who am i in anthropological perspective essay

What are the key components of the anthropological perspective?

Anthropology is the study of human commonalities and diversity. It seeks answers to questions about the different ways of being human, the commonalities and differences between societies in different parts of the world, the impact of different lifestyles and how these developed over time. The anthropological perspective includes several key components. These include a holistic approach to understanding human behaviour, an emphasis on cultural relativism, and a commitment to participant observation as a method of data collection.

Additionally, anthropologists often focus on the ways in which power structures and social inequalities shape human experience, and they may also examine the intersections between biology and culture.

Overall, the anthropological perspective seeks to understand the diversity of human experiences across time and space while also recognizing the interconnectedness of all aspects of human life.

There are three key components of the anthropological perspective – they are comparative or cross-cultural studies, holism and cultural relativism.

Components of the Anthropological Perspective (1) – Comparative or cross-cultural studies

It is not possible to understand human diversity without studying diverse cultures.

An anthropologist approaches the study of different societies with fresh eyes and an open mind. They seek to understand what holds a society together, what makes it function the way it does, and how it has adapted to its environment –

• What holds a society together.
• What makes it function the way it does.
• How the society has adapted to the environment.
• The main modes of communication within the society.
• How the people’s past has shaped their culture.

Only then will an anthropologist be able to trace the impact of different forces on the formation of human culture.

It is also interesting to note that when one views a situation as an “outsider” one is likely to notice things about the society that the society itself is not consciously aware of and which occur simply because that is the way it has “always” been. Anthropologists who are not enculturated can view a society dispassionately. They are able to ask questions that locals never ask. This makes it possible to identify why it is that people do what they do.

Cross-cultural studies are not only important to identify differences. They also enable anthropologists to identify similarities, enabling them to identify universals in being human.

Components of the Anthropological Perspective (2) – Holism

Anthropologists view culture as a complex web of interdependent and interconnected values, beliefs, traditions, and practices that shape the way people live and interact with one another. Each aspect of a society’s culture influences and interacts with other aspects of the same culture. Therefore, it is impossible to understand a culture in isolation or by examining individual elements in a piecemeal manner. This is why an anthropologist must consider all the components of the anthropological perspective.

When an anthropologist attempts to understand a culture, they must take into consideration the whole culture – its history, customs, language, religion, art, politics and economics – as well as the equilibrium between these different parts. This means that all aspects of the culture must be studied together to get a comprehensive understanding of how they work together to create a functioning society.

For example, an anthropologist studying a traditional agricultural community must examine not only the farming techniques used but also the social organization around agriculture including labour division and gender roles. In this way, one can see how farming practices are intertwined with cultural values such as family structure and social hierarchy, in a manner that makes sense in the environmental (for example fertile lands or arid desert) and historical context of the society.

When embarking on an ethnography the anthropologist must take account of each part of the equation or they risk misunderstanding the whole.

Economic Structure

When an anthropologist seeks to understand a culture, they must consider various aspects that influence the way people live and interact with each other. One important aspect is the economics of the culture. This includes examining the mode of production and the relations of production.

The mode of production refers to the way in which goods and services are produced within a society. For example, some societies may rely on subsistence agriculture while others may have industrialized economies with high levels of automation. The mode of production can have profound effects on social organization, power dynamics, and cultural values.

The relations of production refer to the social relationships that exist between people in regards to economic activities such as work and exchange. This includes examining issues such as labour division, property ownership, and access to resources. In some societies, these relationships may be based on kinship ties or communal ownership while in others they may be more individualistic or based on market relationships.

By understanding the economics of a culture, anthropologists gain an understanding of how people make a living, what resources are valued by society, and how wealth is distributed among different groups. They can also better understand how economic activities intersect with other aspects of culture such as religion, politics, and gender roles.

Kinship System

Another important aspect for consideration is the kinship system, which includes the system of descent , marriage practices, and living arrangements after marriage .

The system of descent refers to how people trace their ancestry and inheritance through their family tree. There are several different forms of descent systems such as patrilineal, matrilineal, and bilateral . These systems can have significant impacts on issues such as inheritance rights, social status, and gender roles .

Marriage practices also vary widely across cultures. Some societies practice arranged marriages while others allow individuals to choose their own partners. The rules around who can marry whom depend on factors such as age, social status, religion or ethnicity. Marriage practices may also have an impact on issues such as property ownership and inheritance.

Living arrangements after marriage can also vary widely across cultures . In some societies, newlyweds move in with one spouse’s family while in others they may establish their own household. The living arrangements of married couples can have an impact on issues such as gender roles within the family unit and the relationships between different generations.

By understanding the kinship system of a culture, anthropologists can gain insight into how families are organized and how social relationships are established within a society. They can also better understand how these relationships intersect with other aspects of culture such as religion, politics, and economics.

Religion, Beliefs and Rituals

Religion can be an important part of a culture’s identity and can shape many aspects of daily life. Different cultures may have different religious beliefs or practices, ranging from monotheistic religions such as Christianity or Islam to polytheistic religions such as Hinduism or Shintoism. Religion can also have an impact on issues such as gender roles, social hierarchy, and political power.

Beliefs are another important aspect of culture that anthropologists must consider. These beliefs may include ideas about the nature of reality, morality, and the afterlife. Beliefs shape how people view themselves and their place in society. They can also influence how people make decisions about issues such as health care or education.

Rituals are formalized behaviors that are typically associated with religious or cultural practices. Rituals may include things like prayer, meditation, or sacrifice. They often serve to reinforce social norms and values within a society while also providing individuals with a sense of community and belonging.

By understanding the religion, beliefs, and rituals of a culture, anthropologists can gain insight into how people understand their place in the world and how they relate to others within their society. They can also better understand how these beliefs intersect with other aspects of culture such as politics, economics, and gender roles.

Politics and Power

Politics refers to how a society is organized and who has power within that society. Different societies have different forms of government such as democracy , monarchy, or dictatorship. The balance of power between different groups within a society can also vary widely. Some societies may be hierarchically organized with clear social classes while others may be more egalitarian.

Understanding the political system of a culture can provide insights into issues such as social inequality, conflict resolution, and decision-making processes.

Anthropologists must also consider how political power is obtained and maintained within a society. This can include factors such as wealth, education, or military force.

Gender roles are another important aspect of culture that anthropologists must consider. These roles refer to the behaviours and expectations associated with being male or female in a given society. Gender roles can vary widely across cultures and may influence many aspects of daily life including work, family life, and social interactions. Understanding gender relations within a culture can provide insights into issues such as reproductive rights, violence against women, and access to education or employment opportunities.

Components of the Anthropological Perspective (3) – Cultural Relativism

This concept refers to the idea that when studying a different culture, an anthropologist must suspend their own cultural biases and avoid making value judgments about the beliefs and practices of the people they are studying.

Anthropologists recognize that every culture has its own unique set of values, beliefs, and practices that are shaped by historical, social, and environmental factors. These cultural differences can be difficult for outsiders to understand or accept, but it is important for anthropologists to approach other cultures with an open mind and without imposing their own cultural values on what they observe.

For example, an anthropologist studying a traditional society where arranged marriages are common may initially find this practice strange or even objectionable, based on their own cultural upbringing. However, in order to gain a deeper understanding of why arranged marriages are practiced in this society, the anthropologist must set aside their personal biases and seek to understand how this practice fits into the larger cultural context.

Cultural relativism does not mean that all cultural practices are equally valid or morally acceptable. Rather, it acknowledges that different cultures have different ways of understanding and interacting with the world around them. By approaching other cultures with an open mind and without preconceived notions or judgments, anthropologists can gain a deeper understanding of these differences while also recognizing universal human experiences such as love, loss, joy and pain.

In summary, cultural relativism is an essential component of the anthropological perspective. It requires anthropologists to approach other cultures with humility and respect while recognizing that every culture has its own unique set of values and beliefs shaped by historical, social and environmental factors. By embracing this perspective, anthropologists can gain deeper insights into what makes each culture unique while also recognizing shared human experiences across cultures.

Conclusion – The Importance of Considering all the Components of the Anthropological Perspective

The components of the anthropological perspective are crucial for understanding a culture in its entirety. Without taking these factors into consideration, an anthropologist’s understanding of a culture would be incomplete and may lead to misunderstandings or misinterpretations.

Firstly, studying the politics and power dynamics within a society is important because it provides insights into how decisions are made and who holds influence over different aspects of daily life. This knowledge can help anthropologists understand issues such as social inequality, conflict resolution, and decision-making processes. By understanding the political system of a culture, an anthropologist can gain a deeper understanding of its structure and function.

Secondly, examining gender roles is important because it helps to shed light on how men and women interact with each other in different societies. Understanding gender relations within a culture provides insights into issues such as reproductive rights, violence against women, and access to education or employment opportunities. This knowledge can help anthropologists better understand how gender identity shapes individuals’ lives in different ways.

Finally, cultural relativism is essential for gaining an accurate understanding of another culture. It requires anthropologists to approach other cultures with humility and respect while recognizing that every culture has its own unique set of values and beliefs shaped by historical, social, and environmental factors. By embracing this perspective, anthropologists can avoid imposing their own cultural biases on their observations and instead seek to understand the beliefs and practices of the people they are studying on their own terms.

Overall, these three components of the anthropological perspective work together to provide a holistic view of a given culture. By keeping these components in mind when studying a culture, an anthropologist can gain a more complete picture of that society’s history, traditions, beliefs, practices and way of life over time.

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The Anthropological Perspective

The anthropological perspective is an incredibly complex and vast approach to our human civilization due to its holistic nature. The variety of research methods and subfields within anthropology are unique, as they often rely on scientific and humanistic disciplines to inquire about human nature. As such, the anthropological perspective reflects an overarching study of humanity, with a foundation in cultural relativism, fieldwork, scientific observation, data collection, and analysis.

Cultural relativism is vital to understanding diversity, social norms, and the origins of vastly different cultures. This is the current leading philosophy for many working anthropologists and is defined as an observation technique through which researchers understand a culture through the values of its population and not through their ideologies. This perspective seeks to reject ethnocentrism, judgment, and assumption of the inferiority of other cultures. Within the scope of research, ethnocentric perspectives are ineffective though most anthropologists, like other people, are always vulnerable to certain amounts of bias. Still, a culturally relativistic approach is essential in communication between individuals with differing backgrounds, values, and norms. As an example, the cultural shock and even discomfort that Elizabeth Warnock Fernea faced when assimilating to El Nahara, a remote village in Iraq, did not create an obstacle for her to understanding the local culture and lifestyle on a deeper level. Fernea approached the new environment without judgment and rejection, by participating in appropriate cultural and social activities such as housework, specific dress, and even learning Arabic (Warnock Fernea, 1995). Fernea’s Westernized values did not correlate with all local norms, such as the belief that not wearing a veil suggested immorality or lack of understanding of local customs translated to laziness and incompetence. As such, she may have disagreed with many aspects of local culture and lifestyle but approached the situation with cultural relativism. To create relationships with the women of the village, she assimilated to her best abilities and did not treat their culture and values as inferior or incorrect. This approach allowed her to formulate an informative study that would be much more surface level without the implementation of cultural relativism.

Though fieldwork may seem like an obvious aspect of the anthropological perspective, its effective utilization is vital to an informative and respectful study. The way an anthropologist approaches fieldwork dictates the depth of their understanding, the intricacies the subjects are willing to disclose, as well as a multitude of other factors that can contribute to the study. Most fieldwork is observation-based, with the researcher recording the day-to-day life of cultures, populations, and individuals for prolonged periods. Surveys, interviews, and questionnaires also become essential with informants and subjects, often steering the interviewer towards important aspects of their cultures, lifestyles, and societies. The result of the fieldwork can be referred to as ethnographies, accounts of a descriptive nature based on theory. Many of these accounts also bring further ethical dilemmas that anthropologists have to weigh, such as considering who may be adversely affected by the publication of the work, whether informants should be identified, or the resolution of the competing interests of the community and the funding agency. In the case of ‘In The Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio’, Phillipe Bourgois spent five years among Nuyorican crack dealers in East Harlem during the early years of the crack epidemic (Bourgois, 2003). Bourgeois was able to befriend people within the underground economy and crackhouses to such an extent that he came to observe the reasons why the youth are so susceptible to the criminal career path. Much of the interconnected social and economic factors were revealed to him through personal and seen cases of racism, historical colonialism, and inequality within the legal economy. His opportunity to have such a close view of the crisis may not have been possible without his involvement in his fieldwork. However, such deep understanding also allowed Bourgois to observe multiple ethical dilemmas in his work, such as the potential of negative stereotyping, elitist aspects of anthropology, and sensationalism of crime.

Within the field of anthropology, research merges both scientific and humanistic approaches to gathering data. Research may be deductive, like in the case of biological or archeological anthropology. It may also be inductive, such as in the study of language in which everyday language use may be collected and analyzed. Debates have divided anthropologists who utilize different research approaches, but anthropology is still widely considered a social science. Early 1800s analysis of indigenous groups living in the northern parts of North America was considered to be less advanced than other civilizations due to their continuing to live as hunter-gatherers (Spradley & McCurdy, 2012). This was because intelligence was associated with societal structure, with hunter-gatherers considered less intelligent than communities that relied on agriculture. However, such logic is flawed because it ignores many factors that influence the societal structure, such as the local ecology. The population of the northernmost areas is incredibly adaptive and inventive in terms of survival and long-term habitation. The very hostile area with limited plant life is exceptionally fitting for a community that is as well-prepared for it as indigenous groups are. In this case, a scientific approach, the assessment of local ecology, assisted with the realization that societal structure and intelligence are not directly related.

Bourgois, Phillipe. In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio . 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Spradley, James, and McCurdy, David W. Conflict and Conformity: Readings in Cultural Anthropology . 14th ed., Pearson Education, 2012.

Warnock Fernea, Elizabeth. Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village . Anchor, 1995.

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How to Write an Essay: A Guide for Anthropologists

Ask SAPIENS is a series that offers a glimpse into the magazine’s inner workings.

For academics used to the idea of “publish or perish,” writing may seem to be a well-practiced and even perfected skill. But trying out a new writing style for a new audience—from crafting a tweet to penning an essay for the general public—can be an intimidating challenge, even for the most senior of professors.

If you’re struggling with this endeavor, then don’t despair. SAPIENS has a team of expert editors (including myself) with decades of experience wrangling the words of academics into insightful, clear, and interesting essays .

One of the most basic questions we’re asked at SAPIENS is: “How do I write an essay?” This article provides a framework and starting point.

There are two things you must know intimately before you start: your audience and your core point. Know these things and the rest will be far easier. Once you have locked down those two core elements, there’s a basic formula that you can master for almost any essay.

SAPIENS targets a general audience. Some of our readers are anthropologists, but most of them are not. Think of your reader as someone who is very intelligent but not knowledgeable in your area of expertise. Remember that even another anthropologist won’t necessarily know your subject area, the politics of your country or study sites, or the jargon of your specialty. Your essay should be full of depth and insight, providing new information and perspectives even to close colleagues, but it also needs to include basic background and context so that anyone can easily follow along.

A simple tip is to imagine that you are at a cocktail party and the conversation has turned to something you know a lot about. You want to inject some insight into the conversation. You want to thrill, delight, and inform the person you are talking to. That’s your job and the mood you should be in as you pick up your pen (or raise your fingers over the keyboard).

Remember that you are not writing an academic talk or paper or a grant proposal, where your primary mission may be to dive straight into the details, impress your colleagues or a panel of reviewers, or acknowledge others in the field. Buzzwords, jargon, and formal citations do not belong here.

SAPIENS readers are engaging with your essay not because they have to but because they want to. Grab their attention and hold on tight. As anthropologists know better than anyone, human beings have evolved to tell and listen to stories around the glow of a campfire. Harness this knowledge, and be sure you are telling a tale, complete with characters , tension , and surprises .

Anthropologists often have ethnographic research or a dig site to talk about: real people doing real things in real dirt. Pity the poor chemist who has less evocative characters like atoms and elements!

The next fundamental is to have a point. You may know a lot about a subject, but an essay needs to be more than just an overview of a topic. It needs to express a single (preferably surprising) viewpoint.

It should be possible to express the core of your main point in a single sentence containing a strong verb . To have a story, someone or something needs to be doing something: for example, battling a crisis , gaining an insight , identifying a problem , or answering a question . This statement may even become the headline for your essay. An op-ed , by the way, is a very similar beast to an essay, but its point is by definition an expression of what’s wrong with the world and how to fix it.

Once you know what you’re writing and for whom, you can write.

A strong essay contains some basic elements.

A colleague of mine once observed that writing is like certain styles of jazz: The improvisation is layered on top of some standard rules in order to make something beautiful. Until you master the basics, it’s safer to follow straightforward strategies in order to avoid accidentally playing something jarring and incomprehensible.

In keeping with the musical theme, I offer seven notes to play in your piece.

One: A lead.

This paragraph opens your essay. It needs to grab the reader’s attention. You can use an anecdote , a story , or a shocking fact . Paint a picture to put the reader in a special time and place with you.

Resist the temptation to rely on stereotypes or often-used scenes. Provide something novel and compelling.

Two: A nut paragraph.

This section captures your point in a nutshell. It usually repeats the gist of what your headline will capture but expands on it a little bit. A good nut paragraph (or “ nutgraf ,” to use some journalist jargon) is a great help for your reader. It’s like a signpost to let them know what’s coming, providing both a sense of security and of anticipation, which can make them willing to come on this journey with you over the next thousand words.

The nut is often the most important paragraph but also sometimes the hardest nut to crack. If you can write this paragraph, the rest will be easy. (The nut for this piece is the fourth paragraph; in the essay “ Trump’s Slogan ,” it’s the third.)

Remember to include in your nut, or somewhere near it, a “peg”: some real-world event that you can hang your essay on, like hanging your coat on a hook on the wall, to place it firmly in time and space. Does your point relate to something going on in the world, such as the Black Lives Matter movement , a policy change, a new archaeological dig or museum object —or maybe a pandemic ? Does it relate to a holiday , such as Halloween , or a season ? Did you recently publish a paper or a book on the topic? Why should your reader read on right now ?

Three: Who you are.

Let your reader know what you are an expert in, what you have done that makes you an expert, and why they should put faith in your point of view.

Your byline will link to biographical information that declares you are an anthropologist of such-and-such variety at so-and-so university or institute, but the essay itself should spell out that you have, for example, spent decades among a certain community or surveyed hundreds of people affected by an issue. Sometimes your own personal details—your race , your nationality , your heritage , your lived experiences —may also play into your expertise or story. (See how I snuck my own expertise into the second paragraph of this piece.)

Four: Background and context.

After the opening section, your essay’s pace can slow a little. Tell the reader a bit more about the situation, place, insight, or people you are writing about. What’s the history? How did things get to be the way they are? Why does this situation, place, or finding matter to the rest of the world? Why is it important, and why are you personally so interested in it?

Don’t wander too far along the way: Each paragraph should continue to speak to and support your main point. It’s an essay, not a book. Keep it simple.

Five: The details.

Expand on your point. Provide details, facts, anecdotes, or evidence to back up your point and tell a story. Perhaps you have quotes from people you interviewed or statistics behind some aspect of medical anthropology. Those details are the meat of your piece. What insight can you provide?

Back up your view with facts, and provide links to firm evidence (such as published research papers, by yourself or others) supporting any assertions. Sprinkle in an occasional short, pithy sentence to hammer your point home.

Six: Counterpoint.

If your point of view is contentious, acknowledge that. Let the reader know which groups disagree with you and why, and what your counterarguments are.

This approach will add to your credibility. If your point rubs up against what most readers will think, then acknowledge that too. Anticipate common reactions and deal with them head on.

Seven: Conclusion.

Round up your point, sum up your argument, or perhaps look forward to what needs to be done next. (But please don’t simply say, “More research is needed,” which is always true and too broad to provide helpful insight.) Leave your reader with a sense of satisfaction rather than a craving for more or a feeling of confusion.

Sometimes it is nice to have a final point that ends your piece with a bit of a kick. If your essay is amusing, this “kicker” might be designed to make the reader laugh . If it’s discussing a serious societal problem, it might hammer home what’s at stake. If your essay is personal or reflective, it might be an experience that crystallizes your point . For an op-ed, it may be a call to arms .

An essay as a whole should say to the reader, “Look at the world through my eyes, and you will see something new.” Your goal is to enlighten in a clear, entertaining way.

Your editor’s job, by the way, is to help you do all of this: to formulate your point as clearly and strongly as possible, and to prompt you for an anecdote or story to make that point come alive. Your editor’s job is not to mangle your ideas or force you onto uncomfortable ground, nor is it to put things in ways you would not say them or make your voice unrecognizable. If that happens, be sure to speak up.

Remember that if your editor is misunderstanding your text, your readers will surely misunderstand it too. If your editor trips on a point, or stumbles on your phrasing, so will your readers. Editors are experts at identifying problems in a piece but not necessarily experts on how to fix them—make that your job.

Many, many subtle points of writing exist beyond what I have included in this guide. The interested writer may wish to read a slender book packed with fantastic advice: The Science Writers’ Essay Handbook: How to Craft Compelling True Stories in Any Medium .

And there are some considerations that are particular to, or prominent in, anthropological writing—such as the ethical presentation and protection of your sources and the importance of original writing even when retelling the same tales you have published before. Your editors can help you address all of these challenges.

Writing for the general public comes with many benefits. It helps convince funders and university deans that your area of interest is important. It may count toward your application for tenure or raise the profile of your institution. Perhaps most importantly, it can help strengthen your own writing and clarify your ideas in your own mind—cementing your conclusions or spurring ideas for further research. Stepping away from your usual audience, methods, and ways of thinking is a great way to gain novel insights.

Writing for the public brings your important ideas to the wider world and may even help change that world for the better.

You surely have something important to say: Write it for us !

Nicola Jones is a freelance science journalist living in Pemberton, near Vancouver, British Columbia. She has a bachelor’s degree in oceanography and chemistry, and a master’s in journalism, both from the University of British Columbia. Over her career, Jones has been a regular editor and contributor to SAPIENS , Nature ,  Yale Environment 360 ,   Hakai Magazine , Knowable Magazine , and other publications. She has given a TED Talk and edited a major report for  Future Earth on sustainability. Follow her on Twitter  @nicolakimjones .

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Anthropology

What this handout is about.

This handout briefly situates anthropology as a discipline of study within the social sciences. It provides an introduction to the kinds of writing that you might encounter in your anthropology courses, describes some of the expectations that your instructors may have, and suggests some ways to approach your assignments. It also includes links to information on citation practices in anthropology and resources for writing anthropological research papers.

What is anthropology, and what do anthropologists study?

Anthropology is the study of human groups and cultures, both past and present. Anthropology shares this focus on the study of human groups with other social science disciplines like political science, sociology, and economics. What makes anthropology unique is its commitment to examining claims about human ‘nature’ using a four-field approach. The four major subfields within anthropology are linguistic anthropology, socio-cultural anthropology (sometimes called ethnology), archaeology, and physical anthropology. Each of these subfields takes a different approach to the study of humans; together, they provide a holistic view. So, for example, physical anthropologists are interested in humans as an evolving biological species. Linguistic anthropologists are concerned with the physical and historical development of human language, as well as contemporary issues related to culture and language. Archaeologists examine human cultures of the past through systematic examinations of artifactual evidence. And cultural anthropologists study contemporary human groups or cultures.

What kinds of writing assignments might I encounter in my anthropology courses?

The types of writing that you do in your anthropology course will depend on your instructor’s learning and writing goals for the class, as well as which subfield of anthropology you are studying. Each writing exercise is intended to help you to develop particular skills. Most introductory and intermediate level anthropology writing assignments ask for a critical assessment of a group of readings, course lectures, or concepts. Here are three common types of anthropology writing assignments:

Critical essays

This is the type of assignment most often given in anthropology courses (and many other college courses). Your anthropology courses will often require you to evaluate how successfully or persuasively a particular anthropological theory addresses, explains, or illuminates a particular ethnographic or archaeological example. When your instructor tells you to “argue,” “evaluate,” or “assess,” they are probably asking for some sort of critical essay. (For more help with deciphering your assignments, see our handout on understanding assignments .)

Writing a “critical” essay does not mean focusing only on the most negative aspects of a particular reading or theory. Instead, a critical essay should evaluate or assess both the weaknesses and the merits of a given set of readings, theories, methods, or arguments.

Sample assignment:

Assess the cultural evolutionary ideas of late 19th century anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan in terms of recent anthropological writings on globalization (select one recent author to compare with Morgan). What kinds of anthropological concerns or questions did Morgan have? What kinds of anthropological concerns underlie the current anthropological work on globalization that you have selected? And what assumptions, theoretical frameworks, and methodologies inform these questions or projects?

Ethnographic projects

Another common type of research and writing activity in anthropology is the ethnographic assignment. Your anthropology instructor might expect you to engage in a semester-long ethnographic project or something shorter and less involved (for example, a two-week mini-ethnography).

So what is an ethnography? “Ethnography” means, literally, a portrait (graph) of a group of people (ethnos). An ethnography is a social, political, and/or historical portrait of a particular group of people or a particular situation or practice, at a particular period in time, and within a particular context or space. Ethnographies have traditionally been based on an anthropologist’s long-term, firsthand research (called fieldwork) in the place and among the people or activities they are studying. If your instructor asks you to do an ethnographic project, that project will likely require some fieldwork.

Because they are so important to anthropological writing and because they may be an unfamiliar form for many writers, ethnographies will be described in more detail later in this handout.

Spend two hours riding the Chapel Hill Transit bus. Take detailed notes on your observations, documenting the setting of your fieldwork, the time of day or night during which you observed and anything that you feel will help paint a picture of your experience. For example, how many people were on the bus? Which route was it? What time? How did the bus smell? What kinds of things did you see while you were riding? What did people do while riding? Where were people going? Did people talk? What did they say? What were people doing? Did anything happen that seemed unusual, ordinary, or interesting to you? Why? Write down any thoughts, self-reflections, and reactions you have during your two hours of fieldwork. At the end of your observation period, type up your fieldnotes, including your personal thoughts (labeling them as such to separate them from your more descriptive notes). Then write a reflective response about your experience that answers this question: how is riding a bus about more than transportation?

Analyses using fossil and material evidence

In some assignments, you might be asked to evaluate the claims different researchers have made about the emergence and effects of particular human phenomena, such as the advantages of bipedalism, the origins of agriculture, or the appearance of human language. To complete these assignments, you must understand and evaluate the claims being made by the authors of the sources you are reading, as well as the fossil or material evidence used to support those claims. Fossil evidence might include things like carbon dated bone remains; material evidence might include things like stone tools or pottery shards. You will usually learn about these kinds of evidence by reviewing scholarly studies, course readings, and photographs, rather than by studying fossils and artifacts directly.

The emergence of bipedalism (the ability to walk on two feet) is considered one of the most important adaptive shifts in the evolution of the human species, but its origins in space and time are debated. Using course materials and outside readings, examine three authors’ hypotheses for the origins of bipedalism. Compare the supporting points (such as fossil evidence and experimental data) that each author uses to support their claims. Based on your examination of the claims and the supporting data being used, construct an argument for why you think bipedal locomotion emerged where and when it did.

How should I approach anthropology papers?

Writing an essay in anthropology is very similar to writing an argumentative essay in other disciplines. In most cases, the only difference is in the kind of evidence you use to support your argument. In an English essay, you might use textual evidence from novels or literary theory to support your claims; in an anthropology essay, you will most often be using textual evidence from ethnographies, artifactual evidence, or other support from anthropological theories to make your arguments.

Here are some tips for approaching your anthropology writing assignments:

• Make sure that you understand what the prompt or question is asking you to do. It is a good idea to consult with your instructor or teaching assistant if the prompt is unclear to you. See our handout on arguments and handout on college writing for help understanding what many college instructors look for in a typical paper.
• Review the materials that you will be writing with and about. One way to start is to set aside the readings or lecture notes that are not relevant to the argument you will make in your paper. This will help you focus on the most important arguments, issues, and behavioral and/or material data that you will be critically assessing. Once you have reviewed your evidence and course materials, you might decide to have a brainstorming session. Our handouts on reading in preparation for writing and brainstorming might be useful for you at this point.
• Develop a working thesis and begin to organize your evidence (class lectures, texts, research materials) to support it. Our handouts on constructing thesis statements and paragraph development will help you generate a thesis and develop your ideas and arguments into clearly defined paragraphs.

What is an ethnography? What is ethnographic evidence?

Many introductory anthropology courses involve reading and evaluating a particular kind of text called an ethnography. To understand and assess ethnographies, you will need to know what counts as ethnographic data or evidence.

You’ll recall from earlier in this handout that an ethnography is a portrait—a description of a particular human situation, practice, or group as it exists (or existed) in a particular time, at a particular place, etc. So what kinds of things might be used as evidence or data in an ethnography (or in your discussion of an ethnography someone else has written)? Here are a few of the most common:

• Things said by informants (people who are being studied or interviewed). When you are trying to illustrate someone’s point of view, it is very helpful to appeal to their own words. In addition to using verbatim excerpts taken from interviews, you can also paraphrase an informant’s response to a particular question.
• Observations and descriptions of events, human activities, behaviors, or situations.
• Relevant historical background information.
• Statistical data.

Remember that “evidence” is not something that exists on its own. A fact or observation becomes evidence when it is clearly connected to an argument in order to support that argument. It is your job to help your reader understand the connection you are making: you must clearly explain why statements x, y, and z are evidence for a particular claim and why they are important to your overall claim or position.

Citation practices in anthropology

In anthropology, as in other fields of study, it is very important that you cite the sources that you use to form and articulate your ideas. (Please refer to our handout on plagiarism for information on how to avoid plagiarizing). Anthropologists follow the Chicago Manual of Style when they document their sources. The basic rules for anthropological citation practices can be found in the AAA (American Anthropological Association) Style Guide. Note that anthropologists generally use in-text citations, rather than footnotes. This means that when you are using someone else’s ideas (whether it’s a word-for-word quote or something you have restated in your own words), you should include the author’s last name and the date the source text was published in parentheses at the end of the sentence, like this: (Author 1983).

If your anthropology or archaeology instructor asks you to follow the style requirements of a particular academic journal, the journal’s website should contain the information you will need to format your citations. Examples of such journals include The American Journal of Physical Anthropology and American Antiquity . If the style requirements for a particular journal are not explicitly stated, many instructors will be satisfied if you consistently use the citation style of your choice.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Scupin, Raymond, and Christopher DeCorse. 2016. Anthropology: A Global Perspective , 8th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall.

Solis, Jacqueline. 2020. “A to Z Databases: Anthropology.” Subject Research Guides, University of North Carolina. Last updated November 2, 2020. https://guides.lib.unc.edu/az.php?s=1107 .

University of Chicago Press. 2017. The Chicago Manual of Style , 17th ed. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Anthropology Essay Examples

10+ Anthropology Essay Examples & Topics to Kick-Start Your Writing

Published on: May 5, 2023

Last updated on: Aug 21, 2024

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Are you a student looking for inspiration for your next anthropology essay?

With so many subfields, it's easy to feel overwhelmed and unsure of what to focus on. You want to create an essay that is not only informative but also engaging and thought-provoking. You want to stand out from the crowd and make a lasting impression on your readers.

But how do you achieve that when you're not even sure where to start from?

Don't worry, we've got you covered.

In this blog, we've compiled a collection of some of the best anthropology essay examples to help you get started. We will also provide you with a list of topics you can choose from!

So get ready to dive into the rich and complex world of anthropology through these essays.

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What is an Anthropology Essay?

Anthropology is the study of human societies and cultures. An anthropology essay is an academic paper that explores various aspects of this field. 

The goal of an anthropology essay is to analyze the practices of human beings in different parts of the world. Check out this anthropology essay example for a better understanding:

Anthropology Essay Pdf

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Anthropology Essay Examples for Students 

Writing an anthropology essay can be a daunting task, especially if you're not sure where to start. 

Let’s explore these anthropology essay examples for some captivating ideas.

Anthropology College Essay Examples

Anthropology Research Paper Example

Anthropology Essay Examples on Different Subjects

Anthropology is a vast field with many subfields and topics to explore. As a student, it can be challenging to navigate this diverse landscape and find a subject that interests you.

In this section, we've compiled a list of anthropology paper examples for different subjects to help you get started.

What Makes Us Human Anthropology Essay

Social Anthropology Essay

Cultural Anthropology Essay

What I Learned In Anthropology Essay

Social And Cultural Anthropology Extended Essay Example

Anthropology Essay Format 

The format of an anthropology essay can vary depending on the assignment requirements. But generally, it follows a standard structure. 

Learn how to write an anthropology essay here:

Introduction

A catchy introduction provides background information on your topic and presents your thesis statement.

Check out this introduction example to help you craft yours!

Anthropology Introduction Essay Example

Body paragraphs

Body paragraphs help you develop your argument in a series of paragraphs. Each focuses on a specific idea or argument. 

Make sure to support each argument with evidence from your research.

Learn to write a body paragraph with the help of this example:

Anthropology Body Paragraph Essay Example

The conclusion of an essay summarizes the main points and restates your thesis statement. Always end your essay with a thought-provoking statement or call to action.

Want an example of how to conclude your anthropology essay? Here is an example:

Anthropology Conclusion Essay Example

Anthropology Essay Topics

It's essential to select a topic that interests you and is relevant to the field. 

Here are some anthropology essay topics to consider:

• The cultural significance of rituals and ceremonies
• The impact of globalization on traditional societies
• The evolution of human communication and language
• The social and cultural implications of technology
• The role of gender and sexuality in different cultures
• The relationship between culture and power
• The impact of colonialism on indigenous cultures
• The cultural significance of food and cuisine
• The effects of climate change on human societies
• The ethics of anthropological research and representation.

All in all, anthropology essays require critical thinking, research, and an understanding of diverse cultures and societies. 

With the examples and the right AI essay writing tools , you can craft a compelling essay that showcases insights into the field of anthropology.

If you're feeling overwhelmed or need support, our anthropology essay writing service will ease the process for you. 

Don't let the challenges of writing an anthropology essay hold you back! Just ask us, “ write my college essay for me ” and we'll help you succeed!

Frequently Asked Questions

What are some common mistakes to avoid when writing an anthropology essay.

Common mistakes to avoid when writing an anthropology essay include:

• Using jargon without defining it
• Neglecting to engage with relevant literature
• Failing to provide sufficient evidence to support your claims

Are there any ethical considerations to keep in mind when conducting anthropological research?

Yes, ethical considerations are crucial in anthropological research. Researchers must obtain informed consent from participants and ensure that their research does not cause harm.

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Question of the Month

Who or what am i, the following answers to the question of the self each win a random book..

I am a living, breathing organism signified by the words ‘human being’. I am a material or physical being fairly recognisable over time to me and to others: I am a body. Through my body, I can move, touch, see, hear, taste and smell. The array of physical sensations available to me also includes pain, hunger, thirst, tiredness, injury, sickness, fear, apprehension and pleasure. In this way I experience myself, others and the world around me. However, there is another aspect of me not directly visible or definable. This is the aspect of me which thinks and feels, reflects and judges, remembers and anticipates. Words used to describe this aspect include ‘mind’, ‘spirit’, ‘heart’, ‘soul’, ‘awareness’ and ‘consciousness’. This part of me is aware that I can never be fully known or understood by myself or by others; it notices that although there may be some unchanging essence which is ‘me’, this same ‘me’ is also constantly changing and evolving.

So I am a physical body and an emotional and psychological (or spiritual) being. The two together make me a person. Being a person means that I have virtues and flaws, gifts and needs, possibilities and defeats. I am basically good, but I am capable of evil. I am neither an angel nor a monster. Being a person means that I am a social animal, needing connection, recognition and acceptance from others, while simultaneously knowing myself as isolated and solitary, with many experiences which are never fully shareable with others. However, I also realise that this paradoxical condition is a universal experience, and this enables the emergence of empathy and compassion for others as it affords glimpses of understanding and solicitude, mutuality and intimacy. Being a person means that I am like all other persons, but also unique. It also means that I can never provide a genuinely definitive answer to the question.

Kathleen O’Dwyer, Limerick, Ireland

Human beings are defined by a sense of personality, experiences and reason. We are often inclined to believe that the face we see in the mirror is us, a thing which has developed a personality through experiences. Here the body is merely a tool for the true self, the mind. It is however an error to conclude that the body is not significant for selfhood. Without a body a mind would not be able to make certain types of judgments.

The mind/brain utilizes the body to survive, calculate and function within various social contexts. It also favors order rather than chaos. The mind governing our body assigns mental places to various objects in the world. Through the use of language humanity has come to construct an image of the world that transcends one’s own immediate environment. This has enabled humans to develop complex means of social interaction. Thus we are physical beings capable of having non-physical thoughts that in turn construct and sometimes deconstruct the physical world .

David Tamez, Austin, TX

I would argue that the answer to this question is dependent on the idea of identity. The idea of identity is itself rather problematic in that it’s determined from subjective viewpoints, which can be divided into two types. The first is an internal creation of identity, formed by myself for myself. This is the picture I have of myself. The second is an external creation of identity, formed by someone else. These are the pictures that other people have of me. “I am a fool!” cries the self, while the other labels that person a genius (or vice versa ). Inevitably there will be clashes based on differing viewpoints. While not always so extreme as this example, it must surely be very rare that people will agree entirely on a person’s identity. In the same way that Einstein showed that time is dependant on viewpoint, so I think we can show that identity is relative, and by extension, the answer to the question ‘Who or what am I?’ becomes a matter of who is answering it. The question must then be asked, on what do we base these identities we assign other people or ourselves? It seems that assigning a particular identity to someone else occurs through a process of observation, watching and remembering a person’s actions, then placing a value on the information we have of that person from our past and present encounters. Our view of our own identity places the highest priority on the intentions and thoughts that precede our actions, in contrast to other people’s reliance on our actions. This can mean that the person we consider ourselves to be may not be the person we portray to others.

Anoosh Falak Rafat, Erith, Kent

Philosophy is about generalities, but this question demands particularity: who am I – a particular person in a particular time and place, related in particular ways to others? The usual answers are not of much philosophical interest: Bill, Patricia’s husband, Katy’s father. In each of these identities, however, I find two things: a state of interiority – feelings, thoughts, beliefs and desires with which only I am directly acquainted, and a social role – a relatedness to other human beings. So the question is two-fold: How does it feel to be me? and How do I function in a social context? Each of us must answer these questions for ourselves, but we can share our answers with others. The first-person point of view is an important starting point. We each have a life-story, of what has been and continues to be important to us, what the pivotal events were that brought us to the present moment. By comparing stories, we find such timeless human themes as love and hate, honor and degradation, loyalty and betrayal, inspiration and despair; and we learn how others have handled themselves in situations without ourselves having to undergo them. In this way human culture advances far more rapidly than biological evolution. By taking an ‘objective’ point of view toward our own subjectivity, we can transcend ourselves. We are not bound by chains of habit or instinct; we can see who we are and choose to change it. The ability to examine one’s own experience is something that distinguishes us from other animals. We have, in some measure, the ability to create ourselves. There are limits to what we can make of ourselves imposed by evolution, biology and culture, ut the ability to know those limits and find ways to work within them gives us the unique ability not only to discover, but to decide and create the answer to the question ‘Who am I?’

Bill Meacham, Austin, TX

If you look in the mirror, what is staring back at you? Flesh. Eyes. And underneath that? Bones. Blood. Brain. But then, what makes us different from animals? Is it, with Plato and Aristotle, the ability to reason and live virtuously? Possibly – so a soul, a consciousness. It is perfectly likely that our one defining feature is metaphysical. But higher mammals’ intelligence is too near ours to assume this is our single differentiation: the ability to communicate and love is reflected in dolphins and primates. So it is equally likely that being human comes down to our biological structure – our DNA and physiology – developing certain features that other animals lack, including hormones. Perhaps what we really are comes down to the rather annoying answer, “we are human.” But ‘human’ describes something that we cannot certainly define or grasp. The most we can do is ascertain that we are indeed different, a compilation of our multiplicity: we are evolved animals; the inhabitants of earth; the most widespread of colonists, and the most diverse of species. And when we look in the mirror, to question ourselves and stare at our flesh, our eyes, our bones, our blood, to philosophise and obey our brains – in short, when we define ourselves as human, that is what it is to be a person.

Amy Andrews, Nantwich, Cheshire

Half of our lives we behave like animals. Sleeping, feeding, drinking, pursuing sex and other bodily necessities, we do exactly what baboons, monkeys, and other animals do. Most of the rest of our available time is spend doing what the societies we live in want us to do, namely work to earn enough to pay for those necessities. The little time left over which we could call ‘time out’ is scarcely enough to keep up with what happens in the world around us, if we even are interested.

When I look at the mirror in the morning, the face which stares back at me is not me. It cannot be me, it is too old to be me. I am retired a long time already, and we all change considerably through the years. I call it an evolutionary process; but still, this face I see does not correspond with what I feel I am.

I am still looking for what Martin Heidegger called ‘Being’. I follow his idea about Dasein . Even living 50% of the time as an ape, I nevertheless feel the facticity of living in space and time, and have always tried to be authentic in my acts and the thoughts which motivate them, seeking an independence of mind and avoiding the general entrapment of following the crowd in the search for the Being of beings. I still consider it a lucky fact to have been ‘thrown into’ a world which is no doubt hostile, repetitive and extremely materialistic, and have accepted nothingness as the ultimate destination of my journey, yet I’m still asking the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ I thought about all of this when I was a young man, and the answer to this question and so many other ones are still out of my reach, and the doubts about meaning of life permeate my mind today as strongly as when I was a student opening my eyes to the basic questions of Being. If this is so, why don’t I know the face in the mirror?

Henry Back, Flagler Beach, Florida

The question ‘Who am I?’ can be answered only specifically. Anything else would be an abstraction that would liken me to others who share such characteristics. But that’s not who I am, that’s what I am. So here is a description of who I am in particular contexts. When I walk in the park, I am Friendly Human. I adopt a stance toward others of smiling, looking at them rather than averting my eyes, nodding and saying “Hello” and so forth. Doing so helps me feel safe and connected with them. Friendly Human is a strategy for being in the world which avoids hostility and harm. It includes deference and yielding. I step aside when encountering someone on a narrow path. By letting them pass, I avoid confrontation and disharmony. I get more enjoyment from the path by letting others have it. They pass, and I get to continue to meander as I wish. When I am Friendly Human I am not Worker, focused on accomplishing a task. I am not Competitor, focused on getting somewhere ahead of someone else. I am not Acquisitor, focused on getting what I want. Nor am I Intimate, focused on loving, understanding and enjoying my mate. I am just Friendly Human – a bit like a dog, but with more autonomy. Worker has a sense of self-importance, pleasure at doing something worthwhile, sometimes angry at obstacles, sometimes pleased at accomplishment. Competitor feels tense, anxious and angry. Acquisitor feels much like Worker, but when combined with Competitor, feels hostile. Intimate feels best of all. When I am Intimate, my guard is down; I delight in things my mate does; I let my thoughts and words flow freely; I bask in the warmth of love. By contrast, Friendly Human is peaceful and relaxed but a bit reserved: I am not anxious, angry or hostile, but neither am I completely unguarded. I keep to myself, engaging others briefly if they wish, or not at all. There is philosophical interest in this only to the extent that it illustrates the human capacity to adopt strategies for being in the world, and thereby define our own answers to the question ‘Who am I?’

Robert Tables, Blanco, TX

I’m a crowd, so I’m a ‘what’. There isn’t an ‘I’. As psychosynthesis says, I’m a collection of sub-personalities. More accurately, this thing is a collection of personalities, some shy, some noisy, pushy, sexy, boring, clever. This is the Many Selves model. The Gestalt view is similar: I/This is the continuous interaction and interrelatedness between myself and the environment of others and objects. Except on this theory there isn’t a ‘myself’ at the core, this I-ness is the constant flux. Even when alone, eyes closed in silence, there’s the flux of sensations and thoughts (coming from where?) In the Many Selves model all these Selves are interrelated, actors with a script they write as the play proceeds, with more parts than actors, so multiple roles are played. The problem is that, mostly we want to believe there is a core self or single I inside the sensations, so we can reinforce our Self Concept: “I am the sort of person who…” A fragmented self-concept is emotionally distressing.

I see the Self as a kaleidoscope. As with the Gestalt and the Many Selves models, the pattern is ever changing. Life and its activities is rotating the kaleidoscope, rather than me. My very limited control is to speed it up or slow it down. The constant ‘me’ I wake up as is the kaleidoscope briefly at rest before the environment begins to turn it. The kaleidoscope’s glitter are the few fixed aspects of me, such as gender, body, culture, etc. What’s new every time is the mood I wake up in or experience. Differences between people are simply different combinations of different bits. His bits are mainly red and angular – a spiky person; hers are mostly greenish and rounded, a softer personality. To a degree I can add or remove bits of glitter, choosing colour and shape, such as changing my behaviours and attitudes. But, as with a real kaleidoscope, this means opening up and getting inside, which we mostly resist. So I cannot say “I am.” I can only say “This thing I call Myself is like the image in rotating kaleidoscope” and “I am a Crowd.”

Tony Morris, Putney, London

To answer this question requires gaining some perspective on oneself. Not capable of devouring huge quantities of texts on Descartes’ cogito , Freud’s ego , Proust’s ‘true me’, Sartre’s ‘non-essence’ or Locke’s personal identity, I choose a different approach, related to a condition I have had since my teenage years: depersonalisation. For those of you unfamiliar with the disorder, it involves losing a sense of self – failing to recognise any physical connection with your own body. Sufferers regularly experience autoscopy, more commonly known as an out-of-body experience. A common technique for getting back in is to list the five senses and write what you are experiencing for each one, hopefully reconnecting yourself with yourself in the process. In more extreme cases sufferers have been known to self-harm, acute pain creating a faster and stronger reconnection.

When I am in a depersonalised state I know two things. First, I know that my physical body can function without my mind being in control, as I can observe this occurring. The body runs on the mind’s residuum. Second, as mentioned, I know that to reconnect I must experience a physical sensation, painful or pleasurable, the more intense the more effective. From this I can deduce that there are two entities present, the conscious and the physical, and the link that connects the two is sensation. So for me, the ‘Who’ is the consciousness and the ‘What’ is the body. But are we still the same person if we suffer from some degenerate disease, mental or physical? I’d like to end with a Joyce quote, which could shed more light on the problem than I have: “I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.”

S. E. Smith, Lancaster

I’m a book. Not literally, of course, but this is the metaphor that I’m going to use, so please bear with me.

I am a particular self. So, what makes a self particular? Its story. That is, the events and objects surrounding it, and its actions on, reactions to, and perceptions of them. You are you because you have lived your life, and I am me because I have lived mine. Even if I had a Siamese Clone we would still have different selves because he would perceive the world from a different viewpoint than me. An important aspect of this story about stories is that the story exists independently of me.

This means that I am a self plus a story. The situation is comparable to that of a book. Books have similar physical elements, like paper, binding, and ink. What makes them unique is the story that they contain. Even if The Iliad has the same font, paper, and glue as El Otoño del Patriarca , they are different books because one is about a Greek struggle and the other a Latin dictator. Likewise, I am different from you because my story is about a guy from Edmond and yours is not. And there you have it. You, me, the creepy guy down the hall – we all have similar selves, but I’m a one-of-a-kind story.

Matthew Hewes, Edmond, OK

I share a large genetic similarity with mice. And like mice I am also made of water and soil. Yet I have opposable thumbs and use language, narratives and imagination for almost everything in life. Because of all that, I think myself superior to a mouse. If I were like most humans I would carry that thought even further, and think that I was either the pinnacle of evolutionary development or the crowning achievement of a divine being’s creation, only slightly less divine than the supernatural being who created me. However, personally, I think none of those grand thoughts. I am a water molecule in an ocean. I am a grain of sand on a beach. I am a linguistic phrase in the novel of time. I am a “ha!” in the middle of a long belly laugh. And these thoughts are more comfortable, less stressful views of me than grand visions of me as the center and purpose of everything. I am a part of everything, but I am not in charge of everything, and that’s a relief. I’m here to do as best I can: my watery, grainy, languagey part of the story society is constantly creating about what it means to be alive. Towards that end I am a thought collector, and I hoard ideas and experiences like a mouse hoards cheese. From my collection I create a story, and with my opposable thumbs and language skills I share it.

Sue Clancy, Norman, Oklahoma

I want to answer your question by paraphrasing the originator of Psychosynthesis, Roberto Assagioli:

I have a body, but I am not my body.

I have emotions, but I am not my emotions.

I have a mind, but I am not my mind.

I have roles to play in life, but I am not any of them.

I am a centre of pure consciousness.

Ray Sherman, Duarte, CA

Next Question of the Month

To celebrate the launch of Mark Vernon’s book How To Be An Agnostic (Palgrave Macmillan) the next question of the month is: What is Truth? The prize is a signed copy of the book. Let us know what truth is and what it’s good for in less than 400 words, please. Subject lines or envelopes should be marked ‘Question Of The Month’, and must be received by 25th July. If you want a chance of getting a signed book, please include your physical address. Submission implies permission to reproduce your answer physically and electronically.

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1 (page 6) p. 6 C1 ‘Who am I?’ Identity in philosophy

• Published: February 2019
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The question of how consciousness and self-awareness connect with personal identity has accompanied philosophy since antiquity. Sages of diverse orientations have put forth various elaborate answers, showing among other things that self-awareness is more than just being conscious. The ensouled matter of the self-conscious brain still poses deeply puzzling questions about individual identity, and nowadays the new reality of anthropo-technology once again poses the question how we can know about ourselves. ‘ “Who am I?” Identity in philosophy’ considers the concept of identity in philosophy through time and the mind–body problem. It also discusses empiricist reductionism, mentalist essentialism, ordinary language analysis, and interactionism.

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Insider and Outsider: An Anthropological Perspective

• Anthropology |
• Epistemology |
• Fieldwork |
• Nonreligion
• February 24, 2012

"What my own position may speak to is the categorisation of "religion"; when talked of in isolation, "religion" remains something fixed and visible. But in fact it intersects heavily across cultural domains, and having been in this ‘piggy in the middle’ situation, it is interesting to note the Christian heritage which is shared both by my family, myself and my non-religious participants: we are all insiders to a point." Share this response

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Katie Aston is Associate Lecturer in the Anthropology of Religion and Ethnographies of South Asia at Goldsmiths University. She recently submitted her PhD on the topic of nonreligious and secular material cultures and ritual in the UK. Aston is also Postgraduate and Early Careers Liaison Officer for the Sociology of Religion (Socrel) research group, as part of the British Sociological Association in the UK (BSA). She is also Editor for the Nonreligion and Secularities Research Network [NSRN] blog. Her research interests span material culture, art, cartoons, secularism, atheism, humanism and ritual practices, within the disciplines of Sociology, Cultural Studies and Anthropology.

Katie Aston

The Insider/Outsider Problem

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If an anthropologist holds the same religious beliefs as ‘the natives’ – or even, some might say, any at all – the implicit concern of the discipline is that he or she might be surrendering too much anthropological authority. But as Ewing argues, belief remains an ’embarrassing possibility’ that stems from ‘a refusal to acknowledge that the subjects of one’s research might actually know something about the human condition that is personally valid for the anthropologist’ (1994:571; see also Harding 1987). The problem of belief, then, is the problem of remaining at the proper remove from ‘natives’ inner lives’ (Geertz 1976:236). (Engelke, 2002: 3)

At the heart of ethnographers’ method of participant observation, is the paradox of being at once participant and observer; attempting to be both objective and subjective. I want in this short report to flag up some issues of interest and some texts from anthropology which speak both to the insider/outsider problem and to the broader methodological issue in anthropology of subjective and objective data collection. My response to this interview is informed by my own fieldwork with a non-religious organised group and the epistemological issues raised in the process.

This paper is intended to be broad-based; to be read beside, not against the interview. I want to think about the methodological issues which it brought to mind and suggest that – at least within anthropology – being either or both insider and outsider is an inevitable part of the fieldwork setup. The methodological issues raised relate to the balance of access to tacit knowledge vs. the ability to remain objective in the ultimate analysis which seems to present in the insider/outsider problem. It is possible to suggest that while gaining greater access as an insider you forfeit your ability for objective empirical observance.

Acceptance and Accessibility

Two issues which particularly emerge from Chryssides’ interview are those of acceptance and accessibility – and the ability to understand the subject which derives from this. Access, for example, may come more freely if you are not “other” or if you even hold a religious faith yourself, but this is more complicated. To talk only of religion as an isolated phenomena that we can be inside and outside of suggests that we are all doing (or in the case of the atheist ‘not doing’) religion all the time and may even fail to recognise the multiple identities we hold.  Gender or class, for example, may intersect or even interfere with other aspects of insider/outsider status. Being the correct gender may play a more important role in access than religious persuasion in the case of research within a gender segregated religious institution. In attending to the issue of the outsider and insider in the more broadly ethnographic sense, we may gain a reflexive position, attending to our whole positionality, not only that of our religious (or non-religious) position to another.

The problem can also be addressed in terms of a broader epistemological question of how we can know and, especially, how we can attend to the knowledge of another. I would suggest that looking at this broader set of questions may go some way to addressing the issue of the insider and outsider. Chryssides indeed does discuss this in an early and interesting point relating to truth claims: that the key question is not whether people have access to, and practice the truth, but to demonstrate what people understand to be true and how this manifests. .

There are a number of important anthropological works on the possibilities of knowledge and the limits of accessing tacit knowledge; a favourite of mine is Maurice Bloch’s How We Think They Think . There are a significant number of studies of religions, religion-like and supernatural phenomena (notably almost all from the “outsider” perspective). Yet, a survey essay by Dr Matthew Engelke on the problem of belief in anthropological fieldwork, suggests that prominent anthropologists Victor Turner and Edward Evans-Pritchard ultimately argued that they were not total outsiders, but maintained the ability to access participants due to their own Catholic beliefs. In this work, Engelke addresses Evans-Pritchard’s work with the Azande, in which Evans-Pritchard treats beliefs analytically as social facts: ‘beliefs are for [the social anthropologist] sociological facts, not theological facts, and his sole concern is with their relation to each other and to other social facts. His problems are scientific, not metaphysical or ontological’ (Evans-Pritchard 1965:1). So we return to Chryssides’ point above, regarding the nature of the “truth” you seek to find. Evans-Pritchard also speaks to assumptions regarding the internal or external nature of religious phenomena.

Both Engelke and Evans-Pritchard argue that fieldwork is essential. The method allows for access to practice and “this is how anthropologists can best understand religion as a social fact”. But what is also demonstrated by Engelke, is Evans-Pritchard’s belief that it is better to have some form of religion or religious “inner life” in order to access or understand the inner lives of “others” regardless of the context of that religious “inner life”, than to be an atheist. The argument is that the scientific study is the relation of religious practice to the social world and these are better understood if the relations are shared (even partially) between participants. Engelke then turns to the work of Victor Turner, whose view is perhaps more fatalistic: the study of religion is doomed to fail since ‘religion is not determined by anything other than itself’ (Turner in Engleke, 2002: 8). Regardless of the position of the researcher, is it simply the case that religion cannot be researched at all? In summary of this work, Engelke draws on an important critique that can be drawn more broadly across the insider/outsider issue – that of ‘belief.’ If inner life and insider status is framed in the context of ‘belief’ as the contention around which the possibility of access presides, then we run the risk of always encountering religions from a Christian/Euro-centric perspective.

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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Article contents

• Anthropocene
• Amy Johnson , Amy Johnson Northumbria University
• Chris Hebdon , Chris Hebdon Yale University
• Paul Burow , Paul Burow Yale University
• Deepti Chatti Deepti Chatti Humboldt State University
•  and  Michael Dove Michael Dove Yale University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.013.295
• Published online: 19 October 2022

The Anthropocene is a newly proposed geological epoch that situates humans as geological agents responsible for altering Earth systems as evidenced in the geological record and directly experienced through the earth’s changing climate. There remains significant debate regarding when humans manifested change in Earth systems, as well as how human influence in planetary processes is evidenced geologically. As of 2022, “Anthropocene” has yet to be adopted as an official category of geological time by the International Commission on Stratigraphy and the International Union of Geologic Sciences. Its influence has nonetheless outpaced academic debate, informing politics, policies, and opinions worldwide. In this context, anthropologists engage the Anthropocene simultaneously as a coupled biophysical and geological fact and an imaginary shaping human relations to Earth and environment. While upholding the validity of the Anthropocene as a reflection of accelerating planetary-scale environmental changes, anthropology is notable for asking critical questions about how the concept is developed and mobilized and what mainstream interpretations of the Anthropocene hide from view about life on our changing planet. Anthropology has been especially sensitive to the ontologies of time latent in the Anthropocene debates, recognizing the plural ways time is lived globally and how the concept of the Anthropocene interacts with ideas of past, present, and future. Moreover, in concordance with the standpoints of Indigenous theory and feminist and queer studies, and in conversation with critical scholarship of power and justice, anthropology has contributed to ongoing discussion about the criteria used to evaluate the Anthropocene’s beginnings, advancing discussions about the complicity of political economies of capitalism, colonialism, and plantations in the production of the Anthropocene. The engaged ethnographic approaches central to contemporary anthropology have thus deepened understanding of how the proposed Anthropocene epoch is lived and how its framing is changing human relations to environment and responsibilities for Earth’s future.

• climate change
• standpoints
• climate justice

Introduction

Anthropology, as a discipline uniquely devoted to the study of the human, has become central to the production of knowledge about the newly proposed geological epoch of the human, the Anthropocene . The term “Anthropocene,” popularized by Crutzen and Stoermer (2000) , refers to the “time of Homo sapiens .” Its conceptual development follows longstanding internal debate within the earth sciences about the potential for humans to alter fundamental aspects of Earth systems ( Davis 2011 ). For while the ability of humans to greatly modify environments is uncontested, the dramatic planetary-scale changes experienced over the past century, such as global warming, rising seas, extreme weather, and species extinction, have renewed scientific attention to the boundaries and scale of human influence on Earth’s biological and geological processes.

Homo sapiens have existed as the lone example of the human species since at least forty thousand years ago when the last of the Neanderthals were replaced or absorbed into our species. Almost all our time alone has been experienced within the Holocene Epoch, the warm interglacial period covering the past 11,650+ years of Earth history. The Holocene arguably provided a cradle for the development of modern humans. It is coincident with the Neolithic, a growing reliance on domesticated plants and animals, the rise of cities, global migration, and the very rapid, exponential growth in human population. Yet, evidence suggests that within this same time period, human activity introduced changes to the earth’s atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and other systems. The Anthropocene therefore demarcates an epoch distinct from the Holocene, one in which human activity can be synchronously traced through virtually all planetary processes, as recorded in geological markers, such as ice cores and stratigraphy, and experienced directly through the earth’s rapidly changing climate.

Agreement on when modern humans became geological agents, however, remains elusive. For geochronologists and chronostratigraphers, the challenge of naming the Anthropocene has thus far hinged on how and where to mark the start of it in reference to a “conceptual surface of identical time around the globe,” one signified by markers in sedimentary deposits and other geological materials which predominate globally, rather than just regionally or locally ( Zalasiewicz et al. 2021 , 2). The geological approach to the Anthropocene depends on synchronicity, or the locating of traces of human activity which predominate worldwide at the same time, signifying a so-called “golden spike” for the Anthropocene in the geological record. Many currently trace this time to the “great acceleration” of human resource use since around 1950 , typified by the deployment of nuclear weapons and introduction of plutonium and chemical compounds from metals and plastics into Earth systems ( McNeill and Engelke 2014 ; Steffen et al. 2015 ). Others locate it further in prehistory, proposing anthropogenic fire as a possible early benchmark given its effects on greenhouse gases ( Glikson 2013 , 91).

The geological concern to establish a single time has conflicted with scholars with expertise in multiple times and temporalities. While not in principle disagreeing with facts about the explosive increase in Earth transformation over the past century, anthropologists have been skeptical that stratigraphy alone is able to define “the human age” with scientific adequacy ( Castree 2017 ). In part this is a disagreement between those scholars who see their task as “objectively” defining a new time and those scholars who see such a definition as inadequate insofar as it ignores relations to other times, such as how different people’s biographies have differently connected to global history and vice versa. As Mathews notes,

Anthropological responses to the Anthropocene are marked by a concern with the dangers of the narrative of human mastery or Eurocentrism and the risk of antipolitical concealment of the differential harms that global environmental change poses to the poor, to people of color, and to residents of the Global South. ( Mathews 2020 , 76)

These concerns turn on which materialities and meanings count in the conceptualization of an epoch. Is the Anthropocene “set in stone” or set as well in other traces such as historical evidence and cultural memory, and who decides?

Proposing alternative global markers, some have argued that the American Indigenous population collapses following European colonization—which may have altered global climate for centuries—should be taken as a more informative time for the beginning of the Anthropocene ( Ruddiman 2003 ; Zalasiewicz et al. 2021 ). The collision of New and Old Worlds between 1492 and 1800 is presented by Lewis and Maslin (2015) as a compelling period for the Anthropocene’s beginnings. They identify a low point of CO 2 in glacial ice dated to 1610 and argue that this occurrence reflects the “near-cessation of farming and reduction in fire use” after the population collapse in the Americas, resulting “in the regeneration of over 50 million hectares of forest, woody savanna and grassland with a carbon uptake by vegetation and soils estimated at 5–40 Pg within around 100 years” ( 2015 , 175). Lewis and Maslin go on to state that the intensive uptake of carbon over this short interval represents the most significant dip in preindustrial atmospheric CO 2 levels for the last two thousand years.

Davis and Todd (2017) support Lewis and Maslin’s dating of the Anthropocene to 1610 and colonization. For Davis and Todd (2017) underscores how contemporary ecological crises in North America originate from systems of extraction and dispossession begun in the colonial period, while also facilitating thinking with Indigenous knowledge about the Anthropocene in ways that push beyond Western and European epistemologies ( Davis and Todd 2017 , 764). Lewis and Maslin’s (2015) “Orbis Spike” (from the Latin for “world”) is a satisfying convergence of geophysical science, Indigenous knowledge, and social science analysis of the political economy of the world-system, demonstrating the multiple disciplinary and intellectual traditions being brought together to make sense of the Anthropocene as a geological epoch.

Social scientists and humanists have tended to question the idea that geologists alone can adequately periodize time given time’s plural interpretations. Many examples could be given. One common view in western Amazonia, for example, is that in the beginning of time the world was full of humans who, because of quarrelling over family and food issues, transformed into plants and animals. This enabled them, in new skins, to live without kin conflict ( Swanson and Reddekop 2017 ). In this view, the age of humans is the oldest time rather than the newest. The present time of complicated living and destruction is seen as an era of dehumanization, rather than the apotheosis of humanity ( Hebdon 2021 ). Anthropologists argue that understanding such cultural standpoints is essential to effectively communicating and conceptualizing science in the world. How, for example, might Amish farmers be moved or not by exhortations that, to respond to the Anthropocene, they need to accept environmental regulations and adopt new technologies ( Welk-Joerger 2019 )?

As of 2022 , the Anthropocene as an epoch has yet to be officially adopted as a unit of geological time by the International Commission on Stratigraphy and the International Union of Geologic Sciences. In some ways scientific agreement on the Anthropocene is less relevant than it may at first appear. As an imaginary and a substantiation of observed and evidenced planetary changes, the Anthropocene has escaped the confines of academic debate and regulation. It informs politics, policy, and opinion worldwide, generating new ways of understanding and governing human relations to environment and responsibilities for the future of planet Earth.

The anthropology of the Anthropocene has tended to be reflexive, asking what defining a new time should mean in practice, in large part out of a well-founded understanding that what is “set in stone” is not always the whole story. In this regard, anthropologists have increasingly argued for an Anthropocene with multiple views of this epoch, while also insisting on an integrative proposal for a more scientifically adequate and pluralized single definition in dialogue with colleagues inside and outside the academy. The breadth of research topics, locations, theoretical concerns, and methodologies presented in Anthropocene scholarship in anthropology underscores the concept’s broad appeal as a “problem space” of thought and action ( Moore 2016 ), a way of noticing the imbrication of human systems and biophysical/geophysical processes ( Mathews 2020 ), and a catalyst for exploring life on a changing planet ( Tsing et al. 2017 ).

The literature drawn together here foregrounds the diverse intellectual traditions contributing to the anthropological study of the Anthropocene. Although anthropologists approach the Anthropocene from different perspectives, and with different ethical and theoretical commitments, there is shared interest in the history and development of the Anthropocene concept, its chronological demarcation, and its application as a universal category of experience. Additionally, it is noticed that anthropologists continue to gravitate toward climate change or anthropogenic global warming as a key dimension for entering the Anthropocene debates, likely reflecting the discipline’s historical interest in emic understandings of climate and growing involvement in climate research and policy nationally and internationally ( Dove 2014 ). Critical anthropology scholarship carries these concerns forward by considering how the Anthropocene, as a concept and a biogeophysical reality, alters understandings of time, grounds ontological and political standpoints, and shapes power relations and the practice of environmental justice. Together these concerns build a politically and environmentally resonant foundation for anthropology’s engagements with the Anthropocene epoch as it is lived and imagined.

End Times and the Anthropocene

Some of the most thought-provoking debates in the humanities and social sciences, including anthropology, concern the fundamental point upon which the Anthropocene is based: a before-and-after point in time in human relations with Earth systems, particularly climate. Bauer and Ellis (2018 , 215) write, assailing the concept of a clean historical break:

To reinforce the notion of a historical binary, of an “Anthropocene divide,” by precisely dividing the history of the earth into a time in which human social engagement with the production of environments is globally consequential from a time in which it is not, flows strongly against contemporary understandings of both human-environment relations and the coupling of human activities with Earth systems from prehistory to the present.

The idea of such a historical divide has wide-ranging implications for how we think about the past, future, and present, as well as how we confront the possible end of human life or, at least, the end of current modes of living. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin (1968) famously critiqued the idea that time as history is simply a linear progression. He argued that events in the present make earlier events historical—that is, the present makes the past historical, it makes the past into something that does not simply affect the present, but something that the present itself remakes. In the case of the Anthropocene, the development of this concept has indeed involved a historicization of previously ignored parts of the past. The development of the idea of the Anthropocene, and the warming planet that has driven it, has prompted a search for the pivotal historic moment when this process commenced, a moment whose existence or significance was not previously suspected.

Chakrabarty (2009 , 206) argues that the idea of climate change itself has affected our sense of history, because, in recognizing the human impact on the global environment, it collapses the previous sense of a separate nature and culture. By implicating humans in the earth’s geophysical processes, climate scientists have recast the human as more than a biological agent. If the dichotomy of nature and culture was integral to our concept of history, its collapse means the end of history as we know it. In consequence, Chakrabarty (2009 , 197) says, the future has been placed “beyond the grasp of historical sensibility.” Whereas, following Benjamin, we would say that the Anthropocene makes the past historical; following, Chakrabarty, we would say that it makes the future nonhistorical.

There is some empirical basis for Chakrabarty’s view of anthropogenic climate change as something unique in human history. For policymakers and climate change activists, this claim of uniqueness helps to mobilize resources in the battle against it. But this comes at a cost. If we view anthropogenic climate change as the end of history, this separates us from millennia of human experience with climate, climatic variation, and climatic perturbation, extending back to Hippocrates and beyond ( Dove 2014 ). It suggests that the millennia of human experience dealing with climate is not relevant to the current crisis.

Just as the concept of the Anthropocene can alter our view of the past, resulting in greater attention being paid to some aspects, like the onset of massive human-driven releases of carbon into the atmosphere, and less to others, such as the human experience of climatic perturbation, so too can it alter our view of the future. Some scholars argue that the importance given to the natural sciences in climate change science, and their reliance on quantitative modeling, has reduced much discussion of the future to narrow “model-based descriptions of putative future climates” ( Hulme 2011 , 245; see also Moore, Mankin, and Becker 2015 ). Demeritt (2001 , 318–319) claims that this constrains our view of the future by abstracting climate change science from social-economic structures and culture, which in the end forecloses discussion or imagination of alternative development paths.

Hulme (2011 , 264) similarly characterizes much of the work in climate science to predict the future as “reductionistic,” because it isolates climate as the primary determinant of behavior and response. Ironically, just as the concept of the Anthropocene elevates human agency to a planetary scale, scientific models of climate change reduce the scope of human agency through a deterministic view of present and future action centered on climate. As Hulme (2011 , 256) writes, “These models and calculations allow for little human agency, little recognition of evolving, adapting, and innovating societies, and little endeavor to consider the changing values, cultures, and practices of humanity.” The evacuation of complexity in climate change models is reflective of a wider trend in Anthropocene discourse that identifies humanity as a single monolithic actor disturbing planetary systems in a manner that erases social and economic inequalities and cultural diversity.

The ultimate, perceived loss of human agency in the era of the Anthropocene involves the trope of societal “collapse,” and its concomitant erasure of both pasts and futures. The case of the Norse settlements in Greenland is much discussed in the literature on collapse. Toward the end of the 10th century , Norse seafarers colonized Greenland, and at their peak they numbered over three thousand settlers. In the last quarter of the 15th century , however, one-half millennium after their founding, the Norse settlements in Greenland disappeared. When Danish missionaries went looking for them in 1721 , Inuit hunters showed them crumbling stone church walls—the only remnants of five hundred years of occupation. The end of the Norse settlements is popularly attributed to the rigors of the Little Ice Age, and Norse settlers are framed as passive victims of a changing climate ( McGovern 1994 , 141). McGovern faults this explanation on multiple grounds: historic records show that this did not happen abruptly; it did not happen in a resource-poor environment; and it did not affect the aboriginal Inuit who shared occupation of Greenland at the time.

Greenland Norse society is one of the case studies in Jared Diamond’s 2005 book, Collapse , which popularized this part of the climate change literature. His work did not find favor among most social scientists; Indeed, it prompted the publication, in 2009 , of a counter-volume, Questioning Collapse , which problematizes the whole idea of “collapse” ( McAnany and Yoffee 2009 ). In this volume, Berglund (2009) questions why we should see the five hundred-year Norse Greenland society as a story of collapse when it lasted longer than the United States has existed, and it endured for as long as its inhabitants could manage given the conditions.

Scholarship focusing on a case of supposed collapse in the ancient Near East similarly asks what is meant by the term “collapse”? Weiss and Bradley (2001) , questioning the orthodoxy that global climate through the past eleven thousand years has been “uneventful,” present evidence of the historic occurrence of multiple, sudden onset but prolonged droughts. Under their impact, the abandonment of existing institutions and shift to radically different lifeways was “an adaptive response to otherwise insurmountable stresses” ( Weiss and Bradley 2001 , 609)—thus not collapse in the sense we may think.

The preoccupation with end times reflected in the idea of collapse is also mirrored in the idea of apocalypse, which Haraway et al. (2016) argue is implicit in the anthropogenic climate change discourse. They characterize this discourse as a “sacred theory of the earth,” which falls in a tradition of thinking about chaos, the fall, judgement, and apocalypse. The validity of this characterization is reflected in the fact that some Christian congregations reject the climate change discourse as a rival to their own “end-time” discourse. As Webster (2013 , 75) writes of the way the climate change discourse is regarded in a Scottish fishing village:

It was God, and not man, who was said to be the agent of this future change. It is in this sense that global warming and climate change were seen by Gamrie’s Christians as a false eschatology that provided an alternative account of the end of the world to the one outlined in scripture.

These Scottish villagers argue that the work of Al Gore among others reveals the climate change movement to be a sort of millenarian cult.

The apocalyptic dimensions of climate change discourse are also interwoven in a variety of political discourses. It is apparent in the ways contemporary American politics frames extreme weather events associated with anthropogenic global warming in reference to nuclear attacks and weapons of mass destruction. Masco (2009 , 22) observes how the initial response to Hurricane Katrina by media commentators in the United States was to consider how the event impacted the country’s ability to react to a nuclear attack. This was captured in then-President Bush’s remarks during a statement when conducting a review of the emergency response to Katrina: “We want to make sure that we can respond properly if there is WMD attack or another major storm” (quoted in Masco 2009 , 23–24). Masco criticizes this nuclear discourse on the grounds that it blocks other logics about nature and security and thus other potential ways of dealing with climate change-related disaster. Similarly, Swyngedouw (2010 , 219) interprets the apocalyptic vision of climate change in terms of its political power: his thesis is that apocalyptic imagery contributes to an apolitical populism. He argues that because climate change is presented as a global humanitarian cause, imagination about how to respond to climate change is being depoliticized. In other words, rather than calling upon radical sociopolitical change as a means to alter the course of climate change, Swyngedouw says that the institutions that caused climate change are being invoked to cure it. In his account, “Populism . . . does not invite a transformation of the existing socio-ecological order but calls on the elites to undertake action such that nothing really has to change” ( 2010 , 223).

For authors like Masco and Swyngedouw, the discourse of apocalyptic climate change represented in apolitical populism or reactionary international security policy is limiting because it does not permit the seeing of different futures. In contrast, others argue that an apocalyptic discourse does permit us to see the future, whether for good or ill. Latour (2013) contends that apocalyptic rhetoric is powerful because it permits us to see a future that we cannot otherwise see, and which we need to see. He defends the apocalyptic rhetoric of the Anthropocene precisely because it enables us to think the unthinkable. On the other hand, Cons (2018) argues that the apocalyptic assumptions embedded in Anthropocene discourse and policy ultimately create “heterodystopias” (following Foucault 1998 ), sites where the predicted ill fate of climate change is determined to have already happened, thereby foreclosing mitigation options. He traces how heterodystopia is produced in Bangladesh, arguing that it contributes to a false impression that global climate change is contained to particular local spaces. This is seductive because it displaces anxieties over the future to sites and populations least responsible for the Anthropocene’s emergence and the continuation of harmful anthropogenic global warming.

Standpoints

Responding to the plural ways the Anthropocene is interpreted and experienced globally is a key concern of contemporary anthropology. Feminist and queer theory and Indigenous theory, among other intellectual traditions, have become important interlocutors for anthropologists invested in studying and supporting the varied ontological and political standpoints presented within the Anthropocene.

Feminist and Queer Theory

In many ways, the emergence of the Anthropocene has prompted a rethinking of core principles of Enlightenment humanism, which, while foundational to the growth of anthropology and related disciplines, has entrenched a view of nature as separate from human culture, effectively privileging the human over other forms of life. Anthropologists informed by feminist and queer theory carry critiques of Enlightenment humanism forward methodologically and theoretically in work that decenters the human as the primary subject for interpreting the Anthropocene. Informed by posthumanism and biopolitics, scholarship in this vein provocatively interrogates the biological and social boundaries of the human ( Chen 2012 ), extending ethnographic attention to other-than-human beings ( Tsing 2015 ) and the paradigmatic division of life and nonlife upheld in the extractive political economy of late liberalism ( Povinelli 2016 ). At a theoretical level, philosophical and political conversations surrounding the decentering of human subjects have been generative for the discipline of anthropology as a whole, influencing recent turns toward multispecies studies and the geological that are explicitly responsive to the concerns of the Anthropocene ( Oguz 2020 ).

In looking beyond the human, and beyond human futures, Homo sapiens is sometimes framed as a universally harmful, species-scale, actor. Ahuja (2015) , expanding on the parasite metaphor of Serres (1982) , for example, observes parallels in the ways humans and mosquitoes widen their territorial range and destructive influence as a cause and consequence of global warming. The abstraction of the human species as a planetary parasite, however, is challenged by research that unpacks the variegated responsibilities and experiences of the Anthropocene within and beyond the human species. Anthropologists informed by feminist and queer theory frequently connect the ecological and social harms of the Anthropocene to structural inequalities reproduced through interlinked political-economic systems and environmental practices, such as industrial capitalism and plantation economies ( Haraway et al. 2016 ).

Importantly, the resulting scholarship is not exclusively pessimistic. While anthropology has been influenced by apocalyptic narratives circulating in Anthropocene discourse, it is also the case that anthropologists are perceiving the Anthropocene as generative for worldmaking and the emergence of new kinds of human–environment relationships ( O’Reilly et al. 2020 ). Collaborative research from the Matsutake Worlds Research Group ( Choy et al. 2009 ) and initiatives such as the Feral Atlas digital project ( Tsing et al. 2020 ) highlight instances of multispecies sociality and human ingenuity emerging in response to the Anthropocene, including within sites regarded as capitalist ruins. Feminist interest in interactions transpiring between humans and other forms of life in the Anthropocene has in turn precipitated a range of research on interspecies ethics ( Kim 2017 ) and interspecies labor ( Zhang 2020 ).

The optimism represented within scholarship of multispecies worldmaking is connected to criticism of another ghost of Enlightenment humanism disturbed by the Anthropocene: reproduction. For anthropologists informed by feminist and queer theory, heteronormative models of biological reproduction are harmful in two ways: first, in the physical addition of persons in a world burdened by an expanding, resource-consuming, human population; and second, in the social relations foreclosed by the privileging of biological reproduction. Haraway’s (2016) call to “make kin not babies!” responds to both concerns and has reignited interest in kinship within anthropology. In light of the Anthropocene, interpretations of kinship in the discipline are moving away from the biological to encompass relations that are fluid, multiple, and inclusive of nonhuman beings ( Kirksey 2019 ). By decentering the human subject and giving ethnographic attention to the socialities enacted across species and inorganic entities, feminist and queer theories are changing how anthropology answers what it means to be human in the Anthropocene.

Indigenous Theory

Standpoints that value human–environment entanglements and multispecies sociality are becoming more mainstream in anthropology. Yet, they continue to run up against what Povinelli (2016) and others ( Watts 2013 ; Yusoff 2013 ) concerned with the political economy of late liberalism identify as a key binary sustaining the Anthropocene: the division between life and nonlife. This is a central insight of scholars working in Indigenous studies who situate Anthropocene discourse in the context of settler colonialism and global imperialism. The tension between life and nonlife in the framing of the Anthropocene can be located, for example, in the ways in which technological interventions into planetary processes, such as geoengineering, are frequently proposed as solutions to anthropogenic climate change. While intended to correct the harms created by the insertion of human activity into planetary systems, these projects ironically gain traction by imposing distinctions between what is life and what is nonlife in order to justify new kinds of human activity into objectified and abstracted Earth system processes. Such projects reveal how narratives of human exceptionalism and mastery over nature and the inorganic remain a part of Anthropocene discourse and action.

Geoengineered “solutions,” however, largely fail to contend with the underlying political, economic, and social processes contributing to human-induced climate change. They likewise dismiss the knowledges and values of groups who have long lived with drastic environmental changes, notably Indigenous peoples facing long-term colonization. Indigenous peoples not only demonstrate how humans are caught in webs of interdependence and mutualism with nonhumans and environment, but offer ethical practices to guide relations with the other-than-human world ( de la Cadena 2015 ; Kimmerer 2014 ). It is in this context that TallBear (2019) offers a Dakota model for being in good relations with the other-than human and Todd (2015) cautions against homogenous ontologies within mainstream Anthropocene scholarship that reproduce and elevate divisions between nature and culture.

The critiques raised by Indigenous scholars emerge from a shared recognition that debates about the temporality of the Anthropocene within science and policy circles miss how the Anthropocene’s emergence is inseparable from the material transformations wrought by colonization and capitalism ( Todd 2015 ). Indigenous studies centers the role of colonialism as both a historical process and enduring contemporary structure shaping human–environment relations across societies, culminating in the appearance of the Anthropocene ( Byrd 2011 ). It is for this reason that Davis and Todd (2017) call for a periodization of the Anthropocene that connects histories of land dispossession and genocide to the present environmental crisis. While noting how Indigenous peoples and societies are erased in conceptualizations of the Anthropocene, Whyte (2018) argues that “colonialism and capitalism … laid key parts of the groundwork for industrialization and militarization—or carbon-intensive economics—which produce the drivers of anthropogenic climate change” ( Whyte 2017 , 154).

The erasures of Indigenous perspectives and histories from Anthropocene discussions are reflected in the widely circulating narratives of dystopian futures and apocalypse associated with Western framings of the Anthropocene. Yet, as Simmons (2019) describes, the Anthropocene can be considered as one of many apocalypses faced by Indigenous peoples worldwide. Rather than seeing this moment as a novel dystopia, DeLoughrey (2019) illustrates how the Anthropocene and empire are co-constituted phenomena, arguing that it is only through understanding their interconnections that we can imagine a livable future. On this point, Whyte (2018) warns that the apocalypticism surrounding discussions of the Anthropocene resurrects salvage science in so for as it presents Indigenous peoples as facing inevitable decline and disappearance because of uncontrollable climate change.

Indigenous anthropologists and scholars advocate for a decolonial approach to Indigenous climate change studies ( Whyte 2018 ), which refuses settler conceits of political recognition, integrated knowledge, and the supposed benefits of settler capitalism, to offer new models for living that challenge the ethical and ontological basis of settler societies complicit in the Anthropocene’s emergence ( Coulthard 2014 ; Simpson 2014 ). What a decolonial Anthropocene will look like is being imagined and enacted by Indigenous scholars and those invested in futures that build on appreciation of human embeddedness within environments, their geophysical processes, and the sociality and ethics generated through multispecies relationships. It is no accident that calls for decolonizing scholarly and public understanding of the Anthropocene are coming as the dehumanization of Indigenous peoples and others impacted by colonialism and settler societies is receiving increasing attention worldwide. It is in this context that scholars are focusing more on responsibility for climate change and the production of global differences in wealth and power, both historically and in relation to future climate action.

Power and Justice

Anthropologists and scholars in related fields are thus asking how the Anthropocene reflects and reproduces inequalities between and within different human populations and between humans and other Earthly beings. Such inquiries necessitate a rethinking of complicity in the Anthropocene and the social, political, and economic context of the epoch’s emergence. In this regard, Nixon has productively challenged the standpoint that humans, at a species level, constitute a geological force by questioning who is the “we” in the statement “we the species” ( Nixon 2017 ). Following Nixon, any analysis which wishes to tell the story of Homo sapiens as a collective actor in planetary processes must begin by unpacking the differential relations within human populations that generate uneven effects on planetary systems and geology.

Consequently, a growing number of anthropologists, in line with scholars in Indigenous, feminist, and queer studies, identify industrial capitalism as the economic, historical, and political system most accurately to blame for the current climate catastrophe ( Haraway 2015 ; Sangari 2016 ). They argue that the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few is made possible by capitalism’s logic of disposability that renders most of humanity and all of nature expendable. Taking this observation forward, Moore (2017) points out the easy slippage between understandings of climate change as anthropogenic (caused by human activity) and the assumption that all humans are responsible. Rather than regarding climate change as anthropogenic , Moore proposes that climate change should be acknowledged as capitalogenic , that is, created by capital, with the Anthropocene renamed as Capitalocene . From this basis, it becomes clearer how the appropriation of natural resources and the labor of the colonized, women, and people of color, are not only central to capitalism’s proliferation, but contribute to the globally unequal experiences and effects of the Anthropocene today.

The search for responsibility in the Anthropocene’s emergence has also led anthropologists to concentrate on practices that have most changed human–environment relations at a planetary scale. Specifically, anthropologists pinpoint the development of large-scale monocrop plantation agriculture as a source of human entry into the planetary climate system. Research in this line argues that plantation labor sustained the growth and spread of colonialism and capitalism historically, making plantations the seedbed of structural inequality and environmental degradations experienced globally in the Anthropocene. It is also pointed out that all plantations—whether rubber, banana, soy, or palm oil—rely on intensive chemical inputs, forest/grassland clear-cutting and land reclamation strategies, and forms of coercive labor that combine to discipline landscapes and populations for the purpose of profit. Among other social and ecological effects, these ubiquitous practices result in irreplaceable biodiversity loss and high greenhouse gas emissions that exacerbate and accelerate global warming trends and the deterioration of ecosystems. The term Plantationocene ( Haraway 2015 ; Haraway and Tsing 2019 ) is thus favored by those who aim to keep exploitation, extraction, and dispossession at the front of public and scholarly engagement with the Anthropocene.

While race is acknowledged as central to capitalism, colonialism, and plantation systems, Anthropocene scholarship has been late to consider how race constitutes a core component of the Anthropocene’s genesis and experience. In response, Black Ecologies ( Hare 2016 ; Vergès 2017 ; Yusoff 2018 ) critically outlines how the Anthropocene emerges as a distinctive racial formation tied to the dual extraction of environments and Black lives. Additionally, scholars examining climate change impacts, mitigation practices, and responses show that global warming and its attendant effects disproportionately impact people of color across the planet, affecting communities throughout the Global South ( Lazarus 2012 ; Teaiwa 2014 ; Vaughn 2017 ) and industrialized countries of the Global North ( Lennon 2017 ). Action-oriented climate justice and ecological justice research consequently raises awareness and produces greater insight about how the Anthropocene reproduces inequality, violence, and environmental harm for people of color ( Davis et al. 2019 ). Importantly, scholars committed to climate justice often work alongside activists and in collaboration with communities to elevate issues of concern and create conditions for social, political, and environmental change—for example, through public and collaborative anthropology projects ( Howe and Boyer 2019 ; Roane and Hosbey 2019 ). They work in tandem with Black, Latinx, and Indigenous studies scholars and others to challenge the liberal promise of universal equality and justice claimed by international climate change mitigation policies, prompting imaginative visions of human-environmental futures in the Anthropocene through decolonial and anti-Black Racism approaches.

Studies of justice, power, and responsibility in the Anthropocene importantly also extend beyond the human to include the multitude of nonhuman beings who share Earth as home. Haraway (2015) advocates for a “multispecies ecojustice” that embraces the full diversity and powers of life on our planet. While the dramatic effects of human-induced climatic changes are undeniable, Haraway reminds us that the original terraformers of Earth were bacteria, and therefore that interaction of all kinds of species have had profound impacts on planetary processes (see Kirksey 2019 ). Drawing inspiration from feminist science studies, speculative fiction, and climate science, Haraway invites us to think more capaciously about how to “live and die well as mortal critters” and suggests a new term for our age, the “Chthulucene.” A playful twist on H. P. Lovecraft’s tentacular creature, the “chthu,” the “Chthulucene” as a term connects humans to all other life experiencing a planet in flux, removing the anthropocentrism embedded in the language of the “Anthropocene.” While suggesting the name Chthulucene as a companion to Anthropocene, Plantationocene, and Capitalocene, Haraway insists that all names are simultaneously too big and too small. That is, they are only suggestive of the myriad ways in which we need to learn to make kin and make refuge for all those with whom we are Earth-bound.

Studies of the Anthropocene in anthropology highlight the totalizing and universalizing effects the term “Anthropocene” has had on popular discourses, imaginations, and practices responding to global climate change. By ignoring historic differences in human impacts on environments, it is argued that is has become possible for policymakers, politicians, and the public to avoid reflective inquiry into the structural drivers of climate change, namely the extractive logics of capitalism and colonialism which renders most humans and environments expendable. Mainstream framings of a diffuse “global” climate change that operate without recognition of the different levels of complicity in sharing the benefits of colonialism, capitalism, and environmental degradation essentially make any substantive policy action impossible. For, when everybody is supposed to be responsible for the Anthropocene and its social and environmental harms, effectively nobody is.

Further Reading

• Crutzen, Paul J. 2006. “The ‘Anthropocene.’” In Earth System Science in the Anthropocene , edited by Eckart Ehlers and Thomas Krafft , 13–18. Berlin: Springer.
• Howe, Cymene , and Anand Pandian , eds. 2019. Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon . Santa Barbara, CA: Punctum Books.
• Moore, Amelia . 2019. Destination Anthropocene: Science and Tourism in the Bahamas . Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Moore, Jason W. , ed. 2016. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism . Oakland, CA: PM Press.
• Olson, Valerie A. , and Lisa Messeri . 2015. “Beyond the Anthropocene: Un-Earthing an Epoch.” Environment and Society 6 (1): 28–47.
• O’Reilly, Jessica . 2017. The Technocratic Antarctic: An Ethnography of Scientific Expertise and Environmental Governance . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• Ahuja, Neel . 2015. “Intimate Atmospheres: Queer Theory in a Time of Extinctions.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21 (2–3): 365–385.
• Bauer, Andrew M. , and Erle C. Ellis . 2018. “The Anthropocene Divide: Obscuring Understanding of Social-Environmental Change.” Current Anthropology 59 (2): 209–227.
• Benjamin, Walter . [1950] 1968. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections , edited by H. Arendt , translated by H. Zohn . New York: Schocken Books.
• Berglund, Joel . 2009. “Did the Medieval Norse Society in Greenland Really Fail?” Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire , edited by Patricia A. McAnany and Norman Yoffee , 45–70. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Byrd, Jodi . 2011. Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Castree, Noel . 2017. “Anthropocene: Social Science Misconstrued.” Nature 541: 289.
• Chakrabarty, Dipesh . 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (2): 197–222.
• Chen, Mel Y. 2012. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect . Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Choy, Timothy K. , Lieba Faier , Michael J. Hathaway , Miyako Inoue , Shiho Satsuka , and Anna Tsing . 2009. “A New Form of Collaboration in Cultural Anthropology: Matsutake Worlds.” American Ethnologist 36 (2): 380–403.
• Cons, Jason . 2018. “Staging Climate Security: Resilience and Heterodystopia in the Bangladesh Borderlands.” Cultural Anthropology 33 (2): 266–294.
• Coulthard, Glen . 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Crutzen, Paul J. , and Eugene Stoermer . 2000. The “Anthropocene.” Global Change Newsletter 41: 17–18.
• Davis, Heather , and Zoe Todd . 2017. “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographers 16 (4): 761–780.
• Davis, Janae , Alex A. Moulton , Levi Van Sant , and Brian Williams . 2019. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, . . . Plantationocene? A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises.” Geography Compass 13 (5): e12438.
• Davis, Robert V. 2011. “Inventing the Present: Historical Roots of the Anthropocene.” Earth Sciences History 30 (1): 63–84.
• De la Cadena, Marisol . 2015. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds . Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• DeLoughrey, Elizabeth . 2019. Allegories of the Anthropocene . Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Demeritt, David . 2001. “The Construction of Global Warming and the Politics of Science.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91 (2): 307–337.
• Diamond, Jared . 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed . New York: Viking.
• Dove, Michael R. , ed. 2014. The Anthropology of Climate Change: A Historical Reader . Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Foucault, Michel . [1984] 1998. “Different Spaces.” In Essential Works of Foucault: 1954–1984 , Volume 2 : Aesthetics, Methods, and Epistemology , edited by James D. Faubion , translated by Robert Hurley , 175–186. New York: New Press.
• Glikson, Andrew . 2013. “Fire and Human Evolution: The Deep-Time Blueprints of the Anthropocene.” Anthropocene 3: 89–92.
• Haraway, Donna . 2015. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6 (1): 159–165.
• Haraway, Donna . 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene . Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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Towards Reflexivity in the Sciences: Anthropological Reflections on Science and Society

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• Anna Zadrożna 3  

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Reflexivity, which includes awareness of strengths and limitations of own discipline as well as potential implications of academic endeavor, plays crucial role in developing critical thinking and in proper understanding of scholarly expertise in society. In anthropology, the notion of reflexivity expands to concern positionality of a scholar both as a researcher and as a writer, as well as the awareness of the socio-political context and institutional environment in which one is situated. At the same time, the reflective turn becomes a “paradigm shift” from a “scientific” to a hermeneutic or interpretative approach (Salzman, 2002 ). In my commentary chapter to this volume, I critically engage with contributions to this section of the volume, while remaining attentive to constrains and assets of my own positionality as a scholar and reflecting on the notions of scientificity, society, and reflexivity from anthropological perspective.

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The History of Sociology as Disciplinary Self-Reflexivity

Reflexivity

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There have been significant differences between sociocultural attitudes towards children born with “disabilities.” As an example, whereas the early Christian Church associated the birth of an “intellectually disabled” child with “sin,” the Olmec of ancient Mexico have seen such children as gifted and having religious and superhuman significance (Gaad, 2004 ).

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Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to the organizers, lecturers, and participants of the course “philosophy of sciences” held in Deecember 2017 at the University of Oslo. I am indebted to Murat Somer for his comments and suggestions regarding my draft version of this paper. I also thank Gül Üret for her friendly support during the writing process.

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Zadrożna, A. (2019). Towards Reflexivity in the Sciences: Anthropological Reflections on Science and Society. In: Valsiner, J. (eds) Social Philosophy of Science for the Social Sciences. Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33099-6_6

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