Preface

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About *Introduction to Anthropology*

*Introduction to Anthropology* is a four-field text, grounded in foundational content in cultural anthropology, archaeology, biological anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. This approach makes the text useful for both general and cultural introductory courses as well as for introductory courses in some of the anthropology subfields. Upon this strong foundation, two contemporary themes are highlighted: social inequality and the natural world. Ethnographies and examples throughout the text address the impacts of these two themes on human societies throughout history and around the globe.

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What Is Anthropology?

Introduction

The Study of Humanity, or "Anthropology Is Vast"

The Heart of Anthropology: Central Narrative and Commitments

Anthropologists are great storytellers. They tell many, many stories about all aspects of human life. At the heart of all of these stories is one fundamental story: the “story of humanity,” a rich and complex narrative. A narrative is a story that describes a connected set of features and events. Narratives can be fictional or nonfictional. The narrative of anthropology is a true story, a factual narrative about the origins and development of humanity as well as our contemporary ways of life. The central narrative of anthropology can be summarized this way.

Central Commitment #1: Exploring Sociocultural Diversity

As the narrative suggests, humans in a diversity of conditions create a diversity of cultures. Rather than trying to find out which way of life is better, morally superior, more efficient, or happier or to make any other sort of judgment call, anthropologists are committed to describing and understanding the diversity of human ways of life. Setting aside judgments, we can see that humans everywhere create culture to meet their needs. Anthropologists discover how different cultures devise different solutions to the challenges of human survival, social integration, and the search for meaning.

Central Commitment #2: Understanding How Societies Hold Together

Just as the various parts of our bodies all work together (the brain, the heart, the liver, the skeleton, and so forth), the various parts of a society all work together as well (the economy, the political system, religion, families, etc.). Frequently, anthropologists discover that changes in one realm of society are related to changes in another realm in unexpected ways. When farmers in Ghana began growing cocoa for export during the colonial period, the agricultural shift dramatically altered gender relations as men monopolized cash crops and women were relegated to vegetable farming for their families’ consumption and local trade. As men benefited from the profits of the cocoa trade, relations between men and women became more unequal.

Central Commitment #3: Examining the Interdependence of Humans and Nature

As our narrative suggests, anthropologists are interested in the natural environment, the way humans have related to the natural world over time, and how this relationship shapes various cultures. Anthropologists consider how people in different cultures understand and use the various elements of nature, including land, water, plants, animals, climate, and space. They show how people interact with these elements of nature in complex ways.

The Four-Field Approach: Four Approaches within the Guiding Narrative

Biological Anthropology

Biological anthropology focuses on the earliest processes in the biological and sociocultural development of human beings as well as the biological diversity of contemporary humans. In other words, biological anthropologists study the origins, evolution, and diversity of our species. Some biological anthropologists use genetic data to explore the global distribution of human traits such as blood type or the ability to digest dairy products. Some study fossils to learn how humans have evolved and migrated. Some study our closest animal relatives, the primates, in order to understand what biological and social traits humans share with primates and explore what makes humans unique in the animal world.

Archaeology

Archaeologists use artifacts and fossils to explore how environmental and historical conditions have produced a diversity of human cultures – the study of archaeology. Artifacts are objects made by human beings, such as tools or pottery. **Fossils** are the remains of organisms preserved in the environment. Archaeologists have developed careful methods of excavation, or removing fossils and artifacts from the ground, in order to learn as much as possible about how people lived in times before and after the development of writing. They are interested in how people met basic needs such as clothing and shelter, as well how they organized their societies in family groups, trade networks, and systems of leadership. Many archaeologists seek to understand how humans lived in relation to the natural world around them, altering the environment at the same time that the environment was shaping their evolution and social development.

Cultural Anthropology

Cultural anthropology is devoted to describing and understanding the wide variety of cultures referred to in anthropology’s central narrative. Cultural anthropologists explore the everyday thoughts, feelings, and actions of people in different cultures as well as the cultural and historical events that they consider important. Examining social discourse and action, cultural anthropologists seek to understand unspoken norms and values as well as larger forces such as economic change and political domination. Cultural anthropologists also study how different societies are structured, including the roles and institutions that organize social life.

Linguistic Anthropology

As you might guess, linguistic anthropology focuses on language. Linguistic anthropologists view language as a primary means by which humans create their diverse cultures. Language combines biological and social elements. Some linguistic anthropologists study the origins of language, asking how language emerged in our biological evolution and sociocultural development and what aspects of language might have given early hominins an evolutionary advantage. Other linguistic anthropologists are interested in how language shapes our thinking processes and our views of the world. In addition to its cognitive aspects, language is a powerful tool for getting things done. Linguistic anthropologists also study how people use language to form communities and identities, assert power, and resist authority.

How the Four Fields Work Together: The Example of Race

With their unique methods and emphases, the four fields of anthropology may seem like completely different disciplines. It’s true that anthropologists from the four fields don’t always agree on the best approach to sociocultural enquiry. Biological anthropologists often see themselves as “hard” scientists committed to studying humanity through the scientific method. Cultural anthropologists rely on the “softer” methods of observation, participation, and interviews. Someone who studies the genetic distribution of blood types and someone who studies an addiction treatment program may have a difficult time finding common ground.

Overcoming Ethnocentrism

Enculturation and Ethnocentrism

We are all brought up in a particular culture with particular norms and values and ways of doing things. Our parents or guardians teach us how to behave in social situations, how to take care of our bodies, how to lead a good life, and what we should value and think about. Our teachers, religious leaders, and bosses give us instruction about our roles, responsibilities, and relationships in life. By the time we are in our late teens or early twenties, we know a great deal about how our society works and our role in that society.

Primitivism and Orientalism

Since the 18th century, views of Africans and Native Americans have been shaped by the obscuring lens of primitivism. Identifying themselves as enlightened and civilized, Europeans came to define Africans as ignorant savages, intellectually inferior and culturally backward. Nineteenth-century explorers such as Henry M. Stanley described Africa as “the dark continent,” a place of wildness and depravity (Stanley 1878). Similarly, European missionaries viewed Africans as simple heathens, steeped in sin and needing Christian redemption. Elaborated in the writings of travelers and traders, primitivism depicts Africans and Native Americans as exotic, simple, highly sexual, potentially violent, and closer to nature. Though both African and Native American societies of the time were highly organized and well-structured, Europeans often viewed them as chaotic and violent. An alternative version of primitivism depicts Africans and Native Americans as “noble savages,” innocent and simple, living in peaceful communities in harmony with nature. While less overtly insulting, the “noble savage” version of primitivism is still a racist stereotype, reinforcing the notion that non-Western peoples are ignorant, backward, and isolated.

Western Bias in Our Assumptions about Humanity

Primitivism and Orientalism in Popular Culture

Think for a minute about the last time you saw an image of an African person. Was it, perhaps, an image of wide-eyed girl in tattered clothing in an advertisement from a development agency requesting a charitable donation? Or maybe it was a news media photograph of a child soldier wielding an AK-47 in a conflict zone in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or another African country. Africa is still popularly represented as a dark place full of deprivation and crisis. Africans are frequently infantilized as simple children who need the support and tutelage of White Western helpers. But isn’t it true, you may say, that poverty and violent conflicts are widespread in Africa? Isn’t the representation accurate to some degree?

The Bias of Backwardness

Common to both primitivism and orientalism is the notion that European and Euro-American cultures are more advanced and civilized than other cultures. Since at least the 19th century, Euro-American thinking has been dominated by the idea that the various cultures of the world can be evaluated on a scale of sociocultural sophistication from least advanced to most advanced. Typically, Native American and African cultures were considered the most primitive, while those of Asia and the Middle East were thought of as slightly more developed but certainly not as civilized as the societies of Europe, which were ranked at the top as the epitome of human progress.

Holism, Anthropology’s Distinctive Approach

Society as an Integrated Whole

Throughout the 2010s, infant death rates in certain rural areas in Africa decreased dramatically. While thrilled with this positive trend, researchers did not initially know how to explain it. Were mothers and fathers doing something different to promote the health of their babies? Were African governments providing better health services for infants? Were aid agencies providing more resources? None of these things seemed to be true in any significant way.

Sources of Contradiction, Conflict, and Change

Holistic analysis considers not only how the various features of culture hold together but also how change in one feature can generate cascading changes among others. Often, anthropologists begin their analysis by focusing on one significant change in the lives of a particular cultural group and then chart the ramifications of that change through various other realms of culture.

Cross-Cultural Comparison and Cultural Relativism

Relativism Is *Not* “Anything Goes”

Critics of the notion of relativism, believing so strongly in their own cultural norms that they cannot set them aside, even temporarily. They argue that relativism is amoral, a refusal to condemn aspects of culture considered to be wrong and harmful. For them, relativism means “anything goes.”

Morality, Activism, and Cultural Relativism

A striking example of the application of cultural relativism in anthropology is the controversy surrounding female genital cutting (FGC), sometimes called female genital mutilation. FGC is a cultural practice in which an elder cuts a younger woman’s genitalia, removing all or part of the clitoris and labia. The practice is common in parts of Africa and the Middle East. FGC is not only extremely painful; it can also lead to infection, urination problems, infertility, and complications in childbirth.

Reaching for an Insider’s Point of View

The Challenge of Representing Others

The anthropological goal of representing an insider’s point of view is controversial. Is it truly possible to step outside your own identity to really understand a different perspective? How can a researcher from a particular culture possibly understand exactly how it feels to be a member of another culture? Even anthropologists who study their own cultures may find themselves researching people from different classes, ethnicities, or gender categories. Is it possible to accurately represent the perspectives of people whose lives are so different from your own? Is it ethical? Is it valuable?

Collaborative Methods of Representation

Faced with the challenges of representation, many anthropologists practice methods of collaboration with the individuals and groups that they study. Collaborative ethnography has a very long history in cultural anthropology, traceable all the way back to early Euro-American ethnographies of Native Americans. Often, anthropologists began their research by employing a local person as a translator or field assistant, a role that usually evolved into something much more cooperative.

Working across Cultures toward Common Goals

Stepping back for a moment, consider the problems facing us as humans on our shared planet. Climate change threatens the survival of humanity and the biodiversity of plants and animals. Forms of deeply entrenched inequality fuel racial, ethnic, and class conflicts within and between nations. These are global problems, transnational problems, cross-cultural problems. Human beings need to find a way to communicate and cooperate across the sociocultural boundaries that divide us, always recognizing the power dynamics involved in that process.

Methods: Cultural and Archaeological

Introduction

Archaeological Research Methods

Archaeological Techniques

In archaeology, the first step in conducting field research is to do a survey of an area that has the potential to reveal surface artifacts or cultural debris. Surveys can be done by simply walking across a field, or they may involve using various technologies, such as drones or Google Earth, to search for unusual topography and potential structures that would be difficult to see from the ground. Cultural artifacts that are found may become the basis for an archaeological excavation of the site. A random sampling of excavation units or test pits can determine a site’s potential based on the quantity of cultural materials found. GPS coordinates are often collected for each piece of cultural debris, along with notes on specific plants and animal found at the site, which can be indicators of potential natural resources. Features such as trails, roads, and house pits are documented and included in a full set of field notes. Government agencies have different protocols about what constitutes an archaeological site; the standard in many areas is six cultural objects found in close proximity to one another.

Archaeological Dating Methods

Establishing the age of cultural objects is an important element of archaeological research. Determining the age of both a site and the artifacts found within is key to understanding how human cultures developed and changed over time. Other areas of science, such as paleontology and geology, also use dating techniques to understand animal and plant species in the ancient past and how the earth and animal species evolved over time.

Conservation and Naturalism

Early Efforts

The conservation movement began in the 19th century as people in Europe and America began to realize that human settlement and the exploitation of the world’s natural resources had led to the destruction or endangerment of numerous animals, plants, and significant environments. Efforts began in the 1860s to understand and protect the remaining natural landscapes and habitats. These efforts were partly motivated by concern for wildlife and natural areas. However, also significant were the concerns of sporting organizations and recreationists. The primary aim of early conservation efforts was to preserve significant natural ecosystems for parks or wilderness areas so that sportspeople and outdoor enthusiasts would have places to hunt, fish, and explore. Many areas preserved by these early efforts are still protected today, such as Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks in the United States.

Salvage Anthropology

Connected to the collecting of Indigenous artifacts is a practice known as salvage anthropology. Salvage anthropology was an effort to collect the material culture of Indigenous peoples in the United States and other parts of the world who were believed to be going extinct in the later 19th century. During this period, many anthropologists dedicated themselves to collecting material objects, stories, language lists, and ethnographies from tribal peoples worldwide. Many collections were made through legitimate means, such as purchasing objects or sitting down with collaborators (called *informants* in older anthropological vernacular) to record traditional stories, but some collecting involved the theft of tribal cultural items or purchases from intermediary traders.

Museum Collections

Most of the materials collected by anthropologists during the period of salvage anthropology ended up in museums and university archives. Many natural history museums now display large dioramas featuring the material objects of numerous tribes. Museum research libraries house extensive collections of manuscripts and ethnographies. Archaeologists have contributed to these collections as well; many museums contain large collections of human remains. Indigenous peoples have criticized these collections, especially the gathering of human remains, which is seen as sacrilegious. Today, there are millions of sets of human remains (some full skeletons, but most single bones) in museum repositories that have never been studied and perhaps never will be.

Interpretation and Voice

There is increasing acknowledgement of the role of interpretation in the study of the human past. Although ideally grounded in well-conducted research and the best evidence available at the time, all conclusions about what might have been are based on the interpretations proposed by the authors of history. The backgrounds and viewpoints of those conducting research and publicizing findings play a significant role in the conclusions they reach and share with other scholars. Interpretation and perspective are affected by many factors, including racial category, nationality, religious beliefs, social status, political affiliation, ambitions, and education. For many years, anthropological studies were almost always conducted by White, male scholars who grew up in the Northern Hemisphere and were educated in the same system. These common backgrounds represent a significant interpretive bias.

Ethnography and Ethnology

The Development of Ethnography and Ethnology

As discussed in What is Anthropology? ethnography is a method used by cultural anthropologists to create a description of a culture or society. Ethnographers gather and utilize information from many sources, such as fieldwork, museum collections, government records, and archaeological data. In the 19th century, a form of ethnography developed that was called armchair anthropology, in which theories about human societies and human behaviors were proposed solely based on secondhand information. Lewis Henry Morgan is a well-known practitioner of this type of research. The content of his most famous publication, *League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois* (1851), was gathered primarily from other books he read. Morgan did meet with Native peoples at various times in his career, but he did not conduct ethnographic research among the Iroquois before writing *League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois*.

Perspective and Interpretation in Ethnography

Ethnography is still commonly used by cultural anthropologists. Practitioners today consult multiple informants during their research in order to gather a variety of perspectives on a culture or society. No one person has a full or authoritative view of their own culture; multiple viewpoints are essential to a full description. Many early anthropological studies only invited male perspectives, introducing a male bias into the resulting ethnographies. Now, anthropologists deliberately seek varied perspectives, consulting people of different genders and ages and who occupy different roles.

Participant Observation and Interviewing

Participant Observation

Working in the field often places anthropologists in settings very different from what they are familiar with. Upon first arriving at an unfamiliar field location, it is common for anthropologists to feel out of place and uncomfortable as they adjust to a new culture and environment. Many anthropologists keep a daily log of their feeling and impressions in their new environment. Researchers studying other cultures practice a method called participant observation, which entails directly participating in the activities and events of a host culture and keeping records of observations about these activities.

Interviewing Informants

An important source of information about a culture is interviews with various people who grew up in that culture. Interviews can be uncomfortable for people, and it is important that researchers do all they can to help subjects feel at ease. Researchers will normally conduct an interview in a familiar space for the informant, such as the informant’s home. They will help the subject ease into the interview by participating in introductory and hosting protocols followed in that culture when a visitor comes to someone’s home. The researcher will start off the interview with the exchange of pleasant comments and will introduce themselves by explaining who they are, where they come from, and why they are doing this research. Then the interview may commence.

Ethical Considerations

Contemporary sociocultural researchers and anthropologists must follow protocols established by an institutional review board (IRB) as well as any research protocols specific to the culture being researched. For social science research, IRBs are committees housed within a university that must review and approve research plans before any research begins. There may also be a parallel review process within the host culture. The proposed research is normally fully planned out before the review process can begin, with specific information about the type of research that will be conducted, including examples of questions to be asked, potential risk factors to subjects, plans for emotional support for subjects, means of protecting the identity of subjects, language used to fully disclose the intent of the project to subjects, and the final plan for archiving the research data. Many Indigenous nations have their own research protocols, and foreign countries will have their own research protocols and processes for securing permission to conduct research as well.

Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis

Differences between Quantitative and Qualitative Information

Quantitative information is measurable or countable data that can provide insight into research questions. Quantitative information is one of the most direct ways to understand limited, specific questions, such as how often people in a culture perform a certain action or how many times an art form or motif appears in a cultural artifact. Statistics created from quantitative data help researchers understand trends and changes over time. Counts of cultural remains, such as the number and distribution of animal remains found at a campsite, can show how much the campsite was used and what type of animal was being hunted. Statistical comparisons may be made of several different sites that Indigenous peoples used to process food in order to determine the primary purpose of each site.

Modeling

Many anthropologists create models to help others visualize and understand their research findings. Models help people understand the relationships between various points of data and can include qualitative elements as well. One very familiar model is a map. Maps are constructed from many thousands of data points projected onto a flat surface to help people understand distances and relationships. Maps are typically two-dimensional, but we are of course all familiar with the three-dimensional version of a world map known as a globe. Maps and globes are built on data points, but they also include qualitative information, such as the colors used to represent various features and the human-assigned names of various geographical features. Other familiar types of models include graphs, calendars, timelines, and charts. GPS is also a significant modeling tool today.

The Science of Anthropology

Anthropology is a science, and as such, anthropologists follow the scientific method. First, an anthropologist forms a research question based on some phenomenon they have encountered. They then construct a testable hypothesis based on their question. To test their hypothesis, they gather data and information. Information can come from one or many sources and can be either quantitative or qualitative in nature. Part of the evaluation might include statistical analyses of the data. The anthropologist then draws a conclusion. Conclusions are rarely 100 percent positive or 100 percent negative; generally, the results are somewhere on a continuum. Most conclusions to the positive will be stated as “likely” to be true. Scholars may also develop methods of testing and retesting their conclusions to make sure that what they think is true is proven true through various means. When a hypothesis is rigorously tested and the results conform with empirical observations of the world, then a theory is considered “likely to be accurate.” Hypotheses are always subject to being disproven or modified as more information is collected.

Collections

Archives

Archival collections contain published, re-created, or original manuscripts that are deemed significant enough to be placed in conditions designed to preserve them against damage or loss. Such collections may contain correspondence, maps, drawings, original drafts of books, rare books, or other papers and media that need special care. Photographs are a major resource in many archives, and they need special handling. Preservation policies of archival collections include practices such as keeping resources out of direct sunlight and away from moisture.

Three-Dimensional Collections

Three-dimensional collections of objects such as basketry and pottery are normally housed separately from manuscript collections. Such collections may host tens of thousands of individual cultural objects. These collections typically require much more care and management than manuscript materials. Extensive planning goes into determining the best way to contain and store each type of object in order to slow deterioration over time, with special attention paid to both the temperature and the moisture levels in storage areas. Handwoven baskets will be supported so that their fibers are not under stress, and all organic objects will have been previously frozen, perhaps several times, to destroy any insects that may live in the fibers. Collections of animal and human remains utilized by biological anthropologists or archaeologists must be properly stored and controlled against further degradation by reducing temperatures and maintaining moisture controls. Some very ancient organic collections may need to be chemically stabilized so they do not degrade. Objects made from organic materials—such as wooden canoes, basketry, reed sandals, or human remains—are particularly prone to degradation. Organic artifacts that have been sealed away from contact with the air for centuries, such as boats found on the bottom of a river or lake, will degrade fast once exposed to the air, so they may be kept permanently frozen or preserved with an ammonium glycol solution to stabilize decay.

Ownership

A question being asked by both anthropologists and subjects of research today is who owns the objects housed in material collections. In the past, anthropologists or their host institutions assumed ownership of anything they collected, along with the right to publish images of materials and sign over ownership of the objects to collections repositories. In recent decades, tribal peoples and other subjects of research have begun asking questions about whether such objects really should be considered the property of these repositories. Many of these artifacts were not even collected by scientists but rather donated or sold by collectors, some of whom removed the artifacts from burial sites. Artifact hunting is a common cultural practice in some countries, such as Peru, where many people dig in Inca sites to locate artifacts to sell.

Culture Concept Theory: Theories of Cultural Change

Introduction

The Homeyness of Culture

The Winkiness of Culture

The Elements of Culture

Culture Is What We Make

Museums are buildings where objects of historical, artistic, scientific, or cultural interest are displayed. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian has one of the world’s largest collections of Native artifacts, including many two- and three-dimensional objects such as baskets, pottery, and preserved specimens representative of the lives of Native populations from all areas of the country.

Culture Is What We Do

Ahmed is a carpet seller in the Istanbul Grand Bazaar. Every day, people from all over the world come into his stall to examine, and sometimes buy, the carpets in his inventory. Anthropologist Patricia Scalco (2019) met Ahmed while she was conducting research on market exchange in Istanbul. She carefully observed the set of sales strategies he had crafted to respond to customer desires and knowledge. When anyone pauses at the entrance, Ahmed greets the potential customer and ushers the person into his stall. Bringing out a silver platter, Ahmed offers the customer a cup of tea, a welcoming gesture. As the customer browses, Ahmed initiates a carefully constructed conversation designed to determine what sort of person this customer is, what they are looking for, and what they really know (and do not know) about carpets. He pulls out various carpets from the stacks, unfurling them as he describes their distinctive qualities. Ahmed identifies this interaction as a sort of game he must play with his customers. European tourists in this Turkish marketplace are often inspired by the desire for handmade traditional crafts made by local rural ethnic groups such as the Kurds. These days, however, most carpets sold in the Istanbul market are industrially produced in Pakistan, India, and China. However, in his many years of selling carpets, Ahmed has learned that he must play to Western orientalist fantasies, weaving a distinctive story around the origins and manufacture of a carpet, in order to win a sale. Like other merchants in this market, Ahmed has a family to support, and he cannot afford to openly contradict the knowledge and desires of his customers.

Culture Is What We Think

Imagine that you are walking down the street and you see a building. You notice a mailbox next to a driveway. You follow a little walkway lined with flowers to a front door. Below your feet, you find a mat that says, “Welcome!” Peering through a window, you see a central room where two people are sitting on a couch, eating chips, and watching television. Off to the side, there’s a hallway. You can barely see the stockinged feet of a small person resting on a bed. A dog barks.

The Aggregates of Culture

Symbols

A symbol is an object, image, gesture, vocalization, or event conventionally associated with a particular meaning. anthropologist Jennifer Hasty was conducting fieldwork in Ghana during an election year, she noticed that the posters and pamphlets of one politician featured a broom. Confused, she asked a friend why a male politician would choose a humble domestic tool associated with women’s work as his political motif. Making a sweeping motion with her hands, she explained, “Because he is promising to sweep away all the corruption.” Turns out, he was the not the first to use this symbol. Over time, the broom has come to acquire political meaning as a symbolic anti-corruption tool in Ghana.

Ritual

Combining objects, actions, and meanings, ritual is a special kind of repeated, patterned action conventionally associated with a particular meaning. Rituals incorporate symbols and roles along with routinized activities such as gestures, music, and movement. Many rituals are performed by specialists in group settings to accomplish specific group or individual goals. Rituals bring together symbols, practices, and worldviews.

Social Structure

The way a society is formally organized is called social structure. Typically, a society organizes a set of routine activities and objects in space and time to accomplish a particular function, such as community decision-making, the production and circulation of goods, or religious observance. Social structure is the framework for those realms, designating when, where, how, and by whom these functions are accomplished. Social structures combine material culture (such as buildings) with practices (such as meetings) and ideas (such as the rules and procedures of those meetings).

Modes of Cultural Analysis

Evolution, Adaptation, and Historical Particularism

Some anthropologists are interested in the origins of human cultural forms and how these forms have changed over long periods of time. Just as Charles Darwin applied the notion of evolution to explain how biological species change over time, many 19th-century anthropologists used evolution to explain how cultures changed over time. This approach is called cultural evolutionism. Like Darwin, these anthropologists believed that simple forms evolved into more complex forms. Comparing different cultures of the world, they assigned the ones they considered more rudimentary to earlier evolutionary stages, while the ones they considered more complex were assigned to the more advanced stages. For example, British anthropologist Edward Tylor argued that human culture evolved from savagery through barbarism to civilization. He identified savagery with people who used gathering and hunting to meet their basic needs. The domestication of animals and plants was associated with barbarism. Civilization resulted from more advanced forms of farming, trade, and manufacturing as well as the development of the alphabet. Not surprisingly, British scholars identified their own culture as highly civilized.

Functionalism

Rejecting the comparative unilineal models that assigned each culture to an evolutionary stage, a number of cultural anthropologists developed a radically different approach that attempts to understand each contemporary culture in its own terms. Functionalism seeks to understand the purpose of the elements and aggregates of culture in the here and now.

Structuralism

In the previous paragraph, you learned about structural functionalism, an approach that marries functionalism with social structure. In a different sense, the term *structure* can refer to patterns of thought embedded in the culture of a people—that is, conceptual structure. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss pioneered this approach, sometimes called French structuralism. Lévi-Strauss considered culture to be a system of symbols that could be analyzed in the various realms of culture, including myths, religion, and kinship. In these realms of culture, objects and people are organized into symbolic systems of classification, often structured around binary oppositions. Binary oppositions are pairs of terms that are opposite in meaning, such as light/dark, female/male, and good/evil. For example, kinship systems are varied and complex, but they are fundamentally structured by oppositions such as male versus female, older versus younger, and relation by blood versus relation by marriage. Lévi-Strauss examined myths as well, showing how the characters and plots emphasize binary oppositions. Consider the many European folktales featuring an evil stepmother (Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty), a character that combines the opposition of good versus evil with the opposition of blood relation versus relation by marriage. Lévi-Strauss argued that myths operate as public arenas for conceptually pondering and processing the fundamental categories and relations of a culture.

Ontology

In recent decades, some cultural anthropologists have come to focus on the nature of reality, including but not limited to human perspectives and experiences. Ontology is the study of the true nature of existence. In some cultures, for instance, the social world consists not only of embodied persons but also of spirit beings, such as ancestors and witches, who interact with people in mysterious ways. And in some cultures, people are not just bodies but assemblages that include souls, spirits, characters, or fates. Ontological anthropology explores how culture constructs our social and natural realities, what we consider real, and how we act on those assumptions. Reaching beyond human realities, ontological anthropology also attempts to include nonhuman perspectives, relationships, and forms of communication.

The Paradoxes of Culture

Paradox 1: Culture Is Continuous, but It Changes

Cultural materials, practices, and ideas are handed down from older to younger members of a culture, giving some degree of continuity to culture over time. However, many factors can intervene in this process of cultural reproduction to subtly alter or dramatically change the elements and aggregates of culture. In some contexts, younger people either fail to precisely learn the culture of their elders or deliberately reject those cultural lessons. Through travel and trade, people learn about other ways of doing things, and they take these ideas back to their own cultures, trying them out to see how they might improve their own ways of life. Accidents and deliberate experimentation introduce new possibilities. People may simply get tired of doing things one way over and over and thrill at some refreshing style or craze.

Paradox 2: Culture Is Bounded but Mobile

Because many elements of culture are shaped by environmental forces, trading opportunities, and local histories of settlement, culture becomes associated with territory. But because of the mobility of people, objects, and ideas, culture rarely stays within the boundaries of any society; rather, it wanders restlessly along lines of travel, communication, conquest, and trade.

Paradox 3: Culture Is Consensual but Contested

In any society, people interact using a set of assumptions about the sorts of behavior and speech considered appropriate to certain people in certain situations. That is to say, culture is consensual; through their words and actions, people agree to a certain way of doing things. As discussed earlier in this chapter, culture includes conventionalized roles, behavioral norms, and shared ideas for framing situations.

Paradox 4: Culture Is Shared, but It Varies

The examples of *guanxi* and the geodesic dome both illustrate another paradox: how culture is widely yet unevenly shared among members of a group. Different members of and groups in a society have different perspectives on their shared culture—and different versions of that culture. Among elites, the use of Chinese *guanxi* (or American “networking”) might seem to be a more personal and trustworthy process for making things happen. But for people who lack access to elite networks, these cultural norms may seem to be an exclusive and unfair tool of class oppression.

Biological Evolution and Early Human Evidence

Introduction

What Is Biological Anthropology?

Looking to the Deep Past

Biological anthropology, also referred to as physical anthropology or evolutionary anthropology, is one of the four major subfields of anthropology. While the other subfields focus on current and relatively recent human cultures, biological anthropology looks to the deeper past, asking questions about what it means to be human by exploring where humans came from as a species. Biological anthropology comprises numerous areas of study: human biological variation, paleoanthropology (human and primate evolution), primatology (the study of nonhuman primates), bioarchaeology (the study of bones found at archaeological sites), and genetic anthropology (the application of molecular science to archaeological, historical, and linguistic evidence to reveal the history of ancient human origins and migration). Each of these areas of study contributes something to anthropologists’ understanding of current human physical characteristics and behaviors.

Exploring What It Means to Be Human

Studies of human biological variation evaluate the physical similarities and differences between human populations across both time and space. Differences in morphology include features such as height, jawline, eye sockets, and ear and nose shape and size. Biochemical differences account for variations in the sense of smell, mutations in the *CCR5* gene that offer resistance to HIV, and variations in skin pigmentation in response to levels of exposure to ultraviolet rays from the sun.

What’s in a Name? The Science of Taxonomy

Defining the Science of Taxonomy

Taxonomy is defined as the classification and naming of things. Taxonomy organizes things into groups based on predefined criteria. The criteria can be as simple as color or height or as complex as the presence or absence of a trait, gene, or behavior. Taxonomy is a critical component of biological anthropology because it helps anthropologists organize humans and their evolutionary ancestors both spatially (by location) and temporally (through time).

Defining a Species

While species is a word that most people are familiar with and comfortable using, just what determines a species is incredibly difficult to define. At the most basic level, a species comprises a group of organisms with shared characteristics that distinguish them from other groups. Most scientists distinguish a species based on behavior, genetics, and/or morphology. Species definitions are the basis for scientific names. The *common* name of a species, on the other hand, is usually based on general physical characteristics noted by a culture or local population. Common names are also referred to as folk taxonomy or ethnotaxonomy (classifications influenced by culture, etc.). There is a growing interest among anthropologists and the scientific community in preserving Indigenous classifications of the natural world and connecting them with scientific classifications.

It’s All in the Genes! The Foundation of Evolution

The Units of Life

Cells are the basic units of life in all organisms. They are the smallest entities that are capable of self-reproduction. There are two main types of cells: prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells, named for the types of organisms in which they occur. Prokaryotes are single-celled organisms, such as bacteria and archaea. Eukaryotes are more complex, multicellular organisms, such as plants and animals (including humans). One of the most important components of eukaryotic cells is the enclosed nucleus at the center of the cell; prokaryotic cells do not have this nucleus. The nucleus of a eukaryotic cell houses all of the genetic material, or DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), that controls cellular function. Normally, the DNA forms a long string within the nucleus.

Gregor Mendel and the Laws of Heredity

The true nature of inheritance was not really understood until the beginning of the 20th century, when the 19th-century work of Gregor Mendel, a Catholic priest from Slovakia, was rediscovered. While in college, Gregor Mendel was introduced to cell theory, which states that all organisms are composed of cells and that cells are the fundamental unit of all living things. Cell theory raised many questions in Mendel’s mind, including whether both parents contribute equally to the cells in their offspring. In 1854, Mendel began a series of experiments with pea plants to help resolve this question and better understand how traits are inherited from generation to generation.

Mendelian Inheritance in Humans

Mendel’s laws of inheritance also apply to humans. Indeed, the principles of segregation and independent assortment account for the transmission of certain human traits. Human blood type is one of the most familiar Mendelian traits. Blood type has three phenotypes—A, B, and O—based on three alleles of a single gene. If only the A allele or both the A and O alleles are present, the phenotype is A. If only the B allele or both the B and O alleles are present, the phenotype is B. If both A and B are present, the phenotype is AB. If neither A nor B is present, the phenotype is O. Note that O is recessive to both A and B, while A and B are codominant. Codominance means that instead of one allele masking the other, the products of both alleles are observed. Additional examples of Mendelian traits, or those controlled by a single gene, include Huntington’s disease, widow’s peak, cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, Tay-Sachs disease, hemophilia, and red-green color blindness. OMIM, or Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man, hosts an online database of almost 5,000 Mendelian human traits.

Evolution in Action: Past and Present

Early Evolutionists and the Fixity of Species

Evolution is defined as change in the allele frequency within a gene pool that can lead to changes in an organism’s morphology (form and structure) over time. Evolution involves the processes of mutation, natural selection, and speciation, which will be introduced in upcoming sections. Prior to the 19th century, the prevailing idea in Western thought was that nature was fixed and static; it was made by a supreme being in the form it currently appeared, and it did not change. Within this fixed natural system, living creatures were arranged within a set order that was considered to have been decreed by God, known as the great chain of being. This order featured God at the top, angels beneath God, and then humans. Below humans were various types of animals, followed by plants and minerals. This hierarchy was significant both because it placed some creatures above others and because it distinctly separated humans from the rest of the animal world.

Charles Darwin’s Role in Changing Views of the Natural World

Charles Darwin introduced a new way of seeing the world that was both highly criticized and acclaimed in the scientific community of his time. In spite of resistance by various segments of society, his theories of natural selection became the foundation of biological science. New knowledge pertaining to genetics and molecular science has strengthened Darwin’s theories rather than weakened them.

Understanding Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection

The theory of natural selection has five main components:

What Is a Primate?

What Is a Primate?

Primates—including human beings—are characterized by a number of distinct physical features that distinguish them from other mammals. These include

Primate Behavioral Variation

Anthropologists regularly ask, “What makes us human?” Comparative studies of humans with nonhuman primates help answer this question. Comparing the behavior of nonhuman primates and the behavior of human beings helps anthropologists identify what culture is and develop operational definitions for it. Without the comparative perspective provided by primatology, anthropologists would be missing an important piece of the puzzle of what makes humans human. Without primatology, anthropologists would not be able to fully understand humankind.

Explaining Primate Success

Why primates evolved as they did and how they filled and exploited the range of ecological niches they now fill are questions that have not yet been adequately addressed. Over the last century, various hypotheses have been raised to account for the evolution of primates and their unusual anatomical characteristics. These theories include the arboreal theory, the visual predation hypothesis, and the angiosperm theory.

Primate Classification and Taxonomy

Scientists generally classify the order Primates into two suborders: Strepsirrhini (prosimians) and Haplorrhini (tarsiers and anthropoids).

Origin of and Classification of Primates

Understanding Concepts of Time

Geologists divide deep history into time periods known as eras. Eras are generally based on the fossil life forms observed. The oldest of the geological eras is the Eoarchean, which began approximately four billion years ago. The majority of the fossil evidence that we have for primate evolution comes from the Cenozoic era—the current geological era, dating from 65 million year ago (MYA) to the present. The Cenozoic era is divided into a series of epochs. Each epoch is associated with specific forms of primates that evolved during that time period.

Fossils and Dating Methods

Biological anthropologists primarily, although not exclusively, study fossil artifacts. A fossil is any remainder of a plant or animal that has been preserved in the earth. Upon the death of an organism, its body slowly decomposes until all that remains are the teeth and the bones or a mere impression of the organism’s original form. Under most conditions, teeth and bones and impressions eventually deteriorate, too. However, occasionally conditions are favorable for preservation. Examples of favorable materials for fossil formation include volcanic ash, limestone, and mineralized groundwater. Scientists do not have fossils of everything that lived in the past, and in some cases, remains from only a few individuals of a species have been found. The fossil record is very incomplete. Robert Martin, a curator at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, estimates that there have been more than 6,000 primate species, while the remains of only 3 percent have been found. Fossils are very rare, but they are extremely informative about human biological evolution.

Making Sense of Fossils

An important part of understanding fossils is determining how old they might be and putting them in chronological order. In order to use a primate fossil to reconstruct the evolutionary history of primates, anthropologists must first be able to estimate approximately how old that specific fossil is. For some time, relative dating methods were the only methods available for dating fossils. Relative dating calculates the approximate age of a fossil in comparison to other fossil specimens. The last half century has seen important advances in absolute dating, including techniques that have made possible the dating of the earliest phases of primate evolution. Absolute dating calculates the actual biological age of a fossil in years within a range of years.

Relative Dating Techniques

Stratigraphy is the best-known and most commonly used method of relative dating. Stratigraphy is based on the observation that soil is deposited in successive layers, or strata. The oldest layers of soil (and any artifacts or fossils within them) will appear beneath more recent layers of soil (and any artifacts or fossils within them). In addition to using the location of layers of soil to date fossils deposited within these layers, biological anthropologists also sometimes make use of other items consistently found in a specific layer of the soil. These items are referred to as indicator artifacts because they help indicate the relative age of fossils and other artifacts. The best indicator artifacts are those that have a wide geographic distribution, are presence for a short period of geological time, and/or are from a species that underwent rapid evolutionary change. Different indicator artifacts have been used to ascertain relative age in different areas of the world. In Africa, elephants, pigs, and horses have been used to establish relative dates of different geological strata. The stratigraphy at Olduvai Gorge in East Africa, for example, was established based on fossil pigs. The various species of pig in successive strata are different and distinct, allowing paleoanthropologists to distinguish the strata based on the pig species found within them. Once the stratigraphy of an area is established, the relative ages of two different fossils in different sites can be determined by the associated indicator artifacts.

Absolute Dating Techniques

Many absolute dating methods are based on the rate of decay of a radioactive isotope. A radioactive isotope is a chemical element that dissipates excess energy by spontaneously emitting radiation. These emissions happen at known and stable rates. Once the rate of decay of a radioactive isotope is established, the age of a specimen containing that isotope can be estimated within a range of possible error.

Our Ancient Past: The Earliest Hominins

Walking on Two Feet

The term hominin refers to all species considered to be in direct lineage to humans, which include the genera *Homo, Australopithecus*, *Paranthropus*, and *Ardipithecus*. Hominids refers to all modern and extinct great apes, which include humans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans and their ancestors. These terms have been understood to represent different things over the years, but the definitions provided here are the most current. While all hominins may differ in varying ways from one another, they all share one anatomical behavioral complex: bipedal locomotion.

Miocene Hominids

The first hominid fossils appear in the late Miocene, 10 to 5 MYA. Sometime between 7 MYA and 4 MYA, hominids moved out of the trees and began to adapt more fully to a ground-based living niche. Unfortunately, the fossil evidence from this time period is extremely sparse, but new finds continue to be discovered.

Pliocene Hominins

The Pliocene epoch extended from 5 MYA to 1.8 MYA. Fossils from the Pliocene show evidence of the evolution of hominins that are clearly bipedal. They also show evidence of clear, albeit primitive, cultural behavior. Climatically, the Pliocene was colder than the preceding Miocene, which resulted in changing sea levels and an increase in ice at the poles, opening up some previously inaccessible areas. During this period, North and South America became connected through the Isthmus of Panama, and a land bridge across the Bering Strait appeared between Alaska and Siberia.

Landmarks and Questions

While the fossils discovered up to this point have provided a small window into the story of humanity’s past, they have also simultaneously raised numerous questions. Questions related to phylogenetic relationships and points of divergence are challenges for paleoanthropologists, who have only fragmentary fossil evidence to build hypotheses around. Nevertheless, the discoveries that have been made represent important landmarks in anthropologists’ understanding, providing clues that will lead to the next steps in the human journey.

The Genus Homo and the Emergence of Us

Introduction

Defining the Genus Homo

Putting *Homo* into Context

Before learning about the hominin species that make up the category genus *Homo*, it will be helpful to become familiar with the key archaeological time periods with which *Homo* is associated. The species and cultural developments mentioned below will be explored in greater detail in the sections that follow.

The Challenge of Defining the Genus *Homo*

The previous chapter introduced the australopithecines, who were diverse in their physical characteristics (gracile and robust), with large jaws and teeth and small brain size. A key characteristic shared by both the australopithecines and the genus *Homo* is bipedalism. The transition to bipedalism is linked with various anatomical changes, including longer legs, changes in spinal curvature, and the development of arches in the feet to conserve energy and increase balance when walking.

Tools and Brains: Homo habilis, Homo ergaster, and Homo erectus

The Toolmakers

Archeologists use the word *industry* to describe a classification or assemblage of stone tools. The Oldowan tool industry is the oldest known stone tool industry. It dates from around 2.5 to 1.5 MYA. Because there were several hominins in Africa during this time, it is unclear whether these tools were created and used by *H. habilis* or by *Paranthropus boisei*, or by both (Susman 1991). Oldowan tools are fairly crude and primitive in appearance, which can make it difficult to find and identify them in the field.

*Homo ergaster*

*Homo ergaster* is the first *Homo* that looks much like *H. sapiens*. A key difference between *H. ergaster* and earlier hominins is that *H. ergaster* exhibits substantially less sexual dimorphism in body size. *H. ergaster* males were only 20 percent larger than females. Likewise, modern human males are only 15 percent larger than females. This contrasts sharply with all other previous hominins, such as the australopithecines, in which males were 50 percent larger than females. It is well established that in mammals, significant dimorphism is associated with polygyny, and a lack of dimorphism is associated with a monogamous mating system. It has been suggested that the reduction in dimorphism seen in *H. ergaster* may indicate less male-male competition for access to females and perhaps a shift toward a monogamous mating system, with substantial parental investment in offspring.

*Homo erectus*: A Success Story

*Homo erectus* is the longest-surviving species in the genus *Homo*. For almost two million years, *H. erectus* existed and evolved. Also known as the “Upright Man” or Java Man, *H. erectus* was first found in Indonesia in 1891 by Eugene Dubois, a professor of anatomy at the University of Amsterdam. At a site called Trinil, he found a skull cap and a femur. He named the specimen *Pithecanthropus erectus*. The most current dates for *Homo erectus* are 1.2–1.6 million years ago. *H. erectus* exhibits a cranial capacity averaging 900 cc and several distinguishing characteristics. These characteristics include a slightly projecting nasal spine, shovel-shaped incisors, a nuchal crest (a ridge in the back of the skull that supported strong neck muscles), very thick skull bones, and pronounced brow ridges. They also had longer legs, evidence that they were utilizing energy much more efficiently when walking and becoming effective hunters. We also see a diminishing of the protruding jaw (or prognathism) that was so prominent in the australopithecines.

The *Homo ergaster* and *Homo erectus* Debate

There is great debate as to whether *Homo ergaster* and *Homo erectus* are one species or two. Some refer to *H. ergaster* as the “early” *H. erectus.* Their differences are largely geographical: *H. ergaster* is associated with Africa and *H. erectus* with Asia. Yet some researchers have concluded that *H. ergaster* and even *H. habilis* should be referred to as *H. erectus*. Whether to lump or split the diverse species in the genus *Homo* is an ongoing challenge in the scientific community. While there are some anatomical differences between *H. erectus* and *H. ergaster*, they are fairly minimal.

The Emergence of Us: The Archaic Homo

Defining the Archaic *Homo*

There is no universal consensus on what is included within the term “archaic *Homo*.” The term is used as an umbrella category encompassing all the diverse *Homo* species after *H. erectus*. Hominin species classified as archaic *Homo* typically have a brain size averaging 1,200 to 1,400 cc, which overlaps with the range of modern humans. Archaic *Homo* are distinguished from anatomically modern humans by the characteristics of a thick skull, prominent supraorbital ridges (brow ridges), and lack of a prominent chin. Archaic *Homo* are viewed as transitional between *H. erectus* and *H. sapiens* and display many overlapping and varied traits. It has been proposed that archaic *Homo* may have been the first species to use language, based on the size of their brains and the fairly large social groups they lived in. Archaic *Homo* species as presented here will be divided into two groups: the Early Archaic (800–250 KYA) and the Late Archaic (300–30 KYA).

Early Archaic *Homo*

Late Archaic *Homo*

Rethinking the Neanderthal

The Denisovans

The Denisovans, like *Homo naledi*, are archaic *Homo*. There are not a lot of specimens—just one finger bone, three teeth, some long bone fragments, a partial jawbone, and a parietal bone skull fragment. Because of this lack of evidence, very little is known of their anatomical features. Some of the specimens come from Denisova Cave in Siberia, Russia, and are dated to between 500,000 and 30,000 years ago. These dates are arrived at based on the few fossils that exist, inferences made from genetic studies, and sediment analysis. More recently another specimen was found on the Tibetan plateau. In 1980 a jaw and two teeth were uncovered in the Baishiya Karst Cave by a monk, but it wasn’t until 2010 that scientists were able to study the jaw. Dating placed the specimen at approximately 160,000 years ago. Protein analysis determined the jaw to be of Denisovan origin and from a member of a population who were most likely well adapted to living in high altitudes (Chen et al. 2019).

New *Homo* Genus Discovery *Homo longi,* or Dragon Man

Recently a new archaic *Homo* fossil surfaced in Harbin, China, dated to about 146,000 years ago (Ji et al. 2021). Given the name *H. longi*, it has also been called “Dragon man” as its origins were determined to be in the province of the Black Dragon River. The fossil (referred to as the Harbin cranium) was donated to the Hebei GEO University museum after being hidden away in a well in the 1930s during the construction of a railway bridge. The verdict is still out as to whether *H. longi* represents a lineage of the Denisovans or a new species, but it is clear it was robust and able to adapt to one of the coldest regions of China. It had a large brain, thick brow ridges, and fairly large teeth, similar to what is found in the Denisovans.

Regional Evolutionary Adaptations: *Homo floresiensis*

The Emergence of Us: *Homo sapiens*

Modern *H. sapiens* first appeared about 200,000 years ago in Africa. Anthropologists generally classify these people as “anatomically modern *H. sapiens*,” which is a way of noting that while their bodies are the same as modern humans, they had not yet developed the cultural traditions, symbolic behaviors, and technologies that are seen among later *H. sapiens,* including people of today. Probably the most defining feature of anatomically modern *H. sapiens* is their chin. Modern *H. sapiens* is the first hominin to exhibit a projecting chin. One of the most common explanations for this anatomical feature is that the chin evolved in response to human speech and protects the jaw against stresses produced by the contraction of certain tongue muscles.

Tracking enomes: Our Human Story Unfolds

Mitochondrial Eve

Begun in 1990 and concluding in 2003, the Human Genome Project was an ambitious international effort that sequenced about 99 percent of the human genome with an accuracy of 99.99 percent. Genetics has thus far largely confirmed the Out of Africa theory, which proposes that early humans left Africa around 100,000 years ago and migrated to diverse areas of the world. When early humans left Africa and moved into Europe, they not only lived alongside but also interbred with non-African species such as the Neanderthal, who were already inhabiting the region.

How the Genome of Lice Can Fill in the Gaps

While perhaps not a pleasant thought, lice have long been a part of human history. Studying the coevolution relationship between humans and lice has shed much light on human story. Dr. David Reed, the Curator of Mammals and Associate Director of Research and Collections at the University of Florida Museum, has been studying the coevolution of humans and lice, an area of research that has developed only within the last 20 years. Reed’s groundbreaking research has the potential to fill in some big gaps in humans’ rather sketchy fossil record and provides important data that might have applications in medicine and biology. Two questions that this research has already begun to ask are when did we become less hairy and when did we start wearing clothes.

Natural Selection and Human Variation: Are Humans Still Evolving?

Human variability is attributed to a combination of environmental and genetic factors, including social status, ethnicity, age, nutrition, quality of life, access to healthcare, work and occupation, etc. As mentioned in Chapter 1, anthropology contributes many insights into both the social construct of race and the impacts racial categories have on people’s lives. The focus in this chapter is the role of natural selection in human variation.

Language and Communication

Introduction

The Emergence and Development of Language

Animal Communication

All animals communicate with each other and even with other species (Tallerman and Gibson 2011). Many use vocalizations like calls, growls, howls, and songs. Many also use gestures such as dances, postures, and facial expressions. Some change the color of their scales, skin, or fur. Some produce strong-smelling body fluids sprayed in their environment or rubbed on their own bodies. All of these activities are used to tell other animals about territory, food sources, predators, and mating opportunities.

A Waggle is Not a Word: The Complexity of Language

Consider the famous “waggle dance” of the honeybee. Upon finding a good source of nectar such as a grove of wildflowers, a worker bee returns to the hive and performs a special flight pattern consisting of a figure-eight waggle followed by a return loop alternating right and left. The direction and duration of the waggle communicate the direction and distance to the location of the desirable food source (Seeley 2010; Frisch 1993).

Simple Signs and Pant-Hoots: Language in Primates

Biological anthropologists posit that we share a common ancestor with the other great apes (gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans) about five to eight million years ago. As nonhuman primates do not produce language in the wild, the biological and cultural features that promoted language must have emerged after that. However, studies aimed at teaching human language to nonhuman primates have revealed that individuals of these species are able to master basic vocabulary and use simple words and word combinations to obtain the things they want. So the great apes must have some biological features that enable them to learn human language in a partial and limited way.

Human Biology and the Emergence of Language

There must be something special about us to make possible the distinctively flexible and open-ended communication system of language. Research has focused on our throats, our brains, and our genes, looking for the biological features that allowed for the emergence of language.

Hominin Material Culture

Evidence from the material culture of hominins such as *Homo habilis* and *Homo erectus* is also used to speculate about the emergence of human language. Early hominins developed stone tool technologies and created stunning works of art. The production and use of such tools and artwork must have required a complex set of social and cognitive abilities. Those same types of social and cognitive skills are important to human language. It is possible that language emerged as part of a whole complex of material culture.

Language and the Mind

Linguistic Relativism and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

As seen in previous chapters, it was lamentably common for scholars in the early 20th century to think of non-Western societies as backward and primitive, incapable of complex, abstract thought. Franz Boas worked hard to disprove these racist notions, seeking to demonstrate the equal sophistication of all peoples and cultures. Boas trained a student named Edward Sapir who was particularly interested in how non-Western languages conveyed forms of complex, abstract thought that were different from the Euro-American habits of thought. Sapir, in turn, trained a student named Benjamin Whorf who further elaborated on this theme in his own research (Ahearn 2017). The result is what we have come to call the “Sapir-Whorf” hypothesis.

Linguistic Universals and Folk Taxonomies

While linguistic relativists explore how different linguistic patterns shape different thought patterns (and vice versa), other linguists are interested in how all languages are constrained by our common human biology and in finding universal linguistic patterns. There are specific domains of language that lend themselves particularly well to this kind of inquiry. One of them is color. The reason for this is that color relies directly on our human visual system, invariant across cultures.

Meaning and Metaphor

How are you feeling today? Are you feeling *up* or feeling *down*? If you’re feeling *low*, try doing something fun to *lift your spirits*. Take care of yourself so you don’t *fall into a depression*.

Language, Community, and Culture

Language Acquisition and Language Socialization

Imagine that someone handed you a babbling baby and said to you, “Teach this baby the basic rules and values of our culture.” What would you do?

Performativity and Ritual

The Performativity of Language: Speaking as Action

Consider the following pairs of sentences. What are the differences between the two sentences in each case?

The Performativity of Ritual Language

Just as Malinowski studied the special language used in garden magic among the Trobrianders, many contemporary linguistic anthropologists study the role of performative language in various ritual settings. In a recent article, Patience Epps and Danilo Paiva Ramos examine the performance of incantations among the Indigenous Hup community of the northwest Amazon (Epps and Ramos 2020). An incantation is a patterned set of phrases or sentences used to compel a magical result. Among the Hup, incantations are used by elders for protection, healing, and causing harm. While Epps and Ramos were conducting fieldwork in the area, Hup elders expressed concerns that the young men in the village were not learning the repertoire of important incantations properly, thus endangering the health and safety of the community. The elders invited Epps and Ramos to write down their incantations for healing and protection in order to preserve them for future generations. Epps and Ramos documented and analyzed these incantations in consultation with Hup elders.

Informal Back-Talk: Teasing, Grumbling, and Gossip

Linguistic anthropologists most frequently rely on long periods of fieldwork, living in the communities they study and witnessing and even participating in ritual events where performative language is deployed. Such events include protection and healing magic, but also naming ceremonies, puberty rites, weddings, funerals, and other rituals that mark the passage of persons from one social status to another. Anthropologists term such rituals “rites of passage” (discussed in detail in Anthropology of Food). At such ritual events, elders or religious specialists are called upon to perform the ritual language necessary to publicly move persons from the previous category to the new one.

Language and Power

Gender and Language

In 2018, the word “mansplaining” was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The word is defined as “what occurs when a man talks condescendingly to someone (especially a woman) about something he has incomplete knowledge of, with the mistaken assumption that he knows more about it than the person he's talking to does” (“Words We’re Watching” 2018).

Race and Ethnicity

On many government forms, people are asked to identify their “race.” Forms in the United States often include five categories: Black, White, Asian, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander. The category “Hispanic or Latino” is often listed as an ethnicity rather than a race. On the 2020 U.S. Census, people were presented with 14 racial categories to choose from: White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Chinese, Filipino, Asian Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Other Asian, Native Hawai’ian, Samoan, Chamorro, and Other Pacific Islander. Again, “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish” was listed as a question of “origin.” Even with so many options, many Americans still could not find a category that represented their racial or ethnic identity.

Work, Life, and Value: Economic Anthropology

Introduction

Economies: Two Ways to Study Them

Modes of Subsistence

Gathering and Hunting

The Hadza: Gathering-Hunting as a Subsistence Strategy

The Hadza of northern Tanzania are a resilient example of the way of life of gathering-hunting peoples as well as the contemporary challenges facing such groups. Like most gathering-hunting peoples, the Hadza traditionally lived in seminomadic groups of 20 to 30 people, called bands. About one-third of contemporary Hadza still practice this way of life. Hadza bands settle temporarily to gather and hunt the resources of a particular area, then move on to other areas in seasonal migrations. Sometimes, groups agglomerate into camps of several hundred to take advantage of seasonal foods such as berries.

The Sociocultural Complex of Gathering and Hunting

Anthropologists have identified features of Hadza society as distinctive to gathering-hunting groups found all over the world. Groups such as the Martu and Pintupi in Australia, the Cuiva and Pumé in South America, the Paliyan and Kattunayakan in Asia, and the Inuit and Shoshone in North America have all constructed similar lifeways based on gathering and hunting (Lee 2018). The social features of this way of life include mobility, sexual division of labor, egalitarianism, and vast knowledge of their environments.

Contemporary Challenges to Gathering and Hunting Societies

Originally, all Hadza lived as foragers. In the early 20th century, the British colonial government attempted to convert them to farming and Christianity, but the Hadza successfully resisted. Since the 1950s, however, farmers and herders have claimed their territory, making the Hadza squatters on land they have occupied for millennia. The plants they rely on for food have been clear-cut to make way for the onion and sweet potato crops planted by farming groups. Hadza watering holes have been appropriated for irrigation. The Tanzanian government has responded with yet another attempt to settle the Hadza, building villages on their lands and attempting to convert them to farming. About two-thirds of all Hadza people now live part-time in these villages, where they receive donations of food from the government. They live in poverty on the land stolen from them by their farming and herding neighbors, who discriminate against them as troublesome primitives. Many Hadza now farm for part of the year and then leave their villages to engage in gathering-hunting for several months.

The Original Affluent Society: Comparing Ancient and Contemporary Foragers

In agricultural and industrial societies, people often assume that gathering-hunting peoples must live a hard life, oppressed by the struggle to find enough food and plagued by malnutrition and poor health. Archaeologists and cultural anthropologists who have studied gathering and hunting groups have found otherwise. Researchers have discovered that gatherer-hunters have stronger bones, lower blood pressure, and less heart disease than neighboring farmers, likely due to the amount of walking they do and the abundance of fruits, nuts, and vegetables in their diets (American Heart Association 2012; University of Cambridge 2014). In his ethnographic work among the Dobe Ju/’hoansi, anthropologist Richard Lee found that they worked on average three to four days a week obtaining food and spent the rest of their time socializing and enjoying life. He described the Dobe Ju/’hoansi as fit, healthy, and free of nutritional deficits (1993). Indeed, some Hadza have remarked that the notion of famine is unknown to their culture. While Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith has referred to the wealthy industrial economy of the United States as “the affluent society,” anthropologist Marshall Sahlins describes the gathering and hunting lifestyle as “the original affluent society.”

Pastoralism

The Bedouin: Flexible Pastoralism

Across the dry grasslands of Arabia and northern Africa live about three million Arab peoples collectively known as the Bedouin. Before the 20th century, Bedouin peoples made their living primarily by herding camels, sheep, goats, and cattle. Many still do, although they often cultivate crops or work as wage laborers as well. Among those Bedouin still devoted to herding, most specialize in one or two herd animals particularly suited to the climate and available pastures in their environment. In areas around Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, sheep and goats are preferred, while cattle are kept by Bedouin groups in southern Arabia and Sudan. In very dry regions such as the Sahara and the Arabian Deserts, Bedouin groups herd camels, hardy animals with scant need for water. Camels are valued as transport but also for their high-quality milk and tasty meat. Camel herding, though a prized tradition, is becoming increasingly rare among Bedouin. Bedouin supplement their camels’ diet with feed, and many have been forced to sell off their camels as the price of feed rises. Since the 1960s, trucks and cars have replaced camels as a means of transportation for the Bedouin, sometimes used to bring food and water to herds in arid regions.

The Sociocultural Complex of Pastoralism

As with gathering-hunting, the subsistence mode of pastoralism is coordinated with particular sociocultural features. First and foremost, these are cultures that revolve around herd animals. All aspects of culture are shaped by a preoccupation with herds. The size of a family’s herds is a measure of wealth and social status. Animals are used for meat, milk, blood, cloth, and leather. Animals are gifted to cement social relationships such as marriage and slaughtered to commemorate special occasions or the visit of an honored guest. Animals are passed down from fathers to children, establishing the social position and durability of families. Many pastoralist societies have vibrant traditions of music and oral poetry celebrating their animals and their herding lifestyle.

Contemporary Challenges to Pastoralism

Like many pastoralists, the Bedouin require large tracts of land to continually provide fresh grazing for their herds. Families are associated with defined territories and rarely go beyond them. The nation-states that encompass Bedouin territories do not recognize their right to ownership, however, and consider those lands state-owned. Eager to control this land, governments have asserted various policies to settle the Bedouin, providing schools and health clinics in order to lure them away from their nomadic pastoral lifestyle.

Plant Cultivation: Horticulture and Agriculture

Two Methods of Cultivation: Extensive Horticulture and Intensive Agriculture

The first form of farming that humans developed is known as extensive horticulture. Before a plot of land can be cultivated for the first time, the trees and vegetation must be cleared away, an arduous task usually done by men. Sometimes, a strategy called slash and burn is used, which involves cutting down the trees and shrubs and burning the rest to the ground, then tilling the ash into the soil as fertilizer. Using digging sticks and hoes, horticultural farmers cultivate the top layer of soil before they sow. As seedlings sprout, they water them and feed them with natural fertilizers such as animal dung, and they weed the gardens regularly.

The Kayapó: Flexible Horticulture

In the eastern Amazonian rainforest, beside the Xingu River, live a group of people known by their neighbors as the Kayapó. Mixing slash-and-burn horticulture with gathering and hunting and some animal domestication, the Kayapó have created an ingenious and flexible way of life that carefully cultivates the resources of the rainforest, savanna, and intermediate zones (Posey 2002).

The Sociocultural Complex of Plant Cultivation

As with the Kayapó, horticulture is often combined with gathering and hunting and even pastoralism to form a flexible, sustainable, and highly successful subsistence strategy. Many societies practicing intensive agriculture also forage and keep animals on the side, although they spend much less time gathering and hunting. As they come to rely more and more on their crops, farming peoples settle down to form permanent villages. Frequently, as with the Kayapó, those villages consist of extended-family houses with a central area for public meetings. Most villages consist of several extended families, each with its own family leader or set of elders. As agricultural methods intensify, it becomes necessary for families to cooperate in the development of irrigation schemes, trade networks, and the allocation and protection of land. Forms of community leadership and group decision-making emerge to organize these activities. Those political forms will be discussed in the next chapter.

Contemporary Challenges of Farming Societies

Communities relying primarily on extensive horticulture or intensive agriculture are generally able to meet their own subsistence needs. However, with the development of cities into regional empires, many cultivators became incorporated into larger structures of trade and government. Under pressure from these structures, farmers past and present were and are obliged to sell their surplus for cash in order to pay taxes and purchase agricultural inputs such as seed and fertilizer. As cities and states grow, they exert pressure on cultivators to produce ever higher yields to support greater populations and more elaborate state projects. As cultivators become incorporated into demanding states, they become a class of peasants. A peasant is a farmer with a small plot of land incorporated into a larger regional economy. Nearly all contemporary cultivators are part of a peasant class in their nation-states (Sillitoe 2018). Peasants are often marginalized and disadvantaged, reliant on economic and political structures they cannot control, and exploited by urban elites. Many farmers now make up a rural underclass.

Exchange, Value, and Consumption

Forms of Exchange

Recall the importance of egalitarian sharing in gatherer-hunter societies. When hunters return to camp bearing large game, they divide it equally among members of the band. When gatherers bring back loads of nuts or fruit, they hand them out freely to anyone who is hungry. Everyone is expected and required to share with everyone else. Generalized reciprocity is the anthropological term to describe how people share things with no regard for their value or interest in compensation. This form of exchange doesn’t look like exchange at all; it looks much more like altruism. But when rigorously practiced by a group, with social sanctions used to punish laziness and stinginess, the result of generalized reciprocity over time is more or less the equal exchange of goods among all members of the group.

Money

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, many shops witnessed a scarcity of hard currency, prompting them to put up signs requesting people to use credit or debit cards or mobile payment apps to make purchases. This episode is part of a larger shift over the past several decades away from coins and bills and toward more abstract forms of payment such as chip cards and “fintech,” the mobile debit apps accessed through smartphones. And even more abstractly, now there are even virtual currencies such as bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is a currency generated by a computer dedicated to solving complex mathematical problems. How is that even money?

Industrialism and Postmodernity

Cloth, Factories, and Slavery: The Rise of Industrialism

In the early 1700s, small-scale sheepherders were producing raw wool throughout the British countryside. As large-scale cloth manufacturing was limited in England at the time, traders exported much of that raw wool to European countries such as the Netherlands, where it was processed into cloth. A general rule in economics is that selling raw materials is not nearly as profitable as processing them into commodities to sell to consumers. Envious of European textile processing, British manufacturers sought to greatly expand local processing of British wool into cloth for export. As British manufacturers bought more and more wool, the price of wool skyrocketed. Large British landholders began to evict small-scale peasants from their land so that they could expand their own sheep herds to take advantage of the rising price of wool.

Colonialism and Global Capitalism

A second reason for providing the brief history lesson in the last section is to show how the development of the industrial economy in Europe generated the global system of capitalism that exists today. After the European slave trade was abolished in the early 19th century, Europeans expanded their control over African, Asian, and New World territories, cultivating new sources of such raw materials as peanuts, cocoa, and palm oil to develop even more lucrative European industries. This expansion of control took the form of colonialism, the political domination of another country in the interest of economic exploitation.

Modernity, the Sociocultural Complex of Industrial Societies

What happens when a country industrializes? Anthropologists have been interested in how processes of industrialism have unfolded in non-European contexts such as India, China, Brazil, and Mexico. Wherever this transformation occurs, certain other sociocultural conditions tend to follow. Social scientists refer to the complex of features that accompanies industrialization as modernity.

Postindustrialism and Postmodernity

In the 1970s, the economies of the United States, Japan, and many western European countries began to shift from a base of manufacturing to a base of services and information. Seeking to maximize profits, large manufacturers moved their factories to poorer countries with cheaper labor, weaker environmental regulations, and lower overall operation costs. Therefore, industrialization increased in places such as China and Brazil just as the United States and other countries became postindustrial. As production is moved to other parts of the globe, consumption also becomes increasingly global, with large companies seeking to sell their goods to ever larger markets. Increasingly global processes of production and consumption are referred to by the term globalization, a key feature of national economies since the late 1970s.

Environmental Impacts of Industrial and Postindustrial Societies

Industrialism has taken a heavy toll on the environments where it has become a primary mode of subsistence. The burning of fossil fuels to power factories causes air pollution, particularly the buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This has triggered global climate change. Where factories are built next to water sources, local water supplies can become contaminated with dangerous chemicals. Toxic chemicals such as lead can leach into soils, contaminating crops. The clearing of land for mining, logging, ranching, and cash crops leads to habitat loss, causing dramatic reductions in plant and animal biodiversity. Much of this environmental degradation occurs in poorer countries and poor regions of postindustri al countries.

Authority, Decisions, and Power: Political Anthropology

Introduction

Colonialism and the Categorization of Political Systems

Acephalous Societies: Bands and Tribes

Centralized Societies: Chiefdoms and States

Chiefdoms

Anthropologists refer to those with formal, inherited positions of community leadership as chiefs. Over time, a chief can expand their dominion to incorporate several towns and villages into a small chiefdom. Chiefs may form political alliances with other regional chiefs in large pyramidal systems consisting of various levels of village chiefs and regional chiefs, with one very powerful chief at the top. When a chiefdom expands to encompass multiple ethnic groups in a regional empire, the leader is referred to as a king.

Imperial Chiefdoms: Hawaii and Asante

Chiefdoms developed throughout the Polynesian Pacific, including the peoples of Hawaii, Tahiti, Samoa, and Tonga and the Maori of New Zealand. In Hawaii, chieftaincy developed from the intensive cultivation of taro using systems of irrigation and terracing (Earle 2011). Hawaiian chiefs controlled the distribution of land, giving out subsistence plots in return for labor in their own gardens. They used accumulated wealth and communal labor to build roads, garden terraces, fish ponds, and military fortifications. Their power was reinforced by a belief system that identified chiefs as god figures responsible for agricultural prosperity and social welfare. Chiefs conducted important annual religious rituals to ensure the success of crops. They commanded public labor to build and refurbish shrines for the worship of local gods, personal gods, and high gods such as Lono. Military forces were recruited and commanded by chiefs who used them to defend their chiefdoms and expand their territories.

States

Starting around 5,000 years ago, a new form of political organization emerged independently in many parts of the world, including Mesopotamia, China, Egypt, India, Mesoamerica, and South America. As some societies in these areas became more populous and hierarchical, their leaders developed modes of governance that combined forms of economic extraction such as taxation and tribute with mechanisms of social control such as law and policing. These governments used public revenues to build infrastructure and monuments. They developed extensive bureaucracies to interpret and enforce laws and maintain social order. Large military forces defended and expanded control over territory, resulting in multiethnic empires. The government asserted a monopoly on the use of violence, meaning that only the government was allowed to use extreme forms of violence to control or punish anyone. Societies with this form of political organization are called state societies (Brumfiel 2001).

Archaic States: The Aztecs

In the 14th century, the Aztec state of Mesoamerica arose from a combination of integrative and conflict pressures. Migrants to the area, the Mexica (as they called themselves) first worked as mercenaries for other regional powers, then established their own city of Tenochtitlan on an island in the middle of Lake Texcoco (Peters-Golden 2002). As newcomers, the Mexica were keen to build up the military might necessary to defend their new settlement. They joined forces with two neighboring states to defeat the regional superpower and establish a “Triple Alliance” of three city-states, which they came to dominate. To strengthen their position, they also sought to generate wealth through agricultural surplus, craft manufacture, and trade. At the height of its power in the 15th century, the Aztec state comprised some 50 individual city-states, each with its own ruler who served the Aztec king. The Aztec empire spanned most of present-day central and southern Mexico.

Ideology and Hegemony

People are often shocked to learn about the prevalence of human sacrifice in Aztec society. We might wonder, how could people go along with such routine public violence conducted by representatives of the state? How did they not protest?

Modern Nation-States

Colonial and Postcolonial States

Outside of Europe, a similar array of kingdoms, chiefdoms, lineage orders, and village democracies patterned much of the rest of the world. Recall that ancient state societies had emerged at various times in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, India, and Central and South America. Kingdoms were prevalent forms of centralized rule on most continents as well. All around these highly centralized societies were smaller chiefdoms and acephalous communities.

“Fragile” States and “Failed” States: The Legacies of Colonialism

The study of African politics provides an excellent example of the weaving of local culture and colonial history in the making of contemporary postcolonial societies. Journalists and political scientists frequently lament the political instability of African states and their susceptibility to popular unrest, ethnic conflicts, coups, and corrupt leadership. Some refer to African states as fragile states or failed states. A fragile state is a government that cannot *adequately* perform the essential functions of a state, such as maintaining law and order, building basic infrastructure such as roads and bridges, guaranteeing basic amenities such as electricity and clean water, and defending its citizens against violence. Such a state is fragile because it is susceptible to popular uprising, coups, civil war, and foreign invasion. A failed state is a state that can no longer perform any state functions *at all*.

Nation-States and Globalization

In the latter part of the 20th century, increasing global flows of trade, people, technologies, communication, and ideas all coalesced in a strong but uneven wave of globalization rippling across the globe. To be clear, the world has always been integrated by such flows, but advanced technologies combined with the profit drive of corporate capitalism forced a sudden acceleration of these processes roughly from the late 1970s into the 2000s.

Resistance, Revolution, and Social Movements

Social Inequalities

Introduction

Theories of Inequity and Inequality

Social Stratification

Division of labor, in and of itself, is not hierarchical, but when different values are assigned to different types of labor and some positions or people have power over others, this creates a hierarchy. A hierarchy is a type of social organization in which certain people or roles are given more power and prestige than others. As discussed in Economic Anthropology, there are various possible divisions of labor depending on a group’s mode of production. Many gatherer-hunter groups experience a social structure described as **egalitarian**, in which the diverse roles in a system of production are all given the same decision-making power and accorded the same respect among the group. In such societies, power is usually afforded by age grades, with the elders holding the most power.

Levels of Inequality

Although it is important to understand the ways in which societies control resource accumulation, it is also important to study the phenomena and experiences of inequality in one’s own culture. This section will examine how individuals experience different levels of social inequalities. In contemporary societies, experiences of social inequalities often have roots in systems of capitalism, colonialism, racism, and sexism, which all include a perceived superiority of one group over another.

Classic Theories of Social Inequality

The remainder of this chapter will examine social inequalities in detail. It will cover racism, classism, and sexism along with some common paradigms and theoretical frameworks that explain systems of inequality and power.

Power

More contemporary frameworks of social inequalities include an understanding of power. This section dives into the concepts and frameworks used in studying power. To recap, power is the ability to exert control, authority, or influence over others; agency, which comes from power, is the capability to act and make decisions. Power can be conceptualized as both subtle and coercive; in some contexts, it’s obvious who has power and how it’s utilized, but in other contexts, there are power imbalances that are allowed in everyday life. The point of this section is to contemplate why people allow certain power imbalances to exist while challenging others. Often, people allow power imbalances that they benefit from and resist imbalances that they do not benefit from. To better understand this, it is useful to discuss various concepts related to power, including hegemony, the state apparatus, biopolitics, and necropolitics.

Agency

Agency, or the ability to act and make decisions, has become an important concept in anthropology because it helps make sense of how powerful institutions interact with individuals.

Resistance

In their attempts to better understand power and agency, Marxist and feminist anthropologists in the 1980s and 1990s wrote a number of ethnographies about the relationship between resistance and the systems that create social inequalities and oppression. Resistance, at the basic level, refers to the act of challenging power and domination. Power is nearly always resisted in both overt and subtle ways, but the difference is often reflected in how much agency individuals have in resisting systems of domination and oppression. This section uses the example of Palestine to explore ways in which Palestinians are resisting power.

Systems of Inequality

Race and Racism

Racism is best understood as power intertwined with racial prejudice. Racism can be perpetuated through interpersonal, institutional, and systemic practices. Anthropologists Alan Goodman, Yolanda Moses, and Joseph Jones define racism in *Race: Are We So Different?* (2020) as the use of race to establish and justify a social hierarchy and system of power that privileges and advances certain individuals or groups of people, usually at the expense of others. Many individuals understand interpersonal examples of racism, but what are institutional or systemic forms of racism? To explore this question, this section will discuss the history of race and its social construction.

Class

**Class** refers to a group of people with the same socioeconomic status and proximity to power. In a class-based system, status stems from wealth and one’s proximity to the power that wealth builds. Economically, class systems are most often associated with the capitalist mode of production. People in the United States often think of the term middle class when considering class systems.

Gender and Patriarchy

Although there is a detailed exploration of gender, patriarchy, and power in Gender and Sexuality, this chapter will discuss how gender is tied to social inequalities. Anthropologists have studied how gender relations play a big part in experiences of inequality. Gender relations can interact with various other powerful cultural institutions to further oppress individuals.

Intersections of Inequality

Intersectionality

When thinking about social inequalities, it is useful to conceptualize race alongside other characteristics. Intersectionality is the observation that one’s class, race, sexuality, age, and ability can all define and complicate experiences. The concept of intersectionality can be traced back to pre–Civil War America, when Sojourner Truth made her “Ain’t I a Woman” speech in 1851 at the Ohio Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, addressing the exclusion of Black women from the fight for women’s rights. However, the term *intersectionality* was officially coined by critical race theorist and legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) in the context of discussing Black feminism. Crenshaw argued that the experience of being a Black woman could not be understood in independent terms of either being Black or being a woman; instead, it needed to include interactions between the identities, which often reinforce one another. Intersectionality discredits the notion that one single aspect of identity—race, for example—can capture the multidimensional nature of people’s experiences of oppression. In other words, intersectionality emphasizes the ways in which identities pertaining to features such as race, gender, and class interact to impact people’s lives.

Global Inequalities

Anthropologists, along with other social scientists, recognize that all social systems and structures have developed through a multitude of decisions made by people with social, political, and economic power as well as through the daily interactions and imaginations of individuals. The current world system is the result of an amalgamation of events and historical forces that led humanity, step by step, to the world as it is today. Social systems and social structures are constructed and governed by the people who live within them; they are not ahistorical, and they are not unchanging. Capitalism is an economic system, but it is also the result of the ways in which people and groups interact with each other and with the natural world. Presidents elected by slim margins, compromises that benefited one political party over the other, and responses to natural disasters and other events, some of which may have seemed inconsequential at the time, all played a role in creating the current reality. Structures exist and order the world, but they do not exist outside of it.

Structural Violence

Privatization is also part of global neoliberal economics. Neoliberalism is an economic model that prioritizes privatization of public services in order to decrease government spending, based on the idea that free markets and supply and demand will lead to economic progress and development. Neoliberal policies have historically led to power structures that increase inequity for those who are already marginalized: the poor, women, and people of color. When individuals cannot fulfill their basic needs, they experience ongoing harm. Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung calls this experience of intersecting, overlapping structures of discrimination (racism, sexism, classism, ageism, etc.) structural violence. Structural violence occurs when social institutions or practices reinforce inequalities, preventing certain social groups from obtaining basic needs. This can be an intentional or unintentional consequence.

Studying In: Addressing Inequities within Anthropology

The Global Impact of Human Migration

Introduction

Peopling of the World

Early Hominin Migrations

Human species were migratory from the beginning, moving as small populations of gatherers and hunters within eastern and southern Africa. By following game and the availability of seasonal vegetation from place to place, these small groups of nomads learned about their landscape, interacted with each other, and met their subsistence needs. Their daily needs came through interaction with a changing environment. With the emergence of *Homo erectus* around 1.89 million years BP (before the present), hominins expanded their territories and began to exhibit increasing control over their environment and an ability to adapt, evidenced by the development of new subsistence systems, including cultivation, pastoralism, and agriculture, and an upsurge in migration within Africa and, eventually, into Asia and Europe. This expansion into new geographical regions was a hallmark of the later human species.

Controversies Surrounding the Peopling of the Americas

Current evidence points to the emergence of the genus *Homo* in Africa. From these beginnings, human populations began moving toward the global north, east, and south in migratory waves. Motivations for these migrations included animal movements, overcrowding and resource scarcity, and, likely, curiosity and adventure. The movement into the Western Hemisphere, into North and South America, occurred significantly later than migrations into Europe and Asia; how much later is a question of enormous controversy today. How did the first peoples make their way to the Americas? When did they first arrive, and how did they migrate within these vast continents? The available evidence is inconclusive, leaving us with one of the biggest enigmas in human evolution. While there is some debate on whether earlier human species migrated into the Americas, the evidence we have today points to members of the species *Homo sapiens* being the earliest humans to do so. At this point, there is no evidence of any earlier hominin species in either North or South America. The Western Hemisphere was wholly settled by migrants coming from other continents.

Early Global Movements and Cultural Hybridity

Colonialism and Migration as Global Forces

The global movement that characterizes our current period in history is not preordained. The volatile and powerful nature of multinational cultural change and economic exploitation associated with this global movement is connected with specific historical forces. One of the most consequential early global forces was *colonialism*, an exploitative relationship between state societies in which one has political dominance over the other, primarily for economic advantage. Colonialism did not only affect the countries enmeshed in colonial relationships; it also established world alliances and enduring social, political, and economic changes.

Postcolonialism, Indigenous Identities, and Forced Migration

Although colonialism as a direct politico-economic policy is usually associated with earlier historical periods, it continues to have effects on the world today. The enduring politico-economic relationships established by colonialism have left behind concentrations of capital and technology, wealth and privilege in the former colonizing countries, mainly in Europe, as well as inequality, racism, and violence in the relationships between these nations and their colonies. These aftereffects of colonial relationships are referred to as postcolonialism. As independence movements began to take hold in the early 20th century, former colonies found themselves depleted of resources and competing against European countries whose growth came from their own demise. Today, postcolonialism is a significant topic for anthropologists whose research focuses on the effects of colonialism, marginalization, and intersectionality, where race, gender, and class identities come together.

Globalization in Motion

As the connections and interactions between communities, states, countries, and continents have intensified, a global network of linked forces and institutions known as globalization has emerged. Unlike earlier worldwide movements, globalization tends to be decentered, meaning it is not controlled by any particular nation-state or cultural group. Emerging from earlier worldwide historical movements pertaining to exploration, colonialism, and capitalism, globalization has exceeded them with its reach and has created a worldwide interdependence far more intense and transformative on a global scale than anything ever before seen in human history. It involves all aspects of our lives (e.g., political, economic, social, and religious), and it has no center or origin point. Changes and interactions occur within a dynamic and seemingly arbitrary field of connections among people, ideas, countries, and technologies.

Diaspora, Transnationalism, and Cultural Hybridity

Migration impacts individuals and cultures in diverse ways. It prompts the dissemination and diffusion of cultural ideas and artifacts from one cultural context to another, the development of new cultural forms and practices, and hybridity, in which cultures intermingle in unpredictable ways. Cultural hybridity refers to the exchange and innovation of ideas and artifacts between cultures as a product of migration and globalization. It is a commingling of different cultural elements resulting from the interactions of people and their ideas. While individuals and small groups convey their cultures as they migrate, the movement and dispersal of large ethnic groups can bring about far more rapid structural changes. This large-scale movement, which might be caused by warfare, institutionalized violence, or opportunities (most commonly education and employment), is called diaspora. Related to diaspora is transnationalism, the construction of social, economic, and political networks that originate in one country and then cross or transcend nation-state boundaries. While diaspora and transnationalism can both be related to large-scale migration, transnationalism also refers to the cultural and political projects of a nation-state as it spreads globally (Kearney 1995). One example of this is transnational corporations, which are anchored in one country with satellites and subsidiaries in others.

Peasantry and Urbanization

Peasantry in Anthropology

Peasants, a rural, subsistence-based agricultural class with limited landholdings, are the product of both urban development and rural–urban migration. Prior to the emergence of capitalism and the industrial state, agriculturalists were the most populous class within state societies. The development of the industrial economy prompted an ongoing process of internal migration, the domestic movement of people from rural to urban areas for economic opportunities, education, and employment. For many peasants, internal migration was used to meet immediate family needs, whether taking agricultural goods to urban markets—which may be weekly, monthly, or seasonal—or temporarily moving to work for cash at agricultural tasks for larger farms and companies. The coffee, sugar, and fruit industries, for example, absorbed many small, rural agriculturalists whose families needed money.

Internal Migration: Rural-Urban Continuum

Indian anthropologist Tame Ramya (2017) studied the push and pull factors—a phrase used to describe circumstances and forces that push migrants away from their homeland and pull them toward a new location—affecting the internal migration of different hill tribes of Kurung Kumey, a district in the state of Arunachal Pradesh, India, to the foothills region of the neighboring district of Papum Pare. Although there were several ethnic groups involved in this study, the majority of migrants to Papum Pare are ethnically Nyishi. The Nyishi, the largest ethnic group in their district, are rural cultivators who raise paddy rice, supplemented with cucumbers and maize. Traditionally, they practiced polygyny and had large families with many children. Ramya’s study shows that the primary motivation for voluntary internal migration in this region is to access new economic opportunities, prompting people to move from more peripheral geographical areas to urban centers. Although the motivation for migration is primarily economic, these relocations result in a series of cultural changes.

Inequality along the Margins

Contemporary Types of Migration

Because of emerging global forces of all kinds—social, economic, environmental, and political—there has been a recent rise in migration within geographical regions and across countries. Four of the most common types of contemporary migration are listed below. Each derives from different causes and is associated with different push and pull factors (Woldeab 2019). In some situations, these types of migration may overlap, such as in the aftermath of a natural disaster.

Labor Migration and Migrant Routes

While migration, in its widest sense, is any movement that reestablishes a household, many migratory patterns are specifically associated with socioeconomic need, mainly shifting employment opportunities. Labor migration can be permanent or circular. Circular migration is a repeated pattern of movement between locations, usually mapped to the availability of work. One type of circular migration is seasonal migration, which is migratory movement that coincides with seasonal labor needs, such as planting, harvesting, service, and construction work. Some seasonal workers migrate, with or without their families, for temporary, often low-paid work. Other seasonal workers have long-term relationships with their employers and legal work permits (also called Employment Authorization Documents, or EADs, in the United States) and will return to the same work sites year after year, sometimes maintaining a joint household with other families at the work site. These individuals will often maintain a family household in their country of origin and send home remittances, or transfers of money from workers to their home countries, usually for their families. Today, one in nine people worldwide depends on remittances from migrants (Global Migration Data Analysis Centre 2021).

Refugees Beyond the Nation-State

Refugees are persons who are forced to cross international boundaries to seek residence. Pushed out of their countries, most commonly because of war, famine, or persecution, they typically arrive under extreme circumstances with little food, clothing, or material possessions. They are frequently separated from their relatives and have little chance of finding employment or reestablishing their household. Because of their status as stateless persons (persons forced to leave their countries) and their inability to procure proper travel documentation, refugees are protected under the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, which derives from Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, passed in1948. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights establishes an international legal right for people to seek asylum, which is legal protection extended by one country to citizens of another. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees heads the UN Refugee Agency, a global organization that directs troops and aid workers to set up refugee camps and organizes international efforts to ease the suffering of refugees.

Pandemic as a Global Migration

People and goods are not the only things that migrate. Along with human migration, there is a host of secondary movements that can affect the human population globally. Diseases are a prime example. Diseases that may have once been contained in a single region can move, along with their human and animal hosts, into new geographic areas, where they can become even more virulent. When diseases spread more than expected among a given group of people, they are referred to as epidemics. An outbreak of a disease over a very broad area, typically crossing international boundaries, is called a pandemic. Some early pandemics in Europe were the plague of Athens in 430 BCE (possibly typhus or typhoid fever or Ebola), the Antonine plague from 165 to 180 CE (possibly smallpox), and the Black Death from 1347 to 1351 (caused by a bacterium carried by fleas and infected rodents). In the Americas, Mexico and Central America suffered from various documented pandemics, starting with the arrival of the Spanish in Mexico in 1519, which set off a widespread smallpox outbreak that extended into South America. There have been other pandemics, including the cocoliztli epidemic from 1545 to 1548, likely a form of enteric fever, and the so-called Spanish flu, first detected in the United States in 1918 (Alchon 2003; Vågene et al. 2018). The most serious recent pandemic in the United Stated had been the swine flu pandemic of 2009–2010 ... until 2019–2020.

Forming Family through Kinship

Introduction

What Is Kinship?

Defining Family and Household

Reading and Using Kinship Charts

Anthropologists graphically illustrate relationships between family members with kinship charts (also called kinship diagrams). Anyone who has ever used an online genealogy program like Ancestry.com is already familiar with the ways that family relationships can be depicted. Anthropological charts use EGO as their starting point. The term EGO identifies the person whose chart is depicted. EGO marks the starting point for the kinship chart, and relationships are read as alignments between EGO and other individuals. The sum of kinship relationships identified through EGO is referred to as EGO’s kindred. Serving as a map and model, the kinship chart can be “read” like a text, with its own syntax and grammar identifying each individual within a society by means of their relatedness to each other.

Family Types across Cultures

Although family is difficult to categorize because of its diversity, anthropologists have defined four basic family types that are duplicated across cultures with minor variations. Each of these types is adapted to the social and economic needs of the family unit and is normally associated with particular subsistence strategies. Some families change to address immediate needs, such as when elderly parents can no longer live on their own independently. Regardless of its type, the family unit is a remarkably adaptive cultural mechanism.

Fictive Kinship

Some families also include fictive kin, a kinship tie in which individuals are defined as family regardless of biology. Fictive kinship is based on intentional relationships such as godparenthood or other close social ties.

Adoption

Adoption of children is widespread across cultures, sometimes constituted legally, but more often through informal structures of support and sponsorship. There were an estimated 1.5 million adopted children under 18 in the United States in 2019, about 1 out of every 50 children, and adoption is increasing, especially among same-sex couples. In 2019, 43.3 percent of children of same-sex couples were adopted or stepchildren.

Reckoning Kinship across Cultures

Types of Kinship Systems

In his early research, Lewis Henry Morgan distinguished three basic forms of kinship structure commonly found across cultures. Today, we refer to these kinship forms as lineal, bifurcate merging, and generational kinship. Each one defines family and relatives a bit differently and so highlights different roles, rights, and responsibilities for these individuals. This means that depending on the kinship structure used by a society, EGO will refer to a different set of individuals as kindred and will have a different relationship with those individuals.

Descent

Kinship structure is highly diverse, and there are many different ways to think about it. Descent is the way that families trace their kinship connections and social obligations to each other between generations of ancestors and generations to come. It is a primary factor in the delineation of kinship structures. Through descent, the individual highlights certain particular relationships with kindred and drops or leaves off other possible relationships. Descent ultimately determines such things as inheritance, alliance, and marriage rules. There are two common ways that a cultural group can trace descent across generations:

A Matrilineal Society in the United States

The Navajo are among the most populous of the Indigenous peoples in the United States, exceeding 325,000 members. Roughly half live in the Navajo Nation. Covering some 27,000 square miles, the Navajo Nation is an autonomous jurisdiction that crosses New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah. Traditionally a matrilineal society, the Navajo trace descent and inheritance through their mothers and grandmothers. Such a descent pattern would normally lead to the establishment of matrilocal households, with daughters bringing their husbands to live with or near their matrilineal kin following marriage.

Marriage and Families across Cultures

Anthropological Definition of Marriage

Marriage is the formation of a socially recognized union. Depending on the society, it may be a union between a man and a woman, between any two adults (regardless of their gender), or between multiple spouses in polygamous societies. Marriages are most commonly established to provide a formal structure in which to raise and nurture offspring (whether biological or adopted/fostered), but not all marriages involve reproduction, and marriage can serve multiple functions. One function is to create alliances between individuals, families, and sometimes larger social networks. These alliances may provide political and economic advantages. While there are variations of marriage, the institution itself, with a few notable exceptions, is universal across cultures.

Forms of Marriage

Anthropologists group marriage customs into two primary types: a union of two spouses only (*monogamy*) or a union involving more than two spouses (*polygamy*). Monogamy is the socially sanctioned union of two adults. In some societies this union is restricted to a man and a woman, and in other societies it can be two adults of any gender. Monogamy, because it produces an overall smaller family unit, is especially well adapted to postindustrial societies and cultures where family units are highly mobile (such as nomadic foragers). Monogamy also includes same-sex marriage. In June 2015, in *Obergefell v. Hodges*, the US Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in the United States, following earlier legal recognitions in many other Western countries. Today, same-sex marriage is legal in 30 countries. While the movement to legalize same-sex marriage has been long and tumultuous in many of these countries, same-sex marriages and unions have historically played significant roles in both Indigenous and Western societies.

Postmarital Residence Rules

Following marriage, a couple begins a new family and establishes a shared residence, whether as a separate family unit or as part of an already established family group. The social rules that determine where a newly married couple will reside are called postmarital residence rules and are directly related to the descent rules that operate in the society. These rules may be adapted due to extenuating circumstances such as economic need or lack of housing. In the United States today, for example, it is increasingly common for newly married couples to postpone the establishment of a separate household when work, schooling, or children create a need for familial support.

Marriage Compensation

In all cultures, marriage is a consequential matter not only to the adults immediately involved, but also to their families and to the broader community. In societies that practice unilineal descent, the newly married couple moves away from one family and toward another. This creates a disadvantage for the family that has “lost” a son or daughter. For example, in a patrilineal society, while the wife will remain a member of her birth lineage (that of her father), her children and her labor will now be invested mostly in her husband’s lineage. As a result, in societies practicing unilineal descent, there is a marriage compensation from one family to the other for this perceived loss. Marriage compensation is the transfer of some form of wealth (in money, material goods, or labor) from one family to another to legitimize the marriage as a creation of a new social and economic household. It is not seen as payment for a spouse, but as recognition that the marriage and future children are part of one lineage rather than another (Stone 1998, 77). There are several forms of marriage compensation, each symbolically marked by specific cultural practices.

Remarriage Obligations

The many rules and corresponding obligations specific to marriage in unilineal societies (such as residence rules and marriage compensation) are evidence that families and communities invest a great deal in marriages and the formation of new families. So what happens if a young and newly married spouse dies? What about the marriage compensation and the new household? In many unilineal societies (most especially in patrilineal societies), remarriage obligations ensure that in these cases the marriage contract endures. Remarriage obligations require the widowed spouse to remarry someone from the same lineage in order to maintain the stability of the family unit.

Arranged Marriages

While all marriages are planned, some are arranged, whether between the spouses involved and/or their families or through a third party. Today, an interesting adaptation of arranged marriages has developed involving online websites and hired marriage brokers to help individuals living in different countries find a suitable spouse from their birth culture. As transnational corporations spread worldwide and individuals become more highly mobile (even nomadic) for work, finding a spouse who shares the same cultural values can be difficult. Although there are marriage brokers for many different cultural groups, there is a proliferation of matchmakers for individuals of Indian nationality or descent. While not all of these sites are reputable, the explosion of marriage brokering businesses reminds us that marriage is, first and foremost, a cultural institution.

Gender and Sexuality

Introduction

Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in Anthropology

The Terms: Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

In the social sciences, the term sex refers to the biological categories of male and female (and potentially other categories, as discussed later in this chapter). The sex of a person is determined by an examination of biological and anatomical features, including (but not limited to): visible genitalia (e.g., penis, testes, vagina), internal sex organs (e.g., ovaries, uterus), secondary sex characteristics (e.g., breasts, facial hair), chromosomes (XX for females, XY for males, and other possibilities), reproductive capabilities (including menstruation), and the activities of growth hormones, particularly testosterone and estrogen. It may seem as though nature divides humans neatly into females and males, but such a long list of distinguishing factors results in a great deal of ambiguity and diversity within categories. For instance, hormonal influences can produce results different from the ways that people typically develop. Hormonal influences shape the development of sex organs over time and can stimulate the emergence of secondary sex characteristics associated with the other sex. Clothes on or clothes off, people can have body features associated with one sex category and chromosomes associated with another.

Evidence from Biological Anthropology

Given humans’ close biological relationship to primates, one might expect to see similar dynamics of sex and gender between human and nonhuman primate social groups. Biologists and primatologists have examined sex differences in the biology and behavior of both nonhuman and human primates, looking for commonalities that might suggest a common biological genesis for sex/gender categories.

Evidence from Archaeology

Seeking to understand the origins of human sociocultural formations of gender and sexuality, some researchers have turned to the archaeological record. Archaeologists use temporal sequencing, fossil evidence, comparison with living communities, and knowledge of the evolutionary process to piece together an understanding of the development of gendered and sexual behaviors in the context of human evolution.

Performing Gender Categories

Nature, Culture, and the Performance of Gender

Gender not only influences how people *think* about themselves and others; it also influences how they *feel* about themselves and others—and how others make them feel. Romantic or sexual passion draws from gendered identities and reinforces them. In the words sung by Aretha Franklin, “You make me feel like a natural woman.” There is something about gendered identity that can feel deep and real. The sense that some trait is so profoundly deep and consequential that it creates a common identity for everyone who has that trait is called essentialism. Gender essentialism is the basis of a lot of circular thinking. When a boy kicks a ball through the neighbor’s window and someone says, “Boys will be boys!”—that’s essentialist. You may be familiar with this little essentialist ditty from Euro-American culture:

Women and Feminist Theories of Gender

Inspired by the women’s movement of the 1960s, many female anthropologists in the early 1970s began taking a critical look at mainstream American anthropology, noticing how the discipline focused almost exclusively on the activities of men—both as researchers and objects of study. In most early and mid-20th-century ethnographies, men were represented as the major social actors, and men’s activities were assumed to be the most important ones. Where were the women, and what were they doing? Calling for an “anthropology of women,” many feminist anthropologists set out to correct the ethnographic record by focusing more on the voices, perspectives, and practices of women in cultures all over the world.

Men and Masculinities

While men had been the primary focus of anthropological research up to the 1970s, they had always been studied as general representatives of their cultures. The establishment of gender studies in anthropology prompted both male and female anthropologists to view all persons in a culture through the lens of gender. That is, men began to be seen as not just “people” but people who are socialized and culturally constructed as men in their societies (Gutmann 1997). In the 1990s, a wave of scholarship emerged probing the identities of men and the features of masculinity across cultures.

Intersex and the Ambiguities of Identity

A friend tells you, “My sister just had a baby last night!” You respond, “Is it a boy or a girl?” Your friend replies, “Well, they don’t know. Maybe neither, maybe both.”

Multiple Gender and Variant Gender

Many societies construct additional categories between male and female to accommodate people who do not fit into a binary gender system. The term *multiple gender* indicates a gender system that goes beyond male and female, adding one or more categories of variant gender to accommodate more sex/gender diversity. A variant gender is an added version of male or female that accommodates those who were not assigned to that category at birth but adopt that identity during the course of their lives. A person whose biology, identity, or sexual orientation contradicts their assigned sex/gender role can adopt a variant-gender identity. For instance, a person might be considered female at birth but later transition to a masculine version of female—what anthropologists term *female variant*.

The Power of Gender: Patriarchy and Matriarchy

Patriarchy: Ideology and Practice

The author of this chapter, Jennifer Hasty, reflects on what she learned about gender ideology while working as wedding videographer:

Matriarchy: Ideology and (Not) Practice

As the term suggests, matriarchy means rule by senior women. In a matriarchal society, women would exercise authority throughout social life and control power and wealth. Like patriarchy, matriarchy is a gender ideology. Unlike patriarchy, however, matriarchy is not embedded in structures and institutions in any culture in the contemporary world. That is to say, it’s *just* an ideology—not a dominant one, and certainly not hegemonic.

Gender and Power in Everyday Life

Contemporary anthropologists who study gender pay little attention to hypothetical debates about the origins of patriarchy or the possible existence of ancient matriarchy. Rather, cultural anthropologists are interested in how people interact with the cultural norms and systematized practices of gender in their societies. Gender is diffused throughout culture, embedded in systems of kinship, modes of subsistence, political leadership and participation, law, religion, and medicine. Anthropologists study how people move through these gendered realms in their everyday lives. They explore how identities and possibilities are shaped by the structures of gender as well as how people struggle against and sometimes transform gendered expectations.

Sexuality and Queer Anthropology

Early Anthropological Studies of Sexuality

Cultural anthropologists have long been fascinated with sexuality. In his ethnography of sexual practices among the Trobrianders, Bronislaw Malinowski (1929) identifies sexuality as a central concern threaded throughout the sociocultural realms of everyday life. Of central importance to marriage, kinship, and gender relations, sexuality also pervades art, religion, medicine, economics, and even politics in Trobriand culture. Malinowski charts the sexual life stages of Trobrianders, starting with sexualized games in childhood and continuing with adolescent crushes and expeditions by groups of teenage boys or girls to nearby villages in search of amorous adventures. He describes the selection of marriage partners and the frequency of extramarital sexual relations among men. Throughout his analysis, Malinowski emphasizes that all societies must regulate the primal sexual impulse. In this functional view, sexual norms and rules function to maintain order and protect the institutions of marriage and kinship.

Same-Sex and Queer Studies

Though they may be provocative and enlightening, anthropological studies of heterosexuality are still focused on mainstream gender categories and norms. Even more challenging to traditional Western sensibilities are studies, first emerging in the 1970s and 1980s, that demonstrate the prevalence of same-sex erotic interactions in cultures all over the world.

Transgender Studies

Evans-Pritchard’s research on male-male marriage among the precolonial Azande provided an example of young men who were socially constructed as women through their wifely role in these marriages. Across the continent, in West Africa, women in precolonial Igbo society could be ritually transformed into men and then engage in female-female marriages as husbands. In *Male Daughters and Female Husbands* (1987), Ifi Amadiume describes how a father with no sons could make his eldest daughter into an honorary “son” who could inherit and carry on the patrilineage. This woman became a “male daughter.” If she were married, she would return to her natal compound to undergo a ceremony that transferred her into the social category of male. She would then wear men’s clothes, live in the male section of the compound, perform men’s work rather than women’s, and participate in community life as a man. She could marry women who then became her wives (thus becoming a “female husband”). Those wives would have discreet liaisons with men in the area in order to bear children, who would belong to the lineage of the female husband.

The End of Gender?

In cultures that are strongly heteronormative with rigid two-gender systems, some people feel restricted in their gender identities and sexual practices. In many countries, efforts to create more flexibility in the expression of gender and sexuality have focused on gaining equal rights for and combating discrimination against women and LGBTQIA+ persons. In the past 50 years, this social movement has achieved great strides at national and global levels. In 2011, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution recognizing LGBTQIA+ rights. The United Nations subsequently urged all countries to pass laws to protect LGBTQIA+ persons from discrimination, hate crimes, and the criminalization of non-heterosexuality. Same-sex marriage has now been legalized in 29 countries, including the United States, Canada, Mexico, Taiwan, and most of western Europe. In many countries, however, same-sex acts and gender nonconformity are still criminalized, sometimes punishable by death.

Religion and Culture

Introduction

What Is Religion?

Defining Religion, Spirituality, and Worldview

An anthropological inquiry into religion can easily become muddled and hazy because religion encompasses intangible things such as values, ideas, beliefs, and norms. It can be helpful to establish some shared signposts. Two researchers whose work has focused on religion offer definitions that point to diverse poles of thought about the subject. Frequently, anthropologists bookend their understanding of religion by citing these well-known definitions.

Witchcraft, Sorcery, and Magic

People in Western cultures too often think of religion as a belief system associated with a church, temple, or mosque, but religion is much more diverse. In the 1960s, anthropologists typically used an evolutionary model for religion that associated less structured religious systems with simple societies and more complex forms of religion with more complex political systems. Anthropologists noticed that as populations grew, all forms of organization—political, economic, social, and religious—became more complex as well. For example, with the emergence of tribal societies, religion expanded to become not only a system of healing and connection with both animate and inanimate things in the environment but also a mechanism for addressing desire and conflict. Witchcraft and sorcery, both forms of magic, are more visible in larger-scale, more complex societies.

Supernatural Forces and Beings

As stated earlier, religion typically regards the interaction of natural and supernatural phenomena. Put simply, a supernatural force is a figure or energy that does not follow natural law. In other words, it is nonempirical and cannot be measured or observed by normal means. Religious practices rely on contact and interaction with a wide range of supernatural forces of varying degrees of complexity and specificity.

Religious Specialists

Religious groups typically have some type of leadership, whether formal or informal. Some religious leaders occupy a specific role or status within a larger organization, representing the rules and regulations of the institution, including norms of behavior. In anthropology, these individuals are called priests, even though they may have other titles within their religious groups. Anthropology defines priests as full-time practitioners, meaning they occupy a religious rank at all times, whether or not they are officiating at rituals or ceremonies, and they have leadership over groups of people. They serve as mediators or guides between individuals or groups of people and the deity or deities. In religion-specific terms, anthropological priests may be called by various names, including titles such as priest, pastor, preacher, teacher, imam (Islam), and rabbi (Judaism).

Shamanism

One early form of religion is shamanism, a practice of divination and healing that involves soul travel, also called shamanic journeying, to connect natural and supernatural realms in nonlinear time. Associated initially with small-scale societies, shamanic practices are now known to be embedded in many of the world’s religions. In some cultures, shamans are part-time specialists, usually drawn into the practice by a “calling” and trained in the necessary skills and rituals though an apprenticeship. In other cultures, all individuals are believed to be capable of shamanic journeying if properly trained. By journeying—an act frequently initiated by dance, trance, drumbeat, song, or hallucinogenic substances—the shaman is able to consult with a spiritual world populated by supernatural figures and deceased ancestors. The term itself, *šamán*, meaning “one who knows,” is an Evenki word, originating among the Evenk people of northern Siberia. Shamanism, found all over the world, was first studied by anthropologists in Siberia.

The Institutionalization of Religion

Shamanism is classified as animism, a worldview in which spiritual agency is assigned to all things, including natural elements such as rocks and trees. Sometimes associated with the idea of dual souls—a day soul and a night soul, the latter of which can wander in dreams—and sometimes with unnamed and disembodied spirits believed to be associated with living and nonliving things, animism was at first understood by anthropologists as a primitive step toward more complex religions. In his work *Primitive Culture* (1871), British anthropologist Sir Edward Tylor, considered the first academic anthropologist, identified animism as a proto-religion, an evolutionary beginning point for all religions. As population densities increased and societies developed more complex forms of social organization, religion mirrored many of these changes.

Symbolic and Sacred Space

Symbolism in Religion

Symbolism plays a vital role in religion. A symbol stands for something else, is arbitrary, and has no natural connection to its reference. There are two main types of symbols. A symbol can be a metaphor, meaning that it is completely disconnected from what it represents, such as the Islamic symbol of the crescent and star, which represents enlightenment brought about through God. Or a symbol might be a metonym, in which the part stands for the whole, such as the cross, which is an artifact of a specific portion of Christian history that is now used to stand for Christianity as a whole. Symbols are multivocal by nature, which means they can have more than one meaning. Their meaning derives from both how the symbol is used and how the audience views it. The more common and widespread a symbol, the more conflicting references and meanings may coexist. As an example, think of the U.S. flag; when draped over a veteran’s casket, the flag has a different meaning from when it is waved at a rally or burned in protest. One symbol, multiple meanings.

Religious Places

Anthropologists distinguish between space, an unmarked physical field on which imagination or action can occur, and place, a location that has sociocultural meaning(s) attached. Many religions and religious practices are defined by sacred places that serve as settings for hierophany, the manifestation of the sacred or divine. Commonly, the sense of the sacred derives from the prior history and the use of a place. In most religions, sacred places are marked by other symbols. A Jewish home is identified as a special religious place. One way of marking this sacred place is by attaching mezuzahs, small casings containing a tiny parchment with a verse from the Torah to external and internal doorposts. Placings these mezuzahs at the points of entry marks the place inside as holy, sacred, and set apart. Like most religious places, the Jewish home is a densely symbolic place.

Myth and Religious Doctrine

The Role of Myth in Religion

Sometimes, our everyday usage of a word is the same as its scholarly use; when it comes to the word *myth*, however, this is not the case. *Myth* is used often in popular culture to mean something that is false or deceptive, a made-up story that is not true, as in the TV series *MythBusters*. In anthropology, however, myth is defined as a well-known story that explains primary principles, beliefs, and values outside of chronological time. Pieces of a myth may or may not be true. Its veracity is not what matters; it is most important for what it teaches. Many times, the characters within myths are culture heroes, semidivine persons whose experiences and lives serve as a teaching tool, allowing those within the culture to identify with them and learn from their challenges. Myths shape a society’s worldview, explain its origins, and also teach and affirm social norms (Moro 2012).

A Brief Structural Analysis of a Myth

Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss saw myths as containing both universal messages about shared human experiences and concerns and particular messages about the cultures with which they are associated. His approach to understanding myth is part of the theory of structuralism, and it separates myth into its component parts in order to understand the underlying form—the structure. Lévi-Strauss believed that mythic structure was the same across all cultures. He argued that the concerns of all cultures, expressed within their myths, are very similar. Structural analysis can be very complicated. At each step, as the myth is gradually “stripped down,” the information it reveals is more enlightening. There are approaches to structuralism that can be applied more quickly, however, allowing a more penetrating look at the “real story” within the myth.

Oral and Written Religious Traditions

Religion scholars often separate religions into oral traditions, or local or indigenous religions passed down across generations through storytelling, and written traditions, or world religions that are primarily associated with sacred, written texts. While each may use components of the other tradition—oral storytelling is still occasionally used in a religion that is primarily a written tradition, for example—the emphasis on either oral or written worship affects the nature of the religious system in various ways.

Rituals of Transition and Conformity

The Varieties of Ritual Experience in Religion

Rituals, also called *rites*, are performative acts by which we carry out our religious beliefs, public and private. As sociologist Émile Durkheim noted, they follow a formal order or sequence, called a liturgical order; are performed in a place that is set apart and sacred during the time of the performance; and are inherently social. Unlike idiosyncratic behaviors that an individual may practice on their own, rituals are learned and shared. They foster social solidarity and identity within a community of believers (this a focus of Durkheim’s). Even when performing a religious ritual alone, such as walking a labyrinth during meditation, the ritual itself, because it is learned as part of a larger body of religious practices, connects the individual to the larger community.

Rites of Intensification

Called by various names, such as rites of affirmation and calendrical rites, rites of intensification are performed to affirm, strengthen, and maintain bonds of solidarity. Most of the repetitive religious services that are offered through churches, synagogues, and mosques are rites of intensification. These rituals tend to have a rather stable and repetitive structure that allows practitioners to follow along easily. If you attend or participant in any kind of repetitive daily, weekly, or monthly religious ritual, it is likely a rite of intensification. These rites define and indoctrinate individuals so that they identify as a religious community, even though there may be other ritual acts accompanying it. It is not unusual in state religions for these rites to create unity among believers across cultures and nation-states. A good example is the daily practice of Islamic prayer, or *salat*. *Salat* involves praying in the direction of the holy city of Mecca at dawn, noon, midafternoon, sunset, and evening every day, regardless of where the believer is located or even what they are doing. *Salat* establishes a direct relationship between the believer and God and affirms one’s membership in a global community of Muslims.

Rites of Passage

First identified by anthropologist Arnold van Gennep in 1909, rites of passage mark social transformations in people’s lives and establish a change in social status within their communities. Associated most commonly with birth, puberty, marriage, and death, these rituals can be prolonged ceremonies during which the individual receives instruction and preparation for this change in their lives. Gennep noted that there are three stages in a rite of passage—separation, transition, and incorporation—and that during the transition stage, the individual must traverse a threshold (*limen* in Latin) from their old social position or status to a new one.

Rites of Affliction

Unlike rites of intensification and many rites of passage, rites of affliction are usually non-calendrical and unplanned. Normally classified as healing rituals or petitions for supernatural intervention, these rites seek remedy or compensation for the affliction. Whether directly through a shamanic journey or through the mediation of a religious leader, communities petition the spirits or deity for healing or a blessing. While illness and health in most Western societies are understood to be biomedical phenomena based on empirical evidence, in non-Western societies and in localized religious traditions across cultures, well-being is viewed as a relationship between body and soul and thus is believed to have a religious component.

Other Forms of Religious Practice

Utopian Religious Communities

While the most typical form of religious community today is a group of people who share a common faith and set of beliefs and meet periodically to worship, there are other ways of creating religious community. One example, widespread in the United States during the 19th century, is utopian religious communities. A utopian community is a community intentionally established by a group of people seeking to live out their ideas of an ideal society. Utopian communities may be secular or religious. The utopian communities that are most successful share certain characteristics: they are physically separate from the larger society; establish a degree of economic self-sufficiency, through either agriculture or industry; and have a clear authority structure and ideology, or shared set of beliefs.

Secular Religion

Secular religion is a system of beliefs held by a society that elevates social ideas, qualities, or commodities to a metaphysical, semidivine status. Often, the group sees itself in terms of a divine image, creating a situation in which, as Émile Durkheim famously said, “society = God.” Various types and degrees of nationalism are a form of secular religion in which a group shows honor, respect, and allegiance to the nation itself as a sacred entity. For large and diverse societies, secular religion can create a powerful and enduring bond among otherwise very different groups of people. Often, philosophical ideas and materialism itself have been at the center of secular religion.

Anthropology of Food

Introduction

Food as a Material Artifact

Food Artifacts

The study of early human diets is important in understanding the evolution of the human species. The size and shape of our skulls and teeth are directly linked with culture and diet. As foods became softer over time (primarily due to the use of fire and cooking) and meat became more common in the human diet, the size of human dentition decreased. Along with this reduction in the size of teeth, cooked foods, especially meats, made increased calories and nutrition available and also prompted brain growth. The most direct evidence of meat eating among early humans is butcher marks found on bone, estimated to be from as early as 3.4–2.6 million years ago (Wild 2019; Pobiner 2013). The earliest evidence of humans cooking a carbohydrate source is charred tubers recently identified by archaeologist Cynthia Larbey (Wild 2019) at Blombos Cave, in the Klasies River site in South Africa, and dated to 120,000 BP. Excavations at the archaeological site Shubayqa 1 in Jordan have uncovered the earliest evidence of charred breadcrumbs, indicating that humans were baking bread as early as 14,500 BP (Richter and Arranz-Otaegui 2018). From meat to potatoes to bread, humans and their diets have adapted to changing ways of life.

Early Archaeological Sites and Food Utensils

By the emergence of *Homo habilis* around 2.6 million years ago, early human settlements were typically littered with the debris of stone tools that were most likely used in food production. There is evidence of tools that were used for hunting, skinning, crushing, slicing, and grinding. These earliest tools were chipped and flaked from pieces of stone to create objects that had both an edge and a point. As tools evolved and became more specialized, they became increasingly focused on specific aspects of food procurement and production.

Ancient Foodways and Food Reconstructions

Anthropologists are interested in foodways, a term used to describe a society’s collection, production, and consumption of food. There is a particular interest in understanding how culinary traditions shape identity. It is not uncommon for archaeologists and cultural anthropologists to attempt to reconstruct food practices of the cultures they are studying, utilizing different types of clues. While written accounts, artwork, and visible food remnants help tell the story of a culture’s foodways, anthropologists also use residue studies of traces of food and drink in pottery, baskets, and gourds and stable isotope analysis of human bones and teeth, in which they measure isotopes (radioactive elements found naturally in food) to determine the diet of an individual and the environment in which they lived. These clues to ancient foodways can reveal a great deal about daily life.

Food as Cultural Heritage

Sometimes, anthropologists find it useful to distinguish between the terms *culture*—which, as discussed in Chapter 3, The Concept of Culture, can be defined as beliefs, behaviors, and artifacts that a group uses to adapt to its environment—and cultural heritage, which comprises traditions passed down for generations and used as a way of identifying a group of people. In state societies peopled by diverse cultural groups, it is common for food to be used to distinguish one group from another. “Those people” eat “those things,” and “my people” eat “these things.” Later in this chapter, we will examine how national identities are shaped by food, but ethnic groups also define themselves by differences in food choices and food preparation. Within American culture, there are a number of familiar connections between certain groups and certain foods: the Pacific Northwest Coast Indigenous peoples and salmon; Jewish residents of New York City and bagels; people of German ancestry in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and brats; residents of San Francisco’s Chinatown and steamed pork buns—to name just a few.

Cherokee Ramps

Early studies of the foodways of the Eastern Band of Cherokee mention the prevalence of ramps, wild leeks that are similar to wild onions and grow in the Appalachian region of the United States. Ramps (*Allium tricoccum*) are eaten from the time they begin to sprout in March almost until they bloom in April or May. The bulb is eaten raw or is chopped up and fried with eggs. Some parboil the entire plant, and in recent years, ramps have been canned or deep-frozen by some Cherokee families. (White 1975, 324–325)

A Biocultural Approach to Food

Food and the Biocultural Approach

Many anthropologists take a biocultural approach to their study of food, looking at how food plays both a cultural and a biological role in human lives. Food provides physical nourishment of our bodies and also a means of understanding who we are. How people procure and prepare foods and which foods are deemed appropriate for which occasions are important parts of cultural identity. Food is thus an area that weaves together the biological and cognitive aspects of our lives—an observation captured by the familiar phrase “you are what you eat.” Although the biocultural approach continues to focus on food and identity, it also includes an emphasis on the nutritional science of food.

Subsistence and Biocultural Adaptation

Cereals (including corn, wheat, barley, and rice) and legumes (various types of beans) are the most common crops grown by subsistence farmers because they are versatile and economical and have a wide range of health benefits. In addition to carbohydrates, protein, vitamins, minerals, and fiber, they provide a substantial number of calories. In other words, cereals are a good investment of labor and have long-term health benefits. Indigenous peoples around the world have long been aware of the potential in these foods.

Food, Fads, Diets, and Health

In the fifth century BCE, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote about the Macrobians, a cultural group living in what is now southern Ethiopia who were supposed to have found a mythical “fountain of youth” in which people could bathe and become young again. Herodotus had heard that the Macrobians lived to be 120 years old and consumed only boiled fish and milk. Trying to explain the myths he had heard, he surmised that diet and special waters must have been the cause of their longevity. While this was not likely the first time that someone claimed a secret elixir or remedy for physical aging and illness, it is one of the earliest recorded dietary myths. Many more would follow. In 1558, Venetian patron of the arts Alvise Cornaro authored a best seller titled *Discorsi della vita sobria*, variously translated into English as *Sure and Certain Methods of Attaining a Long and Healthful Life* and *Discourses on a Sober and Temperate Life*, among other titles. In this text, he makes the following claims about human health:

Food and Cultural Identity

Food and Cultural Identity

Food travels across cultures perhaps more often and with more ease than any other tradition. Sometimes food carries with it related culinary practices (such as the use of chopsticks), and sometimes foods mix with existing culinary traditions to form new syncretic cuisines (such as Tex-Mex food, which evolved from a combination of Mexican and US Southwest food traditions). Like culture itself, foods are shared within and move between communities, adapting to changing circumstances and settings. Although it is adaptable, food is also tightly linked to people’s cultural identities, or the ways they define and distinguish themselves from other groups of people. As part of these cultural identities, the term cuisine is used to refer to specific cultural traditions of cooking, preparing, and consuming food. While urban areas tend to shift and adapt cuisine more frequently than rural areas, those aspects of cuisine most tightly linked to identity tend to change slowly in all settings.

Food Prescriptions and Proscriptions

As with all cultural institutions, there are various rules and customs surrounding food and eating. Many of these can be classified as either food prescriptions, foods that one should eat and are considered culturally appropriate, or food proscriptions, foods that are prohibited and not considered proper. These food regulations are social norms that connect production and consumption with the maintenance of cultural identity through food.

Food and Gender

While food itself is a material substance, humans classify and categorize foods differently based on cultural differences and family traditions. In many cultures, food is gendered, meaning some foods or dishes are associated with one gender more than with the other. Think about your own culture. If you were cooking a meal for only women or only men, would that influence the foods you chose to prepare? Although gender-specific food choices are stereotypes of male and female dietary preferences and every person has their own individual preferences, many social institutions and entertainment venues cater to gendered diets.

The Globalization of Food

Globalization of Food

Most people, when they think about food, consider it a local, individual choice based on personal preferences and economic possibilities. But food is a global commodity marketed by transnational corporations, health institutes, advertising campaigns, and subtle and not-so-subtle cultural messaging through global media such as movies, television, and online video. Most often, what people choose to eat is based on underlying structures that determine availability and cost. While there are now hothouse businesses growing year-round fruits and vegetables, affordability often prohibits everyone from having access to fresh, ripe foods. Instead, mainstream grocery stores most often stock foods imported across long distances. Most fruits and vegetables sold in the grocery store were harvested unripe (and often tasteless) so that they would last the days and weeks between harvesting and purchase.

Food Deserts and Oases

Worldwide, access to nutritious and affordable foods is growing increasingly unequal. Areas with inadequate or unreliable access to nutritious foods are sometimes called food deserts. Food deserts present serious challenges to health and wellness in multiple ways and have been linked to eating disorders, obesity, and malnutrition. In Western nations, food deserts frequently correspond to other areas of social inequality, such as low-income and minority communities. Reduced availability of healthy and economical food often exacerbates many of the challenges these communities face.

Anthropology of Media

Introduction

Putting the Mass into Media

Putting Culture into Media Studies

Visual Anthropology and Ethnographic Film

Photography, Representation, and Memory

The Gaze of Photography

In the 1970s, film scholars developed the concept of the gaze to refer both to specific ways that viewers look at images of other people in visual media and to the gazes of those depicted within the images. Gaze theory attempts to understand what it means to view people and events through mass media.

Photography and the Colonial Gaze

Photography was invented in the early 19th century and became widespread in the period when European countries were beginning to establish formal colonial rule over African, Middle Eastern, and Asian territories. In colonial contexts, the imperial gaze framed how Europeans photographed colonial landscapes and colonized peoples, positioning them in strategic ways to justify colonial rule.

The Modernity of Postcolonial Photography

Focusing on more contemporary contexts, many media anthropologists analyze the images produced by postcolonial subjects themselves, along with the producers of those images and the production process. Rather than scrutinizing the imperial or ethnographic gaze, these scholars are interested in local forms of gazing at the self and others in photographs.

News Media, the Public Sphere, and Nationalism

Community, Development, and Broadcast Media

Broadcasting Modernity and National Identity

Digital Media, New Socialities

Digital Socialities: Personal and Political

How do you talk to your friends on a day-to-day basis? How do you arrange to meet up as a group? If you’re an American, it’s very likely that texts and social media are involved in your communication and coordination with your friends. Studying American teens from 2004 to 2007, scholar Danah Boyd found that social networking sites such as Facebook were key to the formation of new friendships and the consolidation of friend groups, while texting deepened one-on-one relationships (Ito et al. 2010). In fact, friendship was the primary reason given by teens for engaging in digital forms of media (rather than, say, looking up information for school projects or texting their parents about where they are at midnight on a Friday night). Of course, the social preoccupation of American teens is not new, nor is it surprising. But digital media provide new modes of engagement, such as the “always on” texting of best friends or social media “friends” who are not really friends at all but strangers or even enemies. Social media also provide new tools for authoring self-identity as well as the ability to search out information about others that may undermine their own professed identities.

Digital Shadowlands: Illicit Media

Digital media enable and enhance social interaction, deepening relationships and activating imagined communities for social change. However, these new forms of media have a darker side. Digital media are also a tool for piracy, smuggling, scams, human trafficking, and illegal forms of pornography. Frequently, these illicit forms operate across the gulf of global inequality separating wealthy societies from poorer ones. Human trafficking, for instance, often involves abducting youth from impoverished rural communities and smuggling them into urban and wealthier communities to be forced into prostitution. Piracy, on the other hand, often involves making illegal copies of music and movies produced in wealthier countries available to people in poorer communities who may not otherwise be able to afford them.

Art, Music, and Sport

Introduction

Anthropology of the Arts

How Do Anthropologists Approach Art?

You might be asking yourself, How does art reflect or guide the study of anthropology? The simple answer is that art is created by humans. While definitions of art vary and have historically been narrowly construed to fit within a Western understanding of the term (Morphy and Perkins 2006), a constant element has been the intentional application of imagination, creativity, and skill. Art is created with intent.

Studying Prehistoric Art

Much of what anthropologists consider prehistoric art consists of artifacts and materials used to facilitate the work necessary to sustain life. It also includes cave paintings created tens of thousands of years ago. Examples of such cave paintings are the Upper Paleolithic cave art dated to 40,000 to 64,000 years ago, which features stenciled figures of animals and artifacts, though not usually humans.

Interpreting Art

Visual art can be viewed as important evidence in attempting to understand a culture. Throughout time, visual art has been used to convey the human experiences of a vast range of cultures. This art provides modern anthropologists with valuable perspectives on other cultures and other times that could be hard to gain access to through other means. The image of the Kangxi emperor in Figure 16.4 conveys pride, wealth, and strength, characteristics that this artist connects to the China’s Qing dynasty, depicting the emperor as its representative. This image articulates the successes of this culture at that particular point in history. Detailed analysis of works of art can contribute to the sophistication with which anthropologists understand both individual cultures and the shifting nature of human cultures in general.

Spiritual Art

Other forms of visual art are significant to spiritual and sociocultural practices and beliefs. One example is the mandala, a symbolic diagram consisting of various geometric patterns that represents the universe. Mandalas are a cultural practice in Tibet, India, Nepal, China, Japan, and Indonesia (Tucci [1961] 2001) and can be traced back to the fourth century CE. Typically square or circular in shape, they are used in Hinduism and Buddhism to focus attention during meditation.

Visual Anthropology

Visual anthropology is a subfield of anthropology and itself a form of anthropological inquiry. It includes the study of art as represented in photography and film. The field largely arose with the invention of the camera, as anthropologists started to document Indigenous groups of the time on film. Some of the best-known figures in the field of visual anthropology are Edward Curtis, whose images of Native Americans are discussed in detail in Chapter 19: Indigenous Anthropology, and Robert Flaherty, whose 1922 film *Nanook of the North* is frequently shown in introductory anthropology courses as an early example of documentary filmmaking.

The Appreciation of Art

Neuropsychologist Dahlia Zaidel has proposed that people’s appreciation of aesthetics stems from their cognitive and affective processes. This simply means that people are attracted to art on the basis of preexisting conditions and that their interest in art evolves through time as they have new experiences, develop appreciation for new things, and otherwise mature as humans.

Pottery

Traced back to the Neolithic period, pottery is considered one of the oldest inventions of humankind. Pottery is an art form created by many cultures for both aesthetic and functional purposes, including storing and cooking foods, carbonization (the formation of carbon from organic matter), and ritualistic practices. It has long been an important artifact type in archaeology. Pottery is an example of a practical object that also contains features of artistic beauty. One example is the Acoma pottery created by the Pueblo culture. Acoma pottery is functional and was not created purely as what we would now consider to be works of art. However, the pottery itself is a material art. Much can be learned about a culture by analyzing both the functionality of a particular piece or style of pottery and the imagery or stories depicted within its details and designs. Pottery, such as the 20,000-year-old pottery pieces found in ancient China depicted in Figure 16.6, has been crucial to understanding cultural history. The creation of pottery merges human knowledge and experiences, including artistic resources, emerging technological processes, and the needs of a population at a given time (P. M. Rice 2015).

Body Art

Various forms of body art are a foundational form of expression in cultures all over the world. All cultures decorate and modify the human body in some way, whether temporarily or permanently. Anthropological frameworks can be used to understand body art as both a form of visual art and a cultural tradition.

Anthropology of Music

Music

Music is found in wide-ranging settings and format, including chants, musicals, live performances, recorded performances, and spiritual rituals. In prehistoric times, music was used to communicate, to tell the stories of people and express important elements of cultures. Music articulates the human experience, focusing on what people want to remember about their history and what they desire for the future. It has been used to heal, to demonstrate power, and to archive the experiences of people. Present-day music is an extension and an evolution of the music that has come before. It is a medium that represents the depths of time, culture, and history. Prehistoric musical instruments, called *music artifacts* in anthropology, include woodwinds and percussion instruments of ancient nomadic tribes. These instruments began as rudimentary music artifacts and evolved into more sophisticated technological equipment invented and formed for the exclusive purpose of creating music.

Ethnomusicology

Someone who studies music from a global perspective, as a social practice, and through ethnographic field work is called an ethnomusicologist. The Society for Ethnomusicology defines ethnomusicology as “the study of music in its social and cultural contexts” (n.d.). Ethnomusicology is complex, requiring the work of many scientific disciplines. It requires study of many geographic areas, with a focus on the social practice of music and the human experience. Ethnomusicology is interdisciplinary, with a close relation to cultural anthropology. It is sometimes described as a historical research approach to understanding the cultures of people through their music. One well-known ethnomusicologist was Frances Densmore, who focused on the study of Native American music and culture.

Musical Instruments in Prehistory

The field of ethnomusicology focuses on all aspects of music, including its genre, its message, the artist(s) who created it, and the instruments they used to do so. Have you ever considered why a particular musical instrument was created? Who made it? Why did they make it? What did they want it to do? How was it used? How did they dream up the design? Emily Brown (2005), formerly of the US National Park Service, studied the development of musical instruments in Ancestral Puebloan sites. Her study yielded insights into the types of instruments created. These included percussion and woodwind flutes that were used to create music culturally centric to the Puebloan people. Her study also yielded great insight into the structural hierarchy of those entrusted to manufacture music-making instruments. Not too dissimilar to today’s trade apprenticeships and master programs found in construction, Ancestral Puebloan people established a system of passing down the construction techniques central to creating musical instruments, ensuring that the knowledge would be carried on by future generations. Brown’s study connected music instruments to politics, music, social status, and social experiences.

The Structure and Function of Music in Different Societies

Music is grounded in the human experience. It is a theatrical expression of its creator’s thoughts and perceptions. The structure of music has evolved along with the experiences of the humans who created it. Examples of this can be found in the early 1800s hymns of Choctaw tribes. These hymns provide an artistic expression of traumatic experiences, referring to a time when the Choctaw people were removed from their homelands and relocated to reservation lands by the US government. They speak of both individual and collective experiences as these peoples made the arduous journey to their new locations. The songs speak about broken promises, the journey, and the fate of their people.

The Importance of Sociocultural Context in Understanding Music

Ethnomusicologist Patricia Campbell (2011) proposes that children’s perspectives on musical interests are derived from their family, community, and environment. How did you learn about music you liked? What did your parents listen to, and what do you listen to? While you may have learned about and grown to like other music as you aged, your appreciation for music is founded in the sociocultural environment that you were raised in. Imagine growing up in a family that only listened to Bansuri bamboo flute music. Would you even know, for example, what rap music is?

Music as a Basis for Subculture and Community

The affiliation of music with identity became a common topic of inquiry in ethnomusicology in the 1980s, perhaps prompted by the music subcultures of the 1970s that arose among groups of people who did not identify with mainstream norms, values, or ideals. Among the music subcultures that emerged during that time was the punk subculture (Moran 2010). Though it was often seen as no more than youthful rebellion, the punk subculture formed its own community, values, and ideals founded in a do-it-yourself, or DIY, ethos. This can be found in the lyrics, music, and performances of punk groups such as the Ramones and the Clash, as well as more recent pop-influenced groups such as Green Day and Blink-182. The lyrics tell stories of needing to break from common ideals and values in order to think and do for oneself.

Cultural Appropriation

Cultural practices important to communities are often integrated into the fabric of each person’s identity. Cultural appropriation is defined as the improper or disrespectful use of a meaningful element of a culture or identity outside of its intended cultural context by someone who is not a part of that culture or identity (Young 2008). The act of cultural appropriation by dominant cultures threatens to erase remaining parts of a culture that may already be jeopardized. Cultural appropriation is tied to social inequity in that it involves a socially dominant group using the culture of a marginalized group for exploitative or capitalist gain. The cultural significance of the appropriated elements is lost. While the act of cultural appropriation is centuries old, there has been a renewed call from marginalized communities in recent years to understand how and why this practice is harmful.

An Anthropological View of Sport throughout Time

The Anthropology of Sports

Anthropologists understand sports as a cultural performance. The term performance can describe a plethora of actions, including any that are artful, active, or competitive—and sometimes some combination of all of these. Anthropologist Ajeet Jaiswal (2019) describes the anthropology of sports as the study of human growth and development. If one conceives of sports as a sort of performance, one also sees that each performance is unique to the performer. Each athlete, even the most impressive and seemingly unique, is a part of a larger performance. Consider your favorite sport or athletic competition. How long has it been in existence? Does it have roots in ancient times? Often, athletes and sports personalities—from Roman gladiators to more recent English footballers, American basketball players, and Olympic athletes—are considered singularly talented at their respective sports; however, without the broader cultural context that has cultivated gymnastics, tennis, soccer, and basketball, these talents would have no stage on which to perform.

The Evolution of Sports

For most of documented human history, sports have been a significant part of the human experience for both audience and participants. Archaeological artifacts pertaining to sports, including colosseums, weapons, and artistic representations of competition, have been traced back to as early as 2000 BCE in China. These ancient sports featured competitions that tested the strength, stamina, and techniques of performers, such as footraces and physical fights. Today, many nations around the world participate in a version of the Olympic Games that were popular in the ancient Greek village of Olympia. Early events included a marathon run and wrestling. The Olympics were revived in the late 19th century, with the first modern games occurring in 1896 in Athens, Greece. Though rules and regulation may have been less stringent and defined in the sports of previous centuries, competition as entertainment has existed for millennia.

Youth Sports

Recreational sports for youth are common in various cultures. This can be especially important in marginalized communities, where youth sports are often viewed as deterrents from (or alternatives to) potentially dangerous activities or preventive structures that support youth development and community by focusing on positive actions that reduce adverse social behaviors. Youth sports programs are often community-building initiatives. One such initiative is the NFL’s Play 60 program, which challenges NFL football players to engage in activities with underrepresented communities, encouraging kids of all skill levels to come together to play sports.

Anthropology, Representation, and Performance

Cultural Identities

Think about sporting team uniforms or a clothing style worn by members of a musical group. Each outfit on its own may not be distinct or significant, but when worn by a group of athletes or musicians and their fans, they become a source of identity. Since prehistoric times, art, music, and sports have been a source of cultural identity. Arts and sports have been intertwined with several human rights movements and the push for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Music has been a means of coded language for escape. Sports have long been a platform for cultural identity and has presented opportunities for cultural evolution and resistance. The Olympics are just one example of a sporting event that is linked deeply with national identity and nation pride.

Art as Resistance

Art is often used as an act of resistance. Graffiti and hip-hop are two forms of artistic expression that have been viewed as acts of resistance in modern times. The practice of graffiti as it is known today is reminiscent of ancient cave painting, as both are drawings, depictions, and writings on a wall. Ancient graffiti can help archaeologists understand general levels of literacy among a population of people or provide linguistic anthropologists with insight into the development of language through time.

Music as Resistance

Hip-hop is a form of music that has consistently served as a means of protesting injustice toward people of color. From its inception in the 1970s at neighborhood block parties, hip-hop has rapidly spread worldwide to influence various cultures, transitioning from the margins of American culture to a central element of global pop culture. The culture of hip-hop offers possibilities for rich anthropological exploration, including linguistics factors, performance, music, and lyricism. The messages expressed by hip-hop often include complex social commentaries.

Sports as Resistance

Throughout time, sports have been a global focal point for resistance. The Olympics have repeatedly been a site of global resistance and a setting for challenging societal norms and expectations. In Figure 16.26, Black American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos, gold and bronze medalists respectively, are depicted raising black-gloved fists during their medal ceremony as the US national anthem plays (Smith 2011). This gesture became known as the 1968 Olympics Black Power salute. Smith later described his raised, black-gloved fist as a symbol of support for all those who are and have been oppressed. Smith and Carlos made their demonstration in response to human rights violations perpetuated in the United States. Another example of resistance was seen four years later, when Jackie Robinson, the first Black player in Major League Baseball, wrote in his autobiography, recalling the opening game of his first World Series championship: “As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world” (Robinson [1972] 1995, xxiv).

Integral Features

Art, music, and sports can themselves be forms of resistance and at the same time can display evidence of historical resistance. A protest, a cultural statement, the overthrow of a regime—all can be found in, and at times have even been started by, works of art, music, and sports. From the ancient Romans to professional American football players, people have used these mediums to fight for their causes and to ensure that the histories of their plights are recorded in the archives of time.

Medical Anthropology

Introduction

What Is Medical Anthropology?

Social Construction of Health

The World Health Organization defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” (World Health Organization 2020). Health is affected by multiple social, biological, and environmental factors. Disease is strictly biological—an abnormality that affects an individual’s physical structure, chemistry, or function. Going back to the time of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, doctors have regarded disease as the result of both a person’s lifestyle habits and the social environment in which they live. Illness, by comparison, is the individual’s *sociocultural experience* of a disruption to their physical or mental well-being. An individual’s perception of their own illness is shaped by how that illness is viewed, discussed, and explained by the society they live in. The social perception of another person’s sickness affects that person’s social well-being and how they are viewed and treated by others. Sick roles are the social expectations for a sick person’s behaviors based on their particular sickness—how they should act, how they should treat the sickness, and how others should treat them. Malady is the term anthropologists use to encompass disease, illness, and sickness.

History of Medical Anthropology

While medical anthropology is a relatively new subfield, it has deep roots within four-field American anthropology, with a strong connection to early European anthropologists’ study of religion. The holistic approach of Franz Boas was also key to the development of medical anthropology. One focus of Boas’s research was analysis of the “race theory” common in the 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States. According to this theory, one’s assigned racial category and ethnic background determined certain physical features as well as behavioral characteristics. Boas challenged this assumption through studies of the health and physiology of immigrant families in New York City in 1912. Boas found that there was a great deal of flexibility in human biological characteristics within an ethnic group, with social factors such as nutrition and child-rearing practices playing a key role in determining human development and health. He noted that cultural changes to nutrition and child-rearing practices, changes that are commonly a part of the immigrant experience, were linked to generational changes in biology. Boas provided empirical data from his own primary sources that refuted theories of biological inheritance as the source of social behaviors and revealed the impact of local environments (natural, modified, and social) in structuring cultural and physical outcomes. This foundation was starkly opposed to the inherent racism of social evolutionism, which was the dominant anthropological theory of his time.

Ethnomedicine

Theories and Methods

The Importance of Cultural Context

Culture is at the center of all human perspectives and shapes all that humans do. Cultural relativism is crucial to medical anthropology. There is a great degree of variety in the symptoms and conditions that cultures note as significant indicators of diminished health. How the sick are treated varies between cultures as well, including the types of treatments prescribed for a particular sickness. Cultural context matters, and health outcomes determined by culture are informed by that culture’s many parts. The United States, for example, relies heavily on biomedicine, treating symptoms of mental and physical illness with medication. This prevalence is not merely an economic, social, or scientific consideration, but all three. A cultural group’s political-economic context and its cultural beliefs, traditions, and values all create the broader context in which a health system exists and all impact individuals on a psychosocial level. Behaviors such as dietary choices and preferences, substance use, and activity level—frequently labeled as lifestyle risk factors—are all heavily influenced by culture and political-economic forces.

Methods of Medical Anthropology

Medical anthropology is a highly intersectional subfield of anthropology. The field addresses both the biological and social dimensions of maladies and their treatments. Medical anthropologists must thus become comfortable with a wide-ranging tool kit, as diverse as health itself. Like all anthropologists, medical anthropologists rely on qualitative methods, such as ethnographic fieldwork, but they also must be able to appropriately use quantitative methods such as biometrics (including blood pressure, glucose levels, nutritional deficiencies, hormone levels, etc.) and medical statistics (such as rates of comorbidities, birth rates, mortality rates, and hospital readmission rates). Medical anthropologists can be found working in a myriad of endeavors: aiding public health initiatives, working in clinical settings, influencing health care policy, tracking the spread of a disease, or working for companies that develop medical technologies. The theories and methods of medical anthropology are invaluable to such endeavors.

Theoretical Approaches to Medical Anthropology

Applied Medical Anthropology

Evolutionary Medicine and Health

A final theoretical approach to medical anthropology, emerging from biological anthropology, is evolutionary medicine. Evolutionary medicine sits at the intersection of evolutionary biology and human health, using the framework of evolution and evolutionary theory to understand human health. Evolutionary medicine asks why human health evolved the way it did, how environments affect health, and how we continue to affect our health through a number of factors including migration, nutrition, and epigenetics.

Culture and the Brain

The human brain is a fascinating research topic, both medically and culturally. Different cultures conceptualize the brain, its functions, and its health differently. Biomedicine and ethnomedicine systems view human physiology in distinct ways, and these two systems typically have very different explanatory models for understanding the brain and its role in psychology and neurology. Anthropologists are interested in both of these explanatory models and the ways they influence treatment. Some topics of particular interest to medical anthropologists include how psychology affects biology and health, the stigma of mental health across cultures, addiction, culture-bound syndromes, and experiences and illnesses related to stress. Daniel Lende and Greg Downey brought together these topics under the heading of neuroanthropology, an emerging specialty that examines the relationship between culture and the brain.

Reproduction

Reproductive health is another area in which medical anthropologists have made significant contributions by applying their knowledge and methods to real medical practices. Medical anthropologists have studied reproduction in many cultures, analyzing the practices, beliefs, and treatment of those who are pregnant, their children, and their supporting network. Another area of interest has been the ritualization of pregnancy. Robbie Davis Floyd (2004) has done work on birth as a rite of passage and the role of the midwife in modern birth practices around the world, with a focus on medicalized birth in the United States. Her work highlights ways in which the experience of birth is made more complicated by policy. Midwives are shown to decrease the chances of complications in births, yet in many places they are denied a role in the birthing process. Regardless of patient preference and the documented success of midwives, in most settings in the United States doctors and medical professionals are given preference over midwives. Floyd argues that this preference sometimes puts the patient at risk. In the Western biomedical system, doctors are preferred and imbued with authoritative knowledge, which is a sense of legitimacy or perceived authenticity.

The Inequalities of Health

Attempting to address the inequalities of health care is a primary application of the work of critical medical anthropologists. Inequalities are apparent in relation to COVID-19, the global pandemic that has left no corner of the world untouched. A number of agencies in the United States, including the National Institutes of Health and the American Civil Liberties Union, have determined that Black and Latinx populations have been most negatively affected by the virus, both in health outcomes and overall deaths per capita relative to their portion of the population. Several states have emphasized the need to ignore personal safety for the sake of economic “health,” essentially stating a willingness to sacrifice workers so their economic prospects do not falter. Meanwhile, people working on the front lines faced what is tantamount to class violence, as they could not afford to stay safely at home and social distance; indeed, it can be argued that later this class violence still applied, as the divide between remote working and those forced to work on-site created a stark contrast. The health of “essential workers” is put at risk. Aside from health care professionals, the category frequently falls along class lines, with the majority of “essential workers” employed in the service industry, in factories, or making deliveries. Economic inequalities and lack of access to health care providers both play a role in these trends. Similarly, the World Health Organization has highlighted how poorer countries have had their access to the many forms of COVID-19 treatment and prevention restricted by the demands of richer countries like the United States and Australia.

Resources: Explore Medical Anthropology

Human-Animal Relationship

Introduction

Humans and Animals

The Human-Animal Continuum

Nonhuman animals are part of many facets of our lives. Many people rely on animals as part of food and subsistence systems, particularly in the areas of hunting, herding, and agriculture. Some people worship deities who are all or part animal. Many people recognize animals as symbols of clans or sports teams. For example, did your school have an animal as the mascot for its sports or debate teams? Across cultures, people love animals as pets and companions, and, as recognized by evolutionary theory, humans are connected to animals as ancestors and relatives. Animals are integral parts of the lives of humans around the world, in which they play a variety of roles. Defining an animal, however, can be complicated.

Multispecies Ethnography

In his essay “Why Look at Animals?,” English art critic and poet John Berger writes, “To suppose that animals first entered the human imagination as meat or leather or horn is to project a 19th century attitude backwards across the millennia. Animals first entered the imagination as messengers and promises” ([1980] 1991, 4). Recent trends in anthropological scholarship attempt to interact with these messengers and understand the relationship that humans and animals share. The term polyspecific refers to the interactions of multiple species. The relationships shared between humans and other species began with our ancestors millions of years ago.

A Case Study: Domestication of Dogs

Humans interact with and relate to animal species that live in the wild as well as those that depend on them for their survival. Animals that are dependent on human beings are typically the result of domestication. Evidence suggests that early humans quickly developed a clear understanding of how selective breeding works, encouraging animals that shared preferred characteristics to mate and produce offspring. These desired traits included a calm temperament; the ability to get along with conspecifics, or members of one’s own species; usually a smaller body so that the animal could be gathered or herded in larger numbers; and an attachment to or tolerance of humans.

Animals and Subsistence

Human-Animal Empathy in Subsistence

One of the most important relationships between humans and animals is that centered on subsistence, the means by which a group of individuals makes a living. In hunting-and-gathering and pastoral societies, the relationships between humans and animals are critical to human survival. Serving as meat, tools for hunting and for herding other animal species, and sources of commodities such as wool and leather, these societies’ animals are central to human lives. In such societies, human relationships with animals are typically characterized by animal empathy, or the sense of being attuned to the feelings or experiences of other beings—in this case, animals. Elaborate beliefs and rituals surrounding human-animal interdependence are common among hunter-gatherers and pastoralists.

Animal Relationships among Indigenous Hunters

Many cultures continue to rely on wild animals for subsistence today. This dependence requires the mastery of various cognitive skills, including knowledge and understanding of animal behaviors. In all cultures, much of the socialization of children is connected to skills required for subsistence. In societies that rely on hunting for survival, children learn to be especially attentive to their environments. It is also common in such societies for children to keep pets, often the young of wild animals that have been hunted, such as birds and small mammals. Many wild animals are capable of being tamed by human handling when they are young. An animal is considered tamed when it has learned to tolerate human proximity and interaction for considerable periods of time.

A Case Study: Rock Cree Hunters

The Asinskâwôiniwak, or Rock Cree, are an Indigenous society of hunter-gatherers living in northwestern Manitoba, Canada. In his ethnography *Grateful Prey* (1993), cultural anthropologist Robert Brightman examines the various ways in which the Rock Cree think about and interact with animals. Once a foraging society subsisting on big game hunting, fishing, and fur trapping, today the Rock Cree are primarily settled on government lands and no longer nomadic. Their relationship with animals continues to be central to their cultural identity, however, and today they hunt and trap as part of a mixed subsistence system that includes both foraging and wage labor. The Rock Cree’s hunting is informed by both Indigenous principles that place high value on big game animals such as bear, moose, and caribou and the current market price for animal products such as pelts.

Animal Relationships among Nomadic and Transhumant Pastoralists

Like hunter-gatherers, pastoralists also have empathic relationships with animals, but the nature of those relationships is different. Pastoralism, which is subsistence based on herding animals, can be either nomadic or transhumant. Nomadic pastoralism is herding based on the availability of resources and involves unpredictable movements, as herders decide from day to day where they will go next. Transhumant pastoralists have patterned movements from one location to another.

Symbolism and Meaning of Animals

Totemism

Totemism is a belief system in which a subcultural group acknowledges kinship with a spirit being, typically a plant or animal, that serves as the group’s emblem or herald. Relationships with their totems mirror the social relationships they have with each other as subgroups within their society. Totemic groups, often referred to as clans, view themselves as descendants of nonhuman ancestors and maintain special relationships of respect with other species in the natural world. Totemism is an example of a *metaphorical relationship* between humans and the natural world, one that links humans, animals, plants, landforms, and even weather events into a unified web of life. Many Indigenous groups practice totemism and have ancestral alliances with certain animals and plants, demonstrated by the ways in which they talk about them in their myths and depict them in their artwork. Totemic cultures frequently practice shamanism as a way to communicate with animal and plant species.

Animals in Oral Tradition

Animals play an important role in nearly all oral traditions and religions. Across cultures, including Western cultures in Europe and the United States, animals appear as protagonists in myths and stories. The animal characters in nursery rhymes, fairy tales, fables, and folktales teach adults and children lessons and morals and model personal characteristics, some peculiar to a specific culture and others more universal. For example, the story of Chicken Little, also known in the UK as Henny Penny, is one that many US children learn at an early age. It was collected in print in the early 19th century, but it has older roots as a European folktale. In this tale, Chicken Little goes out for a walk on a windy day, and an acorn falls on her head. She panics—the sky must be falling! She runs around the farm warning all the animals about the calamity that she believes is happening: “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” The moral of the story is to have courage and not believe everything you hear.

Animals in Religion

Animals play a role in most religions. Common functions include as objects of ritual sacrifice and as tokens symbolizing gifts, payments, or even messages between the human world and the divine. As just one example, think of the use of a dove in the Noah and the ark myth (Genesis 8:6–12). The dove is the first animal to bring back a piece of greenery, evidence that the flood had receded. With this promise, Noah begins preparations to leave the ark and start over. This use of animals as messengers and forms of sacred communication is seen across cultures.

Pet-Keeping

Pets as Cultural Artifacts

Although specific pets are actual beings (many of us can think of the face of one or more pets we live or have lived with), pets in general can be understood as a cultural artifact. This means that the ways in which pets are treated and what is expected of them vary a great deal from one culture to another. Most pets live in or around human households, are considered the possessions of their human owners, and have limited ability to make freewill decisions. Chinese geographer and early scholar in human-animal studies Yi-Fu Tuan (1984) has studied the ways in which humans have dominated the living environment and their pets, with approaches varying between extremes of dominance and affection, love and abuse, cruelty and kindness. He argues that pets in Western societies are defined by emotion and nostalgia, an approach likely related to increasing distance between people and the natural world. Even within a culture that treats certain animals in a sentimental way, relationships with other animals can still be characterized by cruelty and dominance. Tuan writes, “Animals are slaughtered for food and clothing without a twinge of conscience. A few specimens and species, however, catch the fancy of people in a playful mood and are made into pampered pets or fervently supported causes” (1984, 162).

Pet Keeping in Indigenous Societies

There is extensive evidence of pet keeping in Indigenous societies. In many hunter-gatherer societies, children keep numerous pets, most often birds, small rodents, and monkeys. These animals, often taken directly from the forest or wilderness area when they are still young, are considered valuable companions for children. Caring for the animals is thought to teach children to understand animals’ movements and personalities and help them develop a sense of stewardship for the natural world.

The Making of Pets

In Western societies, domesticated animals have increasingly been subjected to extreme genetic manipulation in order to manufacture ever more novel and attractive pet animals. In Europe, the earliest kennel clubs, designed to develop and maintain breeds and record pedigrees, began as dog show societies in England in 1859 and were later established as governing bodies and official institutions, starting in 1873. Although dog breeds now come from all over the world and continue to be developed—a recent addition to the list of breeds recognized by the American Kennel Club (AKC) is the Biewer terrier, first recognized in January 2021—the majority of modern pet breeds were first developed in Victorian England, where pet keeping flourished and was adopted by all social classes.

Animal Industries and the Animal Trade

Zoos

Zoos have long been part of human societies. The earliest evidence of a zoo has been found in Hierakonpolis, the capital of Upper Egypt during the Predynastic period, today called Nekhen. Here, archaeologists have unearthed the mummified remains of a collection of wild and domesticated animals from about 5,000 years ago that included baboons, hippos, gazelles, crocodiles, a leopard, and cats and dogs. Some of the animals had injuries likely caused by being tied or enclosed in some way. Many of them were buried in the same way that humans were buried, and some were found inside human burials (Boissoneault 2015). Another famous historical zoo was that of the Aztec king Montezuma. When the Spaniards arrived in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán in 1519, they were surprised by the vast collection of animals housed in enclosures and rooms within the king’s palace complex, including jaguars, bears, eagles, deer, fowl, ocelots, and little dogs. According to the Spanish chroniclers, the zoo had some 300 keepers to care for the animals. Similar to early pet keeping, zoos were typically associated with wealth and status.

Ecotourism

Another way in which contemporary Western societies are attempting to address the damage caused by a commodified view of the natural world, including the animals living in it, is through ecotourism. This is tourism designed to be sustainable and to help preserve the flora and fauna of endangered natural environments. Often, the focus is on visiting threatened environments and observing wildlife in its natural habitat. Such tourism can earn money to aid in the conservation of these areas, provide employment for local residents, and raise awareness of the importance of biological, as well as cultural, diversity. Ideally, care is taken to ensure that tourists visiting natural areas do not disturb or damage the environment; however, there are no global standards for ecotourism, and some sites are more successful at protecting sensitive environments than others. The term *greenwashing* is sometimes applied to sites that promote the natural environment as an attraction while engaging in exploitative and environmentally destructive behavior.

Animals and the Medical Industry

In 2015, there were estimated to be some 192 million animals being used in biomedical laboratories across 179 countries worldwide (Taylor and Alvarez 2019). These animals are used for medical experiments, drug testing, product testing, and psychological research. The most commonly used animals in US labs are mice, rats, and birds, though a range of other animals—including rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, farm animals such as pigs and sheep, cats, dogs, and nonhuman primates—are used as well (Humane Society of the United States 2021). These animals come from various sources, including breeding programs within the biomedical labs themselves.

Animals in Our Lives

Humans share their lives with animals in many ways, and how we think about ourselves as human beings rests primarily on the distinctions we see between ourselves and other species. English art critic and poet John Berger writes, “With their parallel lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species” ([1980] 1991, 6). Across cultures and across time, humans have looked toward animals as fellow participants in their lives. They actively participate in the ways we define ourselves. They feed us and accompany us. They work for us and protect us. They also serve as symbols and messengers that help us better understand our world. Our lives are intertwined in multiple ways.

Indigenous Anthropology

Introduction

Indigenous Peoples

Minorities in Their Own Lands

Indigenous peoples have become minorities in most countries because many colonizing peoples sought to eliminate them and practiced various strategies to reduce their power to control land and natural resources and even to maintain their cultures and identities. Historically, adult Indigenous people, and even some young people, were forced to work for colonizers, often doing hard labor or other menial tasks, without any opportunities to accumulate wealth or claim a position of higher class. Christianity in various forms was forced on Indigenous peoples through government policies. Children were either not offered any education at all or forced into boarding schools where they were required to adopt the colonial culture. In this manner, many Indigenous people lost touch with their cultural heritage, and most Indigenous groups dwindled in number, some disappearing altogether. This trend was particularly pronounced in Latin American countries. Most people living in these countries today have some Indigenous ancestry, but as Indigenous identities have been so discouraged, few openly identify with this portion of their heritage, choosing to focus on their White and/or Spanish identities. It is evident that assimilation pressures, the process of changing the culture of a person or group of people to some other culture, through socialization or education, have largely succeeded when remaining peoples who identify as Indigenous become minorities within their own native territories.

Membership in a Tribal Community

Tribal relations among mixed-race Indigenous people in the United States are governed according to a series of rights first created through federal laws and policies, then later adopted by individual tribal nations. Tribal nations now have the right to manage their own membership laws and policies, with each tribe setting its own blood quantum rules for membership. *Blood quantum* refers to a genealogical relationship to one’s original tribal people. Full-blooded Native people issue from parents who are both full-blooded members of a tribe, while half-blooded Native people have parents or grandparents who have at least 50 percent Native blood. A person can even be a full-blooded Native, with parents from two tribes, but be considered half-blooded by the tribe they are enrolled in because the tribe only acknowledges the Indigenous blood from the enrollment tribe (Ellinghaus 2017). Some of the terms for people of mixed heritage in the Americas are mestizo (common in Latin America) and Métis (common in Canada). Some nations, such as Canada, assign different rights to people of mixed Indigenous heritage; Métis communities are accorded different rights from First Nations communities.

Tribal Groups and Communities

Most Indigenous communities are extremely poor and face a number of challenges resulting from centuries of colonization, settlement, and exploitation. In the United States, Canada, and Australia, Indigenous peoples were forcibly relocated to reservations, often marginal lands “set aside” for Native peoples after European settlers and colonists claimed their original homelands. Many North American reservation communities have been, and continue to be, kept in a state of perpetual poverty. Reservations typically have few employment opportunities, high substance addiction and alcoholism rates, and high morbidity rates caused by long-term persistent poverty. Some tribes have been successful in making good education available to young people through successes in casino development and effective management of federal education grants, but there is a significant disparity of completion rates at all levels of education. A 2011 report by the Higher Education Research Institute found that among those enrolled in four-year degree programs, approximately 17 percent of Native students completed the degree within four years, compared to 45 percent of Asian students, 43 percent of White students, 26 percent of Latinx/Latina/Latino students, and 21 percent of Black students (DeAngelo et al. 2011, 10; see also Al-Asfour and Abraham 2016).

20th-Century Challenges

In the 20th century, some tribes grew self-sufficient or even wealthy by harvesting or extracting the natural resources on their reservations. The land of the Osage Nation of Oklahoma was found to contain vast reserves of underground oil. Members of the nation who had oil under their allotments became wealthy, so much so that some were among the wealthiest people on the planet during the height of the oil boom. But soon after acquiring this wealth, White neighbors began marrying into the tribe. Tribal members began being murdered, and authorities were slow to launch any investigations. Eventually, White relatives ended up owning much of the Osage lands. The story of the Osage murders is documented in several books, including *Killers of the Flower Moon* by David Grann, which was made into a motion picture directed by Martin Scorsese.

Perspectives

Indigenous peoples have undergone some five centuries of colonization. During this time, the societal structures of the colonial states have emphasized the perspectives of non-Indigenous peoples, broadly identified as White people. Histories have been written to benefit White people, to support their colonizing cultures and to legitimize their takeover of vast territories from Indigenous peoples. Minority perspectives, including Indigenous perspectives, have not been emphasized and have even been sometimes intentionally repressed. Indigenous peoples have struggled with disempowerment in their sovereign relations with state systems and in legal proceedings over their sovereign rights. Many Indigenous peoples still struggle to prove that they are part of a legitimate nation. State-sponsored erasure of Native culture and history has caused losses of and changes to tribal cultures and languages.

Colonization and Anthropology

Deloria’s Critique

These criticisms of anthropology gained strength in the 1960s, with several Native scholars questioning in particular the higher value assigned to academic scholarship than to the voices of Native peoples. These critiques caused many scholars to reassess the nature of anthropological research.

The Othering of Indigenous Peoples

Othering, discussed earlier in this text, refers to viewing those from different cultures or backgrounds as “other,” or inherently and importantly different from oneself or one’s own “type” of people. Indigenous peoples have been particularly affected by a tendency to be viewed as other by White society. As Linda Smith writes, “A critical aspect of the struggle for self-determination has involved questions relating to our history as Indigenous peoples and a critique of how we, as the Other, have been represented or excluded from various accounts” (2021, 31). The “otherness” that Smith refers to reflects tendencies both to not think about Indigenous peoples at all and to deliberately deny Indigenous cultures an equal share of the history of their land. Indigenous histories and contexts are viewed as something “other” than White histories and contexts and are largely ignored. Othering happens in every conceivable context and affects almost all aspects of social existence, including social mobility, civil rights, getting a job, and applying for grants and funding. Othering figures strongly into sometimes subconscious determinations as to whether a person is the right type of person for a specific position or role. Othering is a form of discrimination and racism. Othering has played a large role in recent discussions of policing in the United States. Othering is influential in the ongoing issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Many police agencies are not investigating missing Indigenous women because they are the other—Indigenous—and the women are singled out by predators because they are clearly Indigenous.

Cultural Experts and Authority

Anthropologists have noted the value of tribal cultural experts to their research projects. A cultural expert is immersed in the culture of their Indigenous community and has insight into the intricacies of their community. Cultural experts have been used by anthropologists since the beginnings of anthropology. However, when reporting information provided by cultural experts, anthropologists have too often taken a position of authority that somewhat disempowers these same cultural experts. Those learning about an Indigenous society will typically turn to the published ethnographic literature on the subject. This literature will most likely present an outsider’s understanding of that society, frozen in a specific time frame and based on a single research project. This gives the readers a warped understanding of the culture they are interested in, only completely valid within the time frame of the study.

Indigenous Societies as Colonial Societies

Indigenous societies are in many ways colonial societies. Most Indigenous people are of mixed heritage, and Indigenous cultures have changed in ways that make them more similar to the surrounding White communities. As just one example, many Indigenous peoples have adopted Christianity as their primary religion. But in most Indigenous communities, there is space for Indigenous traditions and spirituality as well. Sometimes, White and Indigenous cultures exist parallel to one another. Such hybrid societies are often criticized by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people as no longer being Native or Indigenous, but this criticism reflects an understanding of what it means to be Indigenous that is frozen in time. Many people envision Native cultures as they existed in the 19th century as being the “true” cultures, while the cultures of Native people living in urban suburbs with automobiles and ranch-style houses are viewed as tainted or inauthentic. Culture is not a static thing; it is dynamic, constantly changing to fit the context of the present. Native peoples continue to maintain a cultural core that is Indigenous while they adopt the technology and trappings of contemporary society.

Decolonizing Anthropology

In the 1970s, a movement began to “decolonize anthropology.” This movement seeks to address anthropology’s role in collecting and taking ownership of Native knowledge and culture and to speak out against anthropological analyses and products that support colonialism. One aspect of anthropological practice that has been particularly criticized is a tendency to treat Native people purely as research subjects, without acknowledging their agency or their rights, such as the right to protect their buried ancestors or control their knowledge, stories, and even place names. As part of the “decolonizing” movement, scholars began developing research protocols to address these criticisms. The Indigenous perspective has begun to be recognized as valuable, and people from diverse backgrounds have been welcomed into the discipline.

Indigenous Agency and Rights

Treaties and Removal

In the mid-19th century, the United States federal government shifted its approach toward purchasing tribal lands rather than conquering Indigenous nations. Many Native societies had already suffered greatly due to White settlement and were ready to sign treaties that would guarantee them protection on federal Indian reservations. Population loss caused by epidemic disease also played a role in many tribes’ decisions to sign treaties with the federal government. Those who signed treaties received payment for lands, money for schools, and support in establishing Western farming practices in addition to land allotments on a reservation where federal authorities were to guarantee their safety.

Domestic Dependent Nations

The legal status of Native nations was greatly influenced by several paternalistic rulings by the US Supreme Court in the 1830s. Three rulings known as the Marshall court trilogy (*Johnson v. M’Intosh*, 1823; *Cherokee Nation v. Georgia*, 1831; *Worcester v. Georgia*, 1832) determined that tribal peoples were domestic sovereign nations within the United States and dependent on the federal government to guarantee their sovereignty. These rulings meant that all reservations were “federal lands,” not part of the states, with the federal government as the administrator. Native rights, therefore, must be given through federal authorities or named in treaties with the federal government.

Water, Fishing, and Agency

From the 1960s to the 1980s, an issue of particular concern to the tribes of the northwestern part of the United States was fishing rights. The “fishing wars” were a series of political and legal battles over whether Indigenous peoples had the right to fish in their usual and accustomed places, as promised in numerous treaties. Following the Belloni (*Sohappy v. Smith/United States v. Oregon*, 1969) and Boldt (*United States v. Washington*, 1974) court decisions, the tribes of Washington State, including those that had been terminated and not yet restored, maintained their rights to fish in their usual and accustomed ways—and their right to half the catch in the state of Washington.

Culture and Language

Native languages are the most threatened part of the cultures of Native peoples. Many tribes now have only a handful of people who fluently speak the tribe’s language. Of the estimated 10,000 languages once spoken worldwide, at least half have now gone extinct with no speakers, and there are 3,018 Indigenous languages spoken worldwide that are today endangered. One assessment of the 115 Indigenous languages currently spoken in the United State rates two as healthy, 34 as in danger, and 79 likely to go extinct within a generation (Nagle 2019). The rate and severity of language loss is connected to the remaining population of the tribe, whether the tribe has a functioning cultural center, and whether the language continues to be spoken in the households of tribal members. In large part, tribal people of the United States are becoming English-only speakers (Crawford 1995).

Traditional Material Culture

The traditional material cultures of Indigenous peoples showcase an impressive array of styles and skills. Native art was heavily collected by individuals and museums in the 19th century, when there were fears that Indigenous cultures were disappearing. Native art remains popular today. While many Indigenous artists continue to work in traditional styles, some are also incorporating contemporary styles and techniques. Native material cultures embed much cultural philosophy. As anthropologist and museum director Nancy Parezo says, “To anthropologists, Native American/First Nation arts are windows to understanding other cultures and societies. They can be specimens used to support evolutionary theories or explain the maker’s cultural concepts of beauty—to show universal concepts and cultural differences, shared meanings, and modes of communication” (1990, 12).

Indigenous Philosophy and Worldviews

A shared element of Indigenous philosophy across various cultures is the conception of humans existing in relationship to the world around them. Native peoples believe they are deeply connected to the natural world; animals are viewed as relatives, and plants, rocks, and mountains are all understood to have animistic spirits. Rivers, lakes, and even the seasons themselves are also understood as having spirits. Many Native American peoples believe that animals were once their brothers and sisters. It is believed that from the actions of some of the godlike animals, such as Coyote, Beaver, and Raven, much of the world was made. Many Native peoples gain shamanic powers by forming close relationships with certain animals. These powers might include the ability to heal, to poison, to call salmon, to call weather, to fish, or to communicate with animals. Typically, these abilities are gained through ceremonies designed to familiarize people with their spirit helpers at a young age. Ceremonies differ, but a common format involves a youth going off by themselves into a special natural area—such as a forest, hilltop, or mountain cave—and fasting and meditating until they hear their helper spirit. In this manner, many Native peoples are connected to spiritual powers; the most powerful may become a shaman or spiritual leader of their tribe. Details of these types of ceremonies are kept secret within each tribe. One reason for this secrecy is a concern that non-Native people might attempt the same ceremonies without guidance and perhaps hurt themselves or the world around them in the process.

Indigenous Critique: Rights, Activism, Appropriation, and Stereotypes

In the contemporary era, the publications of academics have had a great deal of influence on how tribes have been treated by the federal government and other groups. A 1997 essay, titled “Anthropology and the Making of Chumash Tradition,” included the authors’ opinion that the Coast Chumash tribe were descendants of Mexican people, and not Native people of North America at all (Haley and Wilcoxon 1997). The essay relied in part on rumors that were later refuted as unproven by archaeologist Jon Erlandson (1998). These claims, even disproven, aided other Native peoples in accusing the Coast Chumash of not being Native, resulting in many social and political problems for the community. Scholarly publications such as these can affect the ability of tribal nations in the United States to gain federal recognition status because all applicants for federal recognition must establish continuous culture and governance. Public and scholarly opinions can have a huge effect on whether tribes get recognized and are able to restore their culture and sovereignty after centuries of colonization.

Stereotypes

Native peoples have also become vocal in confronting stereotypes about them. The first Western stereotypes of Native peoples in North American depicted them in primitivist terms as noble savages, living in harmony with nature, with no notions of laws, time, or money. Implicit in this view was the idea that Indigenous peoples were not fully civilized and did not deserve the same rights as White, Christian people. Their land could thus be taken away. This stereotype has been described by writer Albert Memmi “as a series of negations: they were not fully human, they were not civilized enough to have systems, they were not literate, their languages and modes of thought were inadequate” (Smith 2021, 31). Throughout the history of the United States, these stereotypes have been used to progressively take more and more away from Native peoples. When reservations were first established, they were said to be permanent homes, but as White settlers began to see these lands as attractive places, the notion was again raised that Native peoples were not using the land appropriately.

Applied and Public Anthropology and Indigenous Peoples

Anthropology on the Ground

Introduction

Our Challenging World Today

Critical Global Challenges

Today humanity faces a growing number of global problems, most of them linked to one another and to long-standing historical inequities and injustice. Many of the problems people experience in their daily lives derive from major global issues, which intersect with and affect cultural traditions and contemporary social behaviors. In other words, our global problems are deeply connected to the ways we live locally. Local and global problems connect and reinforce each other.

The Ethnosphere

When considering the many challenges facing us as a global community, we must also acknowledge our assets—the tools and conditions we can harness to increase value and effect positive change. We do not enter our future empty-handed. To some extent, our challenges and assets have evolved together, hand in hand. As we face concerns about another possible global health pandemic, for example, we bring with us a depth of scientific knowledge based on earlier experiences, having learned and retooled our responses to be better prepared for those things we have experienced before. As we begin to combat overwhelming climate crises after decades of abusing our environment, we have knowledge and tools to make positive changes while continuing to educate people about our physical world, pollution, and global warming. We understand the causes of most of our challenges, and we have the ability to harness large groups of people globally to work together to address them, with an impressive array of technology at our fingertips. We are not a helpless species. We are not necessarily smarter or wiser than our ancestors were, but we do have one great treasure—we have what our ancestors left to us. We have the accumulation of all their cultural wisdom, ingenuity, and humanity.

Why Anthropology Matters

A Uniquely Relevant Discipline

As you learned in What is Anthropology?, anthropology is a unique discipline. Not only does it study all aspects of what it means to be human across time, with a focus on evolution and how changes occur in our bodies and cultures, but it also examines the ways in which we adapt to different social and physical environments. This process of adaptation is a primary source of cultural and biological diversity. Anthropology is also holistic, examining the context of and interconnections between many parts of our lives and weaving together our biology, our traditions, and the diverse social and physical environments in which we live. The anthropological approach views humans as part of a wider system of meaning, as actors and change-makers within a dynamic environment populated by others. Across cultures, those others can include other species (plant and animal) and spirits as well as other human beings. It is the human ability to imagine and construct the universe in which we live that most interests anthropologists.

Anthropological Values

The anthropological perspective is grounded by principles and standards of behavior considered important to understanding other people and their ways of life. These include the value of all cultures; the value of diversities, biological and cultural; the importance of change over time; and the importance of cultural relativism and acknowledging of the dignity of all human beings. These anthropological values undergird our discipline.

What Anthropologists Can Do

What Anthropologists Do Today

Anthropologists are at work now to make a difference in our lives. There are various ways in which anthropologists and those utilizing an anthropological lens or framework contribute critically needed skills and resources in the 21st century.

Anthropological Skills and Resources

Anthropologists are trained to look at the larger context and understand how smaller, local environments fit into overarching forces. They aim to hold a multicultural perspective that represents various constituencies and to interact with people around them with the goal of better understanding where they are coming from and what things *mean* to them. Anthropologists gather and analyze data that reflects real life *on the ground and in the streets*. The central anthropological specialty is an unfettered interest in human beings.

How Anthropology Can Lead in the Future

Career and employment trends today align with what anthropologists do, whether or not one is a full-time practicing anthropologist. Students heading into any fields that address the human condition, past or present, will benefit from studies in anthropology. Within colleges and universities across the world, there is a reemergence of transdisciplinary approaches that utilize methods and perspectives from multiple disciplines to study and propose solutions to complex problems. This educational model, sometimes called the *matrix model* (National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineers, and Institute of Medicine 2005), has resulted in the development of new interdisciplinary degree programs such as the biomedical informatics program at Stanford University; the Indigenous food, energy, and water systems program at the University of Arizona; and the science, medicine, and technology in culture program at Union College. Training in anthropological holism is the ideal foundation for working in teams with multiple interests and a shared focus on the larger context. Specifically, the four-field approach in anthropology prepares researchers to apply a keen perception of the ways in which biology and culture interact and influence each other.