A Degree in a Book: Anthropology: Everything You Need to Know to Master the Subject - in One Book!

By Julia C. Morris

Study the diverse cultures of the world and the common threads of humanity in this wonderfully visual guide to anthropology, covering everything you would find on a degree course.

A Degree in a Book: Anthropology dives deep into the study of human culture and societies. Discover the impact of language on understanding, how different societies approach family and kinship and how different cultures are studied, as well as how anthropology is used in our everyday lives - applied anthropology.

This accessible landscape-format guide is perfect for students and laypeople alike, featuring full-color infographics, flow charts, diagrams summary sections and ideas for further reading. Including theories from Herodotus to Malinowski and Durkeim to de Waal, it covers all the major strands of anthropology that are studied today.

Subjects covered include:
• Fieldwork and Ethnography
• Biological Anthropology
• Language and Cognition
• Gifting and Economic Systems
• Exchange and Consumption
• Globalization and Transnationalism

ABOUT THE SERIES: Get the knowledge of a degree for the price of a book in Arcturus Publishing's A Degree in a Book series. Featuring handy timelines, information boxes, feature spreads and margin annotations, these landscape-format books are perfect for anyone wishing to master seemingly complex subject with ease and enjoyment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcturus Publishing
• Release date: Sep 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781398807303

Book preview

Introduction

On 25 May 2020, George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, was pinned to the ground by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The officer, who was later charged with murder, along with the other three officers who restrained Floyd and stood nearby, knelt on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes, as he pleaded, ‘I can’t breathe’. This violent action had been preceded by a long history of state-sanctioned violence against racialized populations, including the killings of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin and countless others. Following Floyd’s killing, thousands of people rallied in solidarity as #BlackLivesMatter and anti-racism protests swept the USA and other countries around the world. Protestors sought to bring to visibility the structural racism that has undergirded the USA since the violence of settler state colonialism and slavery, with placards reading ‘No justice! No peace!’, ‘I can’t breathe’ and ‘Black lives matter’. Meanwhile, dramatic acts of protest, such as the disposal of the monument of the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol in the UK, also cast a spotlight on the violence of colonial legacies in other places.

What is anthropology?

Anthropology – ‘anthropologia’ (‘the study of humankind’) – provides us with a powerful toolkit to untangle the historical context of struggles for racial equality. It is a discipline that has pushed back from its darker days, when it was deeply entangled with racism and colonialism, to tackle important questions confronting humanity. The discipline now gives us a framework to examine how social movements make visible systems of oppression. It can unearth the links that bring Bristol and the UK together as part of what historian Paul Gilroy (1956–) terms a transnational ‘black Atlantic’. In this global web of interaction, anti-racist messages and feelings are transmitted around the world with extraordinary rapidity. Anthropology is also a discipline that can help us to make sense of the resonance of #BlackLivesMatter in places as seemingly far-flung as Singapore and Rio de Janeiro.

Anthropology: The study of humankind, derived from the Greek words ánthrōpos (‘human’) and logos (study).

Yet paradoxically, anthropology is a discipline that has prided itself on face-to-face ethnographic methodologies. In fact, ethnography is often flagged up as the cornerstone methodology of anthropologists. Ethnography is an observational science that is centred on cultural interpretation. It traditionally involves sustained engagement with communities in particular locations over time. But since the early days of ‘going out into the field’, anthropologists have found creative ways to engage with new field sites. No longer are they only studying faraway people and places. Instead, anthropologists have rethought the boundaries of the discipline in a mobile and globalizing world. Many anthropologists have turned their gaze inwards in the move towards observing their own societies and structures. Some anthropologists have even taken it virtual, conducting ethnography on new forms of digital activism. For example, Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa in their 2015 paper ‘#Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States’ look at how Twitter hashtags bring BLM protestors together through new modes of activism, which also extend well beyond digital lines.

Ethnography: An observational science centred on cultural interpretation. Derived from the Greek ethnos, meaning ‘people’, and graphy, meaning ‘writing’. Literally, the writing of people!

Many of you might already be anthropologists without even thinking about it. You might have travelled to other countries and experienced a diversity of cultures. You will have certainly spoken to people or observed how they act in particular situations or from one language or society to another. In fact, the main goal of anthropology is to study the human being – why do we do the things we do, what is innate to a person, what makes us react to our environment, how we created language and why. Anthropology’s major contributions to knowledge have been to describe and explain human diversity, including the sheer variety of ways of being human around the world, while also identifying our commonalities. So, if you want to understand our increasingly globalized and interconnected world, then the answer is, get to grips with anthropology!

Black Lives Matter protests in Rio de Janeiro reveal the global connectivity of social movements.

About this book

A Degree in A Book: Anthropology provides you with the ability to do just that in a single volume. This book will take you on a journey through the how and the where of anthropological research. We will cover the major concepts that have defined the discipline as we merge early advances in the field with contemporary studies. Our emphasis is on anthropology’s development in Europe and North America. However, this book draws on the work of anthropologists globally. That includes under-represented scholars, scholars of colour, female anthropologists and researchers in what is often termed the ‘global south’. We focus on the discipline as it institutionalized in the 19th century into an academic area of study, but we also acknowledge those who played early pioneering roles in studying and documenting cultural differences around the world.

We begin by unpacking what exactly anthropology is and the different frameworks that anthropologists use to comprehensively understand human cultures. The focus is on social and cultural anthropology, as the largest of anthropology’s sub-fields. However, we will consider how biological (or physical) anthropology, archaeology and linguistic anthropology also interact to provide different lenses for explaining questions of human variety and unity. Collectively, these sub-disciplines provide us with a broad and holistic perspective to fully appreciate what it means to be human. Each of these initial sections includes introductions to the leading figures in the discipline and how they shaped the various fields of study. Definitions highlight anthropology’s seminal concepts and methodologies for conducting research, including vocabulary intrinsic to the discipline. Most of these technical terms are also found at the end of the book to help you master some of anthropology’s more esoteric forms of expression. Throughout, diagrams and images help the reader to visually grasp some of anthropology’s more complex ideas.

After sketching the development of the discipline, we will move on to examine anthropology’s key topics of study: kinship, religion and ritual, gender and sexuality. Many of these familiar subjects for anthropologists are ones that have solidified over time in the anthropological quest for human universals. As you will find, questions of human unity and variety are really intrinsic to the discipline of anthropology. Many of the subjects this book discusses have been identified by anthropologists over the years as they have asked questions about human societies, and what might make them comparable. This is even as anthropologists have expanded these concepts in exciting new directions to account for non-traditional forms or to challenge the view that not all societies have these cultural constructs in common. In fact, some of these concepts, it has been argued, have been imposed on societies by ethnographers, and are instead governed by their own logics.

The final part of the book will take us into the study of globalization, as well as more recent sub-fields of cultural anthropology, such as applied and digital anthropology.

Ethnographic monographs are an essential part of anthropological training and practice. These are written representations of field experiences, usually through the medium of writing. Whenever we move into a new subject, classic anthropological studies in that area will be discussed. As anthropology has developed alongside new technological advances, the definition of ethnography has opened up beyond textual means of representation. Some of the ethnographic monograph-equivalents we draw on will therefore also focus on media-based, performative and other collaborative ways in which anthropologists have conveyed their encounters, experiences and analyses. In short, the many wonderful ways in which anthropologists ‘do ethnography’!

Ethnocentric: Taking one’s own culture as the centre of the universe and as a measurement against which all other cultures are judged, largely as inferior or suspect. Even though this is a common human experience, it is a barrier to learning from others.

Of course, as with any summary of a field, some material will invariably be left out. But anthropology is a discipline that prides itself on curiosity so this could in fact be considered part of your methodological training as a budding anthropologist. Indeed, the goal of this book is to ignite that intellectual thirst for more knowledge and to provide you with a framework for viewing the world in open-minded ways. Anthropology challenges you to move beyond an ethnocentric perspective to appreciate the rich diversity of human cultures in their own terms. The end of the book contains a section on extra reading and films that should nudge you in these inquisitive directions. A great deal of this bibliography is available online so it is supplemented by websites for starting your own anthropological investigations.

One major caveat: anthropology is not about exhibiting or exoticizing different ways of life. As this book will show, these forms of ‘Othering’ have plagued the discipline from its early development when many notable anthropologists went ‘out into the field’ as part of colonial projects; at times, to encourage individuals of diverse cultures to conform to a Western way of life. Simultaneously, other anthropologists retaliated against this, documenting the complex systems of meaning through which non-Western peoples inhabit their worlds. It is in this vein that anthropology premises a cultural comparative approach to ‘make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange’. We compare and contrast people and their cultures to illustrate the multifarious possibilities for living and being in the world. By making the behavioural patterns of people in distant lands seem familiar, while upending the strangeness of our own practices, we can try to see things from other people’s point of view, and learn new models of humanity.

Chapter One: What is Anthropology?

Early beginnings

Anthropology is a discipline that can be traced back many millennia to the work of historians, traders, missionaries, bureaucrats and explorers who studied and documented cultural differences and similarities around the world. The Greek historian Herodotus (484–25bc) is one of these early social scientists who wrote extensively on the cultures of peoples across the Persian Empire during the aftermath of the Greco-Persian Wars. His grandiosely titled book The Histories (c.430bc) details the customs, laws, politics and geographies of the people he encountered or learned about through written accounts and interviews. Filled with local knowledge, as well as fantastical stories – from legendary oracles to gold-digging ants and flying snakes – The Histories is generally seen as one of the first early ethnographies, and a precursor to the institutionalized discipline of anthropology.

The Tunisian-born historian Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) was another renowned early traveller who recognized the significance of concepts later important to anthropology: customs, cultural sensitivity and historical contextualization. In his lengthy The Muqaddimah (1377), the Muslim thinker used a socio-anthropological style of research to examine the social, economic and environmental factors that lead to the rise and fall of empires. This book, along with the work of other early travellers, such as Ibn Battuta’s (1304–69) wonderfully titled Tuhfat al-anzar fi gharaaib al-amsar wa ajaaib al-asfar (A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling) (c.1355), have become canonical examples of early pre-anthropological writing.

The Venetian merchant and explorer Marco Polo (1254–1324) recorded his legendary adventures in the Book of the Marvels of the World or Il Milione (c.1300): some of the earliest ethnographic writing still in existence.

Names to Know: anthropology’s early explorers and ethnographers

Top left-bottom right: Herodotus (484–25 bc), Zhang Qian (164–13 ad), Tacitus (ad 56–120) Marco Polo (1254–1324), Ibn Battuta (1304–69), Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406).

The Age of Discovery

During the ‘Age of Discovery’, from the 1400s through to the 1700s, European explorers began to search for new sources of wealth in more distant lands: Asia, Africa and what are now the Americas. These explorations were motivated by a desire for gold, silver and other forms of wealth, as well as dreams of power, honour, influence and the establishment of permanent settlements. The spread of religion also prompted exploration, with colonization and settlement closely linked to a desire to spread Christianity around the world through crusading expeditions. However, many early explorers held little respect for or knowledge of the cultures and languages of the peoples they encountered, and often made only brief observational notes on their expeditions. Instead, these explorations resulted in violent patterns of colonization, with little concern for the livelihoods of indigenous inhabitants beyond the exploitation of their natural resources and labour. Non-European societies were presented as backward, through the practice known as European ethnocentrism. The savagery depiction was used to support the governance of indigenous lands and justify European interests. At the same time, this practice of inferiorization, which portrayed indigenous peoples as less than human, also fomented the basis of a brutal slave trade that buoyed the expanding European empire.

Orientalism: A concept coined by the Palestinian American academic Edward Said (1935–2003). He argued that Western countries used demeaning cultural representations of Eastern countries and their peoples to produce the authoritative belief that those people were backward. Orientalist fantasies still continue to permeate contemporary popular culture.

Engraving (c.1521) depicting the Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512).

The early anthropological practices of this time were often highly ethnocentric, serving to abet problematic colonial projects. Demeaning accounts of allegedly ‘primitive’ peoples as savage and exotic were contrasted with the superiority of Westerners. During this period, mass-produced images of colonized people also attempted to influence how non-Westerners were portrayed. Themes of discovery, adventure and the representation of a terra nullius – or ‘no man’s land’ – free for the taking resurged through subsequent centuries.

Richard Harvey’s Philadelphus, a defense of the legend of Brutus in British history (1593) is allegedly the first English use of the term ‘anthropology’ to refer to a social science.

The Savages Let Loose, or the Cruel Fate of the Loyalists, William Humphrey, engraving (1783).

The Age of Enlightenment

With the expansion of European empires there arose new ways of comprehending the world and its peoples. The ‘Age of Enlightenment’ (or ‘Age of Reason’) was an intellectual and philosophical movement during the 17th–19th centuries that emphasized the importance of science, rationality and experience. Previously, religious scholars and the alleged divine authority of rulers dominated European belief systems on subjects of human origins and cultural development. It was widely held that human existence and cultural diversity were creations of God. The intellectuals of the Enlightenment challenged the authority of tradition and religious dogma, premising the validity of one’s own reason and experience as the main arbiters of knowledge.

This was a crucial period of intellectual development that eventually gave rise to a number of academic disciplines, including anthropology. The philosophies of empiricism inspired many early social scientists who wanted to move beyond thought and speculation. In fact, this epistemological outlook stated that anyone could learn the truth about the natural and social world through first-hand observation and experience. It challenged individuals to search for the truth through reason rather than blindly accepting authorities or superstitious beliefs.

Names to Know: great thinkers of the Enlightenment

John Locke (1632–1704), Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), David Hume (1711–76), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78).

Empirical research: Literally ‘based on experiences’, this form of knowledge acquisition premises observation and experience rather than belief or theory.

Important Enlightenment works defending empiricism

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) – John Locke

A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) – David Hume

The Spirit of Laws (1748) – Baron de Montesquieu

Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (1755) – Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Thinkers of the Enlightenment

Enlightenment thinkers, such as the British philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), David Hume (1711–76) of Scotland, and the Genevan Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), wanted to find explanatory principles to comprehend the diversity of human nature. Their works placed import on philosophical reason instead of religious authority, asking questions that were later of significance to anthropology.

Rousseau, for example, focused on moral psychology and the social development of humans. Rousseau’s proto-Darwinian concept was that modern man evolved from a (much happier) animal state through an evolutionary process of human consciousness.

Emerging questions for anthropologists

Ethnocentrism vs. cultural relativism – A belief in the superiority of one’s own culture rather than understanding a society or cultural world in its own terms.

Universalism vs. particularity – What is common across societies and what is culturally specific?

Culture vs. nature – What is learned vs. what is innate, does biology shape behaviour more than culture? What distinguishes humans from animals?

Biological variation and evolution – What accounts for human variation?

Also, in France, Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755) proposed a relativistic evolutionary scheme that connected human development to the physical environment, hinting at a kind of cultural relativism. In his Lettres Persanes or ‘Persian letters’ (1722), Montesquieu directly challenged European attitudes towards non-Western peoples. This fictional work describes the experiences of two noblemen from Persia in Europe in an effort to critique eurocentrism and European social and political structures.

‘We never judge anything without secretly considering it in relation to our own self … It has been quite correctly observed that if triangles were to make themselves a god, they would give him three sides’ (Montesquieu, Persian Letters, p.57).

But while the anthropological philosophers of the Enlightenment emphasized the importance of empirical research and understanding societies in their own terms, many of them did not have first-hand experiences with non-Western societies. This was to change in the Victorian era, which combined the imperialistic drive of previous centuries with the Enlightenment rationalist stance and interest in human development.

The study of social evolution

Ideas about the evolutionary progression of societies strongly influenced the Victorian-era social scientists of the 19th century. Imperialist policies of foreign territorial acquisition brought Europeans into contact with diverse cultures from around the world. Building on the questions developed during the Enlightenment, scholars concentrated on understanding human cultural variation in an effort to explain this diversity.

Charles Darwin (1809–82), the renowned naturalist and biologist, cited the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume as a key influence. Darwin employed classificatory systems to argue for biological evolution, and the view that species were not attributable to God’s creativity.

A contemporary cartoon of Charles Darwin (1809–82).

The belief in social evolution – that human societies developed in a particular direction – preoccupied early Victorian anthropologists. This combined with the problematic, but related, notion that European societies represented the pinnacle of development that began with savagery.

The culture concept

The concept of culture is seminal to anthropology. It was first defined by the British anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) in his book Primitive Culture (1871) as ‘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.’ For anthropologists, culture is a crucial theoretical framework to understand how humans create shared patterns of meaning, ideas and behaviour that are passed down over time.

Culture: Shared systems of experiences and meanings that people create and manipulate in their daily lives.

Early anthropologists such as Tylor, Henry Maine (1822–88) and Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–81) applied evolutionary models to suggest that all cultures naturally evolve through steps of progression from simple to complex. They used now highly criticized terms like ‘savage’, ‘barbarian’ and ‘civilization’ to rank societies on a continuum, with Western cultures as the most advanced.

These writers attempted to show that ‘progress’ was attainable for everyone throughout the world, even though they did so through simplistic typological schemata where ‘progress’ was synonymous with ‘Westernization’. However, this was in marked contrast to writers like Comte Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821), who argued that non-Western indigenous peoples were examples of cultural degeneration. Overall, though, anthropologists now totally reject these models of explaining biological and cultural variation as Eurocentric and hierarchical.

These sorts of ideas were common during the Victorian era, dominated by a belief in industrialization, technological progress and European colonialism. The prevailing attitude at the time was of the duty of Europeans to ‘civilise the savages’, as depicted in Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’.

Names to Know: proponents of the culture concept

Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–81)

Henry Maine (1822–88)

Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917)

At the time, imperialist Western European nations – including the UK, Belgium, Spain, France, the Netherlands and Portugal – were expanding political and economic control across the Pacific, Asia, Africa and the Americas. Ethnocentric ideas of cultural evolution – where conquered peoples were described as ‘backward’ and unfit for survival unless they were