A Concise Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

Mark Q. Sutton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000412147
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

This book offers a concise and accessible overview of cultural anthropology for those coming to the subject for the first time. It introduces key areas of the discipline and touches on its historical developments and applied aspects. As well as traditional topics such as social organization, politics, and economics, the book engages with important contemporary issues including race, gender, sexuality, and colonialism.

In a beginner-friendly format, this book is ideal for students of anthropology, as well as for the interested reader as an introduction to the subject.

1Anthropology

What is anthropology?

Anthropology is, quite literally, the study of all things related to humans and their societies throughout time and space, including their culture, language, biology, and evolution. This includes topics that are connected but not commonly associated with humans, such as monkeys, fossil animals, and nonhuman actors (e.g., spirits inhabiting nature). Humans everywhere are virtually the same, biologically (in spite of superficial but visible differences), but there are currently some 7,000 separate and distinct societies across the planet. Anthropology seeks to understand what makes these societies different, what they all have in common, and seeks to help contemporary people understand that we should embrace this great cultural diversity!

Visualize all societies on the planet as part of an orchestra. There are many sections of an orchestra: string, woodwind, brass, and percussion, each with a number and variety of instruments. Imagine each society as part of an instrument, a string on a violin or a key on a saxophone, each producing a variety of sounds. Each section, each instrument, each string or drum, each note, each tone, and each octave, all combine to produce a symphony of music. That is human culture. As societies are diminished or lost, the music of the orchestra becomes less complex and loses its beauty. Eventually, the music may fade altogether and we would have a silent world. And that would be a catastrophic loss for everyone.

Anthropology differs from other fields in that it studies all humans, everywhere, from the earliest times (millions of years ago) to today and from the Arctic to the Antarctic. No group is so small that it is not important, and no period of history or prehistory is without interest. This holistic approach has allowed anthropologists to disprove many of the generalizations that were made based only on modern or industrialized (i.e., Western societies including China and Japan), and to demonstrate some other generalizations that were not obvious once, such as the universality of complex kinship systems and dietary rules.

Anthropology is fieldwork-based, obtaining information about societies and people directly from the people themselves. Anthropologists have generally focused on nonindustrialized, traditional, or indigenous societies, many or most of which are small and largely “invisible” to Western society. More recently, however, anthropologists are working with segments of Western societies or with indigenous communities in developing nations. Anthropology is cross-cultural and comparative and seeks to understand and explain differences. The goal in this is ultimately to explain humans as a whole so as to better understand where we came from, where we are, and where we are going.

But, anthropology can also be viewed as an extension of colonialism, one in which Western interpretations are viewed as superior to those of indigenous groups. In view of this history, anthropologists are now striving to include indigenous views and interpretations into their work.

The major subfields of anthropology

The discipline of anthropology can be organized in several different ways. In the British system (Europe, Canada, and Australia), cultural anthropology is a separate field entirely, one called social anthropology. Archaeology is also a separate field with a focus on history, art, and architecture.

In the American system, anthropology is the overarching discipline and is generally divided into four major subfields (called the “four field approach”). These four major subfields are (1) biological anthropology, (2) linguistics, (3) archaeology, and (4) cultural anthropology. Depending on one’s interests or focus, each of these subfields could be divided into any number of other subfields. Many of the divisions in cultural anthropology are noted below.

Biological (or physical) anthropology

The second major subdiscipline in anthropology is biological anthropology (or physical anthropology): the study of human biology through time, focusing specifically on biological evolution and human variation (e.g., Jurmain et al. 2018). Within biological anthropology are a number of specialties. Paleoanthropology is the multidisciplinary study of primate and human evolution, as well as the various aspects of geology and biology that serve as the background to such studies. The study of our closest living relatives, the nonhuman primates, is called primatology.

Biological anthropologists also specialize in human osteology, the study of the human skeleton. Because many biological anthropologists have this training, they frequently use their skills in criminal cases or major catastrophes (such as wars and airplane crashes) in which human remains are badly decomposed, fragmentary, or skeletonized.

Evolution

In its very basic definition, evolution means change, simply that: change. When most people think of evolution, they think of biological evolution: changes in gene frequency (as seen in the DNA) from generation to generation, the appearance of new species, and the extinction of other species through the process of natural selection (as seen in the fossil record). This is the definition used by biological anthropologists and biologists. Other disciplines might define evolution in different ways, but in essence, it is simply change.

But all things change and so all things evolve. As we learn new things, science evolves. As people invent new things, technology evolves. As new religions arrive, societies evolve. Even in very conservative societies, new people are born and old people die, and so the members of the society change and the society evolves. Biological and cultural evolution is constant and ongoing.

However, a common misunderstanding is that evolution has direction. It is often thought that as something evolves, it advances and gets better and that there is “progress.” These notions are false. Although it is true that some things become more complex over time, not all things do and complexity itself is not necessarily an advantage. A simple amoeba living today is as “evolved” as any human being—not as complex to be sure, but certainly as evolved. It has a long evolutionary history and its continued existence reflects biological success. In the same vein, all living human societies are equally evolved, although in different environments. They are equally far from whatever society may have existed among prehistoric human ancestors. As there is no direction in evolution, there is no such thing as “devolution,” there is no more or less “advanced,” and there is no external scale of progress.

Anthropological linguistics

Anthropological linguistics (Ottenheimer and Pine 2018) is the study of human languages (other animals might have some sort of language but that is not considered here), including their structure (e.g., grammar, syntax, meaning, cognition) and history, since language (and so groups) can be traced back in time. Through language, people can transmit their culture from one generation to the next. This makes language the most important symbol in any society. Linguistics is considered in a bit more detail in Chapter 5.

Archaeology

Archaeology is the study of the human past (e.g., Sutton 2021a). Archaeologists want to learn the same things about past societies that cultural anthropologists do about living ones. The major differences between archaeology and cultural anthropology are in the data available and the methods used to obtain and analyze those data. Archaeologists cannot directly observe past human behavior or directly ask past people questions so they must rely on the material remains of past behaviors, as seen in their artifacts (tools), food remains, houses, human remains, settlement systems, and the like. Thus, it is difficult to obtain the entire picture of a past society.

Archaeologists, however, are able to detect change over long periods of time, can identify broad trends, and can examine transitions, such as the change of some societies from hunting and gathering to agriculture. In addition, an archaeologist can detect the traces of behavior that a cultural anthropologist might not usually see. This access to “hidden behavior” is another advantage of archaeology.

There are a number of subdivisions of archaeology. For example, prehistoric archaeology generally deals with societies prior to writing; historical archaeology is generally the archaeology on non-Native Americans in the Americas; classical archaeology studies Greece, Rome, and other Mediterranean states; Egyptology studies ancient Egypt; bioarchaeology deals with the dead; and Cultural Resource Management (CRM) is the application of archaeology in development projects. There are many more.

Cultural anthropology

Cultural anthropology is, essentially, the study of extant (living) groups with the goal of learning about, and an understanding of, the full range of human behavior. As such, there is nothing that is off limits to what a cultural anthropologist wants to know. Cultural anthropologists usually obtain their information by doing fieldwork with the society or group they are studying, perhaps for years, so as to obtain a rich and detailed knowledge of that society or group. This knowledge is then compared to information obtained by others from other societies so that comparisons can be made and a greater understanding of human behavior realized.

Other social sciences are generally different. For example, sociology tends to study industrialized societies and uses questionnaires and statistical analyses. However, there is no hard and fast rule about this division and cultural anthropologists can and do study groups, such as street gangs, in industrialized societies. Some sociologists also study traditional groups.

The study of a particular group at a particular time is called an “ethnography,” and the information obtained from that study is called ethnographic data. The time period in which the group is described becomes the “ethnographic present,” as the group was at that time. The comparative study of culture and societies—similarities and differences—is called ethnology. More than one ethnography is needed to do ethnology, and it is through ethnology that we can learn about culture in general, the primary goal of cultural anthropology.

Many worlds

During the Cold War between the Democratic West and Communist East, the various nation-states (e.g., those with United Nations membership) were divided into political “worlds.” The First World described countries that were aligned with the United States, now commonly called “the West.” The Second World was the communist states and is now sometimes called “the East.” The “Third World” was the underdeveloped and unaligned states. With the end of the Cold War, the terms First and Second Worlds largely dropped from usage. However, the term “Third World” is still in common usage but now refers to developing countries.

Some anthropologists use the term “Fourth World” to classify indigenous societies without their own nations living within contemporary countries (Neely and Hume 2020). There are some 370 million Fourth World people in some 5,000 groups, speaking 4,000 languages, and living in 90 countries. Well-known examples include nearly a thousand different Native American societies in the United States and Canada and about 700 individual Indigenous Australian societies. Another Fourth World group, one that directly impacts the politics and economics of the Middle East, are the Kurds. The Kurds live mostly in Syria, Turkey, Iran, and Iraq and are striving to establish their own county, a goal resisted militarily by Turkey.

The “Fifth World” consists of past societies known mostly through archaeology (Sutton 2017). In some cases, such as Ancient Egypt or the Ancient Maya, a fair amount is known about them (but with so much still to learn). In other cases, we know of the existence of some societies and perhaps even a little bit about them. However, most past societies, perhaps tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of them, are completely unknown even to the point of not even knowing of their existence. The issue with this is that we cannot know the full range of human behavior if we have no knowledge of so many societies.

Perspectives on others

For the vast majority of human history, societies were small and people mostly interacted with members of their own group. Societies were almost certainly aware of one another but the lack of infrastructure, trade, and transportation provided little opportunity for interaction. As time passed, some societies became larger and more and more people had to interact with strangers, members of other societies. This interaction brought with it increasing bias, tension, distrust, and perhaps even animosity of other groups and so problems increased. Today, most people have to interact with members of other societies, many of whom are just as biased. This brings a constant and increasing challenge of dealing with strangers and having to counter the inherent bias against other societies that has dominated most of human history.

Ethnocentrism and cultural relativism

“Ethnocentrism” is the view that one’s society or group ...