Anthropology

E

Physical Anthropological Research

Physical anthropologists often rely on rigorous medical scientific methods for at least part of their research, in addition to more general observational methods. All physical anthropologists have detailed knowledge of human skeletal anatomy. Paleoanthropologists and forensic anthropologists can construct extremely detailed descriptions of people’s lives from only measurements of bones and teeth. These researchers typically analyze the chemical or cellular composition of bones and teeth, patterns of wear or injury, and placement in or on the ground. Such analyses can reveal information about the sex, age, work habits, and diet of a person who died long ago.

Some physical anthropologists specialize in epidemiology, the study of disease and health among large groups of people. In addition to studying diseases themselves, physical anthropologists focus on cultural causes and preventions of disease. They may study such specific medical topics as nutrition and gastrointestinal function, human reproduction, or the effects of drugs on brain and body function. For instance, physical anthropologists working in San Francisco, California, studied how the beliefs and practices of homosexual and bisexual men factored into the spread of the AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) virus in the 1980s. This information helped in the design of effective health education programs to reduce the spread of the disease.

Physical anthropologists studying human genetics use sophisticated laboratory techniques to analyze human chromosomes and DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), the structures through which people inherit traits from their parents. With these techniques, researchers have identified human populations that have genetic predispositions to specific diseases, such as types of cancer. This knowledge has promoted increased focus on the use of preventive measures among people with higher risk for disease.

VII

Documenting and Presenting Research

Whatever kind of work they do, anthropologists share an interest in making the findings of anthropological research available as widely as possible. Many anthropologists work as professors in colleges and universities. In addition to teaching, they publish results of their research in scholarly books and journals. Others write popular books and magazine articles, produce films, lecture to nonacademic audiences, or work in museums organizing exhibits and maintaining collections.

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Academic anthropologists often present their work in a highly technical style, narrowly focused for specialists in the particular subfields of anthropology. Historically, anthropologists conducted field research in order to produce an ethnography, a book or long article that describes many aspects of a particular culture.

Early ethnographies attempted to describe entire cultures. For example, in 1946 American anthropologists Clyde Kluckhohn and Dorothea Leighton published a study on the culture of the Navajo (also spelled Navaho), Native Americans of the Southwestern United States. The book, called The Navajo, covered a wide variety of topics about the Navajo, including their prehistory, history, economic activities, physique, clothing, housing, health, kinship, religious life, language, worldview, and relations with outsiders.

Ethnographies also sometimes focus on a single aspect of a culture. Bronislaw Malinowski's ethnography Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) dealt primarily with the interisland trading system of the Trobriand Islanders. Malinowski demonstrated, in great detail, how the ritual exchange of items such as jewelry, food, clothing, and weapons among trading partners was central to the entire culture.

Some ethnographies written between the 1920s and the 1960s discussed the history of a culture and described how it changed over time. But many classic anthropological texts of this period were written in a timeless ethnographic present, describing a culture as though it had always existed in the same way, and always would. This style represented a trend in anthropology known as functionalism, in which anthropologists analyzed cultures as if all the parts of a culture fit and worked neatly together. The functionalist model of cultural integrity portrayed cultures as being stable and unchanging.

Later anthropologists became more concerned with the dynamics of culture change. It became clear by the 1960s that the world and all its cultures were changing in dramatic ways. Contemporary ethnographies often focus on change, especially changes brought about by global cultural contact, urbanization, and people’s increasing exposure to and dependence on mass-produced goods, services, and images (as from films or advertisements).

A contemporary anthropologist may write an ethnography from the perspective of a single individual within a culture. Others may write stories or poems. Many try to write using the voices of people they study, and some encourage informants to write their own ethnographies. Anthropologists always give copies of their books or articles to the people they study.

VIII

Ethical Concerns

Often, the people that anthropologists study have strong feelings about how they are portrayed to the rest of the world. Professional anthropologists must therefore exercise great care in how they conduct and present their work. Anthropological research also has the potential to disrupt a people’s way of life and bring problems into their societies. Anthropologists try to avoid introducing new ideas, technologies, or even food items into the societies they study, because to do so can make people want things that cannot be readily obtained.

Anthropologists also have ethical obligations to those who fund their research activities as well as to students and the interested public who may want to learn from their work. As a basic rule, anthropologists only conduct research openly, honestly, and with the approval of the people they study. In the United States, federally funded projects and research conducted through a public university might face a formal review procedure to make sure that the rights and safety of human subjects are protected.

Today, anthropologists are also obliged to share their research results with the people who helped produce it and to acknowledge the assistance those people give. Anthropologists do not normally pay for specific information, but they may compensate some of the people they study for their time and effort put in as field assistants or informants.

In rare cases a researcher might decide not to work with a particularly isolated and self-sufficient group because to do so might unavoidably introduce disease and open the way for exploitation by other outsiders. Small, self-sufficient societies may have difficulty defending themselves against more powerful groups. For example, information from anthropological work can familiarize governments and businesses with small-scale societies living in remote regions. This information can convince state and business interests to negotiate with the people of such societies about using their land for such projects as road or dam building, mining, or large-scale farming. These so-called development projects can cause great hardships for people who live off the land.

Anthropologists must practice particularly great care if they work directly for governmental or commercial agencies whose political or economic interests could conflict with the interests of the people being studied. For example, in the 1970s and 1980s the Brazilian government hired anthropologists to pacify people who lived in the rain forest and who were being forcibly relocated to make way for the Trans-Amazon Highway. While some anthropologists considered this work unethical, others felt they could help negotiate with the government to minimize damage to the peoples living in the highway’s future path.

Most anthropologists take a position of cultural relativism when making decisions on issues of ethics and rights. This position calls for respect for all cultural differences and opposes culture change imposed on one society by another. Anthropologists know that people derive their individual identity and sense of dignity from their own cultures. This ethical stance reflects the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (drafted in 1994), both of which recognize cultural practices as basic human rights.

This does not mean, however, that anthropologists believe all cultural practices are necessarily good. Extreme relativism, which anthropologists avoid, could condone such acts as the Holocaust or other instances of mass ethnocide (the killing of people of a particular ethnic group). Many cultures may foster practices that clearly harm some individuals. Such practices include infanticide (the killing of infants), the burning of people thought to be witches, and the surgical modification of women’s sexual organs (known as female genital mutilation). Anthropologists might speak out against such practices, but generally they believe that change should come from within a culture and not be imposed from outside it.

Archaeologists have other ethical concerns to consider. Archaeological excavations may unearth sensitive or sacred remains of past cultures with living descendants. Such remains might include the bones of dead ancestors or ancient religious offerings.

Archaeologists respect the claims of cultural groups to ownership of their ancestors’ cultural and physical remains, and work to prevent unauthorized removal of such materials by commercial collectors. They also commonly hand over most or all of their finds to the rightful owners or to museums of the countries in which excavations took place. Sometimes, however, an archaeologist may argue that certain excavated materials have such great scientific importance that they should be analyzed before being returned or reburied.

IX

History of Anthropology

A

Origins

Anthropology traces its roots to ancient Greek historical and philosophical writings about human nature and the organization of human society. Anthropologists generally regard Herodotus, a Greek historian who lived in the 400s bc, as the first thinker to write widely on concepts that would later become central to anthropology. In the book History, Herodotus described the cultures of various peoples of the Persian Empire, which the Greeks conquered during the first half of the 400s bc. He referred to Greece as the dominant culture of the West and Persia as the dominant culture of the East. This type of division, between white people of European descent and other peoples, established the mode that most anthropological writing would later adopt.

The Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, who lived in the 14th century ad, was another early writer of ideas relevant to anthropology. Khaldun examined the environmental, sociological, psychological, and economic factors that affected the development and the rise and fall of civilizations. Both Khaldun and Herodotus produced remarkably objective, analytic, ethnographic descriptions of the diverse cultures in the Mediterranean world, but they also often used secondhand information.

During the Middle Ages (5th to 15th centuries ad) biblical scholars dominated European thinking on questions of human origins and cultural development. They treated these questions as issues of religious belief and promoted the idea that human existence and all of human diversity were the creations of God.

Beginning in the 15th century, European explorers looking for wealth in new lands provided vivid descriptions of the exotic cultures they encountered on their journeys in Asia, Africa, and what are now the Americas. But these explorers did not respect or know the languages of the peoples with whom they came in contact, and they made brief, unsystematic observations.

The European Age of Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries marked the rise of scientific and rational philosophical thought. Enlightenment thinkers, such as Scottish-born David Hume, John Locke of England, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau of France, wrote a number of humanistic works on the nature of humankind. They based their work on philosophical reason rather than religious authority and asked important anthropological questions. Rousseau, for instance, wrote on the moral qualities of “primitive” societies and about human inequality. But most writers of the Enlightenment also lacked firsthand experience with non-Western cultures.

B

Imperialism and Increased Contact with Other Cultures

With the rise of imperialism (political and economic control over foreign lands) in the 18th and 19th centuries, Europeans came into increasing contact with other peoples around the world, prompting new interest in the study of culture. Imperialist nations of Western Europe—such as Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, France, and England—extended their political and economic control to regions in the Pacific, the Americas, Asia, and Africa.

The increasing dominance of global commerce, capitalist (profit-driven) economies, and industrialization in late-18th-century Europe led to vast cultural changes and social upheavals throughout the world. European industries and the wealthy, elite classes of people who owned them looked to exotic foreign lands for sources of labor and goods for manufacturing. In addition, poorer Europeans, many of whom were displaced from their land by industrialization, tried to build new lives abroad. Several European countries took over the administration of foreign regions as colonies (see Colonialism and Colonies). See also Capitalism.

Europeans suddenly had a flood of new information about the foreign peoples encountered in colonial frontiers. The colonizing nations of Europe also wanted scientific explanations and justifications for their global dominance. In response to these developments, and out of an interest in new and strange cultures, the first amateur anthropologists formed societies in many Western European countries in the early 19th century. These societies eventually spawned professional anthropology.

Anthropological societies devoted themselves to scientifically studying the cultures of colonized and unexplored territories. Researchers filled ethnological and archaeological museums with collections obtained from the new empires of Europe by explorers, missionaries, and colonial administrators. Physicians and zoologists, acting as novice physical anthropologists, measured the skulls of people from various cultures and wrote detailed descriptions of the people’s physical features.

Toward the end of the 19th century anthropologists began to take academic positions in colleges and universities. Anthropological associations also became advocates for anthropologists to work in professional positions. They promoted anthropological knowledge for its political, commercial, and humanitarian value.

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