Anthropology For Dummies. Cameron M. Smith

Chapter 1

      Human Beings and Being Human: An Overview of Anthropology

      IN THIS CHAPTER

      Why isn’t everyone the same? Why do people worldwide have differences in skin and hair color and ways of greeting one another? Why doesn’t everyone speak the same language? Is there such a thing as “human nature”?

      Questions like these have fascinated humanity for as long as we have written records — and I’m sure people thousands and even tens of thousands of years before writing asked the same questions (in whatever language they used). Why don’t those people do things the way I do? What’s wrong with them, anyway? Of course, people from that other group just on the next hilltop were scratching their heads and asking the same questions.

Enter anthropology, the scientific study of humanity. In this book I tell you what you need to know about anthropology, what anthropologists have discovered about humanity, and what anthropologists mean when they say that there are “many ways of being human.” I also tell you how anthropology works, and what anthropologists have learned about humanity, both modern and ancient. You’ll see that in a century or so of study, anthropology has helped to answer some of humanity’s fundamental questions about itself.

      And knowing ourselves is important if, as a species, we want to make good decisions about our present and future. Biologically, humanity needs to know itself if it’s going to make good decisions about everything from gene therapy to genetically engineered food crops; that knowledge comes from anthropology. And culturally, knowledge of our past helps us understand what we are today, for better and worse; we did not just pop up out of nowhere. We have a long and complex evolutionary history that can help us understand what we are at the moment. In Part 1 of this book — specifically in Chapters 2 and 3 — you find out how anthropology studies humanity from these biological and cultural perspectives. In Part 4 of this book, you see how anthropology helps humanity to deal with some real, real-world problems.

Digging Into Anthropology’s History

      For a long time the answers to profound questions about humanity came largely from religious texts. For example, when European explorers realized that the New World wasn’t India, the Native Americans — millions of people nobody was expecting to find — were explained from a biblical perspective as remnants of the lost tribes of Israel.

      But since the late 19th century AD another perspective has emerged, the scientific study of humanity called anthropology. At first, anthropology was a quaint and pretty simple affair, studied as a hobby by all kinds of Naturalists and pseudoscientists. But when people started to realize how much anthropology could teach humanity about itself, they began to take it more seriously. Anthropology became a science, the science of humanity at large.

      In Chapter 2, you can explore anthropology’s history and how it changed over time from being a pseudoscience to today’s highly technical study of human DNA, ancient fossils, the evolution of the mind, and how cultures change through time. In Chapter 3, you can find more detail about how anthropology has developed over time, affecting how it goes about learning about humanity in the first place.