Anthropology: the humanistic science

1. Anthropology: the humanistic science • Are you as interested as I am in knowing how, when, and where human life arose, what the first human societies and languages were like, why cultures have evolved along diverse but often remarkably convergent pathways, why distinctions of rank came into being, and how small bands and villages gave way to chiefdoms and chiefdoms to mighty states and empires? • --Marvin Harris, Our Kind

2. The four fields of anthropology • Anthropology is the science of humanity – all of humanity, in all its complexity. • There are four field of anthropology: • Cultural Anthropology • Archeology • Linguistic Anthropology • Biological Anthropology

3. Cultural anthropology • Cultural anthropologists study the variation in thought and behavior among people of contemporary societies.

4. Archeology • Archeologists also study the variation in human thought and behavior, but focus on past societies. • Archeology, however, adds more than the dimension of time to the study of human cultural variation. It adds an enormous number of societies to the database of experiments that humans have conducted in social living.

5. Archeology • Classical archeologists focus on the reconstruction of ancient literate civilizations. They get their training in departments of classics. The majority of archeologists in the U.S., however – those who study ancient preliterate civilizations – get their training in departments of anthropology.

6. Linguistic anthropology • Linguistic anthropologists study the variation in human languages, the roots of human languages, and the role of language in shaping human thought and behavior.

7. Biological anthropology • Biological – or physical – anthropologists are biologists who study humans as organisms. • Biological anthropologists show us how the capacity for culture itself has evolved and how that capacity, in turn, has influenced our biological evolution.

8. Applied anthropology • Applied anthropology is the application of anthropological knowledge to the solution of human problems. • Many anthropologists work in applications – that is, trying to solve human problems.

9. Applied anthropology • Delivering better health care, producing better crops, teaching literacy more effectively – these and other development programs across the world are enhanced by anthropological knowledge of local cultural patterns.

10. Applied anthropology • All four fields of anthropology have a basic-science and an applied-science dimension. • Forensics anthropology is applied biological anthropology. • CRM, or cultural resource management, is applied archeology. • Bilingual education makes use of applied linguistic anthropology.

11. Medical anthropology • Medical anthropology, for example, is based on both cultural and biological anthropology. • Studies of health systems and studies of the cultural correlates of disease.

12. Some anthropological questions I • Biological anthropology: • What is the relation between modern apes and humans? Who are the oldest humans and where did they develop? • What happened to the Neanderthals? • Are we still evolving? • What accounts for the different color of people’s skin around the world? • Are gendered behaviors genetic?

13. Some anthropological questions II • Archeology: • When were plants and animals domesticated? • When did the earliest states arise, and how did complex societies evolve at all? • When did the first people come to America? • Why did complex states develop so much later in the Americas, in Europe, and in Africa than in China or the Middle East?

14. Some anthropological questions III • Linguistics: • Are all human languages of equal complexity? Are some languages harder to learn than others? • How did language originate? • Are all the languages of the world related to one another? • Why is it so hard to speak a foreign language without an accent? • Does language shape thought or vice versa?

15. Some anthropological questions IV • Cultural and biocultural anthropology: • Is violence and war inevitable in human society? • Why do people have different cultures? • Why is there economic and social inequality? Is it part of being human? • What accounts for differences in IQ scores around the world? • Are there innate behavioral and cognitive differences in men and women?

16. Why anthropology? • Partly, to satisfy our curiosity about the range of variation in human thought and behavior. This is a motivating force in all sciences. • Partly to shake the foundations of ethno-centrism and to create a respect for cultural diversity. • And partly to help ameliorate human problems.

17. Methods • There are three levels of method: epistemology, strategy, and technique. At the epistemological level, there are two fundamentally different approaches in the social sciences. • One approach is rooted in the scientific, or positivist tradition; the other is rooted in the interpretive, or humanistic tradition. (K10:19) • More about these traditions later.

18. Humanism and science • The methods of humanistically oriented anthropology are the same as those used in all the humanities, particularly those used in the comparative study of literature and in history. (K10:19) • The methods of scientifically oriented anthropology are the same as those used in comparative sociology and psychology. (K10:20-23)

19. Strategic methods vs. technique • In the social and behavioral sciences, the scientific tradition in cultural anthropology has, in the past, represented the larger tradition of natural science. • Psychology has, in the past, represented the larger tradition of experimental science. • Sociologists have combined these two traditions in survey research. (K10:327)

20. In other words, the strategic methods have been historically associated with particular social and behavioral sciences • experiments with psychology • questionnaire surveys with sociology • participant observation with anthropology Each strategic method comprises many techniques.

21. Methodological convergence in the social sciences • Today, the dominant tradition in cultural anthropology is interpretivism – the search for meaning rather than the search for cause (K10:330). • And, the social and behavioral sciences are becoming less identified by their methods of data collection and analysis and more by the theoretical and practical problems they address. 

22. Participant observation • Most people are familiar with the method of questionnaire surveys and with the method of experiments, including the idea of controls and placebos. • Most people are not familiar with participant observation, but this method has become part of the general social science toolkit in the last 30 years. (K10:324-326)

23. Participant observation • Participant observation involves immersion in another culture, including the learning of another culture's language. (K10:324-326)

24. Participant observation • Participant observation is the strategic method that makes possible the collection of data: • about things that people would ordinarily not talk about; • about behavior that people can’t intellectualize and talk about at all. • How far apart do we stand when we talk to one another? What’s the average?

25. Qualitative and quantitative data • Participant observation ethnography is often called a qualitative method, but actually, all sciences use qualitative and quantitative methods – in different amounts, of course. • Long before the physics of avian flight were understood, ornithologists watched and took notes about how birds learned to fly.

26. Anthropology’s strategic method • But for almost all cultural anthropologists – those who advocate the humanistic or interpretivist approach and those who favor the scientific or positivistic approach alike – participant observation is the strategic method for collecting data.

27. The qual-quant question • The first cut in the social sciences, then, is not qualitative or quantitative. • The first cut is: can a question be answered with the scientific method? • Many questions can not be answered with the scientific method.

28. Key concepts in method and theory • Emic vs. etic data: Patterned cognition vs. observable reality. (K10:329) • Individual vs. aggregate phenomena – the science in social science is a focus on aggregate phenomena. • In contrast, the focus in the humanities is on more on understanding the individual.

29. Culture I • All of anthropology is tied together by the concept of culture – the mechanism by which modern humans adapt to their changing physical and social environment. (K10:ch13) • Culture comprises: • the ideas for patterned behavior; • patterned behavior; and • the products of patterned behavior.

30. Culture II • Culture is (K10:345-356) • Learned; psychic unity of humankind • Shared; enculturation by groups and subgroups • Integrated; parts change together –eventually • Particular, general and universal • Mediated symbolically; language and artifacts

31. Culture III • Norms and variations within limits • We see this in all aspects of everyday life. • Ideal vs. real culture • We see this everywhere, too. • Culture is always changing.

32. Three paradigms • Sociobiologists look for evolutionary, biologically rooted explanations for human behavior. • Idealists emphasize the internal emotional and/or cognitive states of human beings in the search for the causes and consequences of variations in human behavior. • Materialists emphasize external conditions – infrastructure and structure

33. Ethnography • If culture is the mechanism of human adaptation, we can see a culture as a set of adaptations. • Ethnography is the study of a culture. (K10:10-25; 324-326)

34. Ethnology • But cultures differ occur across space and across time. • A theory of culture must account for these differences in patterned ideas, behavior, and artifacts across space and time. • Ethnology is the comparative study of cultures. (K10:10-25; 324)

35. Cultural materialism • I support the cultural materialistparadigm as a way to find explanations for differences. • The cultural materialist paradigm was developed by Marvin Harris (1927–2001).

36. The emphasis is on aggregates and long-term outcomes. • It is not a replacement for under-standing the unique in people or in societies. • The key concepts: infrastructure, structure, superstructure

37. Infrastructure • Infrastructure is the interface between nature and culture – where nature includes the physical environment and the technology for production, as well as the biological and psychological constraints on reproduction. • Including the mode of reproduction is one key difference between Marx’s and Harris’ materialist paradigm.

38. Harris’ challenge • “The etic behavioral modes of production and reproduction probabilistically determine the etic behavioral domestic and political economy, which in turn probabilistically determine the behavioral and mental emic superstructures.” (Harris 1979:55-56. Cultural Materialism. The Struggle for a Science of Culture)

39. Structure and superstructure • The structure of society includes its the economic and political components. • The superstructure of a society is the ideology – the internal states of values, beliefs, and attitudes. • The superstructure is what provides humans with meaning, including disappointment and satisfaction.

40. Primacy of the infrastructure • The cultural materialist paradigm is based on the principle of infrastructural primacy. • This principle only works in aggregates and over a longer periods of time. • At any moment, the three components of society may be in flux. • In fact, the infrastructure may change as a consequence of human intervention.

41. Some generalizations: • States only arise after agriculture. • Monotheism is found only in state-level societies. • Ideas about sexuality, family size, and age of marriage follow changes in structure and may be facilitated by changes in the infrastructure.

42. Idealism I • Ideas can take a long time to catch up to changes in material conditions. • And so, despite the many examples of infrastructural determinism, this principle does not account for all changes in structure and culture.

43. Idealism II • The idealist paradigm focuses on psychological, mental, and on the symbolism inherent in cultural behavior. • By contrast, materialism focuses on behavior as the expression of values and assumes that technoenvironmental forces shape both behavior and ideas.

44. Explaining • We should, then, look first to the infrastructure when we try to explain broad changes in a society because that is where the explanation is most likely to come from.

45. And understanding • And we should look to the superstructure (idealism) when we want to understand the meaning of behavior and symbols to people in a society, because that is where the explanation is most likely to come from.

46. The biological substrate • Culture often trumps biology, so it is important to look for nonbiological alternatives in explaining human behavior. • We should, however, look to evolutionary forces (sociobiology) when we try to explain the long-term evolution of reproductive behavior, on a global scale.

47. Paradigms and theories • Sociobiology, idealism and cultural materialism are paradigms, not theories. • They are principles for finding theory – for finding explanations of specific cases, of things that beg to be explained. • Example: The small, important probability of step-children being injured or killed. • There are sociobiological, idealist, and materialist explanations for this phenomenon.

48. Sociobiological explanation • The sociobiological explanation for the battering of nonbiological children is appealing for aggregate, evolutionary phenomena—the big, big picture. • A sociobiological explanation addresses the question: What is the reproductive advantage of this behavior occurring at all?

49. The SB explanation • Maximize inclusive fitness: • The reaction would be strongest for step-parents who support other biological children. • These frustrations will cause some people to become violent, but not others.

50. But why some? • The behavior is not inevitable • A sociobiological explanation can’t explain why only some step-parents hurt their children. • At this level of analysis, we need a processual explanation.