What Anthropology is

 

Finally the answer to the question that must have been nagging all newcomers to this site, and which, at times, even people who have been studying anthropology for some time ask themselves:

What is anthropology?

Generally definitions start from the etymology of the word, and who are we to break a good tradition? Anthropos logos are the Greek words meaning "study of the human being". Great, you might say. People who study human beings could be anything from biologists, to psychologists, to historians to the local psychic gazing in her crystal ball. Now what? And what of those anthropologists who study chimps and gorillas? Did they get a wrong definition of "human" or what?

Unsorting the MISC. box

Anthropology has a very long tradition of being the "Misc. box" of University departments. Misc., or Miscellaneous is generally the title given to the box or folder which gathers all the muddle that cannot be sorted out into the other folders, and this is precisely what happened to anthropology. Therefore anthropology has a very varied set of practices and approaches, and it is best to start clearing the muddle up.

So, we can basically sort out these various practices and approaches into three piles. The first one is Physical Anthropology, and deals with "man as an animal", as the crudest definition goes. A more politically correct term is that this branch studies "human biology". This focuses very much on human evolution and is most popular in the American Departments of Anthropology, for, as you will realise soon after being aquainted with anthropology, various places spawned various approaches.

Another branch is that of Archaeology. This is mostly the study of dead cultures, such as the ancient civilisations of Meso-America. If the first thing that came to mind was Indiana Jones, think again. If the Archaeologist with an eye to culture wants to know more about the daily life of a bygone people, would the poor chap be looking in a temple, or in an ancient rubbish midden? For a breath of fresh air, the same poor chap would, at times, compare the dead civilisation to some other that would be still in existence to corraborate his/her theses.

Finally we come to the third major branch, that which we call "home", due to the way our course is presented. I am speaking indeed about the branch of Cultural Anthropology, which naturally studies culture. (By the way, what is culture? This could lead to a whole new discussion - same time, same place, next episode, maybe?)

You didn't think life was that easy, did you? Cultural anthropology itself seems to branch out into two very separate categories. One is Anthropological Linguistics which focuses on previously unwritten languages, and this also has become very "in" with American anthropologists.

The other offspring of cultural anthropology is that known as Social Anthropology, and which is the study of human culture as a way of living in a particular society (also itself called culture - notice the multiple meanings of that word - it has cost many an anthropologist a fortune in ink! - thanks God for pixels). As a field it is so wide that it splits itself into a spectrum of subjects - you name it, it exists. Such branches might include folklore, ethnohistory (history of a society), psychological anthropology, symbolic anthropology, cognitive anthropology, ecological anthropology, legal anthropology, economic anthropology, political anthropology, and an emerging field called medical anthrpology.

Changing Visions

The most hard-hearted of readers will probably object by saying that all this sounds suspiciously similar to sociology. Well, in many ways, it is, since anthropology and sociology are somewhat sister subjects. However anthropology has a different vision and approach, and anthropologists depend less on the often abstract and theoretical ideas of sociologists, and more on their own personal experience with people. Anthropologists employ extensiveley the technique of fieldwork. The man we have to thank for this vision is Bronislaw Malinowski, the Polish anthropologist who worked in the first decades of this century. He was the first to shift anthropology from the armchair and the verandah to the actual place where society and culture take place. This process of recording and interpreting a people's way of life is called ethnography.

To complete this process well, the anthropologist has to have another way of looking at things - the subjective but holistic vision. People have been reluctant to classify anthropology as a science because of the lack of objective data. However it stands to reason that much more understanding can be gleaned from a reasonable amount of human subjectivity, rather than from objective statistical data. Also the ethnographer must keep in mind that the whole is generally a gestalt, something greater than the sum of its parts.

The End ... but this is only the beginning

I feel that this essay can now be safely concluded, its limited scope having been achieved, and being that of simply introducing the concept of anthropology. Much more research and practical knowledge is required, but the basic ideas are those presented in this essay. Other articles might follow this, such as a discussion of culture (promises are promises, right?) as well as a glossary of anthropological terms, or an introduction to the most famous and influential anthropologists. Well, what can I tell you? Keep checking - we'll keep on evolving.

the author of this article is unkown