Anthropology › Section A · What is anthropology? › Topic A.1
The study of humanity
Anthropology takes the whole human story as its subject: our bodies and our past, our languages and our ways of life, everywhere and at every time. This topic sets out what holds such a wide discipline together and why its way of looking is worth learning.
One discipline, every human question
One anthropologist measures fossil teeth from a cave in Kenya. Another spends a year with nurses in a Mumbai hospital. A third records the last fluent speakers of a language in Siberia, and a fourth digs up a nineteenth-century rubbish pit in Ohio. All four study the same thing: what it means to be human. Most disciplines take one slice of life, such as the economy, the mind or the state. Anthropology asks how all the slices fit together, in every society, past and present.
A definition and a core story
Anthropology is the study of humanity across time and space. The word joins the Greek anthropos, human, and logos, study or reasoning. What turns this huge brief into one discipline is a shared story about our species: humans evolved flexible bodies and a flexible capacity for learning, and these have interacted with very different environments and histories to produce the great variety of human cultures. Three commitments follow from that story, and the next cards take them one at a time: describing human diversity, understanding how a way of life holds together, and studying how people and nature shape each other.
Commitment one: human diversity
Anthropologists set out to describe and explain the many ways people live, not to rank them as better or worse. Every society faces the same broad problems: feeding itself, raising children, settling disputes, making sense of death. The solutions differ enormously. Diversity also runs inside every society. Grandparents and grandchildren, rich and poor, women and men often read the same rules differently and argue about them, and those arguments are one way cultures change.
Commitment two: how a way of life holds together
The parts of a society, such as work, family, religion, politics and law, are connected, so a change in one can ripple into the others in surprising ways. Anthropologists call this view holism, and it gets a topic of its own in Holism, anthropology's distinctive approach. Holism does not mean that societies are calm or balanced. The parts can pull against each other, producing conflict and change, and anthropologists are as interested in tension and breakdown as in stability. The aim is to see a practice in its full setting rather than as an isolated curiosity.
Commitment three: people and nature
Humans and their environments shape each other. Climate, terrain and food sources influenced how our ancestors evolved and how later societies farmed, travelled and worshipped. In return, people have burned forests, bred crops, dammed rivers and hunted species to extinction. In 2000 the scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer proposed the name Anthropocene for an age defined by human impact on the planet. In 2024 geologists voted not to adopt it as a formal unit of geological time, but the word remains widely used, and many anthropologists now study how communities live with climate change and environmental damage.
Comparison: what varies and what is shared
Anthropology's basic tool is comparison across societies and across time. Comparison sorts the features of human life into those found everywhere, such as language, kinship and ritual, and those that vary widely, such as marriage rules, diets and ideas about the person. It also tests claims about "human nature". If a behaviour that one society treats as natural turns out to be absent or quite different elsewhere, it is probably learned rather than fixed by biology. Comparison only works when each case is first understood in its own setting.
Making the familiar strange
A classic aim of anthropology is to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. In 1956 Horace Miner published a satirical article, "Body Ritual among the Nacirema", describing a people obsessed with shrines in their homes, holy-mouth-men and painful rites with bristles and powders. Readers slowly realise that Nacirema is American spelled backwards and that the rites are bathrooms, dentists and toothbrushing. The joke makes a serious point: our own habits look just as odd when described from outside, and practices that seem exotic usually make sense once their context is known.
Where the discipline came from
Anthropology became an academic discipline in the late nineteenth century. Edward Tylor in Britain defined culture in 1871 as "that complex whole" of knowledge, belief, art, morals, law and custom acquired by members of a society. Tylor and the American Lewis Henry Morgan also ranked societies along supposed stages from "savagery" to "civilisation", a scheme now rejected as ethnocentric and unsupported by evidence. Franz Boas, working in the United States from the late 1880s, insisted on fieldwork and on studying each culture's own history. The young discipline also grew up alongside colonial rule, a legacy anthropologists have examined critically since the 1960s.
Worked example: a cup of coffee
Use the three commitments to study one ordinary object. 1. Diversity: coffee is drunk in a quick espresso at a Rome counter, in an Ethiopian coffee ceremony that can last an hour with neighbours, and in a paper cup on a commuter train. 2. Holding together: who serves coffee, to whom and where can mark hospitality, friendship or work routines, so the drink links to family, gender and the working day. 3. People and nature: coffee is a tropical crop whose spread followed trade and colonial plantations, and its growing zones are shifting as the climate warms. 4. Check: one drink has led to economics, kinship, history and ecology.
Worked example: is it human nature?
Claim: "Teenage rebellion is caused by hormones, so it happens everywhere." Analyse it. 1. State it as a universal: if biology alone causes it, every society should show the same stormy adolescence. 2. Seek a comparison: in Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), Margaret Mead argued that adolescence there was far less turbulent than in the United States, so culture must shape it. 3. Weigh the evidence: in 1983 Derek Freeman attacked Mead's fieldwork, and many anthropologists in turn found his critique overstated; the debate continues. 4. Conclude carefully: biology is part of adolescence, but its experience varies with culture, and one study is never the last word.
Common mistakes to avoid
First, thinking anthropology studies only distant or "exotic" peoples: anthropologists work in offices, laboratories, suburbs and online. Second, assuming it simply contains economics, politics and religious studies: it studies those subjects through comparison, fieldwork and holism, which is a different approach. Third, reading diversity as a ranking: describing different solutions is not judging them. Fourth, treating a society as if everyone in it thinks alike. Fifth, assuming that anything common in your own society must be human nature until it has been checked against other societies.
Key takeaways
Anthropology is the study of humanity across time and space. Its core story is that flexible human biology and learning, interacting with varied environments and histories, produced the diversity of cultures. Three commitments follow: describing diversity without ranking it, understanding how the parts of a way of life fit together (holism), and studying how people and nature shape each other. Comparison separates widespread features from variable ones. Miner's Nacirema (1956) makes the familiar strange. The discipline arose in the late nineteenth century; ranking schemes by Tylor and Morgan were rejected, and Boas championed fieldwork and history.
Flashcards
Flashcard
The study of humanity across time and space
Test your understanding
Question 1 of 5
What most clearly distinguishes anthropology from economics or political science?
Question 2 of 5
A researcher asks how a new factory changed family life, religious festivals and local politics in a town. Which commitment does this show most directly?
Question 3 of 5
Why did Horace Miner write "Body Ritual among the Nacirema" (1956)?
Question 4 of 5
What is the current anthropological view of the stage schemes of Tylor and Morgan, from "savagery" to "civilisation"?
Question 5 of 5
Someone says a behaviour common in their country is "just human nature". What would an anthropologist do first?