Where is anthropology practiced

Practices refers to behaviors and actions that may be motivated by belief or performed without reflection as part of everyday routines. Much like art and language, culture is also symbolic. A symbol is something that stands for something else, often without a natural connection. Individuals create, interpret, and share the meanings of symbols within their group or the larger society. For example, in U. Take the Confederate flag: Some people see it as a symbol of pride in a southern heritage.

Many others see it as a symbol of the long legacy of slavery, segregation, and racial oppression. Thus, displaying the Confederate flag could have positive or, more often, negative connotations.

Cultural symbols powerfully convey either shared or conflicting meanings across space and time. This definition of culture — shared, learned beliefs, practices, and symbols — allows us to understand that people everywhere are thinkers and actors shaped by their social contexts. As we will see throughout this book, these contexts are incredibly diverse, comprising the human cultural diversity that drew many of us to become anthropologists in the first place.

While culture is central to making us human, we are still biological beings with natural needs and urges that we share with other animals: hunger, thirst, sex, elimination, etc. Human culture uniquely channels these urges in particular ways and cultural practices can then impact our biology, growth, and development. Humans are one of the most dynamic species on Earth.

Our ability to change both culturally and biologically has enabled us to persist for millions of years and to thrive in diverse environments. Together, they form an all-encompassing, integrated whole that binds groups of people together and shapes their worldview and lifeways.

Humans are born with the capacity to learn the culture of any social group. We learn culture both directly and indirectly. Humans are not bound by culture; they have the capacity to conform to it or not, and sometimes change it. Culture is symbolic; individuals create and share the meanings of symbols within their group or society. The degree to which humans rely on culture distinguishes us from other animals and shaped our evolution. Human culture and biology are interrelated: Our biology, growth, and development are impacted by culture.

Imagine you are living several thousand years ago. Maybe you are a wife and mother of three children. Maybe you are a young man eager to start your own family.

Maybe you are a prominent religious leader, or maybe you are a respected healer. Your family has, for as long as people can remember, lived the way you do. You learned to act, eat, hunt, talk, pray, and live the way you do from your parents, your extended family, and your small community. Suddenly, you encounter a new group of people who have a different way of living, speak strangely, and eat in an unusual manner.

They have a different way of addressing the supernatural and caring for their sick. What do you make of these differences? These are the questions that have faced people for tens of thousands of years as human groups have moved around and settled in different parts of the world.

One of the first examples of someone who attempted to systematically study and document cultural differences is Zhang Qian BC — BC. He spent more than twenty-five years traveling and recording his observations of the peoples and cultures of Central Asia Wood Zhang discovered many of the trade routes used in the Silk Road and introduced several new cultural ideas, including Buddhism, into Chinese culture.

During the fourteenth century, he traveled for a period of nearly thirty years, covering almost the whole of the Islamic world, including parts of Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, India, and China. This book became part of a genre of Arabic literature that included descriptions of the people and places visited along with commentary about the cultures encountered. Some scholars consider Al Rihla to be among the first examples of early pre-anthropological writing.

Europeans exploited natural resources and human labor in other parts of the world, exerting social and political control over the people they encountered. New trade routes along with the slave trade fueled a growing European empire while forever disrupting previously independent cultures in the Old World. Indeed, the emerging anthropological practices of this time were ethnocentric and often supported colonial projects.

As European empires expanded, new ways of understanding the world and its people arose. Beginning in the eighteenth century in Europe, the Age of the Enlightenment was a social and philosophical movement that privileged science, rationality, and experience, while critiquing religious authority. This crucial period of intellectual development planted the seeds for many academic disciplines, including anthropology. He disputed the Young Earth theory, which was popular at the time and used Biblical information to date the earth as only 6, years old, Charles Darwin , a naturalist and biologist, observed similarities between fossils and living specimens, leading him to argue that all life is descended from a common ancestor.

Philosopher John Locke contemplated the origins of society itself, proposing that people historically had lived in relative isolation until they agreed to form a society in which the government would protect their personal property.

These radical ideas about the earth, evolution, and society influenced early social scientists into the nineteenth century. Philosopher and anthropologist Herbert Spencer , inspired by scientific principles, used biological evolution as a model to understand social evolution. Societies were classified into these stages based on their family structure, technologies, and methods for acquiring food.

While there, he started to develop participant-observation fieldwork: the method of immersive, long-term research that cultural anthropologists use today. He developed a theory to explain human cultural diversity: each culture functions to satisfy the specific biological and psychological needs of its people. While this theory has been critiqued as biological reductionism, it was an early attempt to view other cultures in more open-minded ways.

Around the same time in the United States, Franz Boas , widely regarded as the founder of American anthropology, developed cultural relativism, the view that while cultures differ, they are not better or worse than one another. In his critique of ethnocentric views, Boas insisted that physical and behavioral differences among racial and ethnic groups in the United States were shaped by environmental and social conditions, not biology.

In fact, he argued that culture and biology are distinct realms of experience: human behaviors are socially learned, contextual, and flexible, not innate. Further, Boas worked to transform anthropology into a professional and empirical academic discipline that integrated the four subdisciplines of cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, archaeology, and biological anthropology. Biological anthropology is the study of human origins, evolution, and variation.

Some biological anthropologists focus on our closest living relatives, monkeys and apes. They examine the biological and behavioral similarities and differences between nonhuman primates and human primates us! For example, Jane Goodall has devoted her life to studying wild chimpanzees Goodall When she began her research in Tanzania in the s, Goodall challenged widely held assumptions about the inherent differences between humans and apes.

At the time, it was assumed that monkeys and apes lacked the social and emotional traits that made human beings such exceptional creatures.

However, Goodall discovered that, like humans, chimpanzees also make tools, socialize their young, have intense emotional lives, and form strong maternal-infant bonds. Her work highlights the value of field-based research in natural settings that can help us understand the complex lives of nonhuman primates.

Other biological anthropologists focus on extinct human species, asking questions like: What did our ancestors look like? What did they eat? When did they start to speak? How did they adapt to new environments? In , a team of women scientists excavated a trove of fossilized bones in the Dinaledi Chamber of the Rising Star Cave system in South Africa.

The bones turned out to belong to a previously unknown hominin species that was later named Homo naledi. With over 1, specimens from at least fifteen individuals, the site is the largest collection of a single hominin species found in Africa Berger, Researchers are still working to determine how the bones were left in the deep, hard to access cave and whether or not they were deliberately placed there.

They also want to know what Homo naledi ate, if this species made and used tools, and how they are related to other Homo species. Biological anthropologists who study ancient human relatives are called paleoanthropologists. The field of paleoanthropology changes rapidly as fossil discoveries and refined dating techniques offer new clues into our past.

Other biological anthropologists focus on humans in the present including their genetic and phenotypic observable variation. For instance, Nina Jablonski has conducted research on human skin tone, asking why dark skin pigmentation is prevalent in places, like Central Africa, where there is high ultraviolet UV radiation from sunlight, while light skin pigmentation is prevalent in places, like Nordic countries, where there is low UV radiation.

She explains this pattern in terms of the interplay between skin pigmentation, UV radiation, folic acid, and vitamin D. In brief, too much UV radiation can break down folic acid, which is essential to DNA and cell production. Vitamin D is essential to calcium absorption and a healthy skeleton. Archaeologists focus on the material past: the tools, food, pottery, art, shelters, seeds, and other objects left behind by people. Prehistoric archaeologists recover and analyze these materials to reconstruct the lifeways of past societies that lacked writing.

They ask specific questions like: How did people in a particular area live? Why did their societies to change over time? They also ask general questions about humankind: When and why did humans first develop agriculture? How did cities first develop? How did prehistoric people interact with their neighbors? The method that archaeologists use to answer their questions is excavation—the careful digging and removing of dirt and stones to uncover material remains while recording their context.

Archaeological research spans millions of years from human origins to the present. For example, British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon , was one of few female archaeologists in the s.

She famously studied the city structures and cemeteries of Jericho, an ancient city dating back to the Early Bronze Age 3, years before the present located in what is today the West Bank. Based on her findings, she argued that Jericho is the oldest city in the world and has been continuously occupied by different groups for over 10, years Kenyon Historical archaeologists study recent societies using material remains to complement the written record.

The Garbage Project, which began in the s, is an example of a historic archaeological project based in Tucson, Arizona. It involves excavating a contemporary landfill as if it were a conventional archaeology site.

Archaeologists have found discrepancies between what people say they throw out and what is actually in their trash. In fact, many landfills hold large amounts of paper products and construction debris Rathje and Murphy This finding has practical implications for creating environmentally sustainable waste disposal practices.

In , while working on an office building in New York City, construction workers came across human skeletons buried just 30 feet below the city streets. Archaeologists were called in to investigate. Upon further excavation, they discovered a six-acre burial ground, containing 15, skeletons of free and enslaved Africans who helped build the city during the colonial era.

The site is now a national monument where people can learn about the history of slavery in the U. Language is a defining trait of human beings. While other animals have communication systems, only humans have complex, symbolic languages—over 6, of them!

Human language makes it possible to teach and learn, to plan and think abstractly, to coordinate our efforts, and even to contemplate our own demise. Linguistic anthropologists ask questions like: How did language first emerge? How has it evolved and diversified over time?

How has language helped us succeed as a species? How does language influence our views of the world? If you speak two or more languages, you may have experienced how language affects you. The Spanish language arguably expresses more nuanced views of love than the English language. One intriguing line of linguistic anthropological research focuses on the relationship between language, thought, and culture.

When Benjamin Whorf studied the Hopi language, he found not just word-level differences, but grammatical differences between Hopi and English. He wrote that Hopi has no grammatical tenses to convey the passage of time. At the same time, Malotki recognized that English and Hopi tenses differ, albeit in ways less pronounced than Whorf proposed Malotki Still others explore how language is crucial to socialization: children learn their culture and social identity through language and nonverbal forms of communication Ochs and Schieffelin Sometimes considered a fifth subdiscipline, applied anthropology involves the application of anthropological theories, methods, and findings to solve practical problems.

Applied anthropologists are employed outside of academic settings, in both the public and private sectors, including business or consulting firms, advertising companies, city government, law enforcement, the medical field, nongovernmental organizations, and even the military.

Applied anthropologists span the subfields. An applied archaeologist might work in cultural resource management to assess a potentially significant archaeological site unearthed during a construction project. An applied cultural anthropologist could work at a technology company that seeks to understand the human-technology interface in order to design better tools. Medical anthropology is an example of both an applied and theoretical area of study that draws on all four subdisciplines to understand the interrelationship of health, illness, and culture.

Rather than assume that disease resides only within the individual body, medical anthropologists explore the environmental, social, and cultural conditions that impact the experience of illness. For example, in some cultures, people believe illness is caused by an imbalance within the community. Therefore, a communal response, such as a healing ceremony, is necessary to restore both the health of the person and the group.

This approach differs from the one used in mainstream U. Trained as both a physician and medical anthropologist, Paul Farmer demonstrates the applied potential of anthropology.

There, he was struck by the poor living conditions and lack of health care facilities. Later, as a physician, he would return to Haiti to treat individuals suffering from diseases like tuberculosis and cholera that were rarely seen in the United States.

As an anthropologist, he would contextualize the experiences of his Haitian patients in relation to the historical, social, and political forces that impact Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere Farmer Today, he not only writes academic books about human suffering, he also takes action.

Through the work of Partners in Health , a nonprofit organization that he co-founded, he has helped open health clinics in many resource-poor countries and trained local staff to administer care. Anthropologists across the subfields use unique perspectives to conduct their research.

These perspectives make anthropology distinct from related disciplines — like history, sociology, and psychology — that ask similar questions about the past, societies, and human nature. They are interested in explaining the similarities and differences that are found among humans across the world.

Through this work, biological anthropologists have shown that, while humans do vary in their biology and behavior, they are more similar to one another than different. Sociocultural anthropologists explore how people in different places live and understand the world around them. They want to know what people think is important and the rules they make about how they should interact with one another.

Even within one country or society, people may disagree about how they should speak, dress, eat, or treat others. Anthropologists want to listen to all voices and viewpoints in order to understand how societies vary and what they have in common. Sociocultural anthropologists often find that the best way to learn about diverse peoples and cultures is to spend time living among them. They try to understand the perspectives, practices, and social organization of other groups whose values and lifeways may be very different from their own.

The knowledge they gain can enrich human understanding on a broader level. Linguistic anthropologists study the many ways people communicate across the globe. They are interested in how language is linked to how we see the world and how we relate to each other. This can mean looking at how language works in all its different forms, and how it changes over time.

It also means looking at what we believe about language and communication, and how we use language in our lives. This includes the ways we use language to build and share meaning, to form or change identities, and to make or change relations of power.

For linguistic anthropologists, language and communication are keys to how we make society and culture. Applied or practicing anthropologists are an important part of anthropology. Each of the four subfields of anthropology can be applied. Applied anthropologists work to solve real world problems by using anthropological methods and ideas. For example, they may work in local communities helping to solve problems related to health, education or the environment.

They might also work for museums or national or state parks helping to interpret history. They might work for local, state or federal governments or for non-profit organizations. Others may work for businesses, like retail stores or software and technology companies, to learn more about how people use products or technology in their daily lives. Some work in the USA while others work internationally. When the project is approved, and budget is set, it is difficult to completely adjust the focus and plan based on new knowledge of community needs.

Anthropologists working on these projects often find themselves in the challenging space of advocating for new approaches, such as funding structures based on needs, rather than donor priorities, and flexibility in programming as opposed to carrying out the set activities that are outlined in program plans. Despite the passing of years and even the identification of some strong resistance by people in the communities, the food taboos were consistently presented as cultural issues or misconceptions that best practices and evidence-based behavior-change approaches could eliminate.

On paper, the plan sounded good. The diverse activities would reinforce the message of behavior change with each offering unique insight and thus having a compounding effect in achieving the desired objective. The activities had previously been shown to be successful in a range of settings. For the project staff, all required information appeared to have been gathered. My work began with spending time with the people in their communities and asking them about the food taboos—what they actually were and why they existed—and the community members provided detailed and insightful information.

When I talked to the field staff about it, they reported that they had never asked the people in the communities those questions. That might sound like a case of neglect, but I view it is the logical outcome of one way of seeing.

When a problematic practice has been identified and the organization has experience with activities that have changed such behavior, why do the details matter? From that perspective, the tedious task of collecting such data would waste valuable resources, time, and effort. It is important, at this juncture, to shed some light on the systemic nature of seeing from technical perspectives of this sort, which are common in the organizational cultures of international development programs and their staff members.

When I started my work in the program, I had no previous experience with the ethnic group that practiced the food taboos and had never been in the region. I was sent to visit a number of communities as part of an assessment unrelated to food taboos and to conduct gender-separated focus group discussions and individual interviews. In the first community I visited, the adult men made no mention of food taboos but the women did, and what they said was at odds with the project reports.

They said that the restrictions applied only to adult married women and were, as one of the official reports had noted, limited to a specific local breed of chicken raised in specific households.

I made note of the comments and went on with my tasks. In the second community, I interviewed religious leaders from two Christian sects who also mentioned the food taboos, describing them as examples of common practices of witchcraft. In the third and fourth communities, I had lengthy discussions exploring the context that no one had asked about until then: What in fact were the food taboos? Why did the taboos exist? What reinforced them as an ongoing practice? How did people view the practices and what were the consequences of not following them?

The staff members who had been working with the communities were amazed at the valuable information gathered by simply asking the questions.

Community members made a number of important clarifications, some of which aligned with what was presented in reports and some did not. The details of these taboos were not uniform in all communities, however they shared some trends. For example, once a woman married a number of restrictions began, which included the prohibition of eating eggs and chicken meat, although only those that were produced from local breeds of chicken and only those raised within her household or the household of her in-laws.

The restrictions did not apply to children or unmarried girls, nor did they apply to other breeds of chickens. In some communities, this also applied to the meat of hunted animals and milk. Women who did consume the prohibited products were believed to suffer from illnesses, such as swelling and itching, or even to cause the death of one of their in-laws.

One project activity instructed women to bring the eggs they were forbidden to eat to the project staff, who then cooked the eggs and told the women to eat. The response of some women was outright refusal, some ate and then induced vomiting, while others followed the instructions and ate without strong objection.

Reactions such as these suggested that there was more to the prohibition than a simple misconception. Elders in the communities explained that food taboos were one of a series of interconnected restrictions on behaviors, some identified by the project as harmful but not connected to the food taboos. In addition to food taboos, the restrictions included limitations on what women can touch and places they could enter while menstruating, a prohibition against a wife eating from the first harvest of the season until after her husband does, and rules preventing a wife from drinking from a newly prepared batch of alcoholic drink until after her husband does.

Project workers had identified many of these practices, but understood them to be isolated from each other as separate traditions. The food taboos were, in fact, a small part of a detailed belief system that influenced many components of everyday life. There had been, perhaps two generations ago, a respected leader from their ethnic group who had supernatural traits. His name was Gumzanjela, and he guided the community and held a role akin to religious leadership.

Although Gumzanjela had passed on, he continued to be present in the community. His presence, described as his spirit, influenced what happened, could bring about illness, and could be called on when seeking cures.

Some believed that Gumzanjela was a person; others believed that he had always been a supernatural being. Regardless, belief in Gumzanjela was a serious matter; people believed in him, believed his regulations were true, and had witnessed repercussions of failing to follow them.

Gumzanjela had established the food taboos and restrictions for women. One of the many stories told about him was that his first child was born holding a leaf of a specific plant that was thereafter used as a cure for spiritual illnesses. Treatment of illness was a common theme in recollections of Gumzanjela and was a primary reason people continued to seek his help.

Disobeying Gumzanjela was said to result in curses, sometimes on the one who violated a rule and other times on a relative such as the in-laws cited in the food taboos. The curses ranged from relatively minor ailments such as severe itching or swelling to the death of an in-law. In addition to prohibiting a number of behaviors for women, Gumzanjela had imparted specific directions for people to follow, often built on his teachings, that were delivered via spiritual mediums in the community who communicated with Gumzanjela.

For example, Gumzanjela had prescribed a cure that involved cutting off the claw of a chicken and placing it in the belly button of the person needing treatment. The claw was left there for one week, and the person could not bathe during that time. At the end of the week, the claw was removed and the person bathed. Only the person being treated could eat the chicken from which the cutting was taken.

In each community, there were well-known practitioner spirit-mediums, both male and female, to whom people go to connect with Gumzanjela. They sought various forms of support or requested that curses be placed on someone.

The seeker could be given specific instructions to do certain things or to refrain from doing certain things. One of the project reports had referred to the food taboos as being deeply rooted and, in context, it is easy to understand why that was the case. A brief analogy demonstrates the gravity of this point. Imagine that the people in the project communities were followers of Judaism or Islam, religions that prohibit consumption of a number of foods, including pork.

Additionally, disadvantaged members of society could be encouraged to raise and sell pigs to generate income. Because Islam and Judaism are major recognized religions with millions of followers, it might seem absurd to try to convince them to eat pork based on nutritional and economic grounds. But the law of Gumzanjela is also a belief system and is as important to the communities in the project as Islam and Judaism are to their followers.

The project had failed to recognize that the food taboos were part of a comprehensive belief system and that the organization had made demands that directly confronted culturally important beliefs and values. As a result, the project activities were viewed as an affront to their religious traditions and to the righteous, respected man from whom the laws had come and his living spirit.

I asked a group of men if a person could continue to believe in Gumzanjela and not practice the food taboo regarding chicken and eggs.

No, they said, it was not possible. I have seen the effects; no cure works except from Gumzanjela. The majority of the community members interviewed agreed that belief in Gumzanjela was correct and that they must follow the system set out.

Gumzanjela was present in their lives and in their homes and affected their lives daily.