writing style of some traditional ethnographies that have been referred to as ‘boring’ and ‘virtually unreadable’ (MacClancy 1996: 237). The desire for being not only clear but also more engaging has opened up space for experimental writing, such as the early In sorcery’s shadow (1987), a memoir of an apprenticeship among the Songhay people who live in Niger and Mali in West Africa. Written by Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes as a literary essay informed by theory, it did not include explicit academic references: there is no bibliography. The memoir has been appreciated for its well-crafted narrative that also includes methodological points as Stoller learnt about and understood a way of life which was at first alien to him. The different stages of his training to become an apprentice sorcerer are carefully conveyed.   

With the growth of global connections came the insight that interlocutors might, and indeed should, be able to read anthropological work about themselves without the risk of being harmed personally or politically. Such ethical issues are considered in When they read what we write (Brettell 1993), which mainly focuses on how this can impact the anthropologist and the writings. There is, for instance, the devastating experience of having one’s published work contested by those it is about. Such experiences can be unexpected, which makes them even more painful. In addition, they might impact negatively the possibility for future research in the community for other colleagues, who might have had nothing to do with this work. Newspaper accounts of anthropological writings add complexity to this problem, especially when they misrepresent findings and if interlocutors read the newspapers but not the actual text. Highly politicised contexts such as conflicts over national language and between ethnic groups may feed into resulting dilemmas. While awareness of the difficulty of doing justice to divided communities is important, the necessity of including the studied people as a potential audience, and not only academics, remains a primary concern in contemporary anthropological writing. Existing concerns are fuelled by the rise of digital online journals and e-books, which can reach a vast and worldwide audience in an instant, particularly when they are Open Access.

All of this raises questions regarding publication outlets in relation to making an academic career, and negotiations over whether a monograph or journal article ranks the most highly (Wulff 2019; Boyer 2016). This has been a concern since the natural sciences, where journal articles are the prime publication format, became the model for citation indices and research assessments. As part of ‘new public management’ of European universities since the 1980s (Shore & Wright 2017), ranking systems have been in place for publishers, their books, and journals. They attempt to emulate private sector management models and business-like approaches to improve research efficiency and results. At some universities, publishing with highly ranked publishers can thus impact positively a department’s funding, as well as the anthropologist’s salary. It certainly impacts hiring practices. Rankings have also reinforced the notion of ‘publish or perish’, meaning that, even in order to keep a job, academics sometimes have to publish a certain number of high-ranking publications per year, for if not, their careers may be in jeopardy. In spite of these measures, the politics of academic publishing remain elusive as criteria keep changing, not least because what one cohort of anthropologists was trained for is bound to be different once they are exposed to assessment. There is a debate over the extent to which the quality of academic writing is and should be tailored to research assessments and evaluation formats, and what the intellectual consequences of this might be (Strathern 2000).

Anthropological writing is increasingly influenced by these managerial trends. In our discipline, journal articles continue to be important, but there is an enduring notion that long-term fieldwork can best be justified in the space of a full-length monograph. While a number of substantial journal articles might work almost as well, it may be more cumbersome to find those articles rather than reading a book where the material and analysis are all in one place. As books, edited volumes, and book chapters are less prominent in the natural sciences and thus on the ranking lists, they become less prestigious on the citation indices where anthropology is included. Moreover, the amount of work it takes to write a monograph is not rewarded, as it is often treated as just another ‘item’. What is more, appreciative references are not distinguished in the citation indices from negative ones. [1] Anthropology, in so far as it is a critical science, can also not be captured by numerical metrics (Stein 2018). The logic of such ranking lists is not in accordance either with how certain edited volumes or at least notable introductions to volumes that were published before citation indices were set up keep having a major influence on anthropology. This aspect is obviously not indicated in citation indices or as impact factors, as they only take account of recent work that is available online. Fredrik Barth’s introduction to his edited Ethnic groups and boundaries (1969) is a case in point as it keeps being a standard reference in anthropology (see also Appadurai 1986) but was published too early to be included in indices. As to the fate of books, printed or electronic, fiction or nonfiction, John Thompson, in his sociological research of the publishing business, predicts that as long as it is attractive enough to readers, the book will ‘continue to play an important role as a means of expression and communication in our cultural and public life for the foreseeable future’ (2011: 399-400).

Writing anthropology in relation to literature

Though anthropology’s literary mode is nothing new, the ‘writing culture’ debate intensified the presence of literature in anthropology, which has been identified in terms of a ‘literary turn’ because of literature’s impact on anthropological writing (Scholte 1987). This was in line with the growing awareness of the writing process. As a part of the move away from the detached textual style, as well as when it came to narrative structure, anthropologists took inspiration from fiction. Geertz (1988) even identified the ‘anthropologist as author’. [2] An anthropology of writing and writers emerged. Local literary work from a field was read as ethnography and might be included in anthropological accounts. With his background as a student of literature at University College London, Victor Turner later connected African ritual and Western literature as ‘mutually elucidating’ (1976: 77-8). Jane Austen was identified by Richard Handler and Daniel Segal (1990) as an ethnographer of marriage, kinship, and class in early eighteenth century England. In the 1990s, Nigel Rapport (1994) organised his fieldwork in the village of Wanet in England in relation to the writer E.M. Forster as an imagined fellow fieldworker. Rapport’s technique was to ‘zigzag’ between the work of Forster and his own field experience. A similar way of combining anthropology and literature, of writing anthropology together with a literary companion, is Kirin Narayan’s Alive in the writing (2012). Narayan juxtaposes her experience of ethnographic writing with that of Anton Chekhov, the renowned playwright and short story writer, as he researched and wrote about Sakhalin Island, the Russian penal colony. Recognising Chekhov as her ethnographic muse releases Narayan’s writing creativity. Inspired by Chekhov’s letter about his journey to Sakhalin, his reflections on his research, and writing process, Narayan feels an affinity with him as she finds topics and texts to include in her book. Incidentally, Chekhov’s work on Sakhalin is nonfiction, and as Naryan gets to know his literary oeuvre , she learns that he is a literary writer with an ethnographic sensibility. [3] Included in Alive in the writing, at the end of the chapters, are writing exercises, and the book concludes with a postscript with advice for different stages of the writing process, ranging from getting started and moving forward to moving past writer’s block, and revising and finishing. In response to the upsurge of non-academic writing workshops and university programs in creative writing in Euro-America during the last decades, there is a plethora of writing manuals, also by fiction writers (cf. Wulff 2017). The daughter of Alfred Kroeber, and his writer-wife Theodora, Ursula Le Guin (2015: ix, xiii, xii) was not an anthropologist herself, but there are anthropological aspects in her fiction, referred to as science fiction or fantasy. Anthropologists appear in her writings, and the ‘other worlds’ she imagined resonate with an anthropological endeavour to study very different ways of living. Le Guin also wrote a ‘handbook for storytellers – writers of narrative prose’ to go with the writing workshops she taught. Her declaration that her ‘book is not for beginners’ attests to an awareness that writing is a skill that is never fully learnt, but ideally one to keep developing. Observing that some people have a gift for writing, she points out that writing is a skill to be learnt and mastered even for those who are gifted (cf. Wulff 2018). Le Guin emphasises that reading one’s own work also requires training. This would be what Brian Moeran refers to as ‘self-editing’, the process of making choices about style, grammar, organization, and of what to include and exclude (2016: 60-5). ‘Editing’, Moeran goes on, ‘is not writing but rewriting’ and this entails being ‘tough with yourself’ (2016: 60-5). Before submitting a text to an editor at a publishing house, Moeran’s advice is to get a sympathetic colleague’s stern comments on it.     

Writing about connections between anthropology, ethnographic writing, and literature, Caroline Brettell observes that:  

The experiments with forms of ethnographic writing that might enliven the ethnographic text represent just one dimension of the way in which anthropology has engaged with literature…Some anthropologists have drawn directly on works of literature as inspiration; others have subjected these literary works to an anthropological analytical and theoretical lens (2015: 73).

Yet others, she goes on to say, ‘have found the ethnographer or the autoethnographer in the novelist’. Anthropological interest in literary production certainly exists, such as in the ethnographic study of writing as craft and career in Ireland. Taking the question ‘How come the Irish are such great writers?’ as a point of departure, I have argued that this goes back to the oral storytelling tradition in Ireland, and a culture that cultivates this practice at social gatherings, also by teaching it to younger generations. Then, there is extensive training in creative writing at schools, as well as writing competitions, and an abundance of writing workshops for adults at literary festivals and other literary events. All this fosters a habit and an urge to write (Wulff 2017: ix). Ethnographies of writing are not limited to textual analysis. They can be based on live literature events and public readings of fiction at literary festivals. Drawing on a study of one of the major literary festivals in the UK called the Hay Festival and the small Polari Salon, an LGBT literary festival at the South Bank Centre in London, Ellen Wiles conveys the value of experiential literary ethnography not only to the academic world, but also to arts practitioners, curators, and producers (2021). It was through participant observation at literary festivals that Wiles learnt that, even in our digitalising world, such live events draw big audiences, not least because they provide appreciated opportunities for face-to-face connections between authors and readers.

Another take on how literature can relate to ethnography is the conceptualisation of fiction as a written text along with songs, poetry, essays, drama, and even newspapers and letters that are produced in a society under study (Archetti 1994a). This can reveal, on one level, interpersonal relationships and, on another level, cultural and social contexts such as history and the nation. It has been suggested that there are three types of fiction: ‘The realistic historical novel that attempts to ”reconstruct” a given period in a given society; the totally imagined story set in a historical period; and the essays devoted to an interpretation of a nation, its characteristics and creed’. In addition, ‘some kind of historical and sociological knowledge is important in fiction’, which makes it similar to writing anthropology. In line with much anthropology, in this volume fiction is treated as ‘ethnographic raw material, not . . . authoritative statements about, or interpretations of, a particular society’ (Archetti 1994b: 16-17).

Many anthropologists have expressed a sense of being confined by the rigidity of the academic style, which has led them to seek refuge in fiction writing. This has been a way to complement what has been found to be unsatisfactory with producing dissertations or other academic writing (Stankiewicz 2012). Reflecting on fiction versus anthropology, there is a common notion that ‘anthropology is unique in its specification of dimensions for comparison and its standards for ethnographic descriptions. Are such dimensions and standards straitjackets? If one thinks so, one might turn to fiction for consolation’ (Eriksen 1994: 192; see also Narayan 1999). This advice seems to be both about reading fiction, also from one’s field, and writing fiction by drawing on fieldwork, such as In an antique land (Ghosh 1992). It turns out that ethnographic novels abound. They were (and are) written by authors who were trained in anthropology, and in some cases pursued an academic career while others went into writing fiction full time. An early ethnographic novel is The delight makers (Bandelier 1890), making use of many years of fieldwork with Pueblo Indians. Their eyes were watching God (Hurston 1937) also has an anthropological perspective. In 1954, the bestseller Return to laughter was published by Laura Bohannan under the pseudonym Elenore Smith Bowen. This is a fictionalised story about Bohannan’s fieldwork in Africa, including aspects of tribal life such as the impact of witchcraft. The novel has been widely read not only by students and scholars, but also by a general audience. It is a testimony to the efficacy of conveying anthropological insights through fiction. It is common that social scientists and anthropologists, including those who drive their disciplines, appreciate fiction writers’ ‘capacity to depict the real and unveil truths’ (Fassin 2014: 52). It is even the case that ‘distinguished anthropologists and sociologists have admitted that they find, in the works of these authors, more compelling, more accurate, and more profound accounts of the social worlds they explore than in those proposed by the scholars who study them’ (Fassin 2014: 52; see also McLean 2017). In this spirit, a new brand of ethnographic writing has emerged, one that experiments with various literary styles, not just as embellishment, but also as a way of writing anthropology through creative writing and thereby conveying otherwise unconveyable truths. The volume Crumpled paper boat (Pandian & McLean 2017: 1-2), for example, is composed of ethnographic writing in the form of poetry, fiction, memoir, and scriptwriting, among others. The title is a line from a poem by Arthur Rimbaud and refers in the volume to ethnographic writing as a journey, ‘a transformative passage’ indicated by ‘a little lost boat’ and ‘the frustrations that lead writers to crumple and scrap the slips of paper on which they work’ until their texts will ‘float… to unforeseeable destinations’ (Pandian & McLean 2017: 1-2). Here, writing is about transformations of the author and saying the unsayable, rather merely conveying what social life is like.     

Anthropological writing genres                                                                   

It is obvious that academic scholarly writing is the major genre for anthropologists, and that it is supported by the art of writing field notes (Sanjek 1990, 2015; Andersen et al. 2020). Still, anthropologists do much writing in other genres, not only literary fiction, as discussed above, but also poetry (Rosaldo 2013, among many others). An anthropological career inevitably includes writing academic administrative texts such as a variety of reports and evaluations, but also writing grant proposals, yet another genre (Brenneis 2009; Finnström 2016). Contrary to many fiction writers, anthropologists tend to learn a certain writing style marked by academic strictness and cues such as aim, argument, engagement with debates and/or earlier research, theory, ethnography, method, conclusions, and bibliography. Anthropologists then tend to keep that style, rather than developing in new directions. Some of them, though, see an opportunity for changing track and tone as they move on to new research topics. Others switch between different genres, bringing back stylistic features from creative nonfiction, memoir, autoethnography, travel writing, journalism, and even fiction, poetry, and crime novel writing to their academic writing (Wulff 2016; Barton & Papen 2010).

Creative nonfiction, which tells stories about real events with fiction techniques, has been especially popular among anthropologists in the United States. This genre can be understood as ‘making the reading experience vivid, emotionally compelling, and enjoyable while sticking to the facts’ (Cheney 2001: 2). Originating in the 1960s New Journalism, this writing genre is often connected with the highly successful In cold blood (Capote 1965), a true crime story about the murder of a family on a farm in Kansas in the United States. The book builds on interviews with local people and police investigators, newspaper articles, and observation of the court case. Creative nonfiction has, since it was formulated, ‘gained momentum in subsequent years to inform assorted kinds of writing’ (Narayan 2007a: 130). The movement has come to include a variety of genres and is now established through ‘courses, grants, writing degree tracks, and journals’ (Narayan 2007a: 130). So what can ethnographers learn from creative nonfiction? One point is to strike a balance of writing about social life in an absorbing way without making things up. Another is to think of how to include and deal with situation, story, character, scenes, summaries, and so called ‘expository lumps’ (i.e. dense and heavy background information) when writing up their work (Narayan 2007a: 136-139). The advice to deal with the latter is to ‘break it up, spread it out, slip it into conversation’ (Le Guin 1998: 114).

Following up on writing anthropology in relation to literature, and in different genres, finding publishing outlets for work that is not strictly academic may be an issue. Yet some specialised journals for this exist, such as Anthropology & Humanism , the journal of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology, which publishes traditional academic articles as well as other anthropological writing genres: poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction essays in every issue. [4] These essays often take ethnographic or personal experiences as points of departure and move into more or less imagined realms. The vulnerable observer (Behar 1996), for example, is the story of how a Cuban-American anthropologist was away doing fieldwork on funeral practices in Spain, when her own grandfather died back in Miami. This experience made her argue for the emotional, subjective nature of fieldwork: the ethnographer cannot be detached, nor fully objective, in relation to their field. Spanning different genres, this book is also a kind of memoir, which has itself become a substantial genre in anthropology, primarily recalling events from the field but often going back to the personal life of the anthropologist (Jackson 2006; Narayan 2007b; Stoller 2008; Collins & Gallinat 2010). While memoirs can be expected to be written by older people who have lived long and eventful lives, it turns out that many anthropological memoirs are composed by writers who are still relatively young, or at least middle aged in their 40s or 50s, such as The power of the between (Stoller 2008: 4), triggered by the turmoil of a cancer diagnosis, which entailed a space ‘in-between’ life and death.

My father’s wars (Waterston 2014) is a daughter’s account about her father’s fate as told to her mainly by him, but also by her mother. This was a life course that was driven by dramatic historical events: Alisse Waterston's father had to flee the Holocaust in Poland with his family to Cuba. Eventually he joins the US Army, meets and marries an American woman, and finds himself commuting between Havana and New York, until Castro’s revolution forces the family to leave Cuba for Puerto Rico. This memoir exemplifies how an eventful personal story defined by dangers can convey major political events. Another kind of memoir is My life as a spy (Verdery 2018). When the secret police files in Eastern Europe became available after 1989, Katherine Verdery, an American anthropologist who had spent frequent long research stints studying political economy of social inequality, ethnic relations, and nationalism in communist Romania, discovered in her file that she had been surveilled by the secret police, the Securitate, and accused of being a spy. In this case, the memoir was a way to correct and contextualise a faulty local image of an anthropologist. At the same time, it is an important piece of information about how Romania operated during communism.

Travel writing is yet another form of memoir, as heralded in the classic Tristes tropiques (Lévi-Strauss 1992 [1955]) which documents travels and fieldwork in Brazil. Its proximity to travel writing was later problematised, when travel accounts about the colonies were critiqued for conveying a Western imperial perspective (Pratt 1992). Even though early travel writing relied too much on exoticisation, this is now changing (Nyqvist 2018). Yet travel writing continues to be a way to explore the world on behalf of people ‘at home’, to tell them about places elsewhere, often far away, thereby mediating the world. In addition to describing places and people, as well as the travel itself, travel writing also tends to address the conditions of travel.

Related to anthropological memoir as a genre is the notion of ‘autoethnography’, defined as ‘referring either to the ethnography of one’s own group or to autobiographical writing that has ethnographic interest’ – indeed, the two types can be related (Reed-Danahay 1997: 2). An autoethnography of borders is ‘ Illegal’ traveller , which combines fieldwork on undocumented immigrants with descriptions of the personal experience of having to flee Iran during dangerous circumstances. The preface, dated 1987, begins:

One cold night in late February, in a barren land surrounded by huge rugged mountains, I stood on a gravel road, like any other road in this rural area. Midnight passed; the whole landscape was wrapped in silence. The road separated Iran from Afghanistan. It was the border. Shrouded in a deadly stillness was the road, one of the most sanguinary roads in the world laid in wait for its next prey. It was a moonless night. “Good! The darkness shelters us,” said my smuggler… “If I take this step, I will be an ‘illegal’ person and the world will never be the same again.” That night I took that step and my odyssey of “illegality” began (Khosravi 2010: ix).

There are, again, overlaps between memoirs and autoethnography, yet an anthropological autoethnography is usually distinguished by an explicit and systematic theoretical structure which is intended to explain how a personal story that acknowledges power and inequality has a general ethnographic interest. This has been referred to as critical autoethnography (Reed-Danahay 2019). The experiences in the quote above, and subsequent ones about what it is like to be a refugee in Stockholm, also go into opinion pieces for newspapers such as The Guardian and The New York Times (Khosravi 2020). Contrary to writing anthropology, writing journalism always requires an accessible style, short sentences, and a key point introduced early in the text. If anthropological ideas are used, they have to be explained to a general audience. More often than not, journalistic articles connect to an urgent event in the news. They tend to be much shorter and limited in scope than most academic ones. In addition, editors often decide on the headline, which is drastically different from what academics are used to. Again, the boundaries with anthropological writing are blurred, as some anthropologists who keep writing influential journalistic comments on current affairs become public intellectuals, thereby potentially enhancing their academic reputation. This is at times called public anthropology, considered by many to be crucial for an understanding of public life but requiring a refinement of the art of narrative as well as a relinquishing of dry analysis (Eriksen 2005). Moreover, anthropologists who write journalism can be seen to bring back stylistic traits such as lucidity to their anthropological writing. Journalism in anthropology is – as is so often the case – a twofold topic, comprising both anthropologists writing journalism, and the anthropological study of worlds of journalism and journalistic writing (Boyer 2005, 2013; Hannerz 2004; Boyer & Hannerz 2006). Writing future worlds (Hannerz 2016) investigates the new genre of speculative future scenarios, such as the idea of ‘the clash of civilizations’, having impact on global debate and understandings. As to ethnographies of journalism, there is, for instance, a study of former East German journalists and their attempts at explaining life in post-unification Germany which raises complicated issues about the nation and modernity (Boyer 2005). Still in Germany, another study focuses on news organizations, and how digital information and communication technologies have transformed how journalists work there (as elsewhere): they find themselves in a quickly changing landscape where social media is a major actor and contributes to the fact that their authority, expertise, and skills are challenged (Boyer 2013). More in line with travel writers, foreign correspondents, in a study conducted mainly in Jerusalem, Tokyo, and Johannesburg, report from one part of the world to another. It turns out that unique story lines emerge in different correspondent ‘beats’, yet what they write is also shaped by their home country and personal interest. One insight of this study is that both anthropologists and foreign correspondents have a lot to learn from each other when it comes to illuminating the general public about events and peoples in faraway places (Hannerz 2004).

The frequent blurring of writing genres has attracted a lot of attention. In fact ‘there has been an enormous amount of genre mixing in social science, as in intellectual life generally, and such blurring of kinds is continuing apace’ (Geertz 1980: 1659). One type of genre mixing is the monograph Lost in transition (Ghodsee 2011), on the downfall of communism in Bulgaria, where ethnographic chapters take turns with chapters written as ethnographic fiction. More often, genre mixing in anthropology takes the form of single texts, identified as combinations of ethnography and creative nonfiction, memoir and opinion pieces. Genre mixing has been pivotal for anthropology’s development both intellectually and methodologically. It fosters creativity, and suggests a language to approximate saying the unsayable as well as generating new approaches and ideas for research, even if that is often overlooked on academic ranking lists and citation indices.

Conclusions and looking ahead

As a discipline, anthropology builds on academic writing. Yet a focus on the craft of writing is relatively recent in the discipline’s history. Anthropologists continue to accentuate their identity as writers, drawing on literature, as well as different anthropological writing genres such as creative nonfiction, memoir, autoethnography, travel writing, and journalism. Our on-going sharpening of writing as a skill improves the knowledge that we are able to produce and convey, sometimes even providing more accurate accounts of social life than conventional academic work. Collaborative writing has increased both with the people we study, as an attempt to empower them and to draw on their expertise, and with colleagues from other disciplines, partly in response to requests from research funding agencies. There is also a growing interest in working with visual artists, especially graphic artists, as exemplified by Light in dark times (Waterston & Hollands 2020). Publication formats have equally become more flexible: featuring small books, essays on current affairs, and conversations in journals among many other types of outlets. The rise of digital publishing increases this flexibility, as anthropological discussions are now had on Twitter, and blogs such as AnthroDendum. [5] There is an upswing in honest accounts of how anthropological texts are actually composed that describe the role of personal creativity, academic training, and biography in the way arguments are formulated, as well as the impact of writing routines. They combine writing with a personal touch in combination with a scholarly responsibility, while calling for accessible styles (Nielsen & Rapport 2018; McGranahan 2020). With more diversity in anthropological writing styles, formats, and outlets in the future, questions of how to assess quality will be even more accentuated and debated. Importantly, there is a quickly-expanding realization that writing can and should be a driving force in the process of decolonising anthropology (Pandian 2017; Ulysse 2020; Tapsell 2020), indicating that this is a defining moment for reconsidering writing styles.

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Narayan, K. 1999. Ethnography and fiction: where is the border? Anthropology and Humanism 24 (2), 134-47.

——— 2007a. Tools to shape texts: what creative nonfiction can offer ethnography. Anthropology and Humanism , 32 (2), 130-44.

——— 2007b. My family and other saints. Chicago: University Press.

——— 2012. Alive in the writing: crafting ethnography in the company of Chekhov. Chicago: University Press.

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——— & S. McLean (eds) 2017. Crumpled paper boat: experiments in ethnographic writing . Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

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——— 2019. Autoethnography. In SAGE research methods foundations (eds) P. Atkinson, S. Delamont, A. Cernat, J.W. Sakshaug & R.A. Williams, 1-19. London: SAGE (available on-line: https://methods.sagepub.com/foundations/autoethnography ).

Rosaldo, R. 2013. The day of Shelly’s death: the poetry and ethnography of grief . Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

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——— (ed.) 2015. eFieldnotes: the makings of anthropology in the digital world . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Stankiewicz, D. 2012. Anthropology and fiction: an interview with Amitav Ghosh. Cultural Anthropology (special issue on 25th anniversary of Writing Culture ) 27 (3), 535-41.

Stein, F. 2018. Anthropology’s ‘impact’: a comment on audit and the unmeasurable nature of critique. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 24 (1), 10-29.

Stoller, P. 2009. The power of the between: an anthroplogical odyssey . Chicago: University Press.

——— & C. Olkes 1987. In sorcery’s shadow:  a memoir of apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger . Chicago: University Press.

Strathern, M. (ed.) 2000. Audit culture: anthropological studies in accountability, ethics and the academy . London: Routledge.

Tapsell, P. 2020. The anthropology of being (me). In Writing anthropology: essays on craft and commitment (ed.) C. McGranahan, 256-9. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 

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Turner, V. 1976. African ritual and western literature: is a comparative symbology possible? In The literature of fact (ed.) A. Fletcher, 45-81. New York: Columbia University Press.

Ulysse, G.A. 2020. Writing anthropology and such, or ‘once more, with feeling.’ In Writing anthropology: essays on craft and commitment (ed.) C. McGranahan, 251-5. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.  

Verdery, K. 2018. My life as a spy: investigations in a secret police file . Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Waterston, A. 2014. My father’s wars: migration, memory, and the violence of a century . New York: Routledge.

——— & C. Hollands 2020. Light in dark times: the human search for meaning . Toronto: University Press.

Wiles, E. 2021. Live literature: the experience and cultural value of literary performance events from salons to festivals. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wulff, H. 2016. Introducing the anthropologist as writer: across and within genres. In The anthropologist as writer: genres and contexts in the twenty-first century (ed.) H. Wulff, 1-18. Oxford: Berghahn.

——— 2017. Rhythms of writing: an anthropology of Irish literature . London: Bloomsbury.

——— 2018. Diversifying from within: diaspora writings in Sweden. In The composition of anthropology: how anthropological texts are written (eds) M. Nielsen & N. Rapport, 122-36. London: Routledge.

——— 2019. Rhythms of writing: craft, career, and context . Pro Futura Lecture. Uppsala: Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala University.

Note on Contributor

Helena Wulff is Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. Her current research engages with migrant writing in Sweden. She is editor of The anthropologist as writer: genres and contexts in the twenty-first century (2016, Berghahn) and author of Rhythms of writing: an anthropology of Irish Literature (2017, Bloomsbury).

Professor Helena Wulff, Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, SE-10691 Stockholm, Sweden. [email protected]

[1] Tichenor, M. 2020. Metrics. In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology (eds) F. Stein, S. Lazar, M. Candea, H. Diemberger, J. Robbins, A. Sanchez & R. Stasch (available on-line: http://doi.org/10.29164/20metrics ).

[2] Clifford Geertz (1988) considered especially Bronislaw Malinowski, Ruth Benedict, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, and Claude Lévi-Strauss as authors.

[3] A number of volumes combine anthropology with literature such as Dennis & Aycock 1989, Benson 1993, Daniel & Peck 1996, De Angelis 2002, and Cohen 2013.

[4] The Society for Humanistic Anthropology is a section of the American Anthropological Association. See also the online magazine, Otherwise ( https://www.otherwisemag.com/ ).

[5] https://anthrodendum.org/

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anthropology

Definition of anthropology

Did you know.

The Origin of Anthropology

The word anthropology dates back to the late 16th century, but it was not until the 19th century that it was applied to the academic discipline that now bears its name. In the United States, this field of study is typically divided into four distinct branches: physical (or biological) anthropology, archaeology, cultural (or social) anthropology, and linguistic anthropology.

Anthropology is from the New Latin word anthropologia (“the study of humanity”) and shares its ultimate root in Greek, anthrōpos (“human being”), with a number of other words in English, such as anthropomorphize , philanthropy , and misanthrope .

Examples of anthropology in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'anthropology.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

borrowed from New Latin anthropologia "study of humanity, science of human nature," from anthropo- anthropo- + -logia -logy

1593, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Phrases Containing anthropology

• cultural anthropology
• physical anthropology

Dictionary Entries Near anthropology

anthropolith

anthropomancy

Cite this Entry

“Anthropology.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anthropology. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.

Kids Definition

Kids definition of anthropology, medical definition, medical definition of anthropology, more from merriam-webster on anthropology.

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20.2 Why Anthropology Matters

Learning outcomes.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Explain the characteristics of anthropology that make it uniquely relevant today.
• Describe and give an example of anthropological values.
• Analyze the importance of anthropological skills.

A Uniquely Relevant Discipline

As you learned in What is Anthropology? , anthropology is a unique discipline. Not only does it study all aspects of what it means to be human across time, with a focus on evolution and how changes occur in our bodies and cultures, but it also examines the ways in which we adapt to different social and physical environments. This process of adaptation is a primary source of cultural and biological diversity. Anthropology is also holistic, examining the context of and interconnections between many parts of our lives and weaving together our biology, our traditions, and the diverse social and physical environments in which we live. The anthropological approach views humans as part of a wider system of meaning, as actors and change-makers within a dynamic environment populated by others. Across cultures, those others can include other species (plant and animal) and spirits as well as other human beings. It is the human ability to imagine and construct the universe in which we live that most interests anthropologists.

In most four-field introductory classes, students are surprised at the breadth of anthropology, but this wide lens is the cornerstone of the discipline. Today, anthropologists increasingly approach the study of humans as a dynamic construct. We see humans as agents in motion, undergoing change as a normal state of being, rather than as objects in a petri dish, preserved and inert. This means that anthropological studies are by necessity messy and in flux, as our subject matter makes change. Because holism, adaptation, and adjustment are critical to anthropological studies, we bring an especially powerful lens to attempts to understand complex, large-scale global problems.

Few of our challenges today are simple. Solving the climate crisis requires changes not just to our use of fossil fuels but also to the ways in which we produce food, bathe, heat and cool our houses, and travel. Each culture and each community must be aware of its power and potential to enact positive change. Both a scientific and a humanistic approach are needed to solve our current global challenges.

Anthropological Values

The anthropological perspective is grounded by principles and standards of behavior considered important to understanding other people and their ways of life. These include the value of all cultures; the value of diversities, biological and cultural; the importance of change over time; and the importance of cultural relativism and acknowledging of the dignity of all human beings. These anthropological values undergird our discipline.

The study of culture intersects with each of the four subfields and highlights the importance of diversity. From the beginning, humans have used ingenuity to tackle problems and provide solutions to challenging circumstances. Anthropologists study and value this extraordinary process of human creativity, documenting it in living and past cultures, in our languages and symbol systems, and even in our bones, through cultural procedures such as elongating women’s necks (as is practiced by the Kayan people of Myanmar) or flattening/elongating people’s heads (practiced by the Chinookan peoples of North America). Even our diets, which are cultural artifacts of adaptation, are written on our bones. The consumption of corn, for example, is measurable as carbon isotopes in human bone. Anthropology celebrates this human uniqueness and diversity, understanding that different ways of being are humanity’s greatest legacy—a foundation embodied in the concept of the ethnosphere.

Anthropological studies produce documentation of immeasurable worth. Through anthropological research, we collect, preserve, and share the stories of living humans as well as human artifacts, sites, and bodies. Together, these documents form a valuable database. Field notes and artifacts from the earliest anthropologists document diversity that has since disappeared. Franz Boas taught his students how to make life masks of the people they were studying to document the physical diversity of different groups of people (A. Singer 1986). This vast collection of some 2,000 life masks is now preserved at the Smithsonian Institution as an archival resource for understanding environment, culture, and biological adaptations. Many masks document ethnic groups that are now extinct. Anthropology collections are of inestimable value for future research.

The Council for the Preservation of Anthropological Records , or CoPAR , works with anthropologists, librarians, and archivists to obtain and preserve anthropological records and make them available both for the study of human diversity and as a record of the history of the discipline. The organization has two primary goals. The first is to educate anthropologists on the value and urgency of saving documents. The second is to help train archivists and information specialists in best practices for handling the sometimes very sensitive information within these documents while also facilitating them in making sure that the information is available to scholars anywhere (Silverman and Parezo 1995).

Diversity is a product of adaptation and change over time. As cultural groups encountered different challenges in their environments, they used ingenuity and innovation to address these challenges, sometimes borrowing other cultures’ solutions when applicable. In the high Andes of South America, the steep mountainous inclines mean that there is little flat ground for growing food. In response to this challenge, Inca farmers used terrace farming , building steplike terraces into the hillside to create areas of flatter surfaces for growing crops (see Figure 20.6 ). Forms of terrace farming are found all over Asia and in parts of Africa, with cultures in each area adapting the use of terraces to meet specific climatic conditions and crop requirements (e.g., paddy rice cultivation requires small earthwork borders to allow for flooding). In short, there is no one way to do something; every solution is calibrated to particular needs. Today, with increasing urgency to minimize our carbon footprints, architects are designing homes to meet clients’ demands for net-positive houses —that is, houses that produce more energy than they consume through solar power and lower-energy appliances (Stamp 2020). As we work toward reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, the architectural and construction industries are beginning to adapt to these changing needs and demands.

Besides culture and diversity, anthropology is also about the human power to change. Through adaption, evolution, and even acclimatization (short-term adaptation to environmental change), the human body has evolved alongside human cultures to make us a species uniquely capable of adapting to almost any environmental or social conditions. Humans can survive even in such inhospitable environments as outer space (thanks to the human-designed technology that makes up the International Space Station) and the polar regions (where human-built structures and protective gear make habitation possible at McMurdo Station in Antarctica). And humans have survived health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and historical tragedies such as slavery and warfare. The ability to change, redirect, reassess, reimagine, and innovate has sustained our species across time.

Diversity matters more today than ever. Where diversity is valued, there is greater potential for innovation and collaboration. A central value of anthropology, evident in both research and applied work across communities, is anthropologists’ focus not only on understanding other cultures and different ways of living but also on translating them—that is, communicating what is learned across cultures in order to share it more broadly.

The most important anthropological value, however, is cultural relativism , or suspending judgment about other cultures until one gains a clear understanding of the meaning and significance of what those cultures do and believe. Cultural relativism requires us to understand the rationale, purpose, and meaning of cultural traditions and knowledge before we decide on their validity. And it provides significant advantages in better understanding others:

• It allows us to see the worth, dignity, and respect of all persons, allowing for initial exchange and collaboration between “us” and “them.”
• It reminds us to approach the study of other cultures without automatically judging them as inferior, thus minimizing ethnocentrism.
• It helps us keep an open mind about the potentials and possibilities inherent in our species.

First formally introduced by Franz Boas , cultural relativism laid the groundwork for the discipline of anthropology, a science that would study what it means to be human in all its diverse forms. Boas and his students worked to apply cultural relativism across racial, ethnic, linguistic, and socioeconomic boundaries, documenting the rich cultural traditions of Indigenous peoples, minority communities, and immigrants. The concept, though, has undergone a great deal of debate since the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations. Is anything okay if a culture decides it is? Are there any boundaries to cultural relativism? Do we have to accept everything that a group does, or can an anthropologist ultimately judge that a practice is damaging, harmful, and not deserving of being respected and upheld?

While these debates remain, anthropologists still value cultural relativism (and the worthiness of other peoples and cultures), although perhaps in a modified form that anthropologist Michael Brown calls cultural relativism 2.0 . As Brown states, cultural relativism 2.0 is “a call to pause before judging, to listen before speaking, and to widen one’s views before narrowing them” (2008, 380). In other words, first give people a chance .

Anthropology is important today, perhaps even more than when it formally began some 150 years ago. As French anthropologist Maurice Godelier says:

Anthropology—together with history—is one of the social science disciplines best able to help us understand the complexity of our now globalized world and the nature of the conflicts and crisis we are experiencing. In such a world, it would be irresponsible and indecent for anthropologists [to] stop trying to understand others. (2016, 75–76)

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Essays on Kant's Anthropology

Jacobs, Brian, and Kain, Patrick (eds.), Essays on Kant's Anthropology , Cambridge University Press, 2003, 278pp., $60.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521790387.

Reviewed by Brent Kalar, University of New Mexico

This collection of essays is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature on previously neglected aspects of Kant’s thought. The “anthropology” referred to in the title encompasses not only Kant’s late work Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), but, in addition, the lecture course upon which that work was based. Student notes from the latter have recently (in 1997) become available in a volume of the Akademie Edition of Kants gesammelte Schriften , the appearance of which provided the occasion for this collection of interpretive essays. The collection features original contributions by some of the leading Kant scholars writing today, including Reinhard Brandt and Werner Stark (the editors of the new volume in the Akademie edition), Allen Wood, Robert Louden, Paul Guyer, Howard Caygill, and Susan Meld Shell. The editors also each include their own essays. The essays cover a wide range of topics, relating Kant’s anthropology to issues in his theoretical philosophy, aesthetics, philosophy of history, and (especially) his practical philosophy.

Kant began offering a lecture course on anthropology in the winter of 1772-3 that he repeated every winter semester until his retirement in 1796. The anthropology lectures, therefore, spanning as they do virtually the entire period in which Kant was developing his “critical system,” provide a potentially fascinating historical window into the development of his thought. What was the conception of anthropology that Kant developed in these lectures? As the editors point out in their useful introduction to the collection, anthropology as conceived by Kant was a broad-based inquiry into the nature of human beings in general (p. 3). It was also conceived as a discipline that was empirical and pragmatic. It was to be completely divorced from metaphysical speculation, based instead upon observations of ordinary life (whether first-hand or through literature, travel accounts, histories, etc.). It was also to be useful , providing the kind of “worldly wisdom” that would allow one to get ahead in life, to successfully pursue happiness. As actually practiced by Kant in his lectures and subsequent book, anthropology involved a consideration of the faculties of the human mind in general (i.e., cognition, pleasure/ displeasure, and desire), of the “characters” of various sub-sections of humanity (the two sexes, the different nations and races), and of the “destiny” [ Bestimmung ] of humanity as a whole. In line with its empirical method and practical orientation, Kant’s tone throughout his anthropological writings is more engaging and popular, less technical and rigorous than in his better-known works. At the same time, in his anthropology, Kant deals with some of the same themes and concepts of his critical philosophy, such as self-consciousness, taste, and the highest good. Does this mean that we should take the anthropology to be mainly a popularization of the (developing) critical system? Or does it, on the contrary, have a systematic importance in its own right? In favor of the latter view, one might point to Kant’s enigmatic references in the Groundwork (and elsewhere) to an “empirical part” of moral philosophy, called “practical anthropology,” which would deal with “laws of the human being’s will insofar as it is affected by nature” (4: 387-8; 1). This, of course, is to be the supplement to (and carefully separated from) the primary, “pure” or “rational” part of moral philosophy, the metaphysics of morals. Whereas “practical anthropology” deals with how human beings actually behave, the metaphysics of morals deals with how they ought to behave. Nevertheless, Kant seems to suggest, practical anthropology is required to provide “applicability” to the a priori laws of morality, in order to make these laws “effective in concreto in the conduct of [one’s] life” (4: 389; 3). Is this “practical anthropology” what Kant intends to provide in the anthropology lectures? If so, do these lectures (and the resultant book) actually provide an essential supplement to the purely rational part of Kant’s moral theory? These are among the most interesting puzzles that have arisen in connection with Kant’s anthropology.

The interpretive essays in this collection consider a wide range of questions about Kant’s anthropology. They fall into two broad groups: those dealing with more “historical,” and those dealing with more “philosophical” issues. Several of the essays deal primarily with the ways in which the anthropology lectures illuminate the origin and evolution of key aspects of Kant’s philosophy. This group includes the essays by Stark, Guyer, Caygill, and Shell. In his contribution, Werner Stark usefully provides historical background regarding the academic and intellectual context in which the lectures emerged. Stark connects the emergence of the anthropology to the emergence of Kant’s conception of a “pure” moral philosophy. He finds it particularly suggestive that Kant typically paired his anthropology lectures with his ethics lectures (giving them both in the same semester). According to Stark, this pairing indicates a reciprocal relationship between anthropology and ethics, such that “neither can be thought independently of the other” (p. 25). Here Stark has in mind the relation between the “pure” and “empirical” parts of moral philosophy discussed above. He cites evidence from the lectures of mid-1770’s that show that even there, Kant insisted upon a reciprocal relationship between ethics and anthropology. Somewhat disappointingly, however, Stark does not pursue the more philosophical questions of what this reciprocity actually entailed, or whether Kant was entitled to assert such a connection.

Paul Guyer recounts how the anthropology lectures provide new evidence about the development of Kant’s aesthetic theory. What these lectures show, Guyer argues, is that most of the characteristic elements of Kant’s mature aesthetic theory were already present in early versions of the lectures. The key element that was missing, and only provided in the Critique of Judgment itself, is the connection between aesthetics and teleology. This essay provides additional historical support for a thesis that Guyer has worked out in his previous writings on Kant’s aesthetics: that the aesthetic can provide support for the moral only if it is independently conceived (or “autonomous”).

Howard Caygill provides a valuable contribution to our understanding of the development of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. He argues that the anthropology course was the principal place where Kant worked out his novel doctrine of sensibility (as a unique faculty of the mind). In particular, it was primarily in the anthropology lectures that Kant worked out his defense of sensibility against rationalist objections (such as the objection that the senses served only to confuse the understanding). Caygill evidently believes that the theory of sensibility is the key innovation of Kant’s “critical period,” but he does not really argue for that point here. He does, however, carefully trace the steps by which Kant separated his view from that of his rationalist predecessors.

Finally, Susan Meld Shell traces the evolution of Kant’s conception of happiness, as this is reflected in the anthropology lectures. Her basic thesis is that the lectures document a turning-point in Kant’s conception of happiness, caused by his reading of Pietro Verri’s del piacere e del dolere, which convinced him that human life necessarily involves more pain than pleasure. This encounter with Verri made Kant shift to a more pessimistic conception of human life and a sterner view of what type of happiness is achievable by human beings. Needless to say, Verri’s thesis is highly controversial, and one might wish for more discussion of Kant’s reasons for adopting it than Shell provides here. Nevertheless, she does present a well-documented case for her historical thesis.

While the predominantly historical essays will be interesting for specialists in the various areas of Kant scholarship, a perhaps more intriguing question for philosophers with a more general interest in Kant is whether the newly published anthropology lectures in any way force a reassessment of key aspects of Kant’s philosophy. The best cases for and against such a conclusion are made in essays dealing with aspects of Kant’s practical philosophy, including those by Wood, Jacobs, Kain, Brandt, and Louden. Allen Wood disputes the view, put forth by Alasdair MacIntyre among others, that Kant’s only conception of human nature is one that involves (quoting MacIntyre) “the physiological and non-rational side of man” (p. 42). It is natural, Wood admits, to think that Kant must regard (empirical) anthropology as a mechanistic natural science that excludes freedom (p. 43). This certainly seems to follow from Kant’s view of “the empirical world of nature as a strictly deterministic causal mechanism, in which no free agency could be found” (ibid.). However, Wood argues that this conclusion ignores the fact that for Kant, “our only coherent conception of ourselves, as moral agents or even as subjects of theoretical judgment, is one which presupposes from a practical standpoint that we are free” (p. 44). Wood holds that, because of this, Kant’s empirical anthropology also “interprets the empirical observations that it makes on the basis of [the presupposition that human beings are free]” (ibid.). The “pragmatic” character of Kant’s anthropology, then, also refers to the fact that it deals with human nature as something that is at least in part the product of free agency. If Wood is correct about this Kant, in his anthropological thought, self-consciously blurs his famous distinction between the “two standpoints”: a theoretical standpoint from which we regard ourselves as thoroughly determined by mechanical causes and a practical standpoint from which we regard ourselves as self-determining agents. Wood proposes that, in his anthropology, Kant adopts a hybrid of these two standpoints: a theoretical standpoint from which we regard ourselves as autonomous.

Two questions immediately arise in connection with Wood’s intriguing proposal. First, is Kant’s methodological presupposition in the anthropology in fact as Wood describes? Second, is this presupposition legitimate , given the strictures imposed by the critical philosophy? Wood seems to believe that it is legitimate, but one could raise doubts about this. As regards the first question, it is hard to dispute Wood’s point. First of all, Kant introduces anthropology in the published work as a body of knowledge which aims at “what man makes, can, or should make of himself as a freely acting being” (7: 119; 3 [emphasis added]). Moreover, the actual orientation of the anthropology towards practical, “worldly” knowledge supports this characterization of it, and hence does indeed suggest that it is an inquiry based on the presupposition of human freedom. It is less obvious, however, that Kant is entitled to this assumption. Shouldn’t any properly empirical inquiry for Kant be based upon an investigation of efficient (mechanical) causes? How is Kant’s apparent procedure in the anthropology consistent with his claims in the Critiques that, in principle at least, the conduct of a human being is just as predicable as the occurrence of “a solar or lunar eclipse” (5:99; 83)? If this claim about predictability is true, what is the point of regarding human beings as free when we are observing them (from the empirical perspective)? Wood’s reply is based on the presupposition that Kant is fundamentally skeptical about the prospects of a predictive science of human behavior. Wood argues that Kant’s claims about predictability, such as the one cited above, express merely “metaphysical propositions” that “do not indicate anything about any possible program of empirical research into human actions” (p. 44). Kant, on Wood’s view, ruled out a priori the possibility that there could be a predictive science of human behavior analogous to the science of mechanics. So the predictability Kant is talking about in the above passage must remain forever “in principle” predictability. Why did Kant think this? According to Wood, there are several reasons. First, Kant denied that it was possible to explain the connection between the corporeal and the mental, hence “any mechanistic laws governing acts of the mind would have to involve a psychological determinism cut off from the causality of objects of outer sense” (p. 45). Second, our consciousness of “the appearances of inner sense” – especially of our own motives – is characterized by a lack of certainly and self-deception (p. 45). Finally, we cannot tell what persons’ underlying principles of action are by observing their (habitual) behavior, “for any habit is consistent with a variety of traits or dispositions” (p. 48). This would be an obstacle to forming reliable generalizations about human behavior because we could not predict from observing what people habitually do how they would behave in novel or unusual situations.

Wood puts forth a very convincing textual case for ascribing this view to Kant. He evidently also believes that the position he attributes to Kant is a sound one. Is he right about this? Certainly, if one assumes that (1) we require, for practical purposes, a working knowledge of how human beings usually behave, yet (2) the mechanical model of human behavior cannot provide this, then it does indeed seem reasonable to conclude that we need to adopt some other model. Since the only available alternative is the model that considers human beings as free rational agents, we need to adopt this model for the empirical study of human beings. Assumption (1) above can hardly be disputed. But how can we be so sure that assumption (2) is the right one? One might think that the Kant emphasized by Wood is excessively “defeatist” about the prospects of a mechanistic empirical psychology. At any rate, the reasons Wood cites do not seem to me to actually rule out the possibility that there could (someday) be a predictive science of human behavior analogous to the science of mechanics. To begin with, it is unclear why solving the mind-body problem should be a condition of a predictive science of human behavior. One would think that such a science could remain wholly on the level of outer appearances, and disregard the inner, “mental” side of the picture altogether. For the same reason, the uncertainty and deceptiveness characteristic of our awareness of our own motives would be irrelevant to a mechanistic behavioral science. The motives would not matter, as long as we could accurately predict the behavior that resulted from them. Nor does the last reason Wood gives seem entirely convincing to me. The problem of predicting how a person would behave in unusual situations from how they behave in familiar ones is a real issue, but there is no reason to believe it is unsolvable. For one thing, we can rely on observations of how other people with similar habits have behaved when confronted with a certain situation. Of course, due to the inherent complexity of the phenomena, we should expect that our ability to predict will probably always be less than perfect. Nevertheless, I cannot see why the possibility of a highly reliable predictive science of human behavior should be ruled out a priori .

Wood does, however, at least raise the interesting possibility that there is room in Kant’s thought for a “third standpoint” that unites the theoretical and the practical. In the most philosophically interesting part of his contribution, Brian Jacobs develops this idea with his suggestion that the solution to the problem of finding a basis for the unification of the physiological and practical perspectives on the human being is to be found in Kant’s anthropological conception of “character.” As Jacobs understands it, this conception of character possesses an ambiguity that particularly suits it for being a bridge between the natural and the moral conceptions of the human being. As he puts it, for Kant, “character ought to reveal both the basic psychological constitution of the person and the unmistakable traces of an intelligibly autonomous self” (p. 120). The term “character” refers to both the observable behavior of a person and a moral property – the person’s “way of thinking” – that is not and never can be observed. The link between these two senses of the term is the fact that the observable behavior “stands in for” – we might say expresses – the moral property. Mysterious as this notion is, it is congruent with what Kant says about beauty “symbolizing” morality in the Critique of Judgment . Nevertheless, as Jacobs points out, “characterization” for Kant must be distinguished from symbolization, insofar as only in the case of the latter function does the observed resemble the unobserved. If this is correct, then Kant operated with two distinct conceptions of ways in which the empirical phenomena could “express” the purely intelligible.

Patrick Kain, like Wood, contests what he sees as a widespread misconception about Kant’s moral psychology. In Kain’s case, this is the view held by some contemporary Kantians that Kant does not (and perhaps cannot) provide any independent account of the normativity of prudential reason. Kain suggests that such an account might be based upon Kant’s idea that one’s own happiness or well-being is a “necessary end” (p. 250). This might explain, he thinks, why Kant believes that there is something irrational about pursuing a particular end or object that is in conflict with one’s clear overall well-being; in the face of such a conflict, it only makes sense to give up the only end one can give up, namely, the particular end (Ibid.). As Kain recognizes, however, this entire line of argument depends upon establishing that happiness is in fact a necessary end. And this is a notion, as several commentators have recognized, which is very difficult to reconcile with central doctrines of Kant’s moral theory, such as his view that the free will chooses its own ends.

In addition to these questions about Kant’s moral psychology, there is the previously discussed question how we are to understand the relation of the anthropology writings to the critical system. Several of the authors touch on this question in one way or another, but it is Reinhard Brandt and Robert Louden who most clearly offer opposing estimations of the systematic importance of the anthropology. Brandt is convinced that pragmatic anthropology “neither belongs to philosophy in a strict sense, nor is it articulated as a system based upon an idea of reason” (p. 85). In support of this claim, Brandt first argues that there is no obvious conceptual link between the two main divisions of the Anthropology, the “didactic” and the “characteristic” (p. 89). Whatever unity is to be found here is, according to Brandt, something that developed only gradually and in stages, as Kant groped, in successive versions of the lectures, towards a progressively more complete presentation of a “doctrine of prudence” (the knowledge necessary for the successful pursuit of happiness in the world) (p. 91). Because of this basic orientation towards prudential (hence self-interested) action, Brandt concludes that “pragmatic anthropology” is fundamentally limited in its aims and hence cannot be identified with the discipline of practical anthropology that Kant claimed was the necessary complement to pure moral philosophy (p. 92). Finally, pragmatic anthropology is not properly philosophical, since it lacks an . priori dimension; even its discussion of the destiny or vocation [ Bestimmung ] of the human race “is analyzed entirely empirically and as immanent to the world” (p. 93). We may thus view Brandt as laying down a challenge (and laying out some of the obstacles) to anyone who would claim to find in the anthropology an indispensable part of Kant’s system of moral philosophy.

This challenge is taken up by Robert Louden. Louden concedes that “Kant nowhere (i.e., neither in the anthropology lectures nor anywhere else) hands over to his readers a single, complete, tidy package of moral anthropology” (p. 64). But rather than be daunted by this, Louden attempts to provide a reconstruction of the promised second, empirical part of moral philosophy from the material that Kant does provide. As against Brandt, Louden tries to show that Kant’s pragmatic anthropology does indeed have both a properly moral (as opposed to a merely prudential), as well as an . priori dimension. According to Louden, the “overarching goal” of the anthropology writings “is to figure out what human nature is like in order more effectively to further moral ends” (p. 69). In order to do this, anthropology must of course provide accurate empirical knowledge, but it is not at all a “Weberian value-free undertaking” (p. 79). Rather, it is a mode of empirical inquiry framed by the a priori assumption that human beings are morally free and are destined to realize their freedom through the emergence of a “cosmopolitan society” (p. 73). The descriptions of human beings that anthropology provides are intended to help realize this goal.

Through his detailed scholarship, Louden does a commendable job of reconstructing a plausibly Kantian moral anthropology that overcomes some of Brandt’s skeptical obstacles. However, there is another question that needs to be asked: does this reconstructed anthropology really constitute an essential supplement to the purely rational part of moral philosophy? Is it an indispensable part of the system of philosophy itself? Louden evidently endorses Kant’s claim that moral philosophy “needs anthropology for its application to human beings” (4:412; 23). This is, however, a puzzling claim if we have in mind the famous examples of moral reasoning that Kant provides in the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason . There the pure moral law (the categorical imperative) seems quite adequate all by itself for providing us with determinate answers to moral questions. Consider a question like “Should I make a false promise in order to obtain some ready cash?” The moral law, of course, answers this question in the negative. Anthropological knowledge is not obviously needed in order to translate this answer “into human terms” before it can be applied to my situation. The answer given by pure rational moral philosophy is already immediately applicable as it stands. So here is evidently a situation in which anthropology is not needed for the application of moral philosophy to human beings. But this is not just any situation; it is the typical situation for Kant. So what was Kant thinking when he made his remarks about the need for anthropology in order to make moral philosophy applicable to human beings? One possible answer is that Kant was thinking primarily of moral education here. Anthropological knowledge is necessary in order to educate human beings morally, to “awaken their reason” and arouse their consciousness of the moral law that binds them. This interpretation is supported by passages like one cited by Louden himself, in which Kant explains why “morals must be united with knowledge of humanity” in the following terms: “The reason that morals and sermons … have little effect is due to the lack of knowledge of the human being” (p. 66, quoting 25: 471-2, my emphasis). In other words, Kant is saying that merely moralizing and sermonizing is ineffective as a means of moral education if one lacks adequate knowledge of the specific cognitive capacities and motivations of human beings. One must know how to effectively awaken and elicit the inborn moral consciousness of human beings, and this requires a general “pragmatic” knowledge of their capacities and motives. But here we are talking about the essentially empirical methods of practical pedagogy, which should not be considered a part of moral philosophy proper. Anthropology, in other words, stands outside the system of philosophy.

Essays on Kant’s Anthropology is a valuable collection of contemporary essays on a generally overlooked dimension of Kant’s thought. Whether one views anthropology as a vital part of the critical system or as merely an external appendage offering insight into the development of Kant’s mind, this collection shows beyond a doubt that the anthropological writings deserve more attention than they have hitherto received.

All references to Kant’s writings are given by volume and page number of the Akademie edition of Kants gesammelte Schriften (Berlin, 1902-), followed by the page number of the translation consulted. The latter are listed below.

Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View , Translated by Victor Lye Dowdell (Carbondale and Edwardsville, Ill.: Southern Illinois Press, 1996).

Critique of Practical Reason , Translated and Edited by Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Anthropology@Princeton

Why study anthropology.

Anthropology is the comprehensive study of human development, culture, and change throughout the world , past and present. Anthropology can also help us imagine and design futures that attend to human and environmental complexity. The comprehensiveness of anthropology stems from its emphasis on context, reflected in the perspectives offered by the discipline’s four fields: sociocultural, biological, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology. The Anthropology Department at Princeton regularly offers courses and advising in sociocultural and biological anthropology; additional instruction is available through cross-lists, cognates, and special offerings by visitors.

The characteristic methodologies of anthropology inform an understanding of human experiences and practices, illuminating their interconnectedness and interdependence. For sociocultural anthropologists, such connections are discovered mainly through long-term ethnographic research. Learning to be a good ethnographer requires learning how to observe, learning how to ask necessary and appropriate anthropological questions, and learning how to locate patterns in complex human behavior. Our unique field-based approach to human experience yields distinctive access to the connections between culture and social life. For biological anthropologists, these connections are found in both field and lab research. 

The discipline of anthropology has influenced other disciplines in the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities, and in turn has been influenced by multidisciplinary approaches integrating these modes of inquiry. Anthropologists are often in dialogue with historians, literary critics, psychologists, sociologists, biologists, and other specialists whose scholarship engages anthropological questions. Therefore, in addition to ethnographic methods, anthropologists will sometimes employ more quantitative social science methods (such as surveys), natural science methods (such as laboratory research), and methods associated with the humanities (such as textual and visual studies).

One of the qualities that makes anthropology distinct as an academic discipline is its insistently cross-cultural, or comparative, perspective. By extending our vision beyond familiar social contexts and experiences, and drawing on knowledge and experience from all over the world, this perspective offers a productive counterweight to "culture bound" or ethnocentric ideas regarding human nature, values, and ways of life. Anthropological theory emphasizes the importance of context and people's understandings of their own milieu and the world around them. The relevance of such an approach is potentially broad. For example, together with biological anthropology, this comparative perspective has enabled anthropologists to play a leading role, during the 20th century and into the 21st, in undermining the intellectual credibility of racist social theories. Today, world events continue to engage anthropologists – for example, on questions of economic development, political crisis, the social effects of globalization, and social security. In an ever-shrinking world, where humankind's most difficult problems are both local and global, anthropology’s multicultural expertise is especially relevant wherever improvement can be found in mutual understanding, innovative partnerships and novel combinations of knowledge.

Our course offerings are organized into three tracks: sociocultural anthropology; medical anthropology; and law, politics, and economics. The sociocultural track (SCA) introduces students to a wide range of scholarship on cultural meaning-making and changes in societies around the globe. Courses in the medical anthropology track (MedAnth) focus on global health, different cultural notions of psychological and physical wellbeing, and science and technology studies (e.g. the culture of medicine, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and scientific knowledge production). Students in this track will also learn about the biological aspects of human evolution, as well as the impact of culture and the environment on human growth, development, and disease. The law, politics, and economics track (LPE) introduces students to cross-cultural studies of customary and case law, governance, systems of exchange, and debt.

For Anthropology majors , regardless of track, our courses are designed to provide students with a broad understanding of the discipline through courses on foundational concepts, fundamental methods, and the history of ideas. In addition, special topic courses offer students significant opportunities to craft individualized programs in consultation with their advisers.

For non-majors , our department welcomes students from all disciplines to learn how anthropological theory and methods can be helpful and, indeed, critical for making sense of today's complex world.

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The concept of the “soul-mind”.

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philosophical anthropology

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• University of wisconsin - Stevens Point - Department of philosophy - Anthropology
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philosophical anthropology , discipline within philosophy that seeks to unify the several empirical investigations of human nature in an effort to understand individuals as both creatures of their environment and creators of their own values.

Anthropology and philosophical anthropology

In the 18th century, “anthropology” was the branch of philosophy that gave an account of human nature . At that time, almost everything in the domain of systematic knowledge was understood to be a branch of philosophy. Physics, for example, was still known as “natural philosophy,” and the study of economics had developed as a part of “moral philosophy.” At the same time, anthropology was not where the main work of philosophy was done. As a branch of philosophy it served, instead, as a kind of review of the implications for human nature of philosophically more central doctrines, and it may have incorporated a good deal of empirical material that would now be thought of as belonging to psychology . Because the field of study was a part of philosophy, it did not have to be explicitly so described.

By the end of the 19th century, anthropology and many other disciplines had established their independence from philosophy. Anthropology emerged as a branch of the social sciences that studied the biological and evolutionary history of human beings (physical anthropology), as well as the culture and society that distinguished Homo sapiens from other animal species ( cultural anthropology ). In their study of social and cultural institutions and practices, anthropologists typically focused on the less highly developed societies, further distinguishing anthropology from sociology .

As a result of these developments, the term philosophical anthropology is not in familiar use among anthropologists and would probably not meet with any ready comprehension from philosophers either, at least in the English-speaking world. When anthropology is conceived in contemporary terms, philosophical thought might come within its purview only as an element in the culture of some society that is under study, but it would be very unlikely to have any part to play in an anthropologist’s work or in the way human nature is conceived for the purposes of that work. To put the matter somewhat differently, anthropology is now regarded as an empirical scientific discipline, and, as such, it discounts the relevance of philosophical theories of human nature. The inference here is that philosophical (as opposed to empirical) anthropology would almost certainly be bad anthropology.

These views reflect a positivistic conception of scientific knowledge and the negative judgment of philosophy that typically goes with it. According to this view, philosophy, like religion, belongs to a period in the history of thought that has passed; it has been replaced by science and no longer has any real contribution to make to inquiries that conform to the rigorous epistemic or cognitive norms set by the natural sciences. It follows that the application of the adjective philosophical —not just to anthropology, but to any discipline at all—has fallen out of favour. The only exception would be when the philosophical aspect of the discipline in question is confined to epistemological and logical matters and remains quite distinct from the substantive inquiries in which that discipline engages.

Any mention of the “ philosophy of physics ,” the “ philosophy of history ,” or even the “philosophy of anthropology” almost always pertains to philosophy in this narrower sense. Many philosophers have signaled an acceptance of this limitation on their work by concentrating their attention on language as the medium through which logical issues can be expressed. When other philosophers claim that they still have something substantive and distinctive to say about human nature, their work is customarily categorized as “philosophical anthropology,” thus avoiding the confusion that the old usage might cause. This term is also applied to the older accounts of human nature by philosophers whose work predated such distinctions. For the purposes of this discussion, however, the primary reference of the term philosophical anthropology will be to the period in which these ambiguities developed.

Despite the terminological changes that developed over time, philosophers who have considered questions of human nature have demonstrated substantial continuity in the types of issues they have studied. In both old and new approaches, the principal focus of philosophical interest has been a feature of human nature that has long been central to self-understanding. In simple terms, it is the recognition that human beings have minds —or, in more traditional parlance, souls . Long before recorded history, the soul was understood to be that part of human nature that made life, motion, and sentience possible. Since at least the 19th century the actuality of the soul has been hotly contested in Western philosophy , usually in the name of science, especially as the vital functions once attributed to it were gradually explained by normal physical and physiological processes.

But even though its defenders no longer apply the term widely, the concept of the soul has endured. Within philosophy it has been progressively refined to the point of being transformed into the concept of mind as that part of human nature wherein intellectual and moral powers reside. At the same time, many of the ideas traditionally associated with the soul—immortality, for example—have been largely abandoned by philosophy or assigned to religion. Among a wider public, however, the word soul is arguably more familiar and comprehensible than mind , especially as an expression of what humans conceive of as their “inner reality .” For the purposes of this discussion, therefore, the two terms will be used in their appropriate contexts and, occasionally, in a compound form, the “soul-mind.”