Anthropology For Dummies. Cameron M. Smith
an issue today, but we should be careful with projecting our anxieties on the past. Knowing the potential for bias, anthropologists are careful about making assumptions. My mentor, professor Ken Ames, taught me a great lesson, early in my grad-school career: Be most skeptical of your favorite hypothesis. I try to remember that advice any time I think I have something figured out!
Getting Acquainted with Anthropology’s Subfields
Anthropology has a complex, colorful, and sometimes checkered history. As you find out in Chapter 2, the field has gone through several transformations, and today there are more ways of doing anthropology than you can shake a stick at.
Now, the study of humanity is a vast undertaking, so anthropologists have divvied up the task into four main subfields:
Physical anthropology: Humanity as a biological species
Archaeology: Humanity’s deep past
Cultural anthropology: Humanity’s current behavioral diversity
Linguistics: Humanity’s unique mode of communication
As you study anthropology, keep in mind that to really understand humanity, anthropologists need to know at least a little about each of the subfields. For example, an archaeologist studying an ancient civilization needs to know what a physical anthropologist has to say about that people’s bones, because the bones can tell us what people ate or how they practiced medicine. And today, cultural anthropologists can’t know much about a culture unless they have a good knowledge of that culture’s language, requiring some familiarity with linguistic anthropology.
Physical anthropology
Physical differences between groups of humans are easily visible; mainland Europeans tend to be lighter-skinned with straight hair, and folks from Africa are typically darker-skinned with curlier hair. These are biological differences, and the goal of physical anthropology (sometimes known as biological anthropology) — the study of humanity as a biological species — is to understand how and why these variations on the human theme came about. Physical differences among living humans aren’t all that physical anthropology is concerned with, but understanding human variation (especially genetic differences) worldwide and through time is an important part of the field.
In Part 2 of this book, I boil down the main discoveries of physical anthropology to date so that what’s left is the skeleton, the essentials. This material is what physical anthropologists know today and a little about what they’re studying and hoping to learn in the future. Chapter 4 introduces you to the primate order, your home in the animal kingdom. Chapters 6 and 7 take you to Africa, the cradle of humanity, to cover the fossil (and some DNA) evidence of human evolution.
Like all anthropology, physical anthropology has its fingers in a lot of different pies, from the study of fossils, to DNA analysis, documenting and explaining differences in cold- or heat-tolerance among people worldwide, the study of disease, population genetics, and a dozen other topics. Chapter 19 introduces you to the cutting edge study of physical anthropology, focusing on the magnificent molecule called DNA.
Archaeology
It’s hard to get to know someone without knowing a little about their past, and the same goes for humanity; a lot of what we do today — good and bad — is based on the acts and decisions of our ancestors. To understand humanity any further than skin deep requires looking into the past. This is the business of archaeologists.
But the past can be foggy (on a good day) because history — the written record — can only take us so far (and if you believe everything written in the ancient historical texts, well, I’ve got some oceanfront property in Utah you may be interested in). However well-meaning they may have been, historians have had their biases like everyone else. And, of course, the ancient historians didn’t write down everything, especially if they were unaware of, say, the entire Western Hemisphere (North and South America, also sometimes known as the “New World”).
Archaeologists are the people who try to fill in the gaps of history by studying the material remains of ancient cultures. It’s archaeologists who get excited over discovering an ancient piece of pottery, not necessarily for that piece of pottery alone (though it may be beautiful) but because of what it can tell humanity about our past.
Chapter 5 tells you how archaeologists learn about the past, from carbon dating to meticulous excavation. Chapter 7 tells you about the spread of modern humans out of Africa and across the globe, and Chapter 8 gives some exciting examples of how humanity adapted to every environment imaginable, including the Arctic and the Pacific.
Cultural Anthropology
Humanity has more facets than just where we came from, our relations to the other primates, or how our ancient civilizations rose or fell. You also have to consider the whole original question of why people today differ worldwide. How come traditional Polynesian clothing is different from traditional clothing in the Sahara? Why do many Asian people eat with chopsticks, but others use a fork and knife? Why is it okay for a man to have several wives in one culture but not in another culture?
Unfortunately, the common sense answers are rarely right — chopsticks aren’t some archaic precursor to fork and knife, they’re just a different way of getting food into the mouth. Similarly, the ways in which people find marriage partners in traditional Indian society (perhaps by arranged marriages) and traditional German society are different because of the history of the culture in these regions, not because one is an “advancement” on the other. Cultural anthropologists study why these variations exist in the first place, and how they’re maintained as parts of cultural traditions, as elements of a given society’s collective identity, its culture.
Part 3 of this book covers this field of cultural anthropology, the study of living human cultures and the great diversity in how people behave. Overall, these chapters give you the nuts and bolts of what cultural anthropologists have learned about living human cultures. Chapter 11 tells you just what culture for anthropologists really means (no, it’s not the opera or stuffy wine-and-cheese parties) and how critical it is for human survival.
In Chapter 12 you see that all human cultures are basically ethnocentric, meaning that they typically believe that their own way of doing things — from how they eat to how they dress — is proper, right, and superior to any other way of doing things. This feeling of superiority can lead (and has led) to everything from poor intercultural relations to ethnic cleansing. Cultural anthropologists, and the knowledge and understanding they generate while studying the many different ways of being human, can help smooth out intercultural communications; how they do this is also covered in Chapter 12. It can help humans understand other perspectives.