Anthropology

• 1. Introduction

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  Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, and it sits at an awkward crossroads where biology meets sociology. It looks at human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and language, in the present and the deep past, including archaic humans. Clifford Geertz once described it as a diffuse assemblage held together mainly by the vested interests, sunk costs, and administrative habits of academia, and by a romantic image of comprehensive scholarship. That is a strange thing to say about a discipline taught at most universities in the world. How did a field this sprawling hold together at all? Why does it splinter into dozens of subfields, from forensic work over decomposed remains to the study of altered states of consciousness? And why has it spent much of its life arguing with itself about colonialism, military service, and whether one culture can ever be judged against another?

• 2. A Word Born In Renaissance Germany

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  The abstract noun anthropology was first attested in reference to history, long before it meant the study of humans as we know it. Its present use first appeared in Renaissance Germany, in the works of Magnus Hundt and Otto Casmann, who built the Neo-Latin anthropologia from the Greek words for human and study. The adjectival form had appeared even earlier, in the works of Aristotle.

  In 1647 the Bartholins, early scholars at the University of Copenhagen, gave the term a tidy definition. Anthropology, they wrote, is the science that treats of man, divided into Anatomy, which considers the body, and Psychology, which speaks of the soul. The word then drifted through scattered hands. Étienne Serres used it in 1839 for the natural history of man based on comparative anatomy. In 1850 Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau took a chair in anthropology and ethnography at the French National Museum of Natural History. The word was waiting for a method to grow into.

• 3. Darwin's Epiphany

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  Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace unveiled the theory of evolution in the late 1850s, and there was an immediate rush to bring it into the social sciences. For theorists who had spent the early 19th century making feature-by-feature comparisons across anatomy, linguistics, and ethnology, the publication of On the Origin of Species was the epiphany of everything they had begun to suspect. They had noticed similarities between animals, languages, and folkways, and had started to wonder whether unknown laws lay beneath them.

  Paul Broca in Paris read Darwin and became an immediate convert to Transformisme, as the French called evolutionism. He broke away from the Société de biologie to form the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris, the first explicitly anthropological society, which met for the first time in 1859. Broca went on to discover the speech center of the human brain, today called Broca's area. He defined the field as the study of the human group, considered as a whole, in its details, and in relation to the rest of nature.

  That same year, the German philosopher Theodor Waitz began publishing his six-volume Die Anthropologie der Naturvölker, completed in 1864 with its last two volumes appearing after his death. He defined anthropology as the science of the nature of man, and insisted its data be empirical, gathered by experimentation. Waitz presumed that the species was a unity, and that the same laws of thought are applicable to all men. His definitions would soon cross the Channel.

• 4. Societies And Schisms

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  In 1863 the explorer Richard Francis Burton and the speech therapist James Hunt broke away from the Ethnological Society of London to form the Anthropological Society of London. It was the second society dedicated to general anthropology, and in his keynote address Hunt adopted Waitz's definitions as a standard. Among its first associates were the young Edward Burnett Tylor, who would invent cultural anthropology, and his brother Alfred, a geologist. Edward had once called himself an ethnologist; afterward he was an anthropologist.

  The pattern of founding and breaking away repeated across borders. The Anthropological Society of Madrid formed in 1865, the Anthropological Society of Vienna in 1870, and the Italian Society of Anthropology and Ethnology in 1871. Most were evolutionist. One notable exception was the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory, founded in 1869 by Rudolph Virchow, who was known for vituperative attacks on the evolutionists and insisted that Darwin's conclusions lacked empirical foundation.

  The discipline seeped into the universities. By 1898-48 educational institutions in 13 countries offered some anthropology courses. Yet none of the 75 faculty members teaching them sat in a department actually named anthropology. The name had outrun the institutions built to hold it.

• 5. Four Fields

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  Franz Boas, working in the early 20th century, gave American anthropology the shape it still carries: a four-field approach dividing the discipline into biological or physical anthropology, sociocultural anthropology, archaeological anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. These fields overlap constantly but lean on different methods. Boas argued against 19th-century racial ideology, and the tradition he founded ran forward through Margaret Mead's advocacy for gender equality and sexual liberation.

  Sociocultural anthropology draws together cultural anthropology, the study of how people make sense of the world, and social anthropology, the study of relationships among individuals and groups. Its work is guided by cultural relativism, the attempt to understand other societies in terms of their own symbols and values. Its central method is participant observation, long-term fieldwork inside a community, often aimed at grasping a culture from an emic, conceptual point of view rather than an etic, technical one. The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, a tool for comparison, includes 186 cultures.

  Archaeology, often called the anthropology of the past, reads human activity from physical remains, artifacts, and altered landscapes. In North America and Asia it is generally treated as a branch of anthropology, while in Europe it stands alone or attaches to history and palaeontology. Biological anthropology, meanwhile, studies humans and other primates in their evolutionary and demographic dimensions, spawning subfields like primatology, paleoanthropology, and dental anthropology. Linguistic anthropology rounds out the four, bringing linguistic methods to bear on how language shapes social life.

• 6. A Field Of Subfields

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  Ethnomusicology was formally named by the Dutch scholar Jaap Kunst around 1950, and it studies music for its cultural, social, and cognitive dimensions rather than its isolated sound. It is one entry in a remarkable proliferation of specializations. The anthropology of art wrestled with the fact that Western categories like painting or sculpture do not exist, or exist very differently, in most non-Western contexts. Boas wrote Primitive Art, and Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote The Way of the Masks in 1982, turning the anthropology of art into an anthropology of culturally specific aesthetics.

  Economic anthropology began with Bronisław Malinowski and his French compatriot Marcel Mauss, who studied gift-giving exchange as an alternative to market exchange. Medical anthropology, which William Caudell is credited with first discovering, has become one of the main areas of growth in the whole discipline. Cognitive anthropology borrows from experimental psychology and evolutionary biology to explain shared knowledge. Transpersonal anthropology studies altered states of consciousness and culture, taking note of the roles of myth, ritual, diet, and text.

  The newest branches grew out of the machine age. Donna Haraway's 1985 Cyborg Manifesto could be considered the founding document of cyborg anthropology, which emerged as a sub-focus group at the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting in 1993. Digital anthropology, still so new it answers to several names, studies the relationship between humans and digital-era technology. Forensic anthropology applies physical anthropology and human osteology in legal settings, identifying remains that are decomposed, burned, or otherwise unrecognizable.

• 7. Race, War, And A Reckoning

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  A major driver behind bioarchaeology's creation, the source records bluntly, was the effort to establish the intellectual superiority of the white race. When scientists determined that the remains they studied belonged to Indigenous, enslaved, or otherwise marginalized people, they often treated those individuals not as human beings but as scientific specimens. That racist foundation reinforced a belief among many anthropologists that they held inherent authority over the remains and burial sites they encountered, and its effects persist in damaged evidence and harmful professional assumptions.

  Franz Boas publicly objected to US participation in World War I, and afterward he published a condemnation of several American archaeologists who had spied in Mexico under cover as scientists. By the 1940s many of his contemporaries were active in the Allied war effort, some in the armed forces and others in intelligence work. During the Cold War, David H. Price documented the pursuit and dismissal of anthropologists based on communist sympathies. Through the Vietnam years, numerous anthropologists joined the anti-war movement, and resolutions condemning the war passed overwhelmingly at the American Anthropological Association's annual meetings.

  The controversy never fully closed. Anthropologists worked with the US military under the Human Terrain System program in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2009 the association's commission examining that engagement concluded that when ethnographic investigation is determined by military missions in a potentially coercive environment, it can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology. The field's codes of ethics now warn against secret research and secret debriefings of any kind.

• 8. Judging No Culture

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  Cultural relativism is the principle that cultures should not be judged by another's values, but examined dispassionately on their own terms. Present-day anthropologists typically advocate it as part of their quest for scientific objectivity, and it influences every subfield. In good anthropology, the source insists, there should be no notion of one culture being better or worse than another.

  That stance does not mean looking away from cruelty. Ethical commitments in the field include documenting genocide, infanticide, racism, sexism, and torture. To show the depth of the approach, one can take a single topic like racism and find thousands of anthropological references spanning every major and minor subfield. Feminist anthropology, a four-field approach in its own right, set out to reduce male bias, noting that from 1891 to 1930 more than 85 percent of anthropology doctorates went to men. Vera Mae Green, according to St. Clair Drake, was well into the 1960s the only African American female anthropologist who was also a Caribbeanist.

  The discipline keeps turning its gaze homeward. Since the 1980s, social and cultural anthropologists have increasingly set their research in the North Atlantic, in scientific laboratories, social movements, governments, and businesses. Ulf Hannerz once quoted a 1960s remark that traditional anthropologists were a notoriously agoraphobic lot, anti-urban by definition. The specialists in other cultures had finally started looking across the tracks.