How does language influence our views of the world? If you speak two or more languages, you may have experienced how language affects you. The Spanish language arguably expresses more nuanced views of love than the English language. One intriguing line of linguistic anthropological research focuses on the relationship between language, thought, and culture.
When Benjamin Whorf studied the Hopi language, he found not just word-level differences, but grammatical differences between Hopi and English. He wrote that Hopi has no grammatical tenses to convey the passage of time. At the same time, Malotki recognized that English and Hopi tenses differ, albeit in ways less pronounced than Whorf proposed Malotki Still others explore how language is crucial to socialization: children learn their culture and social identity through language and nonverbal forms of communication Ochs and Schieffelin Sometimes considered a fifth subdiscipline, applied anthropology involves the application of anthropological theories, methods, and findings to solve practical problems.
Applied anthropologists are employed outside of academic settings, in both the public and private sectors, including business or consulting firms, advertising companies, city government, law enforcement, the medical field, nongovernmental organizations, and even the military.
Applied anthropologists span the subfields. An applied archaeologist might work in cultural resource management to assess a potentially significant archaeological site unearthed during a construction project. An applied cultural anthropologist could work at a technology company that seeks to understand the human-technology interface in order to design better tools.
Medical anthropology is an example of both an applied and theoretical area of study that draws on all four subdisciplines to understand the interrelationship of health, illness, and culture. Rather than assume that disease resides only within the individual body, medical anthropologists explore the environmental, social, and cultural conditions that impact the experience of illness.
For example, in some cultures, people believe illness is caused by an imbalance within the community. Therefore, a communal response, such as a healing ceremony, is necessary to restore both the health of the person and the group. This approach differs from the one used in mainstream U.
Trained as both a physician and medical anthropologist, Paul Farmer demonstrates the applied potential of anthropology. There, he was struck by the poor living conditions and lack of health care facilities. Later, as a physician, he would return to Haiti to treat individuals suffering from diseases like tuberculosis and cholera that were rarely seen in the United States. As an anthropologist, he would contextualize the experiences of his Haitian patients in relation to the historical, social, and political forces that impact Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere Farmer Today, he not only writes academic books about human suffering, he also takes action.
Through the work of Partners in Health , a nonprofit organization that he co-founded, he has helped open health clinics in many resource-poor countries and trained local staff to administer care. Anthropologists across the subfields use unique perspectives to conduct their research. These perspectives make anthropology distinct from related disciplines — like history, sociology, and psychology — that ask similar questions about the past, societies, and human nature. The key anthropological perspectives are holism, relativism, comparison, and fieldwork.
There are also both scientific and humanistic tendencies within the discipline that, at times, conflict with one another. Anthropologists are interested in the whole of humanity, in how various aspects of life interact. One cannot fully appreciate what it means to be human by studying a single aspect of our complex histories, languages, bodies, or societies.
By using a holistic approach, anthropologists ask how different aspects of human life influence one another. For example, a cultural anthropologist studying the meaning of marriage in a small village in India might consider local gender norms, existing family networks, laws regarding marriage, religious rules, and economic factors.
By understanding how nonhuman primates behave, we discover more about ourselves after all, humans are primates! By using a holistic approach, anthropologists reveal the complexity of biological, social, or cultural phenomena.
Anthropology itself is a holistic discipline, comprised in the United States and in some other nations of four major subfields: cultural anthropology, biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology.
While anthropologists often specialize in one subfield, their specific research contribute to a broader understanding of the human condition, which is made up of culture, language, biological and social adaptations, as well as human origins and evolution. Anthropologists do not judge other cultures based on their values nor do they view other ways of doing things as inferior.
As it turns out, many people are ethnocentric to some degree; ethnocentrism is a common human experience. Why do we respond the way we do? Why do we behave the way we do? Why do we believe what we believe? Most people find these kinds of questions difficult to answer. Ethnocentrism is not a useful perspective in contexts in which people from different cultural backgrounds come into close contact with one another, as is the case in many cities and communities throughout the world.
People increasingly find that they must adopt culturally relativistic perspectives in governing communities and as a guide for their interactions with members of the community. For anthropologists, cultural relativism is especially important. We must set aside our innate ethnocentric views in order to allow cultural relativism to guide our inquiries and interactions such that we can learn from others.
Anthropologists of all the subfields use comparison to learn what humans have in common, how we differ, and how we change.
Anthropologists ask questions like: How do chimpanzees differ from humans? How do different languages adapt to new technologies? How do countries respond differently to immigration? In cultural anthropology, we compare ideas, morals, practices, and systems within or between cultures.
We might compare the roles of men and women in different societies, or contrast how different religious groups conflict within a given society. Like other disciplines that use comparative approaches, such as sociology or psychology, anthropologists make comparisons between people in a given society. Unlike these other disciplines, anthropologists also compare across societies, and betweeen humans and other primates.
In essence, anthropological comparisons span societies, cultures, time, place, and species. It is through comparison that we learn more about the range of possible responses to varying contexts and problems. Anthropologists conduct their research in the field with the species, civilization, or groups of people they are studying. In cultural anthropology, our fieldwork is referred to as ethnography, which is both the process and result of cultural anthropological research.
This research is inductive : based on day-to-day observations, the anthropologist asks increasingly specific questions about the group or about the human condition more broadly. Oftentimes, informants actively participate in the research process, helping the anthropologist ask better questions and understand different perspectives.
The word ethnography also refers to the end result of our fieldwork. After all, anthropologists are social scientists. While we study a particular culture to learn more about it and to answer specific research questions, we are also exploring fundamental questions about human society, behavior, or experiences.
In the course of conducting fieldwork with human subjects, anthropologists invariably encounter ethical dilemmas: Who might be harmed by conducting or publishing this research? What are the costs and benefits of identifying individuals involved in this study?
How should one resolve competing interests of the funding agency and the community? To address these questions, anthropologists are obligated to follow a professional code of ethics that guide us through ethical considerations in our research. As you may have noticed from the above discussion of the anthropological sub-disciplines, anthropologists are not unified in what they study or how they conduct research.
Some sub-disciplines, like biological anthropology and archaeology, use a deductive , scientific approach. Through hypothesis testing, they collect and analyze material data e. At times, tension has arisen between the scientific subfields and the humanistic ones. As we hope you have learned thus far, anthropology is an exciting and multifaceted field of study.
Because of its breadth, students who study anthropology go on to work in a wide variety of careers in medicine, museums, field archaeology, historical preservation, education, international business, documentary filmmaking, management, foreign service, law, and many more.
Beyond preparing students for a particular career, anthropology helps people develop essential skills that are transferable to many career choices and life paths. Studying anthropology fosters broad knowledge of other cultures, skills in observation and analysis, critical thinking, clear communication, and applied problem-solving.
Anthropology encourages us to extend our perspectives beyond familiar social contexts to view things from the perspectives of others. A lot of issues we have today racism, xenophobia, etc. Some students decide to major in anthropology and even pursue advanced academic degrees in order to become professional anthropologists. We asked three cultural anthropologists — Anthony Kwame Harrison, Bob Myers, and Lynn Kwiatkowski — to describe what drew them to the discipline and to explain how they use anthropological perspectives in their varied research projects.
From the study of race in the United States, to health experiences on the island of Dominica, to hunger and gender violence in the Philippines, these anthropologists all demonstrate the endless potential of the discipline. I like to tell a story about how, on the last day of my first year at the University of Massachusetts, while sitting alone in my dorm room waiting to be picked up, I decided to figure out what my major would be.
So, I opened the course catalogue—back then it was a physical book—and started going through it alphabetically. In truth, I also considered Zoology. I was initially drawn to anthropology because of its traditional focus on exoticness and difference. I was born in Ghana, West Africa, where my American father had spent several years working with local artisans at the National Cultural Centre in Kumasi.
My family moved to the United States when I was still a baby; and I had witnessed my Asante mother struggle with adapting to certain aspects of life in America. Studying anthropology, then, gave me a reason to learn more about the unusual artwork that filled my childhood home and to connect with a faraway side of my family that I hardly knew anything about. I never imagined I would earn a Ph.
Through my anthropological training, I have made a career exploring how race influences our perceptions of popular music. I have written several pieces on racial identity and hip hop—most notably my book, Hip Hop Underground: The Integrity and Ethics of Racial Identification. In all these efforts, my attention is primarily on understanding the complexities, nuances, and significance of race. I am currently the Gloria D. Smith Professor of Africana Studies at Virginia Tech—a school that, oddly enough, does not have an anthropology program.
One of the most important things that anthropology does is create a basis for questioning taken-for-granted notions of progress. Does the Gillette Fusion Five Razor, with its five blades, really offer a better shave than the four-bladed Schick Quattro? Expanding out to the latest model automobile or smartphone, people seem to have a seldom questioned belief in the notion that newer technologies ultimately improve our lives. Anthropology places such ideas within the broader context of human lifeways, or what anthropologists call culture.
What are the most crucial elements of human biological and social existence? What additional developments have brought communities the greatest levels of collective satisfaction, effective organization, and sustainability?
All of this is to say that anthropology offers one of the most biting critiques of modernity, which challenges us to slow down and think about whether the new technologies we are constantly being presented with make sense.
Similarly, the anthropological concept of ethnocentrism is incredibly useful when paired with different examples of how people define family, recognize leadership, decide what is and is not edible, and the like.
Using my own anthropological biography as an illustration, I want to stress that the discipline does not showcase diverse human lifeways to further exoticize those who live differently from us. In contrast, anthropology showcases cultural variation to illustrate the possibilities and potential for human life, and to demonstrate that the way of doing things we know best is neither normal nor necessarily right. It is just one way among a multitude of others.
My undergraduate experience significantly shaped my attitudes about education in general and anthropology in particular. This led me to pursue graduate work in anthropology despite the fact that I had taken only one anthropology course in college.
While in graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I became fascinated with Caribbean history and migration and spent almost two years doing doctoral fieldwork and research on the island of Dominica.
Observations of an impoverished health system in Dominica and family health experiences with dysentery during fieldwork led me toward medical anthropology and public health and so I completed a M. I probably learned more anthropology in Nigeria than in all of graduate school, including examples of the power of a traditional kingdom and the ways large families enable members to manage in distressing economic conditions.
Then I went back to the U. To offset the absence of other anthropologists, colleagues in religious studies and I created a major called Comparative Cultures and later, with colleagues in modern languages, environmental studies, and political science, a Global Studies major, a perfect multi-disciplinary setting for anthropology.
Anthropology is the broadest, most fundamental of academic subjects and should be at the core of a modern undergraduate education. An anthropological perspective is. To me, an anthropological perspective combines a comparative cross-cultural , holistic view with a sense of history and social structure, and asks functional questions like what effect does that have?
How does that work? How is this connected to that? All this contributes to the theme I stress that everything is culturally constructed. Another goal I have in my teaching is to illustrate that an anthropological view is useful for better coping with the world around us especially in our multi-culture, multi-racial society where ethnic diversity and immigration are politically charged and change is happening at a pace never before experienced.
I stress themes of storytelling and interpretation throughout the semester. One of the most effective writing exercises I give students allows them to examine an essential part of their lives, their cell phones. Students have described how their personal relationships evolved as their phone types changed; how social media connections reduced isolation by enabling them to find like-minded friends; one described a journey exploring gender, another how the new technology expanded his artistic creativity.
Most are surprised at the far-flung origins of what they wear. Yes, anthropology helps to see the familiar in a new light. Lots of what we do in class stays with students beyond graduation.
For all of these reasons, studying anthropology is the most broadly useful of undergraduate disciplines. Living in societies throughout the world, and conducting research with people in diverse cultures, were dreams that began to emerge for me when I was an undergraduate student studying anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in the early s. After graduating from college, I served as a Peace Corps volunteer where I worked in primary health care in an upland community in Ifugao Province of the Philippines.
Following my Peace Corps experience, I entered graduate school in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Berkeley and became a cultural anthropologist in the mids, specializing in medical anthropology. While I was a graduate student, I returned to the community in which I lived in Ifugao Province to conduct research for my dissertation which focused on malnutrition, particularly among women and children. I studied ways that hunger experienced by Ifugao people is influenced by gender, ethnic, and class inequality, global and local health and development programs, religious proselytization, political violence, and the state.
I lived in Ifugao for almost four years. I resided in a wooden hut with a thatched roof in a small village for much of my stay there, as well as another more modern home, made of galvanized iron. I also periodically lived with a family in the center of a mountain town. I participated in the rich daily lives of farmers, woodcarvers, hospital personnel, government employees, shopkeepers, students, and other groups of people.
The first is human universalism. This is the view that all people today are fully and equally human. An implication is that people from all societies of the world are equally intelligent, complex, and interesting to study. It may be surprising that this needs to be stated, but historically it was not widely accepted and still is not in many parts of the world. It has been common for people to consider those from other societies to be somehow different and inferior. Even the enlightened 19th century naturalist Charles Darwin held such views.
In his journal of an around the world scientific expedition in the 's, he wrote about his encounter with Native Americans at the southern tip of South America. He said, "It was without exception the most curious and interesting spectacle I ever beheld: I could not have believed how wide was the difference between savage and civilized man: it is greater than between a wild and domesticated animal Viewing such men, one can hardly make one's self believe that they are fellow-creatures, and inhabitants of the same world.
It was incorporated into the German Nazi beliefs during the 's and had dreadful consequences in Europe during the 's and early 's. It led to the labeling of Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs as untermench literally "under man" or "sub-human". Once labeled as not quite fully human, it was psychologically a relatively easy step to rationalize their enslavement and extermination. Similar interpretations of other peoples led to several brutal wars of "ethnic cleansing" during the late 20th century, most notably in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo.
It is easy to condemn these extreme cases of genocide , but it is important to realize that the ethnocentrism that led to them is found in all societies to some degree, including the United States. It has been conveniently forgotten by many Americans that attitudes about Indians during the 19th century were strongly colored by ethnocentrism.
They ranged from considering these indigenous peoples to be simple-minded children who needed protection and education to remorseless savages who had to be exterminated. It is sobering to recall that a common saying in the United States in the last third of the 19th century was "The only good Indian is a dead Indian.
Another common assumption of anthropologists is related to the concept of integration. That is the view that all aspects of a culture are interrelated and that an understanding of any cultural trait or institution requires knowing how it impacts and is in turn impacted by other institutions. Likewise, human biological traits do not evolve and function in isolation. In order to understand them, it is necessary to grasp how they are interrelated with other genetically inherited characteristics and how environmental factors might select for or against them.
For instance, an attempt at understanding the human cardiovascular system mostly the heart, blood vessels, and blood would be inadequate without understanding the effect on it of chemicals in the body such as the "fight or flight" hormone adrenaline. This hormone is produced by the adrenal glands that sit on top of the kidneys.
Within seconds of being injected into the blood, adrenaline can dramatically increase the rate that the heart pumps and cause the lungs to hyperventilate in order to get more oxygen into the blood.
An injection of adrenaline occurs naturally as a consequence of signals from the brain, which in turn is responding to dangerous situations in the environment outside of the body. It is clear that there is a complex interrelationship between the cardiovascular system, other parts of the body, and the surrounding environment.
It can only be fully understood as an interacting whole. Another assumption of anthropologists is related to how we have flourished as a species through adaptation. Physically, humans are not particularly impressive members of the animal kingdom. We have relatively thin skin. We don't have claws or long, sharp killing teeth.
We can't fly, run fast, or jump far, though we can run farther than any other animal. Many other creatures can kill and eat us. Yet, we are now the unquestionably dominant large animal on land, and our population has grown explosively, especially over the last 10, years. While we began as tropical animals and physically continue to be so, we have been able to successfully colonize most environments on our planet.
What has made this possible has been our ability to acquire knowledge and create technology to adapt to new environments. Any successful behavior, strategy, or technique for obtaining food and surviving in a new environment provides a selective advantage in the competition for survival with other life forms. For instance, we have learned how to survive the winters in such areas as Northern Canada and Alaska with their extremely cold temperatures by storing food and creating artificial tropical environments in the form of well insulated houses, fires for heating, and clothes.
Over thousands of years we also slowly adapt genetically to different climatic conditions. Why do we respond the way we do? Why do we behave the way we do? Why do we believe what we believe? Most people find these kinds of questions difficult to answer.
Ethnocentrism is not a useful perspective in contexts in which people from different cultural backgrounds come into close contact with one another, as is the case in many cities and communities throughout the world. People increasingly find that they must adopt culturally relativistic perspectives in governing communities and as a guide for their interactions with members of the community.
For anthropologists, cultural relativism is especially important. We must set aside our innate ethnocentric views in order to allow cultural relativism to guide our inquiries and interactions such that we can learn from others. Anthropologists of all the subfields use comparison to learn what humans have in common, how we differ, and how we change.
Anthropologists ask questions like: How do chimpanzees differ from humans? How do different languages adapt to new technologies? How do countries respond differently to immigration? In cultural anthropology, we compare ideas, morals, practices, and systems within or between cultures.
We might compare the roles of men and women in different societies, or contrast how different religious groups conflict within a given society. Like other disciplines that use comparative approaches, such as sociology or psychology, anthropologists make comparisons between people in a given society. Unlike these other disciplines, anthropologists also compare across societies, and between humans and other primates.
In essence, anthropological comparisons span societies, cultures, time, place, and species.
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