Differences in customs and beliefs reflected differences in intelligence and destiny, with every culture finding its rung on an evolutionary ladder rising from the savage to the barbarian to the civilized of the Strand in London, with technological wizardry, the great achievement of the West, being the sole measure of progress and success. Sexual and behavioral characteristics were presumed fixed.
Whites were smart and industrious, Blacks physically strong but lazy, and some people were barely distinguishable from animals; as late as it was debated in parliament in Australia whether aborigines were human beings. Politics was the domain of men, charity work and the home the realm of women. Immigrants were seen as a threat, even by those who had themselves only just managed to claw their way ashore.
The poor were responsible for their own miseries, even as the British army reported that the height of officers recruited in was on average six inches taller than that of enlisted men, simply because of nutrition.
As for the blind, deaf and dumb, the cripples, morons, Mongoloids, and the mad, they were best locked away, lobotomized and even killed to remove them from the gene pool.
The superiority of the white man was accepted with such assurance that the Oxford English Dictionary in had no entries for racism or colonialism. As recently as , Carleton Coon completed a set of two books, The Origin of Races and The Living Races of Man, in which he advanced the theory that the political and technological dominance of Europeans was a natural consequence of their evolved genetic superiority. Interracial marriage remained illegal across much of the United States until Today, not two generations on, it goes without saying that no educated person would share any of these bankrupt certitudes.
By the same token, what we take for granted would be unimaginable to those who fiercely defended convictions that appear to the modern eye both transparently wrong and morally reprehensible. All of which raises a question. What was it that allowed our culture to go from zero to 60 in a generation, as women moved from the kitchen to the boardroom, people of color from the woodshed to the White House, gay men and women from the closet to the altar?
Political movements are built upon the possibility of change, possibilities brought into being by new ways of thinking. Before any of these struggles could flourish, something fundamental, some flash of insight, had to challenge and, in time, shatter the intellectual foundations that supported archaic beliefs as irrelevant to our lives today as the notions of 19th-century clergymen, certain that the earth was but 6, years old.
We live today in the social landscape of their dreams. If you find it normal, for example, that an Irish boy would have an Asian girlfriend, or that a Jewish friend might find solace in the Buddhist dharma, or that a person born into a male body could self-identify as a woman, then you are a child of anthropology. And if you believe that wisdom may be found in all spiritual traditions, that people in all places are always dancing with new possibilities for life, that one preserves jam but not culture, then you share a vision of compassion and inclusion that represents perhaps the most sublime revelation of our species, the scientific realization that all of humanity is one interconnected and undivided whole.
Widely acknowledged as the father of American cultural anthropology, Franz Boas was the first scholar to explore in a truly open and neutral manner how human social perceptions are formed, and how members of distinct societies become conditioned to see and interpret the world. What, he asked, was the nature of knowing? Who decided what was to be known? How do seemingly random beliefs and convictions converge into this thing called culture, a term that he was the first to promote as an organizing principle, a useful point of intellectual departure.
Far ahead of his time, Boas recognized that every distinct social community, every cluster of people distinguished by language or adaptive inclination, was a unique facet of the human legacy and its promise. Each was a product of its own history. None existed in an absolute sense; every culture was but a model of reality. We create our social realms, Boas would say, determine what we then define as being common sense, universal truths, the appropriate rules and codes of behavior.
Beauty really does lie in the eye of the beholder. Race and gender are cultural constructs, derived not from biology but born in the realm of ideas. Critically, none of this implied an extreme relativism, as if every human behavior must be accepted simply because it exists. Boas never called for the elimination of judgment, only its suspension so that the very judgments we are ethically and morally obliged to make as human beings may be informed ones. Even as he graced the cover of Time magazine in , a German Jew in exile from a homeland already dripping in blood, Boas railed against the cruel conceits and stupidity of scientific racism.
Every culture was a unique expression of the human imagination and heart. Each was a unique answer to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive? When asked that question, humanity responds in 7, different languages, voices that collectively comprise our repertoire for dealing with all the challenges that will confront us as a species. Boas would not live to see his insights and intuitions confirmed by hard science, let alone define the zeitgeist of a new global culture.
But, 80 years on, studies of the human genome have indeed revealed the genetic endowment of humanity to be a single continuum. Race truly is a fiction. We are all cut from the same genetic cloth, all descendants of common ancestors, including those who walked out of Africa some 65, years ago, embarking on a journey that over 40, years, a mere generations, carried the human spirit to every corner of the habitable world. But here is the important idea.
If we are all cut from the same fabric of life, then by definition we all share the same mental acuity, the same raw genius. Whether this intellectual potential is exercised through technological innovation, as has been the great achievement of the West, or through the untangling of complex threads of memory inherent in a myth, a priority of many other peoples in the world, is simply a matter of choice and orientation, adaptive insights and cultural emphasis.
There is no hierarchy of progress in the history of culture, no evolutionary ladder to success. Boas and his students were right. A second important tool in anthropological research is ethnography, or fieldwork, as the main form of data collection. Ethnographic fieldwork is neither capital-intensive nor labour-intensive — it is inexpensive and, in the field, anthropologists spend much of their time apparently doing nothing — but instead, it is very time-intensive. Anthropologists typically spend a year or more in the field.
This is necessary because the aim of the ethnographic method is to develop sound knowledge and a proper understanding of a sociocultural world, and for this to be possible, they must learn the local language and take part in as many local activities as they can. Unlike qualitative sociology, which is typically based on intensive interviews, anthropologists do not see interviewing as a main method, although it forms part of their toolbox.
Rather, they collect data through participant observation , during which the anthropologist simply spends time with people, talks with them, sometimes asks questions, and learns the local ways of doing things as thoroughly as possible.
Anthropologists use people to study other people. The method demands that the researcher gets to know people on a personal level, meets them repeatedly and, if possible, lives with them during fieldwork. For this reason, ethnographic data are of very high quality, although they often need to be supplemented by other kinds of data, such as quantitative or historical data, as the number of people whose lives anthropologists study through participant observation is necessarily limited.
The ethnographic method enables anthropologists to discover aspects of local worlds that are inaccessible to researchers who use other methods. For example, anthropologists have studied the world-views of European neo-Nazis, the functioning of the informal economy in African markets, and the reasons why people in Norway throw away more food than they are willing to admit. By combining direct observation, participation and conversations in their in-depth ethnographic methods, anthropologists are able to provide more detailed and nuanced descriptions of such and other phenomena than other researchers.
This is one of the reasons why ethnographic research is so time-consuming: Anthropologists need to build trust with the people they try to understand, who will then, consciously or not, reveal aspects of their lives that they would not speak about to a journalist or a social scientist with a questionnaire, for example. New insights into the human condition and new theoretical developments in anthropology often grow out of comparison, that is the systematic search for differences and similarities between social and cultural worlds.
Although comparison is demanding, difficult and sometimes theoretically problematic, anthropologists always compare, whether explicitly or implicitly. By using general terms such as kinship, gender, inequality, household, ethnicity and religion, anthropologists tacitly assume that these categories have comparable meanings in different societies, yet they rarely mean exactly the same thing. Looking for similarities and differences between social and cultural worlds, anthropologists can develop general insights into the nature of society and human existence.
Comparison has the additional quality of stimulating the intellectual and moral imagination. A detailed, compelling study of a society where there is gender equality, ecological sustainability and little or no violence is interesting in its own right, but it can also serve as an inspiration for policy and reform in other societies.
By raising fundamental questions in a neutral, detached way, basic research can sometimes prove to be more useful in tackling the problems that the world faces than applied research. When anthropologists study peaceful, ethnically complex societies, they offer models for coexistence which can be made relevant for policy and practice elsewhere. They often come up with unexpected insights such as, for example, the fact that the Internet can strengthen family ties rather than isolate people , that religious participation helps immigrants to integrate into European societies rather than divide them , and that peasants are more economically rational than plantation owners rather than being hopelessly traditional.
The main objective of comparison is not to rank societies on a ladder of development, human rights or environmental sustainability. This does not mean that anthropological knowledge is irrelevant for attempts to solve problems of this kind — on the contrary, the neutral, cool-headed method of anthropological comparison produces knowledge that can be used as a reliable foundation on which to build policy.
Anthropologists carry out fieldwork, make comparisons and do so in a spirit of cultural relativism, but all along they are concerned with context, relationships and connections.
The smallest unit that anthropologists study is not the isolated individual, but the relationship between two people. Culture is what makes communication possible; it is thus activated between minds, not inside them, and society is a web of relationships. To a great extent, we are constituted by our relationships with others, which produce us and give us sustenance and which confirm or challenge our values and opinions. This is why we have to study and engage with human beings in their full social context.
In order to understand people, anthropologists follow them around in a variety of situations and, as they often point out, it is not sufficient to listen to what people say.
We also have to observe what they do, and to analyse the wider implications of their actions. Because of the fine-grained methodology they employ, anthropologists are also capable of making the invisible visible — be it voices which are otherwise not heard or informal networks between high-status people. In fact, one writer who predicted the financial crisis long before it took place was Gillian Tett, a journalist who, thanks to her training in anthropology, understood what the financial elite were actually doing, not just what they told the public.
There is often a strong temptation to simplify complex issues, not least in an information society. But not simpler. For anthropologists, some of the most important things in life, culture and society are those that cannot be measured.
This does not mean that they do not exist. Few would doubt the existential value of love, the social importance of trust, or the power of Dostoyevsky's novels; yet, none of this can be counted and measured. To understand human worlds, qualitative research and interpretation are necessary. The kind of knowledge anthropology teaches is invaluable, not least in our turbulent, globalised age, in which people of different backgrounds come into contact with each other in unprecedented ways and in a multitude of settings, from tourism and trade to migration and organisational work.
Unlike training in engineering or psychology, an education in anthropology is not vocational. There are few readymade niches for anthropologists in the labour market other than in teaching and research in universities and research centres. As a result most anthropologists in Europe work in a multitude of professions in the public and private sectors, where they implement that specific skills and knowledges that anthropology has taught them, which are much sought after by employers: the ability to understand complexity, an awareness of diversity, intellectual flexibility, and so on.
Anthropologists work as journalists, development workers, civil servants, consultants, information officers; they are employed in museums, advertising agencies, corporations and NGOs.
There are several reasons why anthropological knowledge can help to make sense of the contemporary world. First, contact between culturally different groups has increased enormously in our time. For the global middle classes, long-distance travelling has become more common, safer and cheaper than it was in earlier times. In the 19th century, only a small proportion of the Western populations travelled to other countries when they did, it was usually on a one-way ticket , and as late as the s, even fairly affluent Westerners rarely went on overseas holidays.
In recent decades, these patterns have changed. The flows of people who move temporarily between countries have expanded dramatically and have led to intensified contact: Businesspeople, development workers and tourists travel from rich to poor countries.
At the same time as people from affluent countries visit other parts of the world in growing numbers and under new circumstances, the opposite movement is also taking place, though often not for the same reasons.
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