Anthropology For Dummies. Cameron M. Smith
a single culture (for example, American society today encompasses Irish-American, Hispanic-American, and Japanese-American cultures, to name only three). Culture, then, includes ideas about identity (for example, what the word brother means), nature (what wild means as opposed to tame), social relationships (how to greet the queen of England as opposed to how to greet your bowling partner), and so on.
Some anthropologists extend culture to the objects (called artifacts) that humanity makes or uses to aid in survival. In this case, culture is both the information stored in the brain (shared among a group) and the objects that group uses to survive. For example, artifacts (also called material culture) include the distinctive Inuit harpoon carved from bone and used to hunt seals. Not all artifacts have such obvious survival value, though. From the outsider’s perspective, the specially made drum an Arctic shaman (healer) uses in a healing ritual isn’t directly related to staying alive by hunting the landscape. But as far as the shaman is concerned, that specific drum is very important. It has to be made the right way and carry the right tone; otherwise, the healing would be jeopardized. In this way, the drum is just as important to survival as the harpoon. Note that the drum, the healing ceremony, and even the hunting harpoon are all things constructed according to the culture in a specific region. In this way, they are “cultural artifacts.”
Two types of modernity
The term humanity can be a little tricky because anthropologists use it to refer to our biological species, Homo sapiens sapiens, as well as some of our most recent ancestors in the more general species Homo sapiens (lacking the very specific subspecies sapiens.) When the human species should be referred to as Homo sapiens versus Homo sapiens sapiens depends on whether you’re talking about being anatomically or behaviorally modern.
Anatomical modernity is being anatomically indistinguishable from modern, living populations. This term really comes into play only when anthropologists are looking at the bones of ancient human-like creatures and asking whether these creatures were human. Strictly speaking, if anthropologists can’t distinguish the bones they’re looking at from those of modern populations, the bones are those of an anatomically modern person.
Behavioral modernity is behaving in a way that’s indistinguishable from modern, living populations. This label also really comes into play only when anthropologists are looking at the complexity of behavior in the past — for example, at the objects made by ancient proto-humans. Asking whether the creatures that made these objects were behaviorally human is a tough question that I re-examine in Chapter 7, but for the moment it’s enough to know behaviorally modern people employ symbolism, the use of one object to stand for another. Blood, for example, is a common substance, but humanity can also use it — or its properties, such as the color red —symbolically to activate emotions, memories, and actions in other people. This uniquely human capacity for the complex use of symbols is a big part of behavioral modernity.
I explore just when and where humanity became behaviorally and anatomically modern in Chapter 7.
-Isms and the Making of Anthropology
Like most scholarly disciplines, anthropology wasn’t just tidily invented overnight; I think of it as a Frankenstein’s monster of ideas and questions culled from other disciplines, cobbled and stitched together into a more-or-less functional whole. (You can read more about the various subdisciplines of anthropology in Chapter 3.)
But even before anthropology existed as a discrete academic field, its foundations were being laid by people doing other things that would later be called anthropology (or act as guidelines for building anthropology). Herodotus, a 6th-century Greek scholar, described the peoples and antiquities of Egypt, and Julius Caesar described the people he encountered in France (the Gauls) and southern England (the Britons) in the 50s BC. And the ancient Egyptians wrote about their neighbors to the North (in the Near East) and to the South (the Nubians of modern-day Sudan); clearly, people have been interested in other people for a long time. But these reports were often curios, or passages written as political statements, and they were largely descriptive. They showed what was (more or less) but didn’t go into too much detail about why. As descriptions, they were often quite accurate — but they offered few systematic explanations for human diversity.
It wasn’t until the 19th and 20th centuries AD that people systematically went out from the centers of Western civilization (in Europe and North America) with the specific goal of studying other people. (Although there are anthropologists in just about every country today, the discipline really was a 19th-century AD invention of Europe and North America.) Rather than explaining other (non-European) people with ancient legends, or religious explanations, early anthropologists attempted a degree of objectivity, using the scientific method. It was far from perfect, and some things went wrong early in anthropology, but the seed of anthropology was watered, and a new discipline began to grow.
Colonialism
Early anthropology has many roots, and some were in the efforts of Western civilization to better understand the lands and peoples it was colonizing. This isn’t revisionist history or Western-civilization bashing — it’s just plain fact.
For example, in 1902 the Report of the Philippine Commission stated that “Since the first arrival of the Portuguese in Eastern waters, the mind of the Malay has appeared to the European as a closed book. Both races have ever misunderstood and mistrusted each other. Out of mutual ignorance and fear have followed hatred, oppression, and retaliation … this government is attempting to rear a new standard of relationship between the white man and the Malay. The success … will depend … on our correct understanding and scientific grasp of the peoples whose problems we are facing.”
The problems the report refers to were Western problems revolving around how to make better workers of the Malaysians, and the solution was a scientific understanding of these folk to be achieved through the new science of anthropology. Specifically, this new science would use one of its principal tools, ethnography, to help the colonial effort. Ethnography is the direct observation of a group of people by living near or among them, and making records of what one observes.
HARSH WORDS FOR EARLY ANTHROPOLOGY
Although Europeans began to substantially colonize the New World and other “discoveries” in the 17th century, the colonialist endeavor wasn’t fully realized and backed up by industrialization until the 19th century. Early ethnographies — documents describing non-European cultures authored by people who lived for some time on those cultures — were often little more than intelligence reports for use in exploitation.
In 1966, Claude Levi-Strauss, a leading anthropologist of his time, wrote that cultural anthropology and ethnography were rooted in a historical context in which “… the larger part of mankind [was made] subservient to the other, and during which millions of innocent human beings have had their resources plundered and their institutions and beliefs destroyed, whilst they themselves were ruthlessly killed, thrown into bondage, and contaminated by diseases they were unable to resist.”
This kind of study is hardly surprising today, but keep in mind that for a long time, knowledge of what went on in non-Western cultures wasn’t