Anthropology is, at once both easy to define but difficult
to describe; its subject matter both exotic (marriage practices among Australian
aborigines) and commonplace (the structure of the human hand); its focus both
sweeping and microscopic. Anthropologists may study the language of a tribe of
Brazilian Native Americans, the social life of apes in an African rain forest,
or the remains of a long-vanished civilization in their own backyard — but there
is always a common thread linking these vastly different projects, and always
the common goal of advancing our understanding of who we are and how we came to
be that way.
In a sense, we all "do" anthropology because it is rooted
in a universal human characteristic; curiosity about ourselves and other people,
living and dead, here and across the globe. Everyday, as we look around us, we
all ask anthropological questions:
Do men and women have different abilities? Why?
Is it human nature to be warlike? Peaceful? What is "human
nature"?
These, and thousands of questions like them, are part of a
"folk anthropology" practiced daily in bars and on street corners, in newspapers
and magazines, in classrooms and government offices. After all, all societies
have explanations for why their ways of life are the way they are, and our
society is no exception. But if we are all "folk anthropologists," what do
professional anthropologists have to offer? How does the science of anthropology
differ from plain, old fashioned "common sense"?
The science of anthropology begins with a simple, but
enormously powerful, idea: that any particular aspect of our behavior can be
fully understood only when it is placed against the background provided by the
full range of human behavior. This is the comparative perspective, the attempt
to explain both the similarities and differences among people in the context of
humanity as a whole. Anthropology seeks to uncover the principles governing
human behavior that are applicable to all human communities, not just to a
select few of them.
To the anthropologist, the sometimes bewildering variety
of humanity — in body size and shape, social customs, language, religious
belief, skin color, economic system — provides the basic frame of reference for
the understanding of any single aspect of human life in any particular
community.
The power of the comparative perspective can be
illustrated by imagining that you have lived your whole life in a world with
only one color — all your food, all objects, all plants and animals, all a
single shade of, say, red. In such a world, you will obviously have no
understanding of any other colors: of blue or yellow or green. But isn't it also
true that you will have no real understanding of the color red, or even of the
concept of color itself, without the ability to compare one color with all the
other colors of the rainbow?
One branch of anthropology, social or
cultural
anthropology, applies this comparative perspective to the study of human
culture: the norms, values, and standards transmitted from one generation to the
next and by which people act. Cultural anthropologists study human behavior by
means of first-hand observation and interviewing within particular communities,
and interpret that behavior by comparison with the results of similar studies in
other communities. They may focus on particular aspects of life or institutions
such as kinship, religion, art, or economics, or they may try to characterize a
way of life as a whole. Cultural anthropology teaches us how to understand the
internal logic of other societies, those other "colors," and to make sense of
behavior that strikes us, at first, as senseless or even immoral. We learn to
avoid "ethnocentrism"; the tendency to judge strange customs on the basis of our
preconceptions derived from our own society. We see the color "red", with new
eyes. We can look at our everyday surroundings with the same sense of wonder and
discovery that we derive from looking at alien cultures. In fact, while most
people picture anthropologists thousands of miles from home in the midst of a
circle of thatched houses, more and more anthropologists are training their
sights on American society and applying the anthropological perspective to the
study of our own culture.
As the science of cultural anthropology has developed,
specialized branches, focusing on some particular aspect of human culture, have
emerged: economic anthropology, psychological anthropology, ethnomusicology,
medical anthropology, educational anthropology, and many others.
Linguistic anthropology is another of anthropology's major
branches, and it looks at the historical development of human languages and the
ways in which that development can be used to unravel the relationships between
different societies. In addition, linguistic anthropologists are concerned with
the nature of language itself and the relationships between language, thought,
and behavior; that is, the ways in which language and all the other aspects of
human culture interrelate.
But the human story begins even further back in time than
this, back several million years ago with a population of ape-like creatures
starting down a unique evolutionary road. And the anthropologist's comparative
perspective can be broadened to include more than just the full range of human
societies, for how can we fully understand humankind without an understanding of
its place within the entire natural universe of living things? Physical (or
biological) anthropology looks at Homo sapiens as a biological
species--its origins, evolutionary development, and the biological diversity of
modern human populations. Biological anthropologists study the natural history
of the human species and attempt to understand the biological bases for human
nature and our remarkable behavioral abilities.
Man, with all his noble quantities, with sympathy that
feels for the debased, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the
movements and constitution of the solar system--with all these exalted
powers--still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of lowly origins.
— Charles Darwin
Archaeology studies material remains in order to
understand and explain human behavior. Traditionally, archaeologists have
excavated and analyzed the tools, weapons, pottery, and other artifacts that
were left behind by prehistoric societies in order to reconstruct their ancient
cultures. Today, archaeologists no longer limit themselves to the study of
prehistoric peoples but also investigate more recent cultures, adding their
insights to the information available to the historian through the written
record. Archaeologists also work as specialists in preserving knowledge of our
country’s past through Historic Preservation and Cultural Resource Management.
These, then, are the four branches making up anthropology
as a whole: cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, physical
anthropology, and archaeology. Anthropology asks what may be the most difficult
and most important question of all: what does it mean to be human? And while
that question will never be fully answered, the study of anthropology has
attracted some of the world's greatest thinkers, whose discoveries have forever
changed our understanding of ourselves and of the world we create and inhabit.
Anthropology will never lose its hold on us because its subject matter,
humankind, is ever-changing and endlessly fascinating.
