Anthropology

Anthropology is the study of humankind (see genus Homo). It is holistic in
two senses: it is concerned with all humans at all times, and with all
dimensions of humanity. Central to anthropology is the concept of culture,
and the notion that human nature is culture; that our species has evolved a
universal capacity to conceive of the world symbolically, to teach and learn
such symbols socially, and to transform the world (and ourselves) based on
such symbols.

In the United States, anthropology is traditionally divided into four
fields: physical anthropology, which studies primate behavior, human
evolution, and population genetics; linguistics, which studies variation in
language across time and space, the social uses of language, and the
relationship between language and culture; archaeology, which studies the
material remains of human societies; and cultural anthropology, also called
socio-cultural anthropology, which studies social behavior and beliefs
(among phenomena studied by cultural anthropologists are kinship patterns,
social networks, politics, patterns in production, exchange, and
consumption, and religion. Around the 1990s, some U.S. Anthropology programs
began dividing into two, one emphasizing the humanities and critical theory,
the other emphasizing the natural sciences and positivism. In Great Britain,
archeology is often treated as separate from anthropology.

The Historical and Institutional Context of the Development of Anthropology

The anthropologist Eric Wolf once characterized anthropology as the most
scientific of the humanities, and the most humanistic of the social
sciences. In order to see how anthropology does and does not fit into other
academic disciplines, one must see how these disciplines developed.

Anthropology is one Western response to one of the greatest paradoxes of
modernity: as the world is becoming smaller and more integrated, people's
experience of the world is increasingly atomized and dispersed. As Karl Marx
and Freidrich Engels observed in the 1840s,

     All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are
     daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose
     introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized
     nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material
     but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose
     products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the
     globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the
     country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the
     products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and
     national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every
     direction, universal interdependence of nations.

Ironically, this universal interdependence, rather than leading to greater
human solidarity, has coincided with increasing racial, ethnic, religious,
and class divisions, and new ? and to some confusing or disturbing ? forms
of sexuality and notions of gender. These are the conditions of life with
which people today must contend, but they have their origins in processes
that began in the 16th century and accelerated in the 19th century.

In the 19th century numerous scholars grappled with these issues. The
"humanities" reflected an attempt to study different national traditions, in
the form of history and the arts, as an attempt to provide people in
emerging nation-states with a sense of coherence. The "social sciences"
emerged at this time as an attempt to develop scientific methods to address
social phenomena, in an attempt to provide a universal basis for social knowledge.

Some scholars gave a name to the dimension of human action in which these
problems are most evident, and the concept through which they could be
solved: society. The new discipline of sociology would study the ties that
bind people not only as individuals, but as members of associations, groups,
and institutions. Through such studies sociologists could develop "the
antidote to social disintegration."

Nevertheless, this new discipline, in the very process of distinguishing
"society" from "the individual," "the state" and "the market," and by
placing itself among complementary social and behavioral sciences such as
psychology, political science, and economics represented in intellectual
form the very social divisions it sought to understand and heal. Moreover,
the most obvious sites for the study of modernity, and the most convenient
sites for the application of new scientific, quantitative research methods,
was in the sociologists' own societies, at the core of the emerging world
system. Consequently, they neglected the study of those societies on or
beyond modernity's frontiers.

At the same time that social scientists were defining this new object and
method of study, however, a diverse group of scholars ? with training in
jurisprudence, psychology, geography, physics, mathematics, and other
disciplines, and drawing on the methods of the natural sciences as well as
developing new techniques involving not only structured interviews but
unstructured "participant-observation" ? dedicated themselves precisely to
the study of those people on Europe's colonial frontiers. Drawing on the new
theory of evolution through natural selection, they proposed the scientific
study of a new object: "humankind," conceived of as a whole. Crucial to this
study is the concept "culture," which anthropologists defined both as a
universal capacity and propensity for social learning, thinking, and acting
(which they see as a product of human evolution and something that
distinguishes Homo sapiens -- and perhaps all species of genus Homo -- from
other species), and as a particular adaptation to local conditions that
takes the form of highly variable beliefs and practices. Thus, "culture" not
only transcends the opposition between nature and nurture; it transcends and
absorbs the peculiarly European distinction between politics, religion,
kinship, and the economy as autonomous domains. They consequently organized
a new discipline, anthropology, that would transcend the divisions between
the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities to explore the
biological, linguistic, material, and symbolic dimensions of humankind in
all forms.