Anthropology 12
Lecture One: On Anthropology
1) "Anthropology tries to understand what people are, whence and how they sprang,
what they did in the past, and what they do now in their diversity all over the globe.
How they work, think, and feel, speak and sing, fashion objects or reshape the world
with their hands, order their lives with their fellows, and meet the universe of known
and unknown forces that surround them.” (Frederica De Laguna, 1968)
2) The subfields:
a. Physical or biological anthropology: How we got to be human and what
distinguishes us as human; the animal origins of our human species as well as our
relationship to our closest non-human relatives; the evolution of the species.
b. Archaeology: How we’ve lived as humans over time and how and why our
ways of life changed when they did.
c. Anthropological linguistics: How languages have developed and changed;
how humans developed language; what languages exist and how they are related to
one another; what is the relationship between language and culture (or thought); the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
d. Sociocultural anthropology: What people do; why they do what they do;
why do they do things differently.
i.
Ethnographies
3) The sub-disciplines are inter-related; a “sacred bundle” designed to explore humans
as animals and social actors through time and over space
4) How does anthropology differ from other social sciences?
a. In it’s breadth of coverage; it is the first inter-disciplinary discipline; it borrows
from other disciplines, but does so with real skepticism, skepticism deriving from the
fact that it is:
i.
Diachronic; anthropology is concerned with process; it does not assume a
constancy in human behavior; it does not assume that people have done
the same things in all times and all places; it sees human activities and
beliefs as strongly influenced by particular social and historical contexts.
ii.
Comparative; anthropologists vex one another and other social scientists
about generalizations that disregard cross-cultural information. This leads
us to challenge ethnocentrism in its two aspects: seeing the world in your
own terms and evaluating the world by your own standards.
iii.
Holistic; anthropologists look at the total picture (which gets us back to its
interdisciplinarity).
b. Its method of participant-observation; anthropologists immerse themselves in the
everyday lives of people and in so doing acquire a much broader range of
information about all aspects of life than do those in other social scientists.
5. “Anthropology is the only discipline that offers a conceptual schema for the whole
context of human experience. ... It is like the carrying frame onto which may be fitted all
the several subjects of a liberal education, and by organizing the load, makes it more
wieldy and capable of being carried.” (De Laguna.)