An Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology: Adaptations, Structures, Meanings
312
An Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology: Adaptations, Structures, Meanings
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Overview
An Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology exposes students to the cultural detail and personal experiences that lie in the anthropological record and extends their anthropological understanding to contemporary issues.
The book is divided into three parts that focus on the main themes of the discipline: ecological adaptations, structural arrangements, and interpretive meanings. Each chapter provides an overview of a particular topic and then presents two case examples that illuminate the range of variation in traditional and contemporary societies. New case examples include herders’ climate change adaptations in the Arctic, matrilineal Muslims in Indonesia, Google’s AI winning the Asian game Go, mass migration in China, cross-cultural differences in the use of social media, and the North American response to the Syrian refugee crisis. Instructors will also have digital access to all the book’s illustrations for class review.
Covering the full range of sociocultural anthropology in a compact approach, this revised and updated edition of Cultural Anthropology: Adaptations, Structures, Meanings is a holistic, accessible, and socially relevant guide to the discipline for students at all levels.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781607327196 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University Press of Colorado |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| File size: | 15 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
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 beings may not be unique in being social and in having families. Yet the human capacity for social groups is impressive in its variation and in the sheer size of human groups. Those social arrangements also provide a buffer between human beings as biological entities and their environments. Cooperative groups permit the hunting of big game, fishing with large nets, or even whaling. Small groups, such as the nuclear family, permit people to spread out across a large area and be relatively self-sufficient. Large groups with hundreds, thousands, or millions of members permit massive mobilization of people for large-scale action, whether in peace or war.
Culture is not only about tools and social relationships. It is also about ideas, beliefs, and values. This is the way the word "culture" is usually used in everyday life. At its broadest, this aspect of culture can be understood as referring to the overall vision that people have of themselves, of the world, and of how they should orient themselves to that world and to the other human beings in it. It is what makes them who they are and sets the parameters for what they can accomplish. On a more specific level, culture can refer to ideas that might help people work together (such as a belief in the nobility of sacrifice and service) or that might help people survive against their adversaries (such as a belief in the justness of war).
Anthropologists are thus interested in human beings as biological entities, as located in specific environments, and as cultural entities. That makes anthropology a very broad discipline. On the positive side, this broad framework helps anthropologists avoid simplistic arguments that some aspect of human behavior is "caused" by biology, or "caused" by the environment, or even "caused" by culture. Instead, anthropologists know they must account for the biological, environmental, and cultural aspects of human life. As an example, consider race. Whereas many people might accept the idea of race as a simple description of physical differences among people, anthropologists recognize that "race" is, after all, a word. Understanding race thus requires attention to people's ideas and values — to their culture in the everyday sense. It also requires attention to how supposed racial differences are used in social arrangements. Anthropologists might note, for example, that issues of race in the United States have their origins in a system of slavery that provided cheap labor for difficult work that the original settlers did not want to do themselves. Even though anthropologists know that there are not clear biological differences between so-called races, they readily understand how convenient it is for people who are enslaving or abusing other people to claim that biological differences justify it. One of Franz Boas's achievements, for example, was to show that supposed racial differences between northern and southern European immigrants to North America actually disappeared among their children.
RESEARCH AND PRACTICE
This anthropological attention to human beings as biological entities, to the environments in which they live, and to their material, social, and ideational culture, affects the way anthropologists go about their work. Anthropological theory greatly affects anthropological methods. If anthropologists are to study biology and environment and culture, they know they will have to locate themselves in a specific place. If they do not, how can they possibly begin to understand the interactions of biology, culture, and environment? So the first methodological rule is "go there." Since the environment is such an important factor in human life, then the period of time spent in that place will need to be at least a year to grasp the annual cycle. Almost all human environments have sharp seasonal changes of temperature and precipitation; those seasons greatly affect the food people are able to obtain, the shelter they will need, and usually their most important ritual events and celebrations. So the second methodological rule is "and stay there for at least a year." Finally, since much of culture is ideational and hinges on language, there is a third methodological rule, which is "and learn the language." Those three rules create the minimum requirements. Many anthropologists prefer to stay longer than a year and to return later to see if what they found was a relatively durable pattern or a more transient one. This standard of fieldwork is daunting. It is extremely time consuming, often disorienting, and sometimes dangerous. It is even more complicated when the people the anthropologist is studying are themselves in motion. Studying migrants, for example, may well require going to the places from which they come, the places to which they go, and the routes by which they navigate between them. Yet the result of that daunting standard is that anthropological fieldwork provides more depth and range of understanding than other research approaches. Thus, the anthropologist often can give the richest portrayal of other cultures: what people do, why they do it, and what they themselves think about it.
The broad anthropological framework of biology, culture, and environment and the demanding method of intensive fieldwork greatly shape the way in which anthropologists go about being anthropologists. Their jobs vary greatly. Of those with PhDs, some go into academic positions: some entirely teaching and some entirely research, though probably most with a combination of the two. Others go into a range of "real" jobs, many of which are continuations of their own anthropological research. For those with MAs, the proportions shift with more in nonacademic jobs. Of both groups, some work in the areas of international development or humanitarian action, often on behalf of people they already know from their fieldwork. Others bring their skills to bear on issues in North America. Some focus on populations of immigrants and refugees. Others focus on ethnic or racial minorities or on other kinds of diversity by gender, sexual orientation, disability, or legal status. Yet others have become involved in technological areas, for example, looking at computers and other IT products as newer members of the ancient lineage of human tools. The human hand holding a smart phone, after all, looks quite a bit like the human hand holding a scraper. Humans are still tool users — and they still have strong emotional attachments to those tools.
In considering the range of work that anthropologists do, there is a tendency to categorize anthropologists as academics (those in full-time university positions); applied anthropologists (usually split between university and research activities); and practitioners (those in "real" jobs). Yet there is often considerable overlap. Even the most academic of the academics are usually involved in research that has quite practical implications. Often the practitioners are working in areas (such as computerization, genetic engineering, and international migration) that have challenging theoretical implications. Although they sometimes disagree, all share a commitment to an overarching vision of a rich and varied humanity that demands respect for the human condition and for help in moving a complicated and globalized world toward a better and fairer future for all people and all cultures.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY
Tylor and Morgan: Evolution, Ethnography, and Holism
The basic theoretical orientations, methods, and practice of anthropology can also be illustrated through a review of the early history of anthropology as a specific discipline. A full review is too hefty a subject for this book, but a short review suggests there are three basic pillars on which the discipline is built: evolutionism, historical-particularism, and structural-functionalism. The labels may seem contorted, but they are actually simply descriptive: the evolutionists emphasized the importance of evolution in organizing information about different peoples, the historical-particularists emphasized the importance of history and of the particular details of how people live, and the structural-functionalists emphasized that societies were indeed structured and that the different elements of those societies had practical functions.
The story of anthropology as we know it today began in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The world was changing rapidly. The industrial revolution had given Europe and North America a vastly increased ability to produce new goods, sometimes goods of better quality, certainly goods of increased quantity, and often goods — such as weapons — of greatly increased destructiveness. This resulted in an enormous power differential between those countries and the rest of the world. That power differential ultimately reduced much of the rest of the world to colonial or near-colonial status. The industrial revolution also resulted in great social dislocations within Europe and North America and a newly urban life of grit, grime, and crime.
Yet the latter part of the nineteenth century was also a time of hope that the human capacity for reason could resolve these social dislocations and create a better material and social world. That belief mirrored the confidence that science had done well in increasing human understanding and promoting great leaps in productive power. The first anthropologists — the evolutionists — were part of that time of change and hope. They had more information about a broader range of people in a world that was being brought more closely together. To their great credit, these first anthropologists recognized the extent of human diversity and accepted that diversity as their focus. They claimed all these different human beings throughout the world as one integrated field of study. Further, they claimed that all aspects of these people's lives were within the scope of this new discipline. Thus anthropology was at its very creation the study of all people (any time, any place) and of all aspects of their lives. As Edward Tylor (1832–1917), the most eminent of the evolutionists, put it, the focus of anthropology was to be culture, for which he offered the following extremely broad definition: "Culture or civilization taken in its wide ethnographic sense is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."
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