What is Anthropology?

1. What is Anthropology? • From Greek anthropos (human) and logia (study) • Study of Humankind • Who we are, how we came to be that way • Social, cultural, and biological beings

2. Four Subfields • Archaeology • Historical • Prehistoric • Resource management • Physical Anthropology • Paleoanthropology • Evolutionary psychology • Primatology • Human variation • Forensic • Linguistics • Historical • Descriptive • Ethnolinguistics • Sociolinguistics • Social/Cultural Anthropology • (Ethnology): e.g., economic, psychological, medical, urban, political, applied

3. “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 1926-2006

4. Five Hallmarks of Anthropology • Cultural relativism • Subjective understanding (emic vs. etic) • Holism • Fieldwork • Comparison

5. Cultural relativism • Viewing other cultural practices in the context of the cultural system • No absolute standards • Suspension of value judgment for the purpose of study • Tool for understanding logic of behavior • Opposite of ethnocentrism • Ethnocentrism: • Viewing other cultures through the lens of your own culture • Judging other’s behavior based on the standards of your own cultural assumptions and practices • Belief that your own culture is superior to others

6. Subjective Understanding How people view their own behavior – their explanation, logic Emic: Inside, “native’s point of view” Etic: Outside, ethnographer’s view, analysis Theoretical approaches: Interpretive Behavior stems from way people perceive and classify the world Uses emic analysis Materialist Material conditions, e.g. the environment, determine thoughts and behaviors Uses etic analysis

7. Holism Interrelated parts in context of the whole Culture

8. What is Culture?Big ‘C’, little ‘c’ • ‘Culture’ – arts, refinements, high and low, cultured/uncultured persons • culture – the way of life of a people

9. Definitions of “Culture”: Edward Tylor (1871): “Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”

10. Clyde Kluckhohn – “Mirror for Man” (1944)(Compiled by Geertz) • The total way of life of a people • The social legacy the individual acquires from his group • A way of thinking, feeling, and believing • A theory on the part of the anthropologist about the way in which a group of people in fact behave • A storehouse of pooled learning • A set of standardized orientations to recurrent problems • Learned behavior • A mechanism for normative regulation of behavior • A set of techniques for adjusting both to the external environment and to other men • A precipitate of history • A behavioral map, sieve, or matrix

11. Clifford Geertz (1973) “The concept of culture I espouse...is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning.”

12. Gary Ferraro: • Everything that people have, think, and do as members of a society • Material objects • Ideas, values, attitudes • Behavior patterns • Transmitted through learning

13. Capacity to Symbolize • Symbol: • Something that stands for (represents) something else • Leslie White: • Ability to symbolize is most important hallmark of humanity • Culture = “things and events, dependent on symboling” • Identify, sort, and classify things, ideas and behaviors • Language is symbol system • Shared symbols unify a group • Creativity • Assign arbitrary meanings • Distinguishes culture from animal behavior

14. Culture is: • Shared • Learned • Largely unconscious

15. Culture is Shared • Social phenomenon • Makes things more predictable • Internal diversity/degrees of homogeneity • Age, Gender • Class, caste • Ethnicity, religion • Geographical region • Levels of generalization • National • Regional • Local • Personal • Subcultures • Pluralistic societies