Physical anthropology Physical anthropology deals with the animal origins of humans, the evolution and biology of humankind, the classification of physical differences among human groups, and the differences between humans and other primates. This branch of anthropology developed in the first half of the 19th century partly as an attempt to find a physical basis for perceived differences among races, and subsequently was influenced by Darwin’s concept of evolution as well as by 19th-century archeological discoveries. As practiced in the modern era it draws upon a wide range of scientific disciplines and techniques such as genetics, chemistry, and electron microscopy.
Cultural anthropology Cultural anthropology is the study of human culture in all its aspects. It uses a wide variety of methods from the social sciences, humanities, linguistics, and archaeology to describe human groups and the details and meaning of their culture and cultural practices. Originally focused on “primitive” societies, cultural anthropology now studies contemporary societies and subgroups as well. Cultural anthropology includes the study of material culture, asking how and under what circumstances textiles and clothing, articles of adornment, tools and weapons, ceremonial articles, and other material goods are made and used, and what they signify. Within this broad field, psychological anthropology examines the mind and subjective existence of individuals in whom a given culture is embodied. This focus on the experience of individuals provides an important complement to the often schematic approach of traditional cultural anthropology. Other subfields of cultural anthropology include medical anthropology, the anthropology of music and dance, and the anthropology of gender.
Linguistic anthropology Linguistic anthropology is an important and influential subfield of anthropology. It deals with the development of and relationships among languages and the relationship of language to culture. Key questions include the ancient roots of languages and their relationship to human migrations, and the extent to which language shapes understanding in cultural groups, for example in distinguishing the characteristics of oral and literate societies. Linguistic anthropology draws upon the fields of descriptive, historical, and comparative linguistics but is not itself generally considered a subfield of linguistics.
Although the two broad subdivisions of anthropology, as well as linguistic anthropology, cover the range of interests of anthropologists, the subject is often divided into many diverse subfields, which include differing institutional arrangements in teaching and research in the United States and abroad. For example, cultural anthropology is sometimes referred to as “sociocultural” or “cultural and social” anthropology, and is sometimes divided into separate disciplines of cultural and social anthropology. Social anthropology as a separate field is associated particularly with the British tradition of anthropology; it focuses on social institutions, structures, and values, such as the structures and role of kinship in society. Some work in cultural anthropology is referred to as ethnology, the study and comparison of human societies.
The branch of physical anthropology dealing with human prehistory from the study of fossil hominid remains is sometimes called paleoanthropology. Moreover, much of anthropology is linked to and draws from archaeology, which uses the recovery and study of material and physical remains to examine past human societies and their environments. Archaeology as a discipline is distinct from anthropology; in the institutional arrangements of
modern universities, archaeology sometimes shares a department with anthropology but often is housed in other departments such as classics or art history or, less commonly, forms a separate department in its own right.
Anthropology has its roots in the experience of Europeans in the Age of Exploration who, as they navigated the world’s oceans and explored overland through interior regions of Eurasia and the Americas, encountered many groups of people whose languages, appearance, dress, customs, and other characteristics were radically different from their own. Anthropology as a distinct discipline began to coalesce in the 19th century, with developments in science, archaeology, history, and linguistics supporting efforts to understand non-European and supposedly “primitive” peoples throughout the world. Although early anthropological work was often independent of or only indirectly linked to the European imperial enterprise, such involvement as early anthropologists had in promoting commerce, religious conversion, and colonialism would cause much soul-searching for later scholars in the discipline.
Anthropology in the 19th Century
The roots of physical anthropology were intertwined with 19th-century beliefs that physical characteristics of individuals were directly predictive of intellectual and personality traits. Such pseudosciences as phrenology (the study of shape and surface features of the skull as indicators of personality; Franz Joseph Gall, German, 1758–1828), craniometry (the analysis of racial “types” and the prediction of intelligence and other traits from skull shape and brain size; Paul Broca, French, 1824–80), and anthropological criminology (the prediction of criminal behavior from facial features; Cesare Lambroso, Italian, 1835–1909) were closely related to the now discredited ideas of eugenics and “scientific racism.”
Physical anthropology began to find firmer footing with the discovery of fossil remains of early hominids that provided physical evidence of the complexity of the human family tree. The first recognized and typed Neanderthal (German for “Neander Valley”) remains were found near Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1856, the year to which the establishment of the field of paleoanthropology is conventionally dated. Neanderthals were at first thought to be a human ancestor, but are now widely regarded as a subspecies driven to extinction by a combination of climate change and anatomically modern humans. Scholars began to recognize that the material remains of ancient human ancestors and their societies were found in geological strata that could be dated. Remains of the extinct species Homo erectus (extant from about 1.6 million to 250,000 years ago) were found in Java in 1891 (“Java Man”) and in China (“Peking Man”) in the late 1920’s. The discovery, beginning in the late 19th century, of elaborate Paleolithic era (ca. 35,000–20,000 B.C.) cave art at Lascaux and other sites in southwestern France and northern Spain led to the understanding that prehistoric cultures were more ancient and more complex than had previously been believed.
Just three years after the discovery of the first Neanderthals, Charles Darwin’s (English, 1809–82) On the Origin of Species (1859) described the principles of evolution, and his Descent of Man (1871) posited a common ancestor for apes and men. Darwin’s work provided a revolutionary impetus for the study of the prehistory of humans, which was recognized as stretching back hundreds of thousands of years. A further important scientific advance that provided significant perspectives for anthropology was the discovery of the basis of genetics by Gregor Mendel (Austrian, 1822–84).
Earlier, in 1786 Sir William Jones (English, 1746–94) had observed that Latin, Greek and Sanskrit and many other Western languages had a common source; later systematic work by Franz Bopp (German, 1791–1867) supported this hypothesis. From this work emerged the understanding that nearly all languages can be classified into language families, an insight that provided anthropologists with an important tool for understanding human migrations and the historical interactions of societies.
One by-product of colonialism was widespread collection of ethnographic information and artifacts (often by amateurs, missionaries, and colonial officials) that served to broaden the field of anthropological analysis. Some of these materials were housed in newly-established museums or museum departments, such as the ethnographic collections of the British Museum (London), the American Museum of Natural History (New York), and the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.) as well as the Musée de l’Homme (“Museum of Man,” Paris) and the Tropenmuseum (“Museum of the Tropics,” Amsterdam),
providing scholars with a wealth of material for analysis. The professionalization of the field was marked by the founding of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in 1871; the American Anthropological Association in 1902, and the German Anthropological Association (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Völkerkunde) in the 1920’s.
Cultural anthropology also became more respected during the last part of the 19th century, as the social theories of August Comte (1798–1857), Karl Marx, and Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) helped establish the study of western societies in a rational and scientific manner. In addition, James George Frazer’s two-volume book, The Golden Bough (1890), about religious and mythological beliefs throughout the world, attained great notoreity for its assertion that all religions are rooted in ancient magical practices and rituals. By 1915, Frazer’s study had expanded to 12 volumes and had become one of the most influential works, not only in anthropology but in literature and art as well.
Theories of Social Development
During the latter part of the 19th century the prevailing idea in cultural anthropology, particularly in the Anglo-American world, was that, by analogy with Darwin’s theory, human societies progressed in stages from the primitive to the highly civilized. The widely shared view that civilization was essentially a Western phenomenon was associated with debates on the concept of diffusionism. Some scholars held that the essential characteristics of civilization had originated in the ancient Near East and spread (or had yet to spread) to other parts of the world; others theorized about a small number of “culture circles” from which advanced traits radiated to peripheral peoples; still others, primarily in the German-speaking countries, emphasized the particular environmental and other conditions in which cultures developed. This view held that societies might change unpredictably, through borrowing and migrations, rather than following a fixed series of changes.
The latter approach was brought to the United States most notably by Franz Boas (American, b. Germany, 1858–1942); who became the first professor of anthropology at Columbia University and inspired a generation of younger scholars. Boas argued strongly against the Eurocentric bias of many anthropologists. His own studies included work among the Inuit and the Native Americans of British Columbia, and the analysis of Native American languages.
Fieldwork and Theories in the 20th century
The first professionally trained anthropologists to undertake fieldwork on their own went into the field early in the 20th century. The results of their efforts provided much of the framework for theoretical developments. The most notable early intensive fieldwork was by Bronislaw Malinowski (English b. Poland, 1884–1942) between 1915 and 1918 in the Trobriand (now Kiriwina) Islands in the South Pacific. This work represented a movement away from simply listing traditions and customs to close observation of individuals and groups in every day life. The fieldwork of Malinowski and other like-minded contemporaries contributed to the further development of anthropological reasoning away from an attempt to find and explain the primitive origins of civilization and toward the concept of assessing the purposes served by elements of culture such as institutions and beliefs. A substantial literature developed in the 1930s and later classifying and assessing social structures, kinship relations, and belief systems. Malinowski, along with Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (English, 1881–1955), is associated with the theory of structural functionalism, which argues that social and cultural traits evolve to promote overall cohesion within a society. That theory was in turn criticized by other anthropologists as excessively reductionist.
Ruth Benedict (American, 1887–1948), a student and later colleague of Boas, did fieldwork among Native Americans and also studied contemporary Asian and European cultures. She focused on national character and the role of culture in the development of individual personalities. Her best-known work is The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), a study of Japanese culture undertaken during World War II. Margaret Mead (American, 1901–78), perhaps the best known anthropologist to the general public in the United States, completed her graduate work at Columbia during Boas’s tenure. She did extensive fieldwork among Pacific islanders, and became known for books, such as Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), that focused on personality, sexuality, child rearing and culture.
Claude Lévi-Strauss (French, b. Belgium, 1908–2009) carried out fieldwork in Brazil, 1935–39, taught in the United States 1942–45, and, returning to Europe, became the most distinguished anthropologist. Lévi-Strauss founded structural anthropology, which considers culture as a system of communication and looks to patterns of ideas and beliefs that lead to practical activity. His major works include The Elemetary Structure of Kinship (1949), The Savage Mind (1962), and his four-volume
Mythologies (1964–71); the first volume, The Raw and the Cooked, would become the most well-known.
Clifford Geertz (American, 1926–2006) was a cultural anthropologist who did fieldwork in Java, Bali, and Morocco. He is perhaps best known for his seminal essay “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” (1973). He argued for “thick description,” the recording of great detail in fieldwork. Exploring the methodologies of anthropology, he argued that cultures should be interpreted in all their detail as texts. His most influential essays are collected in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973, 2000). Victor Turner (American, b. Scotland, 1920–83), who spent most of his professional career at the University of Chicago, emphasized the importance of rituals, and especially rites of passage, in human social behavior.
Joseph Campbell (American, 1904–87), though more of a popularizer than an original researcher, did much through his publications and media appearances to acquaint the general public with the anthropological study of mythology and comparative religion, especially in his books The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949) and The Power of Myth (1988), which was based on interviews for a television series.
Human Origins in Africa
The fields of paleoanthropology and physical anthropology were greatly advanced by the African work of Louis Leakey (Kenyan, 1903–72) and Mary Leakey (Kenyan, b. England, 1913–96), and their many successors, who showed decisively that human ancestors originated in Africa. Such investigations were facilitated by the scientific research of Willard Libby (American, 1908–80) whose discovery of radiocarbon dating in 1949 provided an important tool for anthropology (and archeology) that permitted the dating of organic remains up to about 60,000 years old. This led to the development of further methods of dating materials of much greater antiquity. Paleoanthropological work in Africa has given rise to the “out of Africa” theory of human origins, which holds that modern humans (Homo sapiens) evolved uniquely in Africa and radiated throughout the world in a series of migrations. Earlier theories, positing an Asian origin or multiple origins, have largely been abandoned, though Milford H. Wolpoff (American, b. 1942) continues to defend his “multiregional hypothesis.”
Modern Developments and Controversies
The cultural upheavals that rocked the academic world in the late 1960’s and 1970’s had a particularly profound impact on anthropology, which was criticized from both within and outside the profession as Eurocentric, racist, sexist, essentialist, colonialist, and more. This was perhaps to be expected in a field in which there is a very wide range of subject matter, professional skills and perspectives, with often limited evidence and a complex history. However, the radicalism and vehemence of the critique plunged the profession into a crisis from which it was slow to recover. Individual scholars came in for heavy criticism, including Carleton Coon (American, 1904–81), perhaps the last major scholar to take race seriously as an anthropological category, and Margaret Mead, whose work in Samoa was attacked as naive, exoticizing, and methodologically flawed. Some critics suggested that societies under study, rather than the anthropologists studying them, had the right to control how they were presented in the professional literature, and certain subjects regarded as derogatory towards non-Western peoples became effectively taboo as research topics. The latter point was dramatically demonstrated in the case of the noted American physical anthropologist Christy G. Turner II, who was strongly criticized for suggesting in his book, Man Corn (1998), with Jacqueline A. Turner (1934–96), that the ancient Anasazi of the American Southwest practiced cannibalism in times of famine.
On the other hand, many scholars agree in retrospect that the radical critiques of anthropology had the salutary effect of making scholars aware of ways in which the profession had been appropriative of or condescending toward people studied by anthropologists, and of opening new and unexpected areas of research. Many anthropologists now have turned from the traditional study of isolated non-Western peoples to explore such new fields as corporate culture, ethnic subcultures in urban settings, and sports culture.
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, anthropology had grown as a field, with important new analytic tools from science and technology. Aerial photography, satellite observations, and other remote sensing techniques have enabled the discovery of valuable sites for archaeological excavation and anthropological study. DNA analyses have improved the ability to evaluate human genetic relationships and migration patterns. Electron microscopy has made possible the detailed study of such things as fossilized pollen and diet-related abrasions on prehistoric teeth. At the same time, there have been many controversies about anthropological studies and issues, both enduring and new.
Issues in Modern Anthropology
How culture structures the worldviews of societies, and how to interpret those worldviews. This issue was at the root of a celebrated, protracted, and unresolved debate between Marshall Sahlins (American, b. 1930) and Gananath Obeyesekere (American, b. Sri Lanka, 1920) about how to interpret the death of Captain Cook at the hands of Hawaiian islanders in 1779. Adopting a postcolonial, culturally relativistic stance, Sahlins argued that Cook’s death could only be understood in the context of Hawaiian religious beliefs. Cook was first taken to be a god but was subsequently killed when the ritual context in which he was seen by the Hawaiians changed. Obeyesekere criticized Sahlins for presuming to speak for “natives,” and put forward a more universalistic and rationalistic explanation of events. The positions of the two scholars, roughly representing postmodernism and traditionalism, were complex and difficult to disentangle; as one observer noted, the vitu-perativeness of the dispute “almost engulf[ed] the important intellectual questions” involved. But the issue of the interpretation of cultural worldviews remains the source of much controversy within anthropology.
The grouping and interrelationships of languages. This continues to be a controversial field, with implications for migration patterns, relationships of human groups, and culture. The preeminent figure in this field was Joseph H. Greenberg (American, 1915–2001), an anthropologist and linguist who classified African languages into four broad groups. He also classified Native American languages into three groups: Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene, and Amerind. His methods generated controversy because of the need to review large numbers of languages and the possibility of source errors, but he is still regarded as an important pioneer in the field. Greenberg’s work has been extended by Luca Cavalli-Sforza (American, b. Italy, 1922), who has pioneered the coordinated use of genetic and linguistic data to track ancient migrations. One of the pioneers of linguistic anthropology was Edward Sapir (American, 1884–1939), founder of the field of structural linguistics and co-formulator of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which posits that the grammatical structure of the language spoken by any group of people plays a key role in shaping their worldview.
The date and circumstances of the peopling of the Americas. The standard paradigm has been that humans migrated to the Americas via the Bering Strait land bridge about 11,000 years ago, and that the first Paleo-Indians were the Clovis people whose culture was characterized by stone implements specialized for hunting big game. This view has been challenged by evidence for much older human settlements in the Americas, notably Monte Verde, Chile, dating to about 12,500 years ago, as well as (controversial) other sites that may be more ancient still, and the view that there may have been multiple inland and coastal routes for migration of the early peoples.
The role of women in early human societies, including:
The existence or non-existence of an early, matriarchal “goddess culture” in Paleolithic Eurasia, a position strongly argued by Marija Gimbutas (American, b. Lithuania, 1921–1994) but disputed by many other scholars.
The role of mothering and maternal instincts in primate and human societies, a field associated especially with Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (American, b. 1946).
Women’s work in paleolithic society, notably the role of textiles and clothing production in early societies, a field pioneered by Elizabeth Wayland Barber (American, b. 1940).
Art, numeracy, paleoastronomy, and the use of symbolic systems in prehistoric societies.
Alexander Marshak (American, 1918–2004) and André Leroi-Gourhan (French, 1911–86) were among the pioneers of the study of ancient technology and symbolic systems, a field that continues to grow with the discovery and interpretation of new evidence. Marshak held that lines on ancient bones were markings reflecting astronomical observations. Since the 1980’s, for example, great strides have been taken in understanding the written language, art, and other symbolic systems of the Mayan cultures of ancient Mesoamerica.
Gender Studies. The burgeoning of gay, lesbian, and transgender studies in all fields of cultural inquiry has had a strong influence on anthropology, which has seen a flowering of research on sexual identity and sex roles in sociocultural systems.