The Anthropological Vision

Anthropology as an academic discipline has its origins in the late nineteenth-century as an attempt to grasp the full range of the human experience: that all aspects of all people's experience belong together as an indivisible subject of study. To that broad sense of inclusion was added an emphasis on direct fieldwork as the best way to understand how people live and how they experience their lives. In North American anthropology, that sense of inclusion and the commitment to field research were applied initially to native Americans (whose lifeways anthropologists feared would soon disappear); to the people whose lives and work were reshaping the North American continent (white and black, native born and immigrant); and ultimately to the full range of people throughout the world in both technologically simple and complex societies.

Today, anthropology consists of an extensive body of knowledge accumulated by anthropologists and a set of conceptual approaches that help organize that material. Yet anthropology also remains a very personal quest for understanding. That quest usually hinges on long-term, direct immersion in the cultures being studied. That field experience is structured not so much by formal research methods as by the unique talents and interests of the anthropologist guided by the accumulated experience of other anthropologists: the basic questions they have asked and the ideas about human interaction that they have developed in the field. The quest for anthropological understanding also continues to have a strong link to the professional practice of anthropologists as they seek to improve the human condition by addressing how people interact with their environments, how their social organization can be made more effective and more equitable, and how they can more fully achieve their human potential given the context of increasingly more intrusive global political and economic forces.

This chapter introduces anthropology in two ways. The first is an overview of anthropological theory, method, and practice. The purpose is to provide a general sense of how anthropologists think about issues ("theory"); how they try to gather information about the world ("method"); and the kinds of work they do — and lives they lead — as they do so ("practice"). The second is a review of the early history of anthropology. The purpose there is to indicate the major intellectual decisions that have formed anthropology as it is today. The most important of these are a commitment to inclusiveness (anthropology is about all aspects of all people's lives); a recognition that all people have their own distinct histories; and a determination to understand other societies on their own terms. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the way this book is organized around three sets of questions that have emerged in anthropology: how people relate to their environments ("adaptations"), the basic ways in which human society is organized ("structures"), and how people make sense of their lives ("meanings").

BIOLOGY, CULTURE, AND ENVIRONMENT

Although anthropologists have many different ideas about how the human world works, there is a common framework shared by most anthropologists. That framework (diagrammed infigure 1.1) includes three major domains: biology, culture, and environment.

Human biology is the specific focus for some anthropologists, but all anthropologists recognize and must factor into their analysis what human beings are in physical terms. Often that consideration of human biology is very much in the background. Thus the specific physical characteristics that permit human language receive little comment in most anthropological research, since those characteristics can generally be assumed. On the other hand, the consideration of human biology may be central in other work. For example, the relative effects of biological sex and the socially constructed issues of gender have long been of concern to anthropologists. Much of the work of Margaret Mead, perhaps the most widely known anthropologist of the twentieth century, was concerned with exactly that interaction between biology and culture. Her first research concerned adolescence in Samoa, particularly how smooth the adolescent experience was there compared with the United States. That suggested to her that the traumas of adolescence in most Western societies had both cultural and biological roots.

Human beings, however, do not live in a vacuum. They live in physical environments that broaden their options in some cases and constrain them in others. Much of the uniqueness of human beings lies in their ability to adapt to a wide range of environments. Thus it is impossible to understand the meaning of human biology without studying people in the full range of environments in which they live. This helps explain the anthropological emphasis on the details of the physical places in which people live. Many anthropological case studies begin with extensive discussions of the physical environment: the quality of the soil, the rains, the temperature changes, the kinds of vegetation, the animals. Franz Boas, who held the first university position in anthropology in North America, and who will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter, was originally a physicist. His initial aim was to study the physical environment in the arctic but then found that the human beings who lived there were of rather more interest than the environment itself.

Although anthropologists deal with both biology and environment, their greatest concern has been with the third domain in the diagram — culture. Culture, in its broadest sense, is a buffer that exists between human beings as biological entities and the environments in which they live. If the weather changes sharply, human beings have the options of putting on clothes or taking them off, of heating their homes or cooling them. That greatly expands the options that they have. Canadians do not need to migrate south to the United States in winter, though they might like to, and those in the southern parts of the United States do not need to migrate north to Canada in the summer, though some of us do just that.

The buffer that is culture is often very physical and very practical. A simple tool, for example, can sharply change the relationship between human beings and their environment: a stone or bone scraper permits the fashioning of hides into clothes; a piece of chipped stone at the end of a big stick (spear) or smaller stick (arrow) permits better hunting; a plow revolutionizes the cultivation of plants. But culture is not just about tools. It is also about social arrangements. Human...