Anthropology For Dummies. Cameron M. Smith
show that not even our galaxy is at the center of the universe, and our species is just one of many millions or billions on Earth.
Now, like any idea, this could go too far, as when people improperly applied biological concepts to cultural change (resulting in the idea of social Darwinism, a mistaken idea I examine in Part 3 of this book), but essentially it was a step in the direction of objectivity, of trying to filter out ones’ own cultural preconceptions when thinking about or documenting other cultures. It was an attempt, then, to combat ethnocentrism.
The attempt to add some scientific objectivity to anthropology led to the recognition and adoption of two very important perspectives:
The emic perspective is that of a person within a culture — it’s the insider’s view. For example, it’s a New Guinea highlander’s concept of what constitutes murder, even though a Western scientist may have a different perception of that word.
The etic perspective is that of a person from outside a culture — it’s the outsider’s view. For example, it’s a scientist’s definition of murder that he or she wants to use in comparing many different societies’ punishments for having killed another person.
Although remaining emic or etic in your fieldwork or observations isn’t always easy, anthropologists strive for both emic and etic knowledge. You can read more about emic and etic perspectives in Chapter 12.
Holism
Another idea that came into anthropology with science was the concept of holism, which is the recognition that all parts of a human culture are more or less interdependent (read that carefully — not independent, but interdependent). It turned out that studying one single aspect of a culture wasn’t working to understand a whole culture. For example, kinship (how people reckon their relations with other members of society) can be influenced by economics, and economics can influence (or be influenced by) religion and politics.
Through time, then, anthropologists had to recognize that the many facets of the human experience were interrelated. This discovery didn’t make humans easier to study, but it was better than laboring under the impression that human societies would be easily understood. And today anthropologists are still trying to figure out how to understand the interrelations of the many facets of human culture — but at least they’re no longer deluded by the idea that every cultural institution, for example, meshes perfectly with some other institution so that both would function in perfect harmony. This idea (one of many functionalist conceptions that focused on how each aspect of culture fulfilled a certain function, like the parts of a complex machine) simply didn’t recognize that people are “messy,” and cultures are hard to draw lines around. For example, even though your culture gives you many instructions for how to behave, how many of us bend the rules on occasion (or often)? Today we borrow all kinds of behaviors from other people and other cultures, and from one generation to the next, a lot can change. This nonuniformity makes cultural anthropology a challenging study. In arithmetic, 1 + 1 = 2, but in culture, few things are so clear-cut.
Anthropology Today
By the 1960s, anthropologists weren’t content to simply study humanity — they wanted to apply what they’d learned about humanity to pressing real-world problems such as poverty. This approach, called applied anthropology, is an important facet of anthropology today, shaping some anthropologists’ research plans (and entire careers) as well as determining where the lessons the anthropologist has learned will be applied.
Today, anthropology is a multidisciplinary study, one that draws on evidence from many studies in many different academic disciplines. Throughout this book I describe the discoveries of generations of anthropologists worldwide. Keep in mind that such discoveries draw on all sorts of lines of evidence to flesh out the human story. You can read about these other kinds of evidence, and the subfields of anthropology, in Chapter 3.
Chapter 3
Actually, Four Mirrors: How Anthropology Is Studied
IN THIS CHAPTER
Anthropology, the study of humanity by humans, isn’t easy. Like any life form, the human species has many fascinating facets — from its biology to its language and deep history — and Western civilization has only been studying these facets in a truly systematic way for about 150 years. And much has changed even in those 150 years, both worldwide and within anthropology, such that anthropologists have to study the history of their own discipline to understand how much of what’s already been done is still important and what’s essentially out of date.
Still, anthropologists press on, believing that with care, diligence, sensitivity, a few research dollars, and plenty of graduate students willing to work for next to nothing, humanity can, indeed, learn important lessons about itself.
In this chapter, I describe the main ways that anthropologists examine humanity. Each of the subfields — physical anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and cultural anthropology — are normally the career of a single anthropologist, but a full understanding of our species demands that you combine information from all these fields (see Figure 3-1). Therefore, anthropologists often proudly tell you that they’re “four-field anthropologists,” focusing on one facet of humanity but tying their findings in with all others. In the same way,