The Essence of Anthropology

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Chapter 1

• The Essence of
  Anthropology

2
Chapter Outline

• The Anthropological Perspective
• Anthropology and Its Field
• Anthropology, Science and the Humanities
• Anthropology's Comparative Method
• Questions of Ethics
• Anthropology and Globalization

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Anthropology

• The study of humankind in all times and places.
• The focus is the interconnections and
  interdependence of all aspects of the human
  experience in all places, in the present and deep
  into the past, well before written history.

4
Holistic Perspective

• The idea that the various parts of human culture
  and biology must be viewed in the broadest
  possible context in order to understand their
  interconnections and interdependence.
• A fundamental principle of anthropology.

5
Culture Bound

• Theories about the world and reality based on the
  assumptions and values of ones own culture.
• The cross-cultural and long-term evolutionary
  perspective of anthropology distinguishes it from
  other social sciences and guards against culture
  bound behavior.
• Reflexive the researcher considers how his
  background might shape his research

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The Four Fields of Anthropology
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Applied Anthropology

• The use of anthropological knowledge and methods
  to solve practical problems, often for a specific
  client.

Bellows Air Force Base Job excavate for
cultural material after HAZ/MAT clearanceturn
military training facility into public beach park
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Physical Anthropology

• Also known as biological anthropology.
• The systematic study of humans as biological
  organisms.
• Molecular anthropology is a branch of biological
  anthropology that uses genetic and biochemical
  techniques to test hypotheses about human
  evolution, adaptation, and variation.

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Paleoanthropology

• The study of the origins and predecessors of the
  present human species.
• Uses a biocultural approach, focusing on the
  interaction of biology and culture.
• Genetic analyses indicate that the human line
  originated 5 to 8 million years ago.

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Primatology

• The study of living and fossil primates.
• Primates include the Asian and African apes, as
  well as monkeys, lemurs, lorises, and tarsiers.
• Primatologists designate the shared, learned
  behavior of nonhuman apes as culture.
• Tool use and communication systems indicate the
  elementary basis of language in some ape
  societies.

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Human Growth, Adaptation, and Variation

• Anthropologists examine biological mechanisms of
  growth as well as the impact of the environment
  on the growth process.
• Physical anthropologists study the impacts of
  disease, pollution, and poverty on growth.
• Studies of human adaptation focus on the capacity
  of humans to adapt or adjust to their material
  environmentbiologically and culturally.

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Forensic Anthropology

• Subfield of applied physical anthropology that
  specializes in the identification of human
  skeletal remains for legal purposes.

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Medical Anthropology

• A specialization in anthropology that brings
  theoretical and applied approaches from cultural
  and biological anthropology to the study of human
  health and disease.

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Archaeology

• The study of human cultures through the recovery
  and analysis of material remains and
  environmental data.

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• Prehistoric
• Historic
• Ethnoarchaeology

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Cultural Resource Management

• A branch of archaeology that is concerned with
  survey and/or excavation of archaeological and
  historical remains threatened by construction or
  development and policy surrounding protection of
  cultural resources.

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Linguistic Anthropology

• Branch of anthropology that studies language.
• Linguists may study
• The description of a language - how a sentence is
  formed, or a verb conjugated.
• The history of languages - how languages develop
  and change with the passage of time
• The relation between language and culture.

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• Descriptive linguistics
• Historical linguistics
• Sociolinguistics

If these girls are having drinks together, how
will they talk?
If they were speaking to their professor, how
might the way they talk change?
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Cultural Anthropology

• Also known as social or sociocultural
  anthropology.
• The study of customary patterns in human
  behavior, thought, and feelings.
• It focuses on humans as culture-producing and
  culture-reproducing creatures.

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Culture

• The standards by which societies operate.
• These standards are socially learned, rather than
  acquired through biological inheritance.
• No person is more cultured in the
  anthropological sense than any other.

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Components of Cultural Anthropology

• Ethnography is a detailed description of a
  particular culture primarily based on fieldwork.
• Ethnology is the study and analysis of different
  cultures from a comparative or historical point
  of view, utilizing ethnographic accounts and
  developing anthropological theories that explain
  why differences or similarities occur among
  groups.

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Fieldwork

• The term anthropologists use for on-location
  research.
• Participant observation - In ethnography, the
  technique of learning a peoples culture through
  participation and personal observation within the
  community being studied, as well as interviews
  and discussion with members of the group over an
  extended period of time.

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Comparative Method

• Anthropologists are concerned with the objective
  and systematic study of humankind.
• The comparative method is key to all branches of
  anthropology.
• Anthropologists make broad comparisons among
  peoples and cultures past and present, related
  species, and fossil groups.

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Comparative Method

• Cross-cultural comparisons are a hallmark of
  anthropology
• Cultural universals?
• A practice or event that occurs everywhere?
• Refute a previously held theory

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Empirical Anthro is science, with a human side?

• Based on observations of the world rather than on
  intuition or faith.

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Hypothesis

• A tentative explanation of the relation between
  certain phenomena.
• For example, when there is a magnetic anomaly
  (brick) in homogenous dirt, it will show up
  during electromagnetic induction survey (previous
  picture).

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Theory

• In science, an explanation of natural phenomena,
  supported by a reliable body of data.
• In common usage, people often use the word theory
  to signify a conjecture, an opinion, or a
  speculation. In this usage, a theory is not
  necessarily based on facts in other words, it is
  not required to be consistent with true
  descriptions of reality. True descriptions of
  reality are more reflectively understood as
  statements which would be true independently of
  what people think about them. In this usage, the
  word is synonymous with hypothesis. This common
  usage of theory leads to the common but misguided
  statement "It's not a fact, it's only a theory."
• In science, a theory is a mathematical or logical
  explanation, or a testable model of the manner of
  interaction of a set of natural phenomena,
  capable of predicting future occurrences or
  observations of the same kind, and capable of
  being tested through experiment or otherwise
  falsified through empirical observation. It
  follows from this that for scientists "theory"
  and "fact" do not necessarily stand in
  opposition. For example, it is a fact that an
  apple dropped on earth has been observed to fall
  towards the center of the planet, and the
  theories commonly used to describe and explain
  this behaviour are Newton's theory of universal
  gravitation (see also gravitation), and general
  relativity.

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Globalization

• Worldwide interconnectedness, evidenced in global
  movements of natural resources, trade goods,
  human labor, finance capital, information, and
  infectious diseases.