Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Despite the many evident differences among people, humans are among the most genetically similar species.
Derived from Greek, the word “anthropos” means “human” and “logy” refers to the “study of.” Therefore anthropology, by definition, is the study of humans. Anthropologists are not the only scholars to focus on the human condition; biologists, sociologists, psychologists, and others also examine human nature and societies. However, anthropologists uniquely draw on four key approaches to do their research: holism, comparison, dynamism, and fieldwork. Anthropology is an incredibly broad and dynamic discipline. It studies humanity by exploring our past and our present and all of our biological and cultural complexity.
Holism
Anthropologists are interested in the whole of humanity, in how various aspects of biological or cultural life intersect. One cannot fully understand what it means to be human by studying a single aspect of our complex bodies or societies. By using a holistic approach, anthropologists ask how different aspects interact with and influence one another. For example, 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, as you will learn in this book, humans are primates! A cultural anthropologist studying marriage in a small village in India might consider local gender norms, existing family networks, laws regarding marriage, religious rules, and economic requisites in order to understand the particular meanings of marriage in that context. By using a holistic approach, anthropologists appreciate the complexity of any biological, social, or cultural phenomenon.
Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): By using a holistic approach, anthropologists learn how different aspects of humanity interact with and influence one another.
As we will discuss in more detail, anthropology itself is a holistic discipline, comprised (in the United States) of four major areas of study called subdisciplines: cultural anthropology, biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology. We need all four subdisciplines in order to understand the human experience, which involves culture, language, and biological and social adaptations, as well as our history, evolution, and relationship to our closest living relatives: nonhuman primates.
Comparison
Anthropology is a comparative discipline: anthropologists compare and contrast data in order to understand what all humans have in common, how we differ, and how we have changed over time. The comparative approach can be historical: How do humans today differ from ancient Homo sapiens? How has Egyptian society changed since the building of the great pyramids? How is the English language adapting to new modes of communication like smartphones? The comparative approach is also applied to sociocultural phenomena. We can compare the roles of men and women in different societies or different religious traditions within a given society. Some anthropologists compare different primate species, investigating traits shared by all primates (including humans!) or identifying traits that distinguish one primate group from another. Unlike some other disciplines that also use comparative approaches, anthropologists do not just consider our own species or society. Our comparisons span societies, cultures, time, place, and species.
Dynamism
Humans are one of the most dynamic species. Our ability to change, both biologically and culturally, has enabled us to persist over the course of millions of years, and to thrive in many different environments.
Depending on their research focus, anthropologists ask about all kinds of changes: short-term or long-term, temporary or permanent, cultural or biological. For example, a cultural anthropologist might look at how people in a relatively isolated society change in the context of globalization, the process of interaction and interdependence among different nations and cultures of the world. A linguistic anthropologist might ask how a new form of language, like Spanglish, emerges. An archaeologist might ask how climate change influenced the emergence of agriculture. A biological anthropologist might consider how diseases affecting our ancestors led to changes in their bodies. All these examples highlight the dynamic nature of human bodies and societies. While we differ from our ancestors who lived hundreds of thousands of years ago, we share with them this capacity for change.
Fieldwork
Throughout this book, you will read examples of anthropological research that will take you around the world. Anthropologists do not only work in laboratories, libraries, or offices. To collect data, they go to where their data lives, whether it is a city, village, cave, tropical forest, or desert. At their field sites, anthropologists collect data which, depending on subdiscipline, may be interviews with local peoples, examples of language in use, skeletal remains, or human cultural remains like potsherds or stone tools. While anthropologists ask an array of questions and use diverse methods to answer their research questions, they share this commitment to conducting their research out of their offices and in the field.
Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\): Anthropologist Katie Nelson conducting fieldwork among undocumented Mexican immigrant college students.
A Brief History of Anthropology
Imagine only interacting with people who looked, spoke, and acted like you. Now, how would you begin to understand a seemingly new group of people? As people first began to explore the world, they grappled with how to make sense of human differences. Many were adventurers, missionaries, or traders, motivated by a desire to explore, spread their religion, or acquire wealth. All of them were familiar with only one way of life—their own. It was, therefore, through the lens of their own culture that they viewed people they met during their travels.
Figure \(\PageIndex{4}\): Statue of Zhang Qian in Chenggu, China. Zhang Qian is still celebrated today in China as an important diplomat and pioneer of the silk road.
One of the first examples of someone who attempted to systematically study and document cultural differences among different peoples is Zhang Qian (Chang Ch’ien 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 25 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 many new cultural ideas, including Buddhism, into Chinese culture.
Figure \(\PageIndex{5}\): An illustration of Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Battuta in Egypt from Jules Verne’s book Discovery of the Earth.
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. Over a period of nearly 30 years during the fourteenth century, Ibn Battuta’s travels covered nearly 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), but became commonly known as Al Rihla, which means “travels” in Arabic (McIntosh-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 Rihla to be among the first examples of early pre-anthropological writing.
Later, from the 1400s through 1700s, during the so-called “Age of Discovery,” Europeans began to not only explore the world but also colonize it. Europeans exploited natural resources and human labor, exerting social and political control over 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.
As European empires expanded, new ways of understanding the world and its people arose. Beginning in the eighteenth century in Europe, the Age of Enlightenment was a social and philosophical movement that privileged science, rationality, and empiricism 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 through observation and experience: Anyone could ask questions and use rational thought to discover things about the natural and social world.
Figure \(\PageIndex{6}\): Charles Darwin, circa 1881.
For example, Charles Lyell (1797–1875), a geologist, would observe layers of rock and argue that Earth’s surface must have changed gradually over long periods of time, such that it could not be only 6,000 years old (as the Young Earth interpretation in the Bible contends). Charles Darwin (1809–1882), a naturalist and biologist, would observe similarities between fossils and living specimens, leading him to argue that all life is descended from a common ancestor. Philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) would contemplate the origins of society itself. He wrote that people 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. For example, 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. 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 kinship patterns, technologies, subsistence patterns, and so forth. So-called savage societies, ones that used rudimentary tools and foraged for food, were said to be stalled in their mental and moral development.
Ethnocentric ideas, like those of Morgan, 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, where he started to do participant-observation fieldwork: the method of immersive, long-term fieldwork that cultural anthropologists use today. By living with and observing the Trobrianders, he realized that their culture was not “savage,” but rather fulfilled 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 for overemphasizing individuals apart from culture, it was an early attempt to view other cultures in more relativistic ways.
Figure \(\PageIndex{7}\): Franz Boas, circa 1915
Around the same time in the United States, Franz Boas (1858–1942), widely regarded as the founder of American anthropology, developed the cultural relativistic approach: the view that cultures differ but are not better or worse than one another. In his critique of ethnocentric views, Boas insisted that physical and behavioral differences among so-called racial groups in the United States were shaped by environmental and social conditions, not biology. In fact, he argued, 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: cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, archaeology, and biological anthropology.
