Anthropology can be sort-of defined as the study of humans. The study of other species can get lumped under entire categories (zoology, herpetology, icthyology), but no, we have to hog an entire field of study to ourselves, because we’re that special. Though exactly what type of “special” is sometimes not obvious. Anthropology itself can be hacked into four big chunks:
Archaeology:
The typical archaeologist at work
The study of past cultures through examination of their material remains. Tragically, these remains usually lean more towards broken chunks of dinnerware and less towards platinum-engraved golden vases with symbols depicting enormous ancient evils. Still, despite the waning interest many feel towards archaeology when they realize its practitioners are not bull-whipping adventurers, it plays a vital role in understanding exactly how those interesting folks white people genocided used to live before we killed them and smashed up their stuff and then looted and raped whatever was left over.
Biological/Physical Anthropology:
The magic of biology lies within.
Loads and loads of stuff. From genetics to forsenics to examining apes uncomfortably closely, biological (or physical) anthropology states that examining “the human condition” is for sissies and gets down to examining the bolts, nuts, and other assorted equipment that allow us to fill our busy time watching Raiders of the Lost Ark and masturbating, although hopefully not both at once. A subfield within physical (or biological) anthropology is primatology, because chimpanzees and company are just close enough to human that we feel compelled to make endless documentaries about them while killing them for bushmeat. Let no one say that humans do not do unto others as they would do unto themselves.
Linguistic Anthropology:
An intriguing and deep example of languages and cultures colliding.
The study of how hue-mens lurn 2 spek gud. Language and culture can interact in all sorts of interesting ways, such as Inuktitut having lots of words for snow or present-day English having lots of words for calling someone homosexual in increasingly less-than-complimentary methods. Tracing these interactions is the job of linguistic anthropologists, as is the task of discovering the roots and sources of modern languages, and the preservation of failing or extinct ones. Here’s a do-it-yourself activity: show a linguistic anthropologist a sample of leetspeak just to see what happens, and try to get the whole thing on tape.
Cultural Anthropology:
The frescoed ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Petroglyphs from Gobustan.
The lolcat, from photoshop and brain damage.
The study of culture, that ill-defined mass of beliefs, prejudices, accepted common knowledge, values, attitudes, and symbols universal to humans the world over. It’s adaptive, society-defining, personality-shaping, and sometimes so mind-bogglingly complex that you wonder how in heaven’s name the collection of bipedal fruitcakes you know could manage to remember half of it, let alone create it. It’s as expansive and varied as the imagination of a toddler on 100 cc of sugar injected straight into the jugular, and sometimes its products seem even less realistic than that metaphor. And without it we’re not all that much. It influences or controls when, how, and what we eat, sleep, and drink, what we find attractive, hot, disgusting, and boring, our gender, the roles of our gender, our religious beliefs, our outlook on life, the universe, and everything, and whether or not we’ve heard of Douglas Adams.
The issue with culture is that a lot of it is based on symbols, and one of the qualifiers for symbols is that they are basically stuff that gets arbitrarily assigned value – they symbolize something entirely different from their actual properties (like a lion or eagle symbolizing nobleness/freedom/who gives a toss). This means that most of anyone’s culture makes no sense, which presents an excellent explanation for why ethnocentrism (the judging of another culture by your own culture’s standards, underlined with the smug, wine-scented trace of self-assured superiority) is bull: you’re judging another person’s arbitrary crap by the quality of your own arbitrary crap. This doesn’t mean that you have to tolerate anything and everything without exception (such as, for example, burning witches, or invading continents and wiping out most of the indigenous population through disease and warfare while not really acknowledging them as “real people”). It just means you shouldn’t automatically presume that you’re right because your society is right because you were born into it which means you’re right repeated ad nauseum.
When it comes down to it, cultural anthropology tries to take you by the forehead and jam that ignorant, insular dome of yours into the billion different varieties of human life on the planet, and if you come out of it dizzy and going “woah, I think I see the innate absurdity and familiarity of all cultures, including my own!” then it’s probably succeeded in its goal: removing your head from your backside. Then, if you’re like me, you eat some salty deep fried foods and forget all about it. Cultural anthropology can be frustrating like that.
All original material copyright Jamie Proctor, 2009.
- Picture Credits:
- Indy grabbing the idol: Screenshot from Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981.
- Outhouse: Public domain image from Wikipedia by user Oven Fresh
- Terrible subtitling on Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith: Someone who did not conduct his linguistic anthropology properly.
- The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: Michelangelo.
- Gobustan Pictoglyphs: Public domain image from Wikipedia by user Baku87.
- Yet another lolcat: The internet. Somewhere.