Anthropology

I

Introduction

Anthropology, the study of all aspects of human life and culture. Anthropology examines such topics as how people live, what they think, what they produce, and how they interact with their environments. Anthropologists try to understand the full range of human diversity as well as what all people share in common.

Anthropologists ask such basic questions as: When, where, and how did humans evolve? How do people adapt to different environments? How have societies developed and changed from the ancient past to the present? Answers to these questions can help us understand what it means to be human. They can also help us to learn ways to meet the present-day needs of people all over the world and to plan how we might live in the future.

II

Key Concepts

Much of the work of anthropologists is based on three key concepts: society, culture, and evolution. Together, these concepts constitute the primary ways in which anthropologists describe, explain, and understand human life.

A

Society and Culture

Two interrelated anthropological concepts, society and culture, are crucial to understanding what makes humans unique. In its general sense, a society consists of any group of interacting animals, such as a herd of bison. But human societies often include millions or billions of people who share a common culture. Culture refers to the ways of life learned and shared by people in social groups. Culture differs from the simpler, inborn types of thinking and behavior that govern the lives of many animals. The people in a human society generally share common cultural patterns, so anthropologists may refer to particular societies as cultures, making the two terms somewhat interchangeable.

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Culture is fundamentally tied to people’s ability to use language and other symbolic forms of representation, such as art, to create and communicate complex thoughts. Thus, many anthropologists study people’s languages and other forms of communication. Symbolic representation allows people to pass a great amount of knowledge from generation to generation. People use symbols to give meaning to everything around them, every thought, and every kind of human interaction.

B

Evolution

Most anthropologists also believe that an understanding of human evolution explains much about people’s biology and culture. Biological evolution is the natural process by which new and more complex organisms develop over time. Some anthropologists study how the earliest humans evolved from ancestral primates, a broader classification group that includes humans, monkeys, and apes. They also study how humans evolved, both biologically and culturally, over the past several million years to the present.

Humans have changed little biologically for the past 100,000 years. On the other hand, today’s worldwide culture, characterized by the rapid movement of people and ideas throughout the world, is only a few hundred years old. Today’s global-scale culture differs vastly from that of the small-scale societies (nonindustrialized societies, with small populations) in which our ancestors lived for hundreds of thousands of years. Understanding these kinds of societies and their cultures can help us make more sense of how people cope with life in today’s culturally diverse and complex world.

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