Anthropology 1102

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The Essence of Anthropology

• Anthropology 1102
• Georgia Perimeter College
• Fall, 2009

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What is Anthropology?
Anthropos Man (i.e. humanity) logia
discourse
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Anthropology Is

• Anthropology is the study of human cultural and
  biological diversity across time.
• Anthropology seeks knowledge about what makes
  people different, and about what they all have in
  common.
• Anthropology seeks to uncover principles of
  behavior that apply to all human communities.
• Diversity is the key body shapes sizes,
  customs, clothing, speech, religion worldview
  to name a few.

http//www.youtube.com/watch?vmUGiSXXdse0
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What Do Anthropologists Do?

• Anthropologists are concerned with the
  description and explanation of reality.
• They formulate and test hypotheses concerning
  humankind so they can develop theories about our
  species.

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The Development of Anthropology

• Anthropology as a distinct field of inquiry is
  relatively recent (since late 1800s).
• The roots of anthropology can be traced to
  initial accounts of early traders such as Marco
  Polo, which focused attention on human
  differences.
• Europeans gradually came to recognize that
  despite all the differences, they might share a
  basic humanity with people everywhere.

Bronislaw Malinowski
Edward Burnett Tylor
Matilda Coxe Stevenson
Franz Boaz
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Culture-bound

• Anthropologies unique cross-cultural and holistic
  perspective protects it from culture-bound
  theories or realities based on the assumptions
  and values of ones own culture.

Example Co-sleeping with parents in infants

• Infants in the United States typically sleep
  apart from their parents, but cross-cultural
  research shows that co-sleeping is the rule.
• The photo on the right shows a Nenet family
  sleeping in their tent. The Nenet are arctic
  reindeer pastoralists in Siberia.

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4 - Sub-Fields of Anthropology
Cultural Linguistics Biological
Archaeology
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Biological (Physical) Anthropology

• Biological anthropologists study the current,
  historical, and pre-historical, bio-cultural
  aspects of humans to understand human nature.
• They focus on humans as biological organisms
  (Homo sapiens), tracing their biological origins,
  evolutionary development, genetic diversity, and
  variation.
• They analyze fossils and observe living primates
  (including modern humans) to reconstruct the
  ancestry of the human species.

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Sub-Fields of Biological Anthropology

• Molecular Anthropology
• Uses genetic and biochemical techniques to test
  hypotheses about evolution, adaptation, and
  variation.
• Paleoanthropology
• The study of the origins of the human species.

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Sub-Fields of Biological Anthropology

• Biocultural
• Focusing on the interaction of biology and
  culture.
• Forensic anthropology
• Specializes in the identification of human
  skeletal remains for legal purposes.
• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vH-lso0JL3Z8
• Primatology
• The study of living and fossil primates.

Dr. Bettina Shell-Duncan studies maternal child
health in sub-Saharan Africa
Jane Goodall
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Cultural Anthropology

• The study of customary patterns in human
  behavior, thought, and feelings.
• Focuses on humans as culture-producing and
  culture-reproducing creatures.
• Three main components fieldwork, ethnography and
  ethnology.

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Culture

• A societys shared and socially transmitted
  ideas, values, and perceptions, which are used to
  make sense of experience and which generate
  behavior and are reflected in that behavior.

http//www.youtube.com/watch?vBhCruPBvSjQ
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Ethnology

• The study and analysis of different cultures from
  a comparative or historical point of view,
  utilizing ethnographic accounts and developing
  anthropological theories that help explain why
  certain important differences or similarities
  occur among groups.

Fieldwork

• The term anthropologists use for on-location
  research.
• Participant observation - The technique of
  learning a peoples culture through direct
  participation in their everyday life over an
  extended period of time.

Ethnography

• The systematic description of a particular
  culture based on firsthand observation.

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Archaeology

• Studies material remains in order to describe and
  explain human behavior.
• Study tools, pottery, and other features such as
  hearths and enclosures that remain as the
  testimony of earlier cultures.

http//www.youtube.com/watch?vVj-Oq8vk3N4
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Rapa Nui (aka Easter Island)

• A tiny volcanic island in the middle of the
  southern Pacific Ocean, also known as Easter
  Island. The landscape is punctuated by nearly 900
  stone heads, some towering to 65 feet, called
  moai by the islanders.

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Linguistic Anthropology

• Studies human languages (The hallmark of the
  human species!)
• Description of a language - the way a sentence is
  formed or a verb conjugated.
• History of languages - the way languages change
  over time.
• The study of language in its social setting.

Babel was a city that united humanity, all
speaking a single language.
It is upon language that culture itself depends
and within language that humanity's knowledge
resides.
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Question

• How is anthropology different from other
  disciplines that study human beings?
• It was the first science to analyze human
  diversity.
• It synthesizes data from many fields in an effort
  to describe human behavior as a whole.
• It requires more training.
• It was the first science to analyze human
  diversity and it synthesizes data from many
  fields in an effort to describe human behavior as
  a whole.

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Answer D

• Anthropology different from other disciplines
  that study human beings because it was the first
  science to analyze human diversity and it
  synthesizes data from many fields in an effort to
  describe human behavior as a whole.

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Empirical

• Based on observations of the world rather than on
  intuition or faith.
• Theory
• An explanation of natural phenomena, supported by
  a reliable body of data.
• Hypothesis
• A tentative explanation of the relation between
  certain phenomena.

Comparative Method

• Uses the methods of other scientists by
  developing hypotheses and arriving at theories.
• Anthropologists make comparisons between peoples
  and cultures past and present, related species,
  and fossil groups.

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We Anthropologists
We anthropologists have been the first to
insist on a number of things that the world does
not divide into the pious and the superstitious
that there are sculptures in jungles and
paintings in deserts that political order is
possible without centralized power and principled
justice without codified rules that the norms of
reason were not fixed in Greece, the evolution of
morality not consummated in England. Most
important, we were the first to insist that we
see the lives of others through lenses of our own
grinding and that they look back on ours through
ones of their own. --Clifford Geertz
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Conclusions

• Anthropology contributes to a students growth in
  three ways
• It broadens your understanding of the human
  experience across cultures and time.
• It encourages new skills of inquiry and provides
  tools for understanding and analyzing the
  diversity of the human condition both past and
  present.
• It provides an interdisciplinary approach to
  teaching that spans from the arts to the sciences
  and offers both real field-based and
  laboratory-based research and vibrant theoretical
  debate.

http//www.youtube.com/watch?vxErJAsZo2Pw