fo u rt h edition
WindoW
Window on Humanity
major changes to the fourth edition include:
WindoW
on
Humanity
on
ISBN 978-0-07-353103-8 MHID 0-07-353103-0 9 0 0 0 0
EAN 9
780073 531038 www.mhhe.com
Conrad Phillip Kottak fo u rt h e d i t i o n
MD DALIM #1037439 7/29/09 CYAN MAG YELO BLK
on tHe CoVer: miao woman holding a baby in Kaili, Guizhou, China.
Humanity Kottak
Visit our online Learning Center Web site at www.mhhe.com/kottak
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page i
8/4/09
2:04:35 PM user-s173 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/01:08:09
Window on Humanity
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page iii
8/4/09
2:04:35 PM user-s173 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/01:08:09
Fourth Edition
Window on Humanity A Concise Introduction to Anthropology
Conrad Phillip Kottak University of Michigan
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page iv
8/27/09
7:31:57 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/24:08:09/MHDQ152:beer AM user-s173
Published by McGraw-Hill, an imprint of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 1221 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. Copyright © 2010, 2008, 2007, 2005 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written consent of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., including, but not limited to, in any network or other electronic storage or transmission, or broadcast for distance learning. This book is printed on acid-free paper. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 DOC/DOC 0 9 ISBN: 978-0-07-353103-8 MHID: 0-07-353103-0 Editor in Chief: Michael Ryan Publisher: Frank Mortimer Sponsoring Editor: Gina Boedeker Developmental Editor: Kate Scheinman Managing Editor: Meghan Campbell Marketing Manager: Leslie Oberhuber Media Project Manager: Vivek Iyer Text Permissions Coordinator: Karyn L. Morrison Production Editor: Leslie LaDow Manuscript Editor: Patricia Ohlenroth Designer: Allister Fein Photo Research Coordinator: Nora Agbayani Photo Researcher: Barbara Salz Production Supervisor: Louis Swaim Composition: 10/12 Times by Aptara®, Inc. Printing: 45 # New Era Matte Plus by R.R. Donnelley & Sons PMS: 1815 Credits: The credits section for this book begins on page 463 and is considered an extension of the copyright page. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kottak, Conrad Phillip. Window on humanity : a concise introduction to anthropology/Conrad Phillip Kottak.—4th ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-07-353103-8 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-07-353103-0 (alk. paper) 1. Anthropology. I. Title. GN25.K68 2010 301—dc22 2009028595 The Internet addresses listed in the text were accurate at the time of publication. The inclusion of a website does not indicate an endorsement by the authors or McGraw-Hill, and McGraw-Hill does not guarantee the accuracy of the information presented at these sites. www.mhhe.com
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page v
8/4/09
2:04:36 PM user-s173 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/01:08:09
To My Wife Isabel Wagley Kottak
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page vi
8/4/09
2:04:36 PM user-s173 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/01:08:09
Also available from McGraw-Hill by Conrad Kottak: Mirror for Humanity: A Concise Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, 7th ed. (2010) Anthropology: The Exploration of Human Diversity, 13th ed. (2009) Cultural Anthropology, 13th ed. (2009) On Being Different: Diversity and Multiculturalism in the North American Mainstream, 3rd ed. (2008) (with Kathryn A. Kozaitis) Physical Anthropology and Archaeology, 2nd ed. (2006) Assault on Paradise: The Globalization of a Little Community in Brazil, 4th ed. (2006)
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page vii
8/27/09
7:31:57 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/24:08:09/MHDQ152:beer AM user-s173
Brief Contents
Anthropology Today Boxes xiv About the Author xv Preface xvii
CHAPTER
1
What Is Anthropology? 19
CHAPTER
2
Culture 41
CHAPTER
3
Ethics and Methods 46
CHAPTER
4
Evolution, Genetics, and Human Variation 71
CHAPTER
5
The Primates 92
CHAPTER
6
Early Hominins 119
CHAPTER
7
The Genus Homo 139
CHAPTER
8
The First Farmers 165
CHAPTER
9
The First Cities and States 186
CHAPTER 10
Language and Communication 210
CHAPTER 11
Making a Living 235
CHAPTER 12
Political Systems 260
CHAPTER 13
Families, Kinship, and Marriage 286
CHAPTER 14
Gender 313
CHAPTER 15
Religion 336
CHAPTER 16
The World System and Colonialism 357
CHAPTER 17
Ethnicity and Race 380
CHAPTER 18
Applying Anthropology 405
CHAPTER 19
Global Issues Today 427
Glossary 449 Credits 463 Bibliography 465 Index 497 vii
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page viii
8/4/09
2:04:36 PM user-s173 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/01:08:09
Table of Contents
List of Anthropology Today Boxes xiv
Culture and Nature 26
About the Author xv
Culture Is All-Encompassing 26
Preface xvii
Culture Is Integrated 26 Culture Can Be Adaptive and Maladaptive 27
CHAPTER 1
What Is Anthropology? 1
Human Adaptability 2 Adaptation, Variation, and Change 3
General Anthropology 4 Human Biological Diversity and the Race Concept 5 Explanatory Approaches 9
The Subdisciplines of Anthropology 12 Cultural Anthropology 12 Archaeological Anthropology 14 Biological, or Physical, Anthropology 16 Linguistic Anthropology 16
Anthropology and Other Academic Fields 17 Applied Anthropology 18 Summary 20 CHAPTER 2
Culture 23
What Is Culture? 24
Culture’s Evolutionary Basis 29 What We Share with Other Primates 29 How We Differ from Other Primates 31
Universality, Generality, and Particularity 33 Universals and Generalities 33 Particularity: Patterns of Culture 34
Culture and the Individual: Agency and Practice 35 Levels of Culture 36 Ethnocentrism, Cultural Relativism, and Human Rights 37
Mechanisms of Cultural Change 39 Globalization 40 Summary 43 CHAPTER 3
Ethics and Methods 46
Ethics and Anthropology 47 Research Methods in Physical Anthropology and Archaeology 48 Multidisciplinary Approaches 48 Primatology 50
Culture Is Learned 24
Anthropometry 50
Culture Is Symbolic 24
Bone Biology 50
Culture Is Shared 25
Molecular Anthropology 51
viii
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page ix
8/4/09
2:04:36 PM user-s173 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/01:08:09
Table of Contents
Paleoanthropology 51 Survey and Excavation 52
Kinds of Archaeology 54 Dating the Past 54
Human Biological Adaptation 84 Genes and Disease 85 Lactose Tolerance 87
Summary 90
Relative Dating 55 Absolute Dating 55
Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology 57 Ethnography: Anthropology’s Distinctive Strategy 58 Ethnographic Techniques 58 Observation and Participant Observation 58 Conversation, Interviewing, and Interview Schedules 60 The Genealogical Method 61 Key Cultural Consultants 62 Life Histories 62 Local Beliefs and Perceptions, and the Ethnographer’s 62 Problem-Oriented Ethnography 63 Longitudinal Research 64 Team Research 64
Survey Research 65 Summary 69
CHAPTER 5
The Primates 92
Our Place among Primates 92 Homologies and Analogies 94 Primate Tendencies 96 Prosimians 97 Monkeys 98 New World Monkeys 100 Old World Monkeys 100
Apes 101 Gibbons 102 Orangutans 102 Gorillas 103 Chimpanzees 104 Bonobos 105
Primate Evolution 106 Chronology 106 Early Primates 108 Early Cenozoic Primates 109 Oligocene Anthropoids 110
CHAPTER 4
Evolution, Genetics, and Human Variation 71
The Origin of Species 71 Theory and Fact 73
Genetics 75 Mendel’s Experiments 76 Independent Assortment 78
Population Genetics 79 Mechanisms of Genetic Evolution 79 Natural Selection 79
Miocene Hominoids 110 Proconsul 111 Later Miocene Apes 111 Pierolapithecus catalaunicus 111 “Toumai” 113 Orrorin tugenensis 115
Summary 117 CHAPTER 6
Early Hominins 119
What Makes Us Human? 119
Mutation 82
Bipedalism 119
Random Genetic Drift 82
Brains, Skulls, and Childhood Dependency 121
Gene Flow 83
ix
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page x
x
8/4/09
2:04:36 PM user-s173 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/01:08:09
Table of Contents
Tools 121
CHAPTER 8
Teeth 121
The First Farmers and Herders in the Middle East 167
Chronology of Hominin Evolution 122 The Earliest Hominins 122 Ardipithecus 123
The Varied Australopithecines 124 Australopithecus anamensis 124 Australopithecus afarensis 126 Gracile and Robust Australopithecines 129
The Australopithecines and Early Homo 132 Oldowan Tools 133 A. garhi and Early Stone Tools 133
Summary 136 CHAPTER 7
The Genus Homo 139
Early Homo 139 H. rudolfensis and H. habilis 139 H. habilis and H. ergaster/erectus 140
Out of Africa I: H. erectus 143 Paleolithic Tools 143 Adaptive Strategies of H. erectus 145 The Evolution and Expansion of H. erectus 147
Archaic H. sapiens 149
The First Farmers 165
Genetic Changes and Domestication 171 Food Production and the State 172
Other Old World Farmers 173 The First American Farmers 176 The Tropical Origins of New World Domestication 177 The Mexican Highlands 180
Explaining the Neolithic 180 Geography and the Spread of Food Production 182
Summary 184 CHAPTER 9
The First Cities and States 186
The Origin of the State 186 Hydraulic Systems 187 Long-Distance Trade Routes 187 Population, War, and Circumscription 187
Attributes of States 189 State Formation in the Middle East 190 Urban Life 190
Ice Ages of the Pleistocene 149
The Elite Level 192
H. antecessor and H. heidelbergensis 151
Social Ranking and Chiefdoms 193
The Neandertals 151 Cold-Adapted Neandertals 152 The Neandertals and Modern People 152
Anatomically Modern Humans 155 Out of Africa II 155
Advances in Technology 158 Glacial Retreat 159 Settling the Americas 160 Summary 162
Advanced Chiefdoms 193 The Rise of the State 195
Other Early States 198 State Formation in Mesoamerica 200 Early Chiefdoms and Elites 201 Warfare and State Formation: The Zapotec Case 201 States in the Valley of Mexico 204
Why States Collapse 205 The Mayan Decline 205
Summary 208
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page xi
8/4/09
2:04:36 PM user-s173 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/01:08:09
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 10
Language and Communication 210
Language 211 Nonhuman Primate Communication 211
xi
Economizing and Maximization 249 Alternative Ends 249
Distribution, Exchange 250 The Market Principle 250 Redistribution 251
Call Systems 211
Reciprocity 251
Sign Language 212
Coexistence of Exchange Principles 253
The Origin of Language 215
Potlatching 253
Nonverbal Communication 215 The Structure of Language 216 Speech Sounds 217
Language, Thought, and Culture 219 The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis 219 Focal Vocabulary 221
Sociolinguistics 223
Summary 258 CHAPTER 12
Political Systems 260
What Is “The Political”? 260 Types and Trends 261 Bands and Tribes 262 Foraging Bands 263
Linguistic Diversity within Nations 223
Tribal Cultivators 265
Gender Speech Contrasts 224
The Village Head 266
Stratification and Symbolic Domination 225
The “Big Man” 267
Black English Vernacular (BEV) 228
Historical Linguistics 229 Language Loss 230
Summary 232 CHAPTER 11
Making a Living 235
Adaptive Strategies 235
Pantribal Sodalities and Age Grades 269 Nomadic Politics 272
Chiefdoms 273 Political and Economic Systems in Chiefdoms 274 Social Status in Chiefdoms 275 Status Systems in Chiefdoms and States 276
Foraging 236
The Emergence of Stratification 277
Correlates of Foraging 238
Open- and Closed-Class Systems 279
Cultivation 239
States 279
Horticulture 239
Population Control 279
Agriculture 241
Judiciary 280
Agricultural Intensification: People and the Environment 242
Enforcement 281
Pastoralism 243 Economic Systems 245 Production in Nonindustrial Societies 245 Means of Production 246 Alienation in Industrial Economies 247
Fiscal Systems 281
Summary 284 CHAPTER 13
Families, Kinship, and Marriage 386
Families 287 Nuclear and Extended Families 287
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page xii
xii
8/27/09
7:31:58 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/24:08:09/MHDQ152:beer AM user-s173
Table of Contents
Industrialism and Family Organization 289
Sexual Orientation 330 Summary 334
Changes in North American Kinship 290 The Family among Foragers 293
Descent 294 Descent Groups 294 Lineages, Clans, and Residence Rules 296
CHAPTER 15
Religion 336
Expressions of Religion 337 Spiritual Beings 337 Powers and Forces 338 Magic and Religion 339
Marriage 296 Incest and Exogamy 297
Uncertainty, Anxiety, Solace 339 Rituals 340
Although Tabooed, Incest Does Happen 297
Rites of Passage 341
Endogamy 299
Totemism 344
Marital Rights and Same-Sex Marriage 300 Marriage across Cultures 303 Bridewealth and Dowry 303 Durable Alliances 304
Divorce 305 Plural Marriages 306 Polygyny 307
Social Control 345 Kinds of Religion 346 World Religions 348 Religion and Change 350 Revitalization Movements 350 Cargo Cults 351
Secular Rituals 353 Summary 354
Polyandry 308
CHAPTER 16
Summary 310 CHAPTER 14
Gender 313
Recurrent Gender Patterns 315 Gender among Foragers 319 Gender among Horticulturalists 320 Reduced Gender Stratification— Matrilineal–Matrilocal Societies 321 Matriarchy 321 Increased Gender Stratification— Patrilineal–Patrilocal Societies 323
Gender among Agriculturists 324 Patriarchy and Violence 325 Gender and Industrialism 326 The Feminization of Poverty 328
What Determines Gender Variation? 329
The World System and Colonialism 357
The World System 357 The Emergence of the World System 359
Industrialization 360 Causes of the Industrial Revolution 360
Socioeconomic Effects of Industrialization 362 Industrial Stratification 362
Colonialism 364 British Colonialism 365 French Colonialism 367 Colonialism and Identity 368 Postcolonial Studies 368
Development 369 Neoliberalism 369
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page xiii
8/27/09
7:31:58 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/24:08:09/MHDQ152:beer AM user-s173
Table of Contents
The Second World 370 Communism 371 Postsocialist Transitions 371
The World System Today 372 Industrial Degradation 374
Ethnicity and Race 380
Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity 380 Status Shifting 381
Race and Ethnicity 383 The Social Construction of Race 384 Hypodescent: Race in the United States 384 Race in the Census 385 Not Us: Race in Japan 387 Phenotype and Fluidity: Race in Brazil 389
Ethnic Groups, Nations, and Nationalities 392 Nationalities and Imagined Communities 392
Ethnic Tolerance and Accommodation 393 Assimilation 393 The Plural Society 393 Multiculturalism and Ethnic Identity 394
Roots of Ethnic Conflict 396 Prejudice and Discrimination 397 Chips in the Mosaic 397 Aftermaths of Oppression 398
Summary 402 CHAPTER 18
Applied Anthropology Today 407
Development Anthropology 408 Equity 408
Strategies for Innovation 409 Overinnovation 409 Underdifferentiation 410
Summary 378 CHAPTER 17
xiii
Applying Anthropology 405
The Role of the Applied Anthropologist 406
Indigenous Models 411
Anthropology and Education 412 Urban Anthropology 413 Urban versus Rural 415
Medical Anthropology 416 Anthropology and Business 421 Careers and Anthropology 422 Summary 424 CHAPTER 19
Global Issues Today 427
Global Climate Change 427 Environmental Anthropology 430 Global Assaults on Local Autonomy 432 Deforestation 433
Interethnic Contact 434 Religious Change 435 Cultural Imperialism 436
Making and Remaking Culture 437 Indigenizing Popular Culture 437 A Global System of Images 438 A Global Culture of Consumption 438
People in Motion 440 Indigenous Peoples 442 Identity in Indigenous Politics 443
The Continuance of Diversity 445 Summary 446 Glossary 449 Credits 463
Early Applications 406
Bibliography 465
Academic and Applied Anthropology 406
Index 497
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page xiv
8/4/09
2:04:36 PM user-s173 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/01:08:09
Anthropology Today Boxes
ANTHROPOLOGIST’S SON ELECTED PRESIDENT 19 THE ADVENT OF BEHAVIORAL MODERNITY 41 ARCHAEOLOGIST IN NEW ORLEANS FINDS A WAY TO HELP THE LIVING 67 GENETIC STUDY BOLSTERS COLUMBUS LINK TO SYPHILIS 88 ENDANGERED PRIMATES 115 “LUCY’S BABY” 135 IMPROVED SCIENCE PUTS MODERN HUMANS IN EUROPE EARLIER 161 THE EARLY ORIGIN OF NEW WORLD DOMESTICATION 183 PSEUDO-ARCHAEOLOGY 207 LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY AND THE INTERNET 231 SCARCITY AND THE BETSILEO 255 YANOMAMI UPDATE: VENEZUELA TAKES CHARGE, PROBLEMS ARISE 282 FIVE WIVES AND 55 CHILDREN 309 CAREERS GIVE INDIAN WOMEN NEW INDEPENDENCE 333 FRANCE CELEBRATES FOREMOST ANTHROPOLOGIST OF RELIGION 353 MINING GIANT COMPATIBLE WITH SUSTAINABILITY INSTITUTE? 375 THE BASQUES 400 CULTURALLY APPROPRIATE MARKETING 423 ENGULFED BY CLIMATE CHANGE, TOWN SEEKS LIFELINE 443
xiv
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page xv
8/4/09
2:04:36 PM user-s173 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/01:08:09
About the Author
Conrad Phillip Kottak (A.B. Columbia College, 1963; Ph.D. Columbia University, 1966) is the Julian H. Steward Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, where he has taught since 1968. He served as Anthropology Department Chair from 1996 to 2006. In 1991 he was honored for his teaching by the university and the state of Michigan. In 1992 he received an excellence in teaching award from the College of Literature, Sciences, and the Arts at the University of Michigan. In 1999 the American Anthropological Association (AAA) awarded Professor Kottak the AAA/Mayfield Award for Excellence in the Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology. In 2005 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2008 to the National Academy of Sciences. Professor Kottak has done ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil (since 1962), Madagascar (since 1966), and the United States. His general interests are in the processes by which local cultures are incorporated—and resist incorporation—into larger systems. This interest links his earlier work on ecology and state formation in Africa and Madagascar to his more recent research on global change, national and international culture, and the mass media. The fourth edition of Kottak’s popular case study Assault on Paradise: The Globalization of a Little Community in Brazil, based on his continuing field work in Arembepe, Bahia, Brazil, was published in 2006 by McGraw-Hill. In a research project during the 1980s, Kottak blended ethnography and survey research in studying “Television’s Behavioral Effects in Brazil.” That research is the basis of Kottak’s book Prime-Time Society: An Anthropological Analysis of Television and Culture (Wadsworth 1990)—a comparative study of the nature and impact of television in Brazil and the United States. Kottak’s other books include The Past in the Present: History, Ecology and Cultural Variation in Highland Madagascar (1980), Researching American Culture: A Guide for Student Anthropologists (edited 1982) (both University of Michigan Press), and Madagascar: Society and History (edited 1986) (Carolina Academic Press). The most recent editions (thirteenth) of his texts Anthropology: The Exploration of Human Diversity and Cultural Anthropology were published by McGraw-Hill xv
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page xvi
xvi
8/4/09
2:04:36 PM user-s173 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/01:08:09
About the Author
in 2008. He also is the author of Window on Humanity: A Concise Introduction to Anthropology (this book) and Mirror for Humanity: A Concise Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (7th ed., McGraw-Hill, 2010). With Kathryn A. Kozaitis, he wrote On Being Different: Diversity and Multiculturalism in the North American Mainstream (3rd ed., McGraw-Hill, 2008). His newest book, with Lara Descartes (Descartes and Kottak 2009), is Media and Middle Class Moms: Images and Realities of Work and Family (published by Routledge/Taylor and Francis) Conrad Kottak’s articles have appeared in academic journals, including American Anthropologist, Journal of Anthropological Research, American Ethnologist, Ethnology, Human Organization, and Luso-Brazilian Review. He also has written for more popular journals, including Transaction/SOCIETY, Natural History, Psychology Today, and General Anthropology. In recent research projects, Kottak and his colleagues have investigated the emergence of ecological awareness in Brazil, the social context of deforestation and biodiversity conservation in Madagascar, and popular participation in economic development planning in northeastern Brazil. Professor Kottak has been active in the University of Michigan’s Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life, supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In that capacity, for a research project titled “Media, Family, and Work in a Middle-Class Midwestern Town,” Kottak and his colleague Lara Descartes have investigated how middle-class families draw on various media in planning, managing, and evaluating their choices and solutions with respect to the competing demands of work and family. That work is the basis of Media and Middle Class Moms. Conrad Kottak appreciates comments about his books from professors and students. He can be readily reached by e-mail at the following address:
[email protected].
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page xvii
8/4/09
2:04:36 PM user-s173 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/01:08:09
Preface
Window on Humanity is intended to provide a concise, readable, lower-cost introduction to general (four-field) anthropology. The combination of shorter length and lower cost increases the instructor’s options for assigning additional reading—case studies, readers, and other supplements—in a semester course. Window also may work well in a quarter system, since traditional anthropology texts may be too long for a onequarter course. As a college student, I was drawn to anthropology by its breadth and because of what it could tell me about the human condition, present and past. Since then, I’ve been fortunate in spending my teaching career at a university (the University of Michigan) that values and unites anthropology’s four subdisciplines. I have daily contact with members of all the subfields, and as a teacher of the four-field introductory anthropology course, I’m happy to keep up with those subfields. I believe that anthropology has compiled an impressive body of knowledge about human diversity in time and space, and I’m eager to introduce that knowledge in the pages that follow. I believe strongly in anthropology’s capacity to enlighten and inform. Anthropology’s subject matter is intrinsically fascinating, and its focus on diversity helps students understand and interact with their fellow human beings in an increasingly interconnected world and an increasingly diverse North America. I wrote my first textbook at a time when there were far fewer introductory anthropology texts than there are today. The texts back then tended to be overly encyclopedic. I found them too long and too unfocused for my course and my image of contemporary anthropology. The field of anthropology was changing rapidly. Anthropologists were writing about a “new archaeology” and a “new ethnography.” Fresh fossil finds and biochemical studies were challenging our understanding of human and primate evolution. Studies of monkeys and apes in their natural settings were complementing conclusions based on work in zoos. Studies of language as it actually is used in society were revolutionizing overly formal and static linguistic models. In cultural anthropology, symbolic and interpretive approaches were joining ecological and materialist ones. Today there are new issues and approaches, such as molecular anthropology and new forms of spatial and historical analysis. The fossil and archaeological records expand every day. Profound changes have affected the people and societies anthropologists traditionally have studied. In cultural anthropology it’s increasingly difficult to know when to write in the present tense and when to write in the past tense. Anthropology hasn’t lost its excitement. Yet many texts ignore change—except xvii
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page xviii
xviii
8/4/09
2:04:36 PM user-s173 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/01:08:09
Preface
maybe with a chapter tacked on at the end—and write as though anthropology and the people it studies were the same as they were a generation ago. While any competent anthropology text must present anthropology’s core, it also should demonstrate anthropology’s relevance to today’s globalized world. Window on Humanity has been written to present that relevance in clear and simple terms to the beginning student.
Goals In writing this book, I’ve been guided by three main goals. First, I wanted to provide a concise, up-to-date, lower-cost, four-field introduction to anthropology. Anthropology is a science—a “systematic field of study or body of knowledge that aims, through experiment, observation, and deduction, to produce reliable explanations of phenomena, with reference to the material and physical world” (Webster’s New World Encyclopedia 1993, p. 937). Anthropology is a humanistic science devoted to discovering, describing, and explaining similarities and differences in time and space. In Mirror for Man, one of the first books I ever read in anthropology, I was impressed by Clyde Kluckhohn’s (1944) description of anthropology as “the science of human similarities and differences” (p. 9). Kluckhohn’s statement of the need for such a field still stands: “Anthropology provides a scientific basis for dealing with the crucial dilemma of the world today: how can peoples of different appearance, mutually unintelligible languages, and dissimilar ways of life get along peaceably together?” (p. 9). Anthropology is a science with clear links to the humanities, as it brings a comparative and cross-cultural perspective to forms of creative expression. One might say that anthropology is among the most humanistic academic fields because of its fundamental respect for human diversity. Anthropologists routinely listen to, record, and attempt to represent voices and perspectives from a multitude of times, places, nations, and cultures. Through its four subfields, anthropology brings together biological, social, cultural, linguistic, and historical approaches. Multiple and diverse perspectives offer a fuller understanding of what it means to be human than is provided by academic fields that lack anthropology’s broad vision and cross-cultural approach. My second goal was to write a book that would be good for students. This book would be user-friendly in layout, writing style, approach, and pedagogy. By discussing current events in relation to anthropology’s core, it would show students how anthropology affects their lives. Throughout this book I’ve attempted to be fair and objective in covering various and sometimes diverging approaches, but I make my own views known and write in the first person when it seems appropriate. I’ve heard colleagues who have used other textbooks complain that some authors seem so intent on presenting every conceivable theory about an issue that students are bewildered by the array of possibilities. Anthropology should not be made so complicated that it is impossible for beginning students to appreciate and understand it. The textbook author, like the instructor, must be able to guide the student. My third goal was to write a book that professors, as well as students, would appreciate. The organization of this text is intended to cover core concepts and basics while also, as mentioned, discussing prominent current interests.
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page xix
8/4/09
2:04:36 PM user-s173 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/01:08:09
Preface
xix
Content and Organization Window on Humanity covers the core and basics of all four subfields, while also examining current issues and approaches. No single or monolithic theoretical perspective orients this book. My e-mail, along with reviewers’ comments, confirms that instructors with a wide range of views and approaches have been pleased with Window as a teaching tool. In Chapter 1, anthropology is introduced as an integrated four-field discipline, with academic and applied dimensions, that examines human biological and cultural diversity in time and space. Anthropology is discussed as a comparative and holistic science, featuring biological, social, cultural, linguistic, humanistic, and historical approaches. Chapter 2 examines the anthropological concept of culture, including its symbolic and adaptive features. This “Culture” chapter has been moved up from a later placement (Chapter 9) in the previous edition. This shift responds to users’ and reviewers’ comments that because the culture concept is so central to anthropology, it should be presented as early in the text as possible. Chapter 3 considers ethics and methods in physical anthropology, archaeology, and cultural anthropology. The chapters focusing on physical anthropology and archaeology (4–9) offer up-to-date answers to several key questions: When did we originate, and how did we become what we are? What role do genes, the environment, society, and culture play in human variation and diversity? What can we tell about our origins and nature from the study of our nearest relatives—nonhuman primates? When and how did the primates originate? What key features of their early adaptations are still basic to our abilities, behavior, and perceptions? How did hominids develop from our primate ancestors? When, where, and how did the first hominins emerge and expand? What about the earliest real humans? How do we explain biological diversity in our own species, Homo sapiens? What major transitions have taken place since the emergence of Homo sapiens? In Chapters 8 and 9 we learn that the origin of food production (the domestication of plants and animals) was a major change in human adaptation, with profound implications for society and culture. The spread and intensification of food production are tied to the appearance of the first towns, cities, and states, and the emergence of social stratification and major inequalities. The chapters on linguistic and sociocultural anthropology (10–19) are organized to place related content close together—although they are sufficiently independent of one another to be assigned in any order the instructor might select. Thus “Political Systems” (Chapter 12) logically follows “Making a Living” (Chapter 11). Chapters 13 and 14 (“Families, Kinship, and Marriage” and “Gender,” respectively) also form a coherent unit. The chapter on religion (15) covers not just traditional religious practices but also contemporary world religions and religious movements. It is followed by four chapters (16–19) that form a natural unit exploring sociocultural transformations and expressions in today’s world. This concluding unit represents one of the key differences between this text and others. Several important questions are addressed in these four chapters: How and why did the modern world system emerge? How has world capitalism affected patterns
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page xx
xx
8/4/09
2:04:36 PM user-s173 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/01:08:09
Preface
of stratification and inequality within and among nations? What were colonialism, imperialism, and Communism, and what are their legacies? How are race and ethnicity socially constructed and handled in different societies, and how do they generate prejudice, discrimination, and conflict? How do economic development, globalization, and climate change affect the peoples, societies, and communities among which anthropologists traditionally have worked? How do people today actively interpret and confront the world system and the products of globalization? What factors threaten continued human diversity? How can anthropologists work to ensure the preservation of that diversity? Let me focus here as well on two chapters present in Window on Humanity but not found consistently in other anthropology texts: “Ethnicity and Race” (Chapter 17) and “Gender” (Chapter 14). I believe that systematic consideration of race, ethnicity, and gender is vital in an introductory anthropology text. Anthropology’s distinctive four-field approach can shed special light on these subjects. Race and gender studies are fields in which anthropology always has taken the lead. I’m convinced that anthropology’s special contributions to understanding the biological, social, cultural, and linguistic dimensions of race, ethnicity, and gender should be highlighted in any introductory text. So significant do I consider the anthropological approach to issues of race that this topic is introduced in the very first chapter of this book.
New in the Fourth Edition I’ve already mentioned the change in chapter order caused by shifting “Culture” from Chapter 9 to Chapter 2—done in order to highlight the centrality of the culture concept in anthropology. Also, I have added to that chapter a new section on “Culture’s Evolutionary Basis.” The other major change is in Chapter 19. I have combined parts of old Chapter 19 (“Cultural Exchange and Survival”) with new material on global issues to make this chapter “Global Issues Today.” All chapters of Window on Humanity have been updated, with charts, tables, and statistics based on the most recent information available. Of the nineteen end-ofchapter boxes, twelve are new to this edition. These “Anthropology Today” boxes are intended to bring home anthropology’s relevance to current issues and events, including, for example, the election of an anthropologist’s son as president of the United States. With the new chapter “Global Issues Today” and other changes, the focus on global themes, trends, and issues has been strengthened even further in this edition.
Chapter By Chapter Changes Chapter 1: What Is Anthropology? A revised Chapter 1 introduces anthropology as a four-field, integrated, biocultural discipline that focuses on human biological and cultural diversity in time and space. Anthropology is discussed as a comparative and holistic science, with links to the natural and social sciences and the humanities. Chapter 1 includes an expanded and
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page xxi
8/4/09
2:04:36 PM user-s173 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/01:08:09
Preface
xxi
updated discussion of problems with the race concept. A new “Anthropology Today” box about Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, Barack Obama’s anthropologist mother, concludes the chapter.
Chapter 2: Culture Chapter 2 examines the anthropological concept of culture, including its symbolic and adaptive features. A major new section on “Culture’s Evolutionary Basis” discusses the role culture has played in human evolution, along with differences and similarities between humans and the apes. There is a new “Anthropology Today” box on the emergence of behavioral modernity.
Chapter 3: Ethics and Methods Chapter 3 focuses on ethical issues, research methods, and dating techniques. The ethical issues anthropologists increasingly confront are highlighted. Students learn how anthropologists do their work and how that work is relevant in understanding ourselves.
Chapter 4: Evolution, Genetics, and Human Variation Chapter 4 discusses natural selection and other evolutionary principles, along with genetics. I try to provide a gentle, yet complete, introduction to these difficult topics. Included are discussions of evolution as theory and fact, and of disease as an evolutionary force. A new “Anthropology Today” box shows how syphilis spread to the Old World as part of the Columbian exchange, an early form of globalization, in which products, populations, and pathogens of the Old World and the New World became forever linked after 1492.
Chapter 5: The Primates Chapter 5 describes primate traits and trends, the major primate groups, and primate evolution. Also included is updated information on endangered primates. Again, I’ve tried to cover the basics—what’s interesting and relevant about primates—while avoiding the more confusing classificatory terminology that some other texts provide. In this chapter and throughout this edition, hominins (the human line and its ancestors after the split from the African apes) are distinguished from hominids, which include humans, chimps, and gorillas. The discussion of Miocene apes examines several possible common ancestors for humans and the apes, including Pierolapithecus from Spain. Also discussed are the Toumai discovery from Chad and Orrorin tugenensis from Kenya—possible early hominins.
Chapter 6: The First Hominins Chapter 6 considers early hominins–their fossils and tool making—from Ardipithecus and the australopithecines to the advent of Homo. The latest finds and interpretations are covered. All charts and tables have been updated. The section on the
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page xxii
xxii
8/4/09
2:04:36 PM user-s173 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/01:08:09
Preface
Australopithecines and early humans has been revised. A new “Anthropology Today” on “Lucy’s Baby” reports on the earliest known hominin child yet discovered.
Chapter 7: The First Humans This chapter has been revised substantially, with new information on the H. habilis-H. erectus overlap and new interpretations of H. erectus finds at Dmanisi (Georgia). Also reported are recent discoveries involving Neandertals in Asia, and the Clovis toolmaking tradition of early Americans, aka Paleoindians.
Chapter 8: The First Farmers A significantly revised and updated Chapter 8 examines the origins and implications, and the costs and benefits, of food production (the domestication of plants and animals). The section on New World domestication has been revised substantially. A section titled “Explaining the Neolithic” explores the geographic, environmental, and other factors that influenced the origin and spread of Neolithic economies in various world areas. Also discussed are animal and plant characteristics that influenced domestication patterns. Chapter 8 contains a new “Anthropology Today” describing how recent dating techniques applied to plant remains found in northern Peru have pushed back the origin of domestication in the New World to about the same time that food production arose in the Old World.
Chapter 9: The First Cities and States Chapter 9 examines the emergence of towns, cities, chiefdoms, and states, with examples from the Middle East, India/Pakistan, China, Mesoamerica, Peru, and Africa. An addition to this chapter is a new section titled “Warfare and State Formation: The Zapotec Case.” As well, the sections on Peru, Oaxaca, and the Valley of Mexico have been revised.
Chapter 10: Language and Communication Chapter 10 introduces methods and topics in linguistic anthropology, including nonverbal communication, descriptive and historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and language and culture. There is a new discussion of the genetic basis of language and a new section on language loss. The chapter concludes with a new “Anthropology Today” box on linguistic diversity and the Internet.
Chapter 11: Making a Living Chapter 11 surveys economic anthropology, including changing adaptive strategies (systems of food production), industrial alienation, and exchange systems. The concluding box on scarcity has been updated based on my most recent revisit to Madagascar.
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page xxiii
8/4/09
2:04:36 PM user-s173 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/01:08:09
Preface
xxiii
Chapter 12: Political Systems Using case material from various societies, Chapter 12 discusses political systems in terms of scale and types of conflict resolution. The chapter concludes with a new “Anthropology Today” section that illustrates the various levels of political regulation (local, regional, national, and international) that determine how contemporary people such as the Yanomami of Venezuela and Brazil live their lives and strive to maintain their health, autonomy, and cultural traditions.
Chapter 13: Families, Kinship, and Descent Chapter 13 discusses families, households, descent groups, and marriage cross-culturally, and also with reference to updated U.S. and Canadian census data. Various definitions of family are considered. The discussion of marriage examines exogamy, endogamy, the incest taboo, caste, postmarital residence rules, marital exchanges, replacement marriage, and plural marriage cross-culturally. Also covered are divorce and same-sex marriage, updated to reflect recent events and legal decisions. The new “Anthropology Today” box shows how customs involving plural marriage are changing in the contemporary world and in the context of nation-states and globalization.
Chapter 14: Gender A thoroughly updated Chapter 14 examines cross-cultural similarities and differences in male and female roles, rights, and responsibilities. Systems of gender stratification and multiple genders are examined. There is information on contemporary gender roles and issues, including the feminization of poverty. The latest relevant census data is included. The new “Anthropology Today” box describes changes in work patterns and gender roles in contemporary India, where women increasingly are entering the work force after college and deferring marriage.
Chapter 15: Religion Chapter 15 surveys time-honored anthropological approaches to religion, while also discussing contemporary world religions and religious movements. The section on contemporary world religions has been updated. The new “Anthropology Today” box focuses on France’s Musée du Quai Branly, inspired by, and site of events honoring, a famed anthropologist of religion, Claude Lévi-Strauss. That museum, which has become one of Paris’s key tourist destinations, is a tribute to the arts, beliefs, and cosmology of non–Western peoples.
Chapter 16: The World System and Colonialism This chapter examines the emergence and nature of the modern world system, including industrial and postindustrial systems of stratification and their impact on nonindustrial societies. Also discussed are colonial systems and development policies that have impinged on the people and societies anthropologists traditionally have studied.
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page xxiv
xxiv
8/4/09
2:04:36 PM user-s173 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/01:08:09
Preface
Covered as well are neoliberalism, Communism and its fall, postsocialist transitions, and global energy consumption. This chapter’s new “Anthropology Today” box reports on a conundrum facing a major university. Is a firm whose operations have destroyed the landscapes and livelihoods of indigenous peoples a proper advisor for an institute devoted to ecological sustainability?
Chapter 17: Ethnicity and Race This chapter focuses on the social construction of race and ethnicity and offers crosscultural examples of variation in racial classification and ethnic relations. Discussed as well are discrimination and ethnic conflict. A new section on “Race in the Census” is based on the most recent sources and census data for the United States and Canada.
Chapter 18: Applying Anthropology Applied anthropology is presented here as anthropology’s second dimension, rather than as a fifth subfield. Examples of applying anthropology are provided from all four subfields. Development anthropology is discussed as an important subtopic within applied anthropology.
Chapter 19 Global Issues Today This chapter begins with sections on global climate change and environmental anthropology. Using recent examples, it shows how local people actively confront the world system and the products of globalization. All chapter material, including that on the political mobilization of indigenous peoples, has been revised so as to highlight globalization. Using a case study from contemporary Alaska, Chapter 19’s new “Anthropology Today” section describes some of the first climate change refugees in the United States—true victims of global warming. This chapter also considers the role of the anthropologist in ensuring the continuance and preservation of cultural diversity.
Pedagogy This fourth edition incorporates suggestions made by users of my other texts as well as reviewers of previous editions of Window on Humanity. The result, I hope, is a sound, well-organized, interesting, and “user-friendly” introduction to anthropology. Window contains “Anthropology Today” boxes (twelve new ones) at the end of each chapter, intended to give students a chance to consider anthropology’s relevance to today’s world and to their own lives. Some boxes examine current events or debates. Others are more personal accounts, which add human feeling to the presentation of anthropology’s subject matter. Many boxes illustrate a point with examples familiar to students from their enculturation or everyday experience. A glossary defining key terms presented in each chapter is found at the end of the book, along with a bibliography of references cited. End-of-chapter summaries are numbered, to make major points stand out.
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page xxv
8/28/09
7:18:47 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/27:08:09/MHDQ170 AM user-s173
Preface
xxv
Supplements Visit our Online Learning Center website at www.mhhe.com/kottak for robust student and instructor resources.
For Students Student resources include self-quizzes (multiple-choice, true or false, essay), Internet exercises, and additional chapter study aides.
For Instructors The password-protected instructor portion of the website includes the instructor’s manual, a comprehensive computerized test bank, PowerPoint lecture slides, and a variety of additional instructor resources.
CourseSmart eBook
Course Smart
Learn Smart. Choose smart.
CourseSmart is a new way find and buy eTextbooks. At CourseSmart you can save up to 50% off the cost of a print textbook, reduce your impact on the environment, and gain access to powerful Web tools for learning. CourseSmart has the largest selection of eTextbooks available anywhere, offering thousands of the most commonly adopted textbooks from a wide variety of higher education publishers. CourseSmart eTextbooks are available in one standard online reader with full text search, notes and highlighting, and e-mail tools for sharing notes between classmates. For further details contact your sales representative or go to www.coursesmart.com.
Tegrity Campus Tegrity Campus is a service that makes class time available all the time by automatically capturing every lecture in a searchable format for students to review when they study and complete assignments. With a simple one-click start and stop process, you capture all computer screens and corresponding audio. Students replay any part of any class with easy-to-use, browser-based viewing on a PC or Mac. Educators know that the more students can see, hear, and experience class resources, the better they learn. With Tegrity Campus, students quickly recall key moments using its unique search feature. This search helps students find what they need, when they need it, across an entire semester of class recordings. Turn all your students’ study time into learning moments immediately supported by your lecture. To learn more, watch a 2-minute Flash demo at http://tegritycampus.mhhe.com.
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page xxvi
xxvi
8/28/09
7:18:56/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/27:08:09/MHDQ170 AM user-s173
Preface
Acknowledgments I’m grateful to many colleagues at McGraw-Hill. Gina Boedeker has been supportive and enthusiastic as McGraw-Hill’s sponsoring editor for anthropology. As developmental editor, Kate Scheinman once again did an excellent job synthesizing the reviews, helping me plan and implement the revision, working with me to complete and turn over the manuscript, keeping things moving, and catching things even in pages. I also enjoy working with Frank Mortimer, McGraw-Hill’s publisher of anthropology and other social sciences, and Marketing Manager Leslie Oberhuber. I would like to thank Leslie LaDow for her wonderful work as production editor (for this and my other books), guiding the manuscript through production and keeping everything moving on schedule. Thanks as well to the entire K4 team. Louis Swaim, production supervisor, worked with the printer to make sure everything came out right. It’s always a pleasure to work with Barbara Salz, freelance photo researcher, with whom I’ve worked for two decades. I want to thank Victoria Springer for her work on the Instructor’s Manual and Test Bank, Gerry Williams for his work on the PowerPoints, and Maria Perez for her work on the student supplements located on the Online Learning Center website. I also thank Patricia Ohlenroth for her copyediting, George Watson for proofreading, and Allister Fein for executing the design. Nora Agbayani also deserves thanks as photo research coordinator for this and other books of mine. Thanks, too, to Vivek Iyer, media project manager, for creating the OLC. I also thank Karyn Morrison, who has handled the literary permissions. I’m very grateful to the following prepublication reviewers of this and previous editions of Window: Terri Aihoshi, Grant MacEwan College Sue L. Aki, University of Texas at San Antonio Linda Allen, Kirkwood Community College Diane Everett Barbolla, San Diego Mesa College Joshua Barker, University of Toronto Jeffrey P. Blick, Georgia College & State University Beau Bowers, Central Piedmont Community College Jim Brady, California State University, Los Angeles Larisa Lee Broyles, California State University, San Bernardino Stephen Childs, Valdosta State University William L. Coleman, University of North Carolina, Greensboro Leslie Dawson, Grant MacEwan College Connie Deroche, Cape Breton University Barbra E. Erickson, California State University–Fullerton Jason M. Fancher, Washington State University Les W. Field, University of New Mexico Elizabeth Fortenbery, Pierce Community College Elizabeth Fuller-Tarbox, State University of New York–Potsdam Dan Gardiner, Mohawk College
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page xxvii
8/27/09
7:31:58 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/24:08:09/MHDQ152:beer AM user-s173
Preface
xxvii
Maidie R. Golan, Kennesaw State University David B. Halmo, University of Wisconsin-Parkside Christopher Hays, University of Wisconsin-Washington County Marc Healy, Elgin Community College Katherine Hirschfeld, University of Oklahoma Patricia Jolly, University of Northern Colorado Hilary Kahn, Indiana University–Indianapolis Patricia Kelly-Spurles, Mount Allison University Yin Lam, University of Victoria Jami Leibowitz, East Carolina University William Leons, University of Toledo Daniel Maher, Westark College Susan Meswick, CUNY Queens College Garry Morgan, Northwestern College Martin Oppenheimer, Kansas State University Mary Patterson, The University of Melbourne, Australia Gerald F. Reid, Sacred Heart University Carolyn Rock, Valdosta State University Rita C. Rodabaugh, Central Piedmont Community College Eugene E. Ruyle, California State University, Long Beach Jon A. Schlenker, University of Maine at Augusta Pete Sinelli, University of Central Florida Andris Skreija, University of Nebraska–Omaha Betty A. Smith, Kennesaw State University Shannon Speed, University of Texas at Austin Emily Stovel, Ripon College Ted Swedenburg, University of Arkansas Susan Tanner, University of Georgia Mark Tromans, Broward Community College Helen Vallianatos, University of Alberta Salena Wakim, Orange Coast College Thomas Williamson, St. Olaf College Students, too, regularly share their insights about Window via e-mail. Anyone— student or instructor—with access to e-mail can reach me at the following address:
[email protected]. As usual, my family has offered me understanding, support, and inspiration during the preparation of Window. Dr. Nicholas Kottak regularly shares his insights with me, as does Isabel Wagley Kottak, my companion in the field and in life for four decades, to whom this book is dedicated. During my long teaching career, I’ve benefited from the knowledge, help, and advice of so many friends, colleagues, teaching assistants (graduate student instructors—GSIs), and students that I can no longer fit their names into a short preface. I hope they know who they are and accept my thanks. Feedback from students,
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page xxviii
xxviii
8/27/09
7:31:58 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/24:08:09/MHDQ152:beer AM user-s173
Preface
faculty, and GSIs keeps me up to date on the interests, needs, and views of the people for whom Window is written, as does my ongoing participation in workshops on the teaching of anthropology. I continue to believe that effective textbooks are based in the enthusiastic practice of teaching. I hope this product of my experience will continue to be helpful to others. Conrad Phillip Kottak Johns Island, South Carolina
[email protected]
kot31030_fm_i-xxviii.indd Page ii
8/4/09
2:04:35 PM user-s173 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/01:08:09
kot31030_ch01_001-022.indd Page 1
C
H
A
7/28/09
P
3:22:30 PM user-s173
T
E
R
/Users/user-s173/Desktop
1
What Is Anthropology? ❖ Human Adaptability Adaptation, Variation, and Change ❖ General Anthropology ❖ Human Biological Diversity and the Race Concept Explanatory Approaches ❖ The Subdisciplines of Anthropology
Biological, or Physical, Anthropology Linguistic Anthropology ❖ Anthropology and Other Academic Fields ❖ Applied Anthropology Anthropology Today: Anthropologist’s Son Elected President
Cultural Anthropology Archaeological Anthropology
“T
hat’s just human nature.” “People are pretty much the same all over the world.” Such opinions, which we hear in conversations, in the mass media, and in a dozen scenes in daily life, promote the erroneous idea that people in other countries have the same desires, feelings, values, and aspirations that we do. Such statements proclaim that because people are essentially the same, they are eager to receive the ideas, beliefs, values, institutions, practices, and products of an expansive North American culture. Often this assumption turns out to be wrong. Anthropology offers a broader view—a distinctive comparative, cross-cultural perspective. Most people think that anthropologists study nonindustrial societies, and they do. My research has taken me to remote villages in Brazil and Madagascar, a large island off the southeast coast of Africa. In Brazil I sailed with fishers in simple sailboats on Atlantic waters. Among Madagascar’s Betsileo people I worked in rice fields and took part in ceremonies in which I entered tombs to rewrap the corpses of decaying ancestors. However, anthropology is much more than the study of nonindustrial peoples. It is a comparative science that examines all societies, ancient and modern, simple and complex. Most of the other social sciences tend to focus on a single society, usually an industrial nation such as the United States or Canada. Anthropology offers a unique cross-cultural perspective, constantly comparing the customs of one society with those of others. To become a cultural anthropologist, one normally does ethnography (the firsthand, personal study of local settings). Ethnographic fieldwork usually entails spending a year or more in another society, living with the local people and learning about 1
kot31030_ch01_001-022.indd Page 2
2
7/23/09
3:34:19 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 PM user-s173
Chapter 1 What Is Anthropology?
their way of life. No matter how much the ethnographer discovers about the society, he or she remains an alien there. That experience of alienation has a profound impact. Having learned to respect other customs and beliefs, anthropologists can never forget that there is a wider world. There are normal ways of thinking and acting other than our own.
Human Adaptability Anthropologists study human beings wherever and whenever they find them—in a Turkish café, a Mesopotamian tomb, or a North American shopping mall. Anthropology is the exploration of human diversity in time and space. Anthropology studies the whole of the human condition: past, present, and future; biology, society, language, and culture. Of particular interest is the diversity that comes through human adaptability. Humans are among the world’s most adaptable animals. In the Andes of South America, people wake up in villages 16,000 feet above sea level and then trek 1,500 feet higher to work in tin mines. Tribes in the Australian desert worship animals and discuss philosophy. People survive malaria in the tropics. Men have walked on the moon. The model of the starship Enterprise in Washington’s Smithsonian Institution symbolizes the desire to “seek out new life and civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.” Wishes to know the unknown, control the uncontrollable, and create order out of chaos find expression among all peoples. Creativity, adaptability, and flexibility are basic human attributes, and human diversity is the subject matter of anthropology. Students often are surprised by the breadth of anthropology, which is the study of the human species and its immediate ancestors. Anthropology is a uniquely comparative and holistic science. Holism refers to the study of the whole of the human condition: past, present, and future; biology, society, language, and culture. People share society—organized life in groups—with other animals, including baboons, wolves, and even ants. Culture, however, is more distinctly human. Cultures are traditions and customs, transmitted through learning, that form and guide the beliefs and behavior of the people exposed to them. Children learn such a tradition by growing up in a particular society, through a process called enculturation. Cultural traditions include customs and opinions, developed over the generations, about proper and improper behavior. These traditions answer such questions as: How should we do things? How do we make sense of the world? How do we tell right from wrong? What is right, and what is wrong? A culture produces a degree of consistency in behavior and thought among the people who live in a particular society. The most critical element of cultural traditions is their transmission through learning rather than through biological inheritance. Culture is not itself biological, but it rests on certain features of human biology. For more than a million years, humans have had at least some of the biological capacities on which culture depends. These abilities are to learn, to think symbolically, to use language, and to employ tools and other products in organizing their lives and adapting to their environments. Anthropology confronts and ponders major questions of human existence as it explores human biological and cultural diversity in time and space. By examining
kot31030_ch01_001-022.indd Page 3
7/23/09
3:34:19 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 PM user-s173
Human Adaptability
3
ancient bones and tools, we unravel the mysteries of human origins. When did our ancestors separate from those remote great-aunts and great-uncles whose descendants are the apes? Where and when did Homo sapiens originate? How has our species changed? What are we now, and where are we going? How have changes in culture and society influenced biological change? Our genus, Homo, has been changing for more than 1 million years. Humans continue to adapt and change both biologically and culturally.
Adaptation, Variation, and Change Adaptation refers to the processes by which organisms cope with environmental forces and stresses, such as those posed by climate and topography or terrains, also called landforms. How do organisms change to fit their environments, such as dry climates or high mountain altitudes? Like other animals, humans use biological means of adaptation. But humans are unique in also having cultural means of adaptation. Table 1.1 summarizes the cultural and biological means that humans use to adapt to high altitudes. Mountainous terrains pose particular challenges, those associated with high altitude and oxygen deprivation. Consider four ways (one cultural and three biological) in which humans may cope with low oxygen pressure at high altitudes. Illustrating cultural (technological) adaptation would be a pressurized airplane cabin equipped with oxygen masks. There are three ways of adapting biologically to high altitudes: genetic adaptation, long-term physiological adaptation, and short-term physiological adaptation. First, native populations of high-altitude areas, such as the Andes of Peru and the Himalayas of Tibet and Nepal, seem to have acquired certain genetic advantages
TA B L E 1 . 1 Forms of Cultural and Biological Adaptation (to High Altitude) Form of Adaptation
Type of Adaptation
Example
Technology
Cultural
Pressurized airplane cabin with oxygen masks
Genetic adaptation (occurs over generations)
Biological
Larger “barrel chests” of native highlanders
Long-term physiological adaptation (occurs during growth and development of the individual organism)
Biological
More efficient respiratory system, to extract oxygen from “thin air”
Short-term physiological adaptation (occurs spontaneously when the individual organism enters a new environment)
Biological
Increased heart rate, hyperventilation
kot31030_ch01_001-022.indd Page 4
4
7/23/09
3:34:19 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 PM user-s173
Chapter 1 What Is Anthropology?
for life at very high altitudes. The Andean tendency to develop a voluminous chest and lungs probably has a genetic basis. Second, regardless of their genes, people who grow up at a high altitude become physiologically more efficient there than genetically similar people who have grown up at sea level would be. This illustrates long-term physiological adaptation during the body’s growth and development. Third, humans also have the capacity for short-term or immediate physiological adaptation. Thus, when lowlanders arrive in the highlands, they immediately increase their breathing and heart rates. Hyperventilation increases the oxygen in their lungs and arteries. As the pulse also increases, blood reaches their tissues more rapidly. All these varied adaptive responses—cultural and biological—achieve a single goal: maintaining an adequate supply of oxygen to the body. As human history has unfolded, the social and cultural means of adaptation have become increasingly important. In this process, humans have devised diverse ways of coping with the range of environments they have occupied in time and space. The rate of cultural adaptation and change has accelerated, particularly during the past 10,000 years. For millions of years, hunting and gathering of nature’s bounty—foraging—was the sole basis of human subsistence. However, it took only a few thousand years for food production (the cultivation of plants and domestication of animals), which originated some 12,000–10,000 years ago, to replace foraging in most areas. Between 6000 and 5000 b.p. (before the present), the first civilizations arose. These were large, powerful, and complex societies, such as ancient Egypt, that conquered and governed large geographic areas. Much more recently, the spread of industrial production has profoundly affected human life. Throughout human history, major innovations have spread at the expense of earlier ones. Each economic revolution has had social and cultural repercussions. Today’s global economy and communications link all contemporary people, directly or indirectly, in the modern world system. People must cope with forces generated by progressively larger systems—region, nation, and world. The study of such contemporary adaptations generates new challenges for anthropology: “The cultures of world peoples need to be constantly rediscovered as these people reinvent them in changing historical circumstances” (Marcus and Fischer 1986, p. 24).
General Anthropology The academic discipline of anthropology, also known as general anthropology or “four-field” anthropology, includes four main subdisciplines or subfields. They are sociocultural, archaeological, biological, and linguistic anthropology. (From here on, the shorter term cultural anthropology will be used as a synonym for “sociocultural anthropology.”) Of the subfields, cultural anthropology has the largest membership. Most departments of anthropology teach courses in all four subfields. There are historical reasons for the inclusion of four subfields in a single discipline. The origin of anthropology as a scientific field, and of American anthropology in particular, can be traced to the nineteenth century. Early American anthropologists were concerned especially with the history and cultures of the native peoples of North America. Interest in the origins and diversity of Native Americans brought together
kot31030_ch01_001-022.indd Page 5
7/23/09
3:34:19 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 PM user-s173
Human Biological Diversity and the Race Concept
5
studies of customs, social life, language, and physical traits. Anthropologists still are pondering such questions as, Where did Native Americans come from? How many waves of migration brought them to the New World? What are the linguistic, cultural, and biological links among Native Americans and between them and Asia? (Note that a unified fourfield anthropology did not develop in Europe, where the subfields tend to exist separately.) There also are logical reasons for the unity of American anthropology. Each subfield considers variation in time and space (that is, in different geographic areas). Cultural and archaeological anthropologists study (among many other topics) changes in social life and customs. Archaeologists use studies of living societies to imagine what life might have Early American anthropology was especially concerned with the been like in the past. Biological anthropologists history and cultures of Native North examine evolutionary changes in physical form, for Americans. Ely S. Parker, or Ha-saexample, anatomical changes that might have been no-an-da, was a Seneca Indian who associated with the origin of tool use or language. made important contributions to early Linguistic anthropologists may reconstruct the basics anthropology. Parker also served as Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the of ancient languages by studying modern ones. United States. The subfields influence each other as anthropologists talk to each other, read books and journals, and meet in professional organizations. Anthropologists share certain key assumptions. Perhaps the most fundamental is the idea that sound conclusions about “human nature” cannot be derived from studying a single population, nation, society, or cultural tradition. A comparative, cross-cultural approach is essential. General anthropology explores the basics of human biology, society, and culture and considers their interrelations. The four-field approach has been particularly effective in examining the relation between biology (e.g., “race”—see below) and culture. About 70 years ago, the famed anthropologist Ruth Benedict realized, “In World history, those who have helped to build the same culture are not necessarily of one race, and those of the same race have not all participated in one culture” (Benedict 1940, Ch. 2). This statement is even truer in today’s globalizing world. How do contemporary anthropologists deal with issues of human biological diversity and race?
Human Biological Diversity and the Race Concept The photos in this book offer only a glimpse of the range of human biological variation. Additional illustration comes from your own experience. Look around you in your classroom or library, or at the mall or multiplex. Inevitably you’ll see people whose ancestors lived in many lands. The first (Native) Americans had to cross a land bridge that once
kot31030_ch01_001-022.indd Page 6
6
7/23/09
3:34:20 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 PM user-s173
Chapter 1 What Is Anthropology?
linked Siberia to North America. For later immigrants, perhaps including your own parents or grandparents, the voyage may have been across the sea or overland from nations to the south. They came for many reasons. Some came voluntarily, while others were brought here in chains. The scale of migration in today’s world is so vast that millions of people routinely cross national borders or live far from the homelands of their grandparents. Now meeting every day are diverse human beings whose biological features reflect adaptation to a wide range of environments other than the ones they now inhabit. Physical contrasts are evident to anyone. Anthropology’s job is to explain them. Historically, scientists have approached the study of human biological diversity in two main ways: (1) racial classification (now largely abandoned) versus (2) the current explanatory approach, which focuses on understanding specific differences. First we’ll consider problems with racial classification (the attempt to assign humans to discrete categories [purportedly] based on common ancestry). Then we’ll offer some explanations for specific aspects of human biological diversity (in this case light versus dark skin color). Biological differences are real, important, and apparent to us all. Modern scientists find it most productive to seek explanations for this diversity, rather than trying to pigeonhole people into categories called races. What is race anyway? In theory, a biological race would be a geographically isolated subdivision of a species. (A species is a population whose members can interbreed to produce offspring that can live and reproduce.) Such a subspecies would be capable of interbreeding with other subspecies of the same species, but it would not actually do so because of its geographic isolation. Some biologists also use “race” to refer to “breeds,” as of dogs or roses. Thus, a pit bull and a Chihuahua would be different races of dogs. Such domesticated “races” have been bred by humans for generations. Humanity (Homo sapiens) lacks such races because human populations have not been isolated enough from one another to develop into such discrete groups. Nor have humans experienced controlled breeding like that which has created the various kinds of dogs and roses. A race is supposed to reflect shared genetic material (inherited from a common ancestor), but early scholars instead used phenotypical traits (usually skin color) for human racial classification. Phenotype refers to an organism’s evident traits, its “manifest biology”—anatomy and physiology. Humans display hundreds of evident (detectable) physical traits. They range from skin color, hair form, eye color, and facial features (which are visible) to blood groups and enzyme production (which become evident through testing). Racial classifications based on phenotype raise the problem of deciding which traits are most important. Should races be defined by height, weight, body shape, facial features, teeth, skull form, or skin color? Like their fellow citizens, early European and American scientists gave priority to skin color. Many school books and encyclopedias still proclaim the existence of three great races: the white, the black, and the yellow. This overly simplistic classification was compatible with the political use of race during the colonial period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Such a tripartite scheme kept white Europeans neatly separate from their African, Asian, and Native American subjects. Colonial empires began to break up, and scientists began to question established racial categories, after World War II.
kot31030_ch01_001-022.indd Page 7
7/23/09
3:34:20 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 PM user-s173
The photos in this chapter illustrate only a small part of the range of human biological diversity. Shown above is a woman from Guangzhou province, People’s Republic of China.
A young man from the Marquesas Islands in Polynesia.
A Native American: a Chiquitanos Indian woman from Bolivia.
A Native Australian.
7
kot31030_ch01_001-022.indd Page 8
8
7/23/09
3:34:21 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 PM user-s173
Chapter 1 What Is Anthropology?
Politics aside, one obvious problem with such racial labels is that they don’t accurately describe skin color. “White” people are more pink, beige, or tan than white. “Black” people are various shades of brown, and “yellow” people are tan or beige. These terms also have been dignified by more scientific-sounding synonyms— Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid—which actually have no more of a scientific basis than do white, black, and yellow. It’s true also that many human populations don’t fit neatly into any one of the three “great races.” For example, where does one put the Polynesians? Polynesia is a triangle of South Pacific islands formed by Hawaii to the north, Easter Island to the east, and New Zealand to the southwest. Does the bronze skin color of Polynesians place them with the Caucasoids or the Mongoloids? Some scientists, recognizing this problem, enlarged the original tripartite scheme to include the Polynesian race. Native Americans present an additional problem. Are they red or yellow? Again, some scientists add a fifth race—the red, or Amerindian—to the major racial groups. Many people in southern India have dark skins, but scientists have been reluctant to classify them with black Africans because of their Caucasoid facial features and hair form. Some, therefore, have created a separate race for these people. What about the Australian aborigines, hunters and gatherers native to the most isolated continent? By skin color, one might place some Native Australians in the same race as tropical Africans. However, similarities to Europeans in hair color (light or reddish) and facial features have led some scientists to classify them as Caucasoids. But there is no evidence that Australians are closer genetically or historically to either of these groups than they are to Asians. Recognizing this problem, scientists often regard Native Australians as a separate race. Finally, consider the San (“Bushmen”) of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa. Scientists have perceived their skin color as varying from brown to yellow. Those who regard San skin as yellow have placed them in the same category as Asians. In theory, people of the same race share more recent common ancestry with each other than they do with any others; but there is no evidence for recent common ancestry between San and Asians. More reasonably, the San are classified as members of the Capoid (from the Cape of Good Hope) race, which is seen as being different from other groups inhabiting tropical Africa. Similar problems arise when any single trait is used as a basis for racial classification. An attempt to use facial features, height, weight, or any other phenotypical trait is fraught with difficulties. For example, consider the Nilotes, natives of the upper Nile region of Uganda and Sudan. Nilotes tend to be tall and to have long, narrow noses. Certain Scandinavians also are tall, with similar noses. Given the distance between their homelands, to classify them as members of the same race makes little sense. There is no reason to assume that Nilotes and Scandinavians are more closely related to each other than either is to shorter (and nearer) populations with different kinds of noses. Would it be better to base racial classifications on a combination of physical traits? This would avoid some of the problems just discussed, but others would arise. First, skin color, stature, skull form, and facial features (nose form, eye shape, lip thickness) don’t go together as a unit. For example, people with dark skin may be tall
kot31030_ch01_001-022.indd Page 9
7/23/09
3:34:21 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 PM user-s173
Human Biological Diversity and the Race Concept
9
or short and have hair ranging from straight to very curly. Dark-haired populations may have light or dark skin, along with various skull forms, facial features, and body sizes and shapes. The number of combinations is very large, and the amount that heredity (versus environment) contributes to such phenotypical traits is often unclear. There is a final objection to racial classification based on phenotype. The phenotypical characteristics on which races are based supposedly reflect genetic material that is shared and that has stayed the same for long periods of time. But phenotypical similarities and differences don’t necessarily have a genetic basis. Because of changes in the environment that affect individuals during growth and development, the range of phenotypes characteristic of a population may change without any genetic change. There are several examples. In the early 20th century, the anthropologist Franz Boas (1940/1966) described changes in skull form among the children of Europeans who had migrated to the United States. The reason for this wasn’t a change in genes, since the European immigrants tended to marry among themselves. Some of their children had been born in Europe and merely raised in the United States. Something in the new environment, probably in the diet, was producing this change. We know now that changes in average height and weight produced by dietary differences in a few generations are common and have nothing to do with race or genetics. Anthropology’s comparative, biocultural perspective recognizes that environmental factors, including customary diet and other cultural forces, constantly mold human biology. (Biocultural refers to the inclusion and combination of both biological and cultural perspectives and approaches to comment on or solve a particular issue or problem.) Culture is a key environmental force in determining how human bodies grow and develop. Cultural traditions promote certain activities and abilities, discourage others, and set standards of physical well-being and attractiveness. Bodies—ideal, and actual—vary from culture to culture and within one culture over time. Ideal bodies change from generation to generation and, with the influence of the mass media, even from decade to decade. Old movies make it easy for us to study bodies and clothing over time. Such movie stars of the past as Humphrey Bogart and Barbara Stanwyck wore stylish hats and smoked cigarettes. Contemporary American men and women wear baseball caps and lift weights. When asked how he recognized Americans in the street, one European mentioned lifting (of weights, and its effects on the body) and tennis shoes (an item of dress considered inelegant in Europe, but a mainstay of hard-core American touring).
Explanatory Approaches Traditional racial classification assumed that biological characteristics were determined by heredity and were stable (immutable) over long periods of time. We know now that a biological similarity doesn’t necessarily indicate recent common ancestry. Dark skin color, for example, can be shared by tropical Africans and Native Australians for reasons other than common ancestry. It is not possible to define human races biologically. Still, scientists have made much progress in explaining variation in skin color, along with many other expressions of human biological diversity. We shift now from classification to explanation, in which natural selection plays a key role.
kot31030_ch01_001-022.indd Page 10
10
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 3:34:21 PM user-s173
Chapter 1 What Is Anthropology?
Before the 16th century, almost all the very dark-skinned populations of the world lived in the tropics, as does this Samburu woman from Kenya.
Very light skin color, illustrated in the photo above, maximizes absorption of ultraviolet radiation by those few parts of the body exposed to direct sunlight during northern winters. This helps prevent rickets and osteoporosis.
First recognized by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, natural selection is the process by which the forms most fit to survive and reproduce in a given environment—such as the tropics—do so in greater numbers than others in the same population do. Over the years, the less fit organisms die out and the favored types survive by producing more offspring. The role of natural selection in producing variation in skin color will illustrate the explanatory approach to human biological diversity. Comparable explanations have been provided for many other aspects of human biological variation. Melanin, the primary determinant of human skin color, is a chemical substance manufactured in the epidermis, or outer skin layer. The melanin cells of darker-skinned people produce more and larger granules of melanin than do those of lighter-skinned people. By screening out ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the sun, melanin offers protection against a variety of maladies, including sunburn and skin cancer. Before the 16th century, most of the world’s very dark-skinned populations lived in the tropics, a belt extending about 23 degrees north and south of the equator, between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. The association between dark skin color and a tropical habitat existed throughout the Old World, where humans and their ancestors have lived for millions of years. The darkest populations of Africa evolved not in shady equatorial forests but in sunny open grassland, or savanna, country. Outside the tropics, skin color tends to be lighter. Moving north in Africa, for example, there is a gradual transition from dark brown to medium brown. Average skin color continues to lighten as one moves through the Middle East, into southern Europe,
kot31030_ch01_001-022.indd Page 11
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 3:34:22 PM user-s173
Human Biological Diversity and the Race Concept
11
through central Europe, and to the north. South of the tropics skin color also is lighter. In the Americas, by contrast, tropical populations don’t have very dark skin. This is because the settlement of the New World, by light-skinned Asian ancestors of Native Americans, was relatively recent, probably dating back no more than 18,000 years. How, aside from migrations, can we explain the geographic distribution of human skin color? Natural selection provides an answer. In the tropics, intense UV radiation poses a series of threats that make light skin color an adaptive disadvantage. First, UV radiation can cause severe sunburn, which aside from discomfort can lead to vulnerabilities in the body. By damaging sweat glands, sunburn reduces the body’s ability to perspire and thus to regulate its own temperature (thermoregulation). Sunburn also can increase susceptibility to disease. Yet another disadvantage of having light skin color in the tropics is that exposure to UV radiation can cause skin cancer (Blum 1961). Melanin, nature’s own sunscreen, confers a selective advantage (i.e., a better chance to survive and reproduce) on darker-skinned people living in the tropics because it helps protect them from sunburn and skin cancer. Another selective factor in the geographic distribution of human skin color relates to the manufacture (synthesis) of vitamin D in the body. Years ago, W. F. Loomis (1967) focused on the role of UV radiation in stimulating the manufacture of vitamin D by the human body. The unclothed human body can produce its own vitamin D when exposed to sufficient sunlight. However, in a cloudy environment that also is so cold that people have to dress themselves much of the year (such as northern Europe, where very light skin color evolved), clothing interferes with the body’s manufacture of vitamin D. The ensuing shortage of vitamin D diminishes the absorption of calcium in the intestines. A nutritional disease known as rickets, which softens and deforms the bones, may develop. In women, deformation of the pelvic bones from rickets can interfere with childbirth. In cold northern areas, light skin color maximizes the absorption of UV radiation and the synthesis of vitamin D by the few parts of the body that are exposed to direct sunlight. There has been selection against dark skin color in northern areas because melanin screens out UV radiation. This natural selection continues today: East Asians who have migrated recently from India and Pakistan to northern areas of the United Kingdom have a higher incidence of rickets and osteoporosis (also related to vitamin D and calcium deficiency) than the general British population. A related illustration involves Eskimos (Inuit) and other indigenous inhabitants of northern Alaska and northern Canada. According to Nina Jablonski (quoted in Iqbal 2002), “Looking at Alaska, one would think that the native people should be pale as ghosts.” One reason they aren’t is that they haven’t inhabited this region very long in terms of geological time. Even more important, their traditional diet, which is rich in seafood, including fish oils, supplies sufficient vitamin D so as to make a reduction in pigmentation unnecessary. However, and again illustrating natural selection at work today, “when these people don’t eat their aboriginal diets of fish and marine mammals, they suffer tremendously high rates of vitamin D-deficiency diseases such as rickets in children and osteoporosis in adults” (Jablonski quoted in Iqbal 2002). Far from being immutable, skin color can become an evolutionary liability very quickly. According to Jablonski and George Chaplin (2000), another key factor explaining the geographic distribution of skin color involves the effects of UV on folate, an essential nutrient that the human body manufactures from folic acid. Folate is needed for
kot31030_ch01_001-022.indd Page 12
12
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 3:34:22 PM user-s173
Chapter 1 What Is Anthropology?
cell division and the production of new DNA. Pregnant women require large amounts of folate to support rapid cell division in the embryo, and there is a direct connection between folate and individual reproductive success. Folate deficiency causes neural tube defects (NTDs) in human embryos. NTDs are marked by the incomplete closure of the neural tube, so the spine and spinal cord fail to develop completely. One NTD, anencephaly (with the brain an exposed mass), results in stillbirth or death soon after delivery. With spina bifida, another NTD, survival rates are higher, but babies have severe disabilities, including paralysis. NTDs are the second-most-common human birth defect after cardiac abnormalities. Today, women of reproductive age are advised to take folate supplements to prevent serious birth defects such as spina bifida. Natural sunlight and UV radiation destroy folate in the human body. Because melanin, as we have seen, protects against UV hazards, such as sunburn and its consequences, dark skin coloration is adaptive in the tropics. Now we see that melanin also is adaptive because it conserves folate in the human body and thus protects against NTDs, which are much more common in light-skinned than in darker-skinned populations (Jablonski and Chaplin 2000). Studies confirm that Africans and African Americans have a low incidence of severe folate deficiency, even among individuals with marginal nutritional status. Folate also plays a role in another process that is central to reproduction, spermatogenesis—the production of sperm. In mice and rats, folate deficiency can cause male sterility; it may well play a similar role in humans. Today, of course, cultural alternatives to biological adaptation permit lightskinned people to survive in the tropics and darker-skinned people to live in the far north. People can clothe themselves and seek shelter from the sun; they can use artificial sunscreens if they lack the natural protection that melanin provides. Dark-skinned people living in the north can, indeed must, get vitamin D from their diet or take supplements. Today, pregnant women are routinely advised to take folic acid or folate supplements as a hedge against NTDs. Even so, light skin color still is correlated with a higher incidence of spina bifida. Jablonski and Chaplin (2000) explain variation in human skin color as resulting from a balancing act between the evolutionary needs to (1) protect against all UV hazards (favoring dark skin in the tropics) and (2) have an adequate supply of vitamin D (favoring lighter skin outside the tropics). This discussion of skin color shows that common ancestry, the presumed basis of race, is not the only reason for biological similarities. Natural selection, still at work today, makes a major contribution to variations in human skin color, as well as to many other human biological differences and similarities.
The Subdisciplines of Anthropology Cultural Anthropology Cultural anthropology is the study of human society and culture, the subfield that describes, analyzes, interprets, and explains social and cultural similarities and differences. To study and interpret cultural diversity, cultural anthropologists engage in two kinds of activity: ethnography (based on field work) and ethnology (based on crosscultural comparison). Ethnography provides an account of a particular community,
kot31030_ch01_001-022.indd Page 13
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 3:34:22 PM user-s173
The Subdisciplines of Anthropology
13
society, or culture. During ethnographic fieldwork, the ethnographer gathers data that he or she organizes, describes, analyzes, and interprets to build and present that account, which may be in the form of a book, article, or film. Traditionally, ethnographers have lived in small communities and studied local behavior, beliefs, customs, social life, economic activities, politics, and religion (see Wolcott 2008). The anthropological perspective derived from ethnographic field work often differs radically from that of economics or political science. Those fields focus on national and official organizations and policies and often on elites. However, the groups that anthropologists traditionally have studied usually have been relatively poor and powerless. Ethnographers often observe discriminatory practices directed toward such people, who experience food shortages, dietary deficiencies, and other aspects of poverty. Political scientists tend to study programs that national planners develop, while anthropologists discover how these programs work on the local level. Cultures are not isolated. As noted by Franz Boas (1940/1966) many years ago, contact between neighboring tribes always has existed and has extended over enormous areas.” Human populations construct their cultures in interaction with one another, and not in isolation” (Wolf 1982, p. ix). Villagers increasingly participate in regional, national, and world events. Exposure to external forces comes through the mass media, migration, and modern transportation. City and nation increasingly invade local communities with the arrival of tourists, development agents, government and religious officials, and political candidates. Such linkages are prominent components of regional, national, and international systems of politics, economics, and information. These larger systems increasingly affect the people and places anthropology traditionally has studied. The study of such linkages and systems is part of the subject matter of modern anthropology. Ethnology examines, interprets, analyzes, and compares the results of ethnography—the data gathered in different societies. It uses such data to compare and contrast and to make generalizations about society and culture. Looking beyond the particular to the more general, ethnologists attempt to identify and explain cultural differences and similarities, to test hypotheses, and to build theory to enhance our understanding of how social and cultural systems work. Ethnology gets its data for comparison not just from ethnography but also from the other subfields, particularly from archaeological anthropology, which reconstructs social systems of the past. (Table 1.2 summarizes the main contrasts between ethnography and ethnology.)
TA B L E 1 . 2 Ethnography and Ethnology—Two Dimensions of Cultural Anthropology Ethnography
Ethnology
Requires field work to collect data
Uses data collected by a series of researchers
Often descriptive
Usually synthetic
Group/community specific
Comparative/cross-cultural
kot31030_ch01_001-022.indd Page 14
14
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 3:34:22 PM user-s173
Chapter 1 What Is Anthropology?
Archaeological Anthropology Archaeological anthropology (more simply, “archaeology”) reconstructs, describes, and interprets human behavior and cultural patterns through material remains. At sites where people live or have lived, archaeologists find artifacts, material items that humans have made, used, or modified, such as tools, weapons, camp sites, buildings, and garbage. Plant and animal remains and ancient garbage tell stories about consumption and activities. Wild and domesticated grains have different characteristics, which allow archaeologists to distinguish between gathering and cultivation. Examination of animal bones reveals the ages of slaughtered animals and provides other information useful in determining whether species were wild or domesticated. Analyzing such data, archaeologists answer several questions about ancient economies. Did the group get its meat from hunting, or did it domesticate and breed animals, killing only those of a certain age and sex? Did plant food come from wild plants or from sowing, tending, and harvesting crops? Did the residents make, trade for, or buy particular items? Were raw materials available locally? If not, where did they come from? From such information, archaeologists reconstruct patterns of production, trade, and consumption. Archaeologists have spent much time studying potsherds, fragments of earthenware. Potsherds are more durable than many other artifacts, such as textiles and wood. The quantity of pottery fragments allows estimates of population size and density. The discovery that potters used materials that were not available locally suggests systems
An archaeological team works at Harappa, one site from an ancient Indus River civilization dating back some 4,800 years.
kot31030_ch01_001-022.indd Page 15
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 3:34:23 PM user-s173
The Subdisciplines of Anthropology
15
of trade. Similarities in manufacture and decoration at different sites may be proof of cultural connections. Groups with similar pots may be historically related. Perhaps they shared common cultural ancestors, traded with each other, or belonged to the same political system. Many archaeologists examine paleoecology. Ecology is the study of interrelations among living things in an environment. The organisms and environment together constitute an ecosystem, a patterned arrangement of energy flows and exchanges. Human ecology studies ecosystems that include people, focusing on the ways in which human use “of nature influences and is influenced by social organization and cultural values” (Bennett 1969, pp. 10–11). Paleoecology looks at the ecosystems of the past. In addition to reconstructing ecological patterns, archaeologists may infer cultural transformations, for example, by observing changes in the size and type of sites and the distance between them. A city develops in a region where only towns, villages, and hamlets existed a few centuries earlier. The number of settlement levels (city, town, village, hamlet) in a society is a measure of social complexity. Buildings offer clues about political and religious features. Temples and pyramids suggest that an ancient society had an authority structure capable of marshaling the labor needed to build such monuments. The presence or absence of certain structures, like the pyramids of ancient Egypt and Mexico, reveals differences in function between settlements. For example, some towns were places where people came to attend ceremonies. Others were burial sites; still others were farming communities. Archaeologists also reconstruct behavior patterns and lifestyles of the past by excavating. This involves digging through a succession of levels at a particular site. In a given area, through time, settlements may change in form and purpose, as may the connections between settlements. Excavation can document changes in economic, social, and political activities. Although archaeologists are best known for studying prehistory, that is, the period before the invention of writing, they also study the cultures of historical and even living peoples (see Sabloff 2008). Studying sunken ships off the Florida coast, underwater archaeologists have been able to verify the living conditions on the vessels that brought ancestral African Americans to the New World as enslaved people. In a research project begun in 1973 in Tucson, Arizona, archaeologist William Rathje has learned about contemporary life by studying modern garbage. The value of “garbology,” as Rathje calls it, is that it provides “evidence of what people did, not what they think they did, what they think they should have done, or what the interviewer thinks they should have done” (Harrison, Rathje, and Hughes 1994, p. 108). What people report may contrast strongly with their real behavior as revealed by garbology. For example, the garbologists discovered that the three Tucson neighborhoods that reported the lowest beer consumption actually had the highest number of discarded beer cans per household (Podolefsky and Brown 1992, p. 100)! Rathje’s garbology also has exposed misconceptions about how much of different kinds of trash are in landfills: While most people thought that fast-food containers and disposable diapers were major waste problems, in fact they were relatively insignificant compared with paper, including environmentally friendly, recyclable paper (Rathje and Murphy 2001).
kot31030_ch01_001-022.indd Page 16
16
8/28/09
11:53:32/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/28:08:09/MHDQ170 AM user-s173
Chapter 1 What Is Anthropology?
Biological, or Physical, Anthropology The subject matter of biological, or physical, anthropology is human biological diversity in time and space. The focus on biological variation unites five special interests within biological anthropology: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Human evolution as revealed by the fossil record (paleoanthropology). Human genetics. Human growth and development. Human biological plasticity (the body’s ability to change as it copes with stresses, such as heat, cold, and altitude). The biology, evolution, behavior, and social life of monkeys, apes, and other nonhuman primates.
These interests link physical anthropology to other fields: biology, zoology, geology, anatomy, physiology, medicine, and public health. Osteology—the study of bones—helps paleoanthropologists, who examine skulls, teeth, and bones, to identify human ancestors and to chart changes in anatomy over time. A paleontologist is a scientist who studies fossils. A paleoanthropologist is one sort of paleontologist, one who studies the fossil record of human evolution. Paleoanthropologists often collaborate with archaeologists, who study artifacts, in reconstructing biological and cultural aspects of human evolution. Fossils and tools often are found together. Different types of tools provide information about the habits, customs, and lifestyles of the ancestral humans who used them. More than a century ago, Charles Darwin noticed that the variety that exists within any population permits some individuals (those with the favored characteristics) to do better than others at surviving and reproducing. Genetics, which developed later, enlightens us about the causes and transmission of this variety. However, it isn’t just genes that cause variety. During any individual’s lifetime, the environment works along with heredity to determine biological features. For example, people with a genetic tendency to be tall will be shorter if they are poorly nourished during childhood. Thus, biological anthropology also investigates the influence of environment on the body as it grows and matures. Among the environmental factors that influence the body as it develops are nutrition, altitude, temperature, and disease, as well as cultural factors, such as the standards of attractiveness we considered previously. Biological anthropology (along with zoology) also includes primatology. The primates include our closest relatives—apes and monkeys. Primatologists study their biology, evolution, behavior, and social life, often in their natural environments. Primatology assists paleoanthropology, because primate behavior may shed light on early human behavior and human nature.
Linguistic Anthropology We don’t know (and probably never will) when our ancestors acquired the ability to speak, although biological anthropologists have looked to the anatomy of the face and the skull to speculate about the origin of language. And primatologists have described the communication systems of monkeys and apes. We do know that well-developed, grammatically complex languages have existed for thousands of years. Linguistic anthropology offers further illustration of anthropology’s interest in comparison,
kot31030_ch01_001-022.indd Page 17
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 3:34:23 PM user-s173
Anthropology and Other Academic Fields
17
variation, and change. Linguistic anthropology studies language in its social and cultural context, across space and over time. Some linguistic anthropologists make inferences about universal features of language, linked perhaps to uniformities in the human brain. Others reconstruct ancient languages by comparing their contemporary descendants and in so doing make discoveries about history. Still others study linguistic differences to discover varied perceptions and patterns of thought in different cultures. Historical linguistics considers variation in time, such as the changes in sounds, grammar, and vocabulary between Middle English (spoken from approximately a.d. 1050 to 1550) and modern English. Sociolinguistics investigates relationships between social and linguistic variation. No language is a homogeneous system in which everyone speaks just like everyone else. How do different speakers use a given language? How do linguistic features correlate with social factors, including class and gender differences (Tannen 1990)? One reason for variation is geography, as in regional dialects and accents. Linguistic variation also is expressed in the bilingualism of ethnic groups. Linguistic and cultural anthropologists collaborate in studying links between language and many other aspects of culture, such as how people reckon kinship and how they perceive and classify colors.
Anthropology and Other Academic Fields As mentioned previously, one of the main differences between anthropology and the other fields that study people is holism, anthropology’s unique blend of biological, social, cultural, linguistic, historical, and contemporary perspectives. Paradoxically, while distinguishing anthropology, this breadth is what also links it to many other disciplines. Techniques used to date fossils and artifacts have come to anthropology from physics, chemistry, and geology. Because plant and animal remains often are found with human bones and artifacts, anthropologists collaborate with botanists, zoologists, and paleontologists. As a discipline that is both scientific and humanistic, anthropology has links with many other academic fields. Anthropology is a science—a “systematic field of study or body of knowledge that aims, through experiment, observation, and deduction, to produce reliable explanations of phenomena, with references to the material and physical world” (Webster’s New World Encyclopedia 1993, p. 937). The following chapters present anthropology as a humanistic science devoted to discovering, describing, understanding, and explaining similarities and differences in time and space among humans and our ancestors. Clyde Kluckhohn (1944) described anthropology as “the science of human similarities and differences” (p. 9). His statement of the need for such a field still stands: “Anthropology provides a scientific basis for dealing with the crucial dilemma of the world today: how can peoples of different appearance, mutually unintelligible languages, and dissimilar ways of life get along peaceably together?” (p. 9). Anthropology has compiled an impressive body of knowledge that this textbook attempts to encapsulate. Besides its links to the natural sciences (e.g., geology, zoology), and social sciences (e.g., sociology, psychology), anthropology also has strong links to the humanities. The humanities include English, comparative literature, classics, folklore, philosophy, and the arts. These fields study languages, texts, philosophies, arts, music,
kot31030_ch01_001-022.indd Page 18
18
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 3:34:23 PM user-s173
Chapter 1 What Is Anthropology?
performances, and other forms of creative expression. Ethnomusicology, which studies forms of musical expression on a worldwide basis, is especially closely related to anthropology. Also linked is folklore, the systematic study of tales, myths, and legends from a variety of cultures. One might well argue that anthropology is among the most humanistic of all academic fields because of its fundamental respect for human diversity. Anthropologists listen to, record, and represent voices from a multitude of nations and cultures. Anthropology values local knowledge, diverse worldviews, and alternative philosophies. Cultural anthropology and linguistic anthropology in particular bring a comparative and nonelitist perspective to forms of creative expression, including language, art, narratives, music, and dance, viewed in their social and cultural context.
Applied Anthropology Anthropology is not a science of the exotic carried on by quaint scholars in ivory towers. Rather, anthropology has a lot to tell the public. Anthropology’s foremost professional organization, the American Anthropological Association (AAA), has formally acknowledged a public service role by recognizing that anthropology has two dimensions: (1) academic or general anthropology and (2) practicing or applied anthropology. The latter refers to the application of anthropological data, perspectives, theory, and methods to identify, assess, and solve contemporary social problems. As Erve Chambers (1987, p. 309) states it, applied anthropology is the “field of inquiry concerned with the relationships between anthropological knowledge and the uses of that knowledge in the world beyond anthropology.” More and more anthropologists from the four subfields now work in such “applied” areas as public health, family planning, business, economic development, and cultural resource management. Applied anthropology encompasses any use of the knowledge and/or techniques of the four subfields to identify, assess, and solve practical problems. Because of anthropology’s breadth, it has many applications. For example, applied medical anthropologists consider both the sociocultural and the biological contexts and implications of disease and illness. Perceptions of good and bad health, along with actual health threats and problems, differ among societies. Various ethnic groups recognize different illnesses, symptoms, and causes and have developed different health-care systems and treatment strategies. Applied archaeology, usually called public archaeology, includes such activities as cultural resource management, contract archaeology, public educational programs, and historic preservation. An important role for public archaeology has been created by legislation requiring evaluation of sites threatened by dams, highways, and other construction activities. To decide what needs saving, and to preserve significant information about the past when sites cannot be saved, is the work of cultural resource management (CRM). CRM involves not only preserving sites but also allowing their destruction if they are not significant. The “management” part of the term refers to the evaluation and decision-making process. Cultural resource managers work for federal, state, and county agencies and other clients. Applied cultural anthropologists sometimes work with the public archaeologists, assessing the human problems generated by the proposed change and determining how they can be reduced. Table 1.3 relates anthropology’s four subfields to its two dimensions.
kot31030_ch01_001-022.indd Page 19
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 5:42:16 PM user-s173
19
Applied Anthropology
TA B L E 1 . 3 The Four Subfields and Two Dimensions of Anthropology Anthropology’s Subfields (General Anthropology)
Examples of Application (Applied Anthropology)
Cultural anthropology
Development anthropology
Archaeological anthropology
Cultural resource management (CRM)
Biological or physical anthropology
Forensic anthropology
Linguistic anthropology
Study of linguistic diversity in classrooms
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Anthropologist’s Son Elected President It is widely known that Barack Obama is the son of a Kenyan father and a White American mother from Kansas. Less recognized is the fact that the 44th president of the United States is the son of an anthropologist— Dr. Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro (usually called simply Ann Dunham). This account focuses on her life and her attraction to diversity, which led her to a career in anthropology. A sociocultural anthropologist by training, Dunham’s work on microfinance and socioeconomic issues affecting Indonesian women illustrates the application of anthropology to identify and solve contemporary problems. In other words, she was both a cultural and an applied anthropologist. Anthropologists study humanity in varied times and places and in a rapidly changing world. By virtue of his parentage, his enculturation, and his experience abroad, Barack Obama provides an excellent symbol of the diversity and interconnections that characterize such a world. As well, his election is a tribute to an ever more diverse United States of America.
Young Barack Obama with his mother, anthropologist Ann Dunham.
I
n the capsule version of the Barack Obama story, his mother is simply the white woman from Kansas. . . . On the campaign trail, he has called her his “single mom.” But neither description begins to capture the unconventional life of Stanley Continued
kot31030_ch01_001-022.indd Page 20
20
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 3:34:23 PM user-s173
Chapter 1 What Is Anthropology?
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Ann Dunham Soetoro, the parent who most shaped Mr. Obama. . . . In Hawaii, she married an African student at age 18. Then she married an Indonesian, moved to Jakarta, became an anthropologist, wrote an 800-page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing in Java, worked for the Ford Foundation, championed women’s work and helped bring microcredit to the world’s poor. She had high expectations for her children. In Indonesia, she would wake her son at 4 a.m. for correspondence courses in English before school; she brought home recordings of Mahalia Jackson, speeches by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And when Mr. Obama asked to stay in Hawaii for high school rather than return to Asia, she accepted living apart—a decision her daughter says was one of the hardest in Ms. Soetoro’s life. “She felt that somehow, wandering through uncharted territory, we might stumble upon something that will, in an instant, seem to represent who we are at the core,” said Maya Soetoro-Ng, Mr. Obama’s half-sister. “That was very much her philosophy of life—to not be limited by fear or narrow definitions, to not build walls around ourselves and to do our best to find kinship and beauty in unexpected places.” . . . Mr. Obama . . . barely saw his father after the age of 2. Though it is impossible to pinpoint the imprint of a parent on the life of a grown child, people who knew Ms. Soetoro well say they see her influence unmistakably in Mr. Obama. . . . “She was a very, very big thinker,” said Nancy Barry, a former president of Women’s World Banking, an international network of microfinance providers, where Ms. Soetoro worked in New York City in the early 1990s. . . .
Continued
In a Russian class at the University of Hawaii, she met the college’s first African student, Barack Obama. They married and had a son in August 1961, in an era when interracial marriage was rare in the United States. . . . The marriage was brief. In 1963, Mr. Obama left for Harvard, leaving his wife and child. She then married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student. When he was summoned home in 1966 after the turmoil surrounding the rise of Suharto, Ms. Soetoro and Barack followed. . . Her second marriage faded, too, in the 1970s. Ms. Soetoro wanted to work, one friend said, and Mr. Soetoro wanted more children. He became more American, she once said, as she became more Javanese. “There’s a Javanese belief that if you’re married to someone and it doesn’t work, it will make you sick,” said Alice G. Dewey, an anthropologist and friend. “It’s just stupid to stay married.”. . . By 1974, Ms. Soetoro was back in Honolulu, a graduate student and raising Barack and Maya, nine years younger. . . . When Ms. Soetoro decided to return to Indonesia three years later for her field work, Barack chose not to go. . . . Fluent in Indonesian, Ms. Soetoro moved with Maya first to Yogyakarta, the center of Javanese handicrafts. A weaver in college, she was fascinated with what Ms. Soetoro-Ng calls “life’s gorgeous minutiae.” That interest inspired her study of village industries, which became the basis of her 1992 doctoral dissertation. “She loved living in Java,” said Dr. Dewey, who recalled accompanying Ms. Soetoro to a metalworking village. “People said: ‘Hi! How are you?’ She said: ‘How’s your wife? Did your daughter have the baby?’ They were friends. Then she’d whip out her notebook and she’d say: ‘How
kot31030_ch01_001-022.indd Page 21
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 5:42:21 PM user-s173
Summary
many of you have electricity? Are you having trouble getting iron?’ ” She became a consultant for the United States Agency for International Development on setting up a village credit program, then a Ford Foundation program officer in Jakarta specializing in women’s work. Later, she was a consultant in Pakistan, then joined Indonesia’s oldest bank to work on what is described as the world’s largest sustainable microfinance program, creating services like credit and savings for the poor. Visitors flowed constantly through her Ford Foundation office in downtown Jakarta and through her house in a neighborhood to the south, where papaya and banana trees grew in the front yard and Javanese dishes . . . were served for dinner. Her guests were leaders in the Indonesian human rights movement, people from women’s organizations, representatives of community groups doing grass-roots development. . . . Ms. Soetoro-Ng . . . remembers conversations with her mother about
21
philosophy or politics, books, esoteric Indonesian woodworking motifs. . . . “She gave us a very broad understanding of the world,” her daughter said. “She hated bigotry. She was very determined to be remembered for a life of service and thought that service was really the true measure of a life.” Many of her friends see her legacy in Mr. Obama—in his selfassurance and drive, his boundary bridging, even his apparent comfort with strong women. She died in November 1995, as Mr. Obama was starting his first campaign for public office. After a memorial service at the University of Hawaii, one friend said, a small group of friends drove to the South Shore in Oahu. With the wind whipping the waves onto the rocks, Mr. Obama and Ms. Soetoro-Ng placed their mother’s ashes in the Pacific, sending them off in the direction of Indonesia. Source: Janny Scott, “A Free-Spirited Wanderer Who Set Obama’s Path,” New York Times, March 13, 2008. Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Co. Reprinted by permission.
Summary 1. Anthropology is the holistic, biocultural, and comparative study of humanity. It is the systematic exploration of human biological and cultural diversity across time and space. Examining the origins of, and changes in, human biology and culture, anthropology provides explanations for similarities and differences among humans and their societies. 2. The four subfields of general anthropology are (socio)cultural, archaeological, biological, and linguistic. All consider variation in time and space. Each also examines adaptation—the process by which organisms cope with environmental stresses. 3. Anthropology’s biocultural perspective is a particularly effective way of approaching the topics of human biological diversity and “race.” Because of a range of problems involved in classifying humans into racial categories, contemporary scientists focus on specific differences, such as in skin color, and try to explain them. Biological similarities between groups—rather than common
kot31030_ch01_001-022.indd Page 22
22
8/28/09
11:53:38/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/28:08:09/MHDQ170 AM user-s173
Chapter 1 What Is Anthropology?
ancestry (the assumed basis of race)—may reflect similar but independent adaptation to similar natural selective forces. Cultural forces mold human biology, including our body types and images. 4. Cultural anthropology explores the cultural diversity of the present and the recent past. Archaeology reconstructs cultural patterns, often of prehistoric populations. Biological anthropology documents diversity involving fossils, genetics, growth and development, bodily responses, and nonhuman primates. Linguistic anthropology considers diversity among languages. It also studies how speech changes in social situations and over time. 5. Concerns with biology, society, culture, and language link anthropology to many other fields—natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. 6. Anthropology has two dimensions: general and applied. The latter uses anthropological perspectives, theory, methods, and data to identify, assess, and solve social problems. The fields in which applied anthropologists work include business, government, economic development, education, and social services, action, and outreach. Applied anthropologists come from all four subfields.
Key Terms adaptation (p. 3) anthropology (p. 2) applied anthropology (p. 18) archaeological anthropology (p. 14) biocultural (p. 9) biological (or physical) anthropology (p. 16) cultural anthropology (p. 12) cultural resource management (CRM) (p. 18) cultures (p. 2) ethnography (p. 12)
ethnology (p. 13) food production (p. 4) general anthropology (p. 4) holistic (p. 2) linguistic anthropology (p. 17) natural selection (p. 10) phenotype (p. 6) primates (p. 16) racial classification (p. 6) science (p. 17) sociolinguistics (p. 17) tropics (p. 10)
Go to our Online Learning Center website at www.mhhe.com/kottak for Internet resources directly related to the contents of this chapter.
kot31030_ch02_023-045.indd Page 23
C
H
7/28/09
A
P
3:29:28 PM user-s173
T
E
R
/Users/user-s173/Desktop
2
Culture ❖ What Is Culture? Culture Is Learned
❖ Universality, Generality, and Particularity
Culture Is Symbolic
Universals and Generalities
Culture Is Shared
Particularity: Patterns of Culture
Culture and Nature Culture Is All-Encompassing Culture Is Integrated Culture Can Be Adaptive and Maladaptive ❖ Culture’s Evolutionary Basis What We Share with Other Primates How We Differ from Other Primates
❖ Culture and the Individual: Agency and Practice ❖ Levels of Culture ❖ Ethnocentrism, Cultural Relativism, and Human Rights ❖ Mechanisms of Cultural Change ❖ Globalization Anthropology Today: The Advent of Behavioral Modernity
I
n Chapter 1 we saw that humans share society, organized life in groups, with other animals—social animals, such as monkeys, wolves, and ants. Other animals, especially the great apes, have rudimentary cultural abilities, but only humans have fully elaborated cultures—distinctive traditions and customs transmitted over the generations through learning and through language. The concept of culture has long been basic to anthropology. Well over a century ago, in his book Primitive Culture, the British anthropologist Edward Tylor proposed that cultures, systems of human behavior and thought, obey natural laws and therefore can be studied scientifically. Tylor’s definition of culture still offers an overview of the subject matter of anthropology and is widely quoted. “Culture . . . is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, arts, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (Tylor 1871/1958, p. 1). The crucial phrase here is “acquired . . . as a member of society.” Tylor’s definition focuses on attributes that people acquire not through biological inheritance but by growing up in a particular society in which they are exposed to a specific cultural tradition. Enculturation is the process by which a child learns his or her culture. 23
kot31030_ch02_023-045.indd Page 24
24
Chapter 2
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:33:24 PM user-s173
Culture
What Is Culture? Culture Is Learned The ease with which children absorb any cultural tradition rests on the uniquely elaborated human capacity to learn. Other animals may learn from experience, so that, for example, they avoid fire after discovering that it hurts. Social animals also learn from other members of their group. Wolves, for instance, learn hunting strategies from other pack members. Such social learning is particularly important among monkeys and apes, our closest biological relatives. But our own cultural learning depends on the uniquely developed human capacity to use symbols, signs that have no necessary or natural connection to the things they stand for or signify. On the basis of cultural learning, people create, remember, and deal with ideas. They grasp and apply specific systems of symbolic meaning. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz defined culture as ideas based on cultural learning and symbols. Cultures have been characterized as sets of “control mechanisms—plans, recipes, rules, instructions, what computer engineers call programs for the governing of behavior” (Geertz 1973, p. 44). These programs are absorbed by people through enculturation in particular traditions. People gradually internalize a previously established system of meanings and symbols, which helps guide their behavior and perceptions throughout their lives. Every person begins immediately, through a process of conscious and unconscious learning and interaction with others, to internalize, or incorporate, a cultural tradition through the process of enculturation. Sometimes culture is taught directly, as when parents tell their children to say “thank you” when someone gives them something or does them a favor. Culture also is transmitted through observation. Children pay attention to the things that go on around them. They modify their behavior not just because other people tell them to do so but as a result of their own observations and growing awareness of what their culture considers right and wrong. Culture also is absorbed unconsciously. North Americans acquire their culture’s notions about how far apart people should stand when they talk not by being told directly to maintain a certain distance but through a gradual process of observation, experience, and conscious and unconscious behavior modification. No one tells Latins to stand closer together than North Americans do; they learn to do so as part of their cultural tradition.
Culture Is Symbolic Symbolic thought is unique and crucial to humans and to cultural learning. A symbol is something verbal or nonverbal, within a particular language or culture, that comes to stand for something else. Anthropologist Leslie White defined culture as dependent upon symbolling. . . . Culture consists of tools, implements, utensils, clothing, ornaments, customs, institutions, beliefs, rituals, games, works of art, language, etc. (White 1959, p. 3)
For White, culture originated when our ancestors acquired the ability to use symbols, that is, to originate and bestow meaning on a thing or event, and, correspondingly, to grasp and appreciate such meanings (White 1959, p. 3).
kot31030_ch02_023-045.indd Page 25
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:33:24 PM user-s173
What Is Culture?
25
There need be no obvious, natural, or necessary connection between the symbol and what it symbolizes. The familiar pet that barks is no more naturally a dog than it is a chien, Hund, or mbwa, the words for “dog” in French, German, and Swahili, respectively. Language is one of the distinctive possessions of Homo sapiens. No other animal has developed anything approaching the complexity of language, with its multitude of symbols. Symbols often are linguistic. There also are myriad nonverbal symbols, such as flags, which stand for various countries, and the arches that symbolize a particular hamburger chain. Holy water is a potent symbol in Roman Catholicism. As is true of all symbols, the association between a symbol (water) and what is symbolized (holiness) is arbitrary and conventional. Water probably is not intrinsically holier than milk, blood, or other natural liquids. Nor is holy water chemically different from ordinary water. Holy water is a symbol within Roman Catholicism, which is part of an international cultural system. A natural thing has been associated arbitrarily with a particular meaning for Catholics, who share common beliefs and experiences that are based on learning and that are transmitted across the generations. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans have shared the abilities on which culture rests—the abilities to learn, to think symbolically, to manipulate language, and to use tools and other cultural products in organizing their lives and coping with their environments. Every contemporary human population has the ability to use symbols and thus to create and maintain culture. Our nearest relatives—chimpanzees and gorillas—have rudimentary cultural abilities. However, no other animal has elaborated cultural abilities to the extent that Homo has.
Culture Is Shared Culture is an attribute not of individuals per se but of individuals as members of groups. Culture is transmitted in society. Don’t we learn our culture by observing, listening, talking, and interacting with many other people? Shared beliefs, values, memories, and expectations link people who grow up in the same culture. Enculturation unifies people by providing us with common experiences. People in the United States sometimes have trouble understanding the power of culture because of the value that American culture places on the idea of the individual. Americans are fond of saying that everyone is unique and special in some way. However, in American culture individualism itself is a distinctive shared value. Individualism is transmitted through hundreds of statements and settings in our daily lives. From the late Mr. Rogers on TV to parents, grandparents, and teachers, our enculturative agents insist that we are all “someone special.” Today’s parents were yesterday’s children. If they grew up in North America, they absorbed certain values and beliefs transmitted over the generations. People become agents in the enculturation of their children, just as their parents were for them. Although a culture constantly changes, certain fundamental beliefs, values, worldviews, and child-rearing practices endure. Consider a simple American example of enduring shared enculturation. As children, when we didn’t finish a meal, our parents may have reminded us of starving children in some foreign country, just as our
kot31030_ch02_023-045.indd Page 26
26
Chapter 2
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:33:24 PM user-s173
Culture
grandparents might have done a generation earlier. The specific country changes (China, India, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda—what was it in your home?). Still, American culture goes on transmitting the idea that by eating all our brussels sprouts or broccoli, we can justify our own good fortune, compared to a hungry child in an impoverished or war-ravaged country.
Culture and Nature Culture takes the natural biological urges we share with other animals and teaches us how to express them in particular ways. People have to eat, but culture teaches us what, when, and how. In many cultures people have their main meal at noon, but most North Americans prefer a large dinner. English people eat fish for breakfast, but North Americans prefer hot cakes and cold cereals. Brazilians put hot milk into strong coffee, whereas many North Americans pour cold milk into a weaker brew. Midwesterners dine at five or six, Spaniards at ten. Cultural habits, perceptions, and inventions mold “human nature” into many forms. People have to eliminate wastes from their bodies. But some cultures teach people to defecate standing, while others tell them to do it sitting down. Peasant women in the Andean highlands squat in the streets and urinate, getting all the privacy they need from their massive skirts. All these habits are parts of cultural traditions that have converted natural acts into cultural customs. Our culture—and cultural changes—affect how we perceive nature, human nature, and “the natural.” Through science, invention, and discovery, cultural advances have overcome many “natural” limitations. We prevent and cure diseases such as polio and smallpox, which felled our ancestors. We use Viagra to enhance or restore sexual potency. Through cloning, scientists have challenged the way we think about biological identity and the meaning of life itself. Culture, of course, does not always protect us from natural threats. Hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and other natural forces regularly overthrow our wishes to modify the environment through building, development, and expansion. Can you think of other ways in which nature strikes back at culture?
Culture Is All-Encompassing For anthropologists, culture includes much more than refinement, good taste, sophistication, education, and appreciation of the fine arts. Not only college graduates but all people are “cultured.” The most interesting and significant cultural forces are those that affect people every day of their lives, particularly those that influence children during enculturation. Culture, as defined anthropologically, encompasses features that are sometimes regarded as trivial or unworthy of serious study, such as those of “popular” culture. To understand contemporary North American culture, we must consider television, fastfood restaurants, sports, and games. As a cultural manifestation, a rock star may be as
kot31030_ch02_023-045.indd Page 27
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:33:24 PM user-s173
What Is Culture?
27
interesting as a symphony conductor (or vice versa); a comic book may be as significant as a book-award winner.
Culture Is Integrated Cultures are not haphazard collections of customs and beliefs. Cultures are integrated, patterned systems. If one part of the system (the overall economy, for instance) changes, other parts change as well. For example, during the 1950s most American women planned domestic careers as homemakers and mothers. Most of today’s college women, by contrast, expect to get paying jobs when they graduate. What are some of the social repercussions of this particular economic change? Attitudes and behavior regarding marriage, family, and children have changed. Late marriage, “living together,” and divorce have become more common. The average age at first marriage for American women rose from 20 in 1955 to 26 in 2007. The comparable figures for men were 23 and 28 (U.S. Census Bureau 2007). The number of currently divorced Americans quadrupled from 4 million in 1970 to about 23 million in 2007 (U.S. Census Bureau 2008). Work competes with marriage and family responsibilities and reduces the time available to invest in child care. Cultures are integrated not simply by their dominant economic activities and related social patterns but also by sets of values, ideas, symbols, and judgments. Cultures train their individual members to share certain personality traits. A set of characteristic core values (key, basic, central values) integrates each culture and helps distinguish it from others. For instance, the work ethic and individualism are core values that have integrated American culture for generations. Different sets of dominant values influence the patterns of other cultures.
Culture Can Be Adaptive and Maladaptive Humans have both biological and cultural ways of coping with environmental stresses. Besides our biological means of adaptation, we also use “cultural adaptive kits,” which contain customary activities and tools that aid us. Although humans continue to adapt biologically, reliance on social and cultural means of adaptation has increased during human evolution and plays a crucial role. Sometimes, adaptive behavior that offers short-term benefits to particular subgroups or individuals may harm the environment and threaten the group’s long-term survival. Economic growth may benefit some people while it depletes resources needed for society at large or for future generations. Thus, cultural traits, patterns, and inventions can also be maladaptive, threatening the group’s continued existence (survival and reproduction). Air conditioners help us deal with heat, as fires and furnaces protect us against the cold. Automobiles permit us to make a living by getting us from home to workplace. But the by-products of such “beneficial” technology often create new problems. Chemical emissions increase air pollution, deplete the ozone layer, and contribute to climate change. Many cultural patterns such as overconsumption and pollution appear to be maladaptive in the long run. Can you think of others?
kot31030_ch02_023-045.indd Page 28
28
Chapter 2
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:33:24 PM user-s173
Culture
Cultures are integrated systems. When one behavior pattern changes, others also change. During the 1950s, most American women expected to have careers as wives, mothers, and domestic managers. As more and more women have entered the workforce, attitudes toward work and family have changed. On the top, mom and kids do the dishes in 1952. On the bottom (taken in January 2005), nuclear expert and Deputy Director of ISIS (Institute for Science & International Security) Corey Hinderstein uses her office in Washington, D.C., to monitor nuclear activities all over the globe.
kot31030_ch02_023-045.indd Page 29
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:33:25 PM user-s173
Culture’s Evolutionary Basis
29
Culture’s Evolutionary Basis The human capacity for culture has an evolutionary basis that extends back at least 2.5 million years to early toolmakers. Evidence for these toolmakers exists in the archeological record. However, based on observation of tool use and manufacture by apes, scientists believe the evolutionary basis for culture may extend even further back. Similarities between humans and apes, our closest relatives, are evident in anatomy, brain structure, genetics, and biochemistry. Most closely related to us are the African great apes: chimpanzees and gorillas. Hominidae is the zoological family that includes fossil and living humans, as well as chimps and gorillas. We refer to members of this family as hominids. The term hominins is used for the group that leads to humans but not to chimps and gorillas and that encompasses all the human species that ever have existed. Many human traits reflect the fact that our primate ancestors lived in the trees. These traits include grasping ability and manual dexterity (especially opposable thumbs), depth and color vision, learning ability based on a large brain, substantial parental investment in a limited number of offspring, and tendencies toward sociality and cooperation. Like other primates, humans have flexible, five-fingered hands and opposable thumbs: each thumb can touch all the other fingers on the same hand. Like monkeys and apes, humans also have excellent depth and color vision. Our eyes are placed forward in the skull and look directly ahead, so that their fields of vision overlap. Depth perception, impossible without overlapping visual fields, proved adaptive—e.g., for judging distance—in the trees. Having color and depth vision also facilitates the identification of various food sources, as well as mutual grooming—picking out burrs, insects, and other small objects from hair. Such grooming is one way of forming and maintaining social bonds. The combination of manual dexterity and depth perception allows monkeys, apes, and humans to pick up small objects, hold them in front of their eyes, and appraise them. Our ability to thread a needle reflects an intricate interplay of hands and eyes that took millions of years of primate evolution to achieve. Such dexterity, including the opposable thumb, confers a tremendous advantage in manipulating objects and is essential to a major human adaptive capacity: tool making. In primates, and especially in humans, the ratio of brain size to body size exceeds that of most mammals. Even more important, the brain’s outer layer—concerned with memory, association, and integration—is relatively larger. Monkeys, apes, and humans store an array of images in their memories, which permits them to learn more. Such a capacity for learning is another tremendous adaptive advantage. Like most other primates, humans usually give birth to a single offspring rather than a litter. Receiving more parental attention, that one infant has enhanced learning opportunities. The need for longer and more attentive care of offspring places a selective value on support by a social group. Humans have developed considerably the primate tendency to be social animals, living and interacting regularly with other members of their species.
What We Share with Other Primates There is a substantial gap between primate society (organized life in groups) and fully developed human culture, which is based on symbolic thought. Nevertheless, studies
kot31030_ch02_023-045.indd Page 30
30
Chapter 2
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:33:25 PM user-s173
Culture
of nonhuman primates reveal many similarities with humans, such as the ability to learn from experience and change behavior as a result. Apes and monkeys, like humans, learn throughout their lives. In one group of Japanese macaques (land-dwelling monkeys), for example, a three-year-old female started washing sweet potatoes before she ate them. First her mother, then her age peers, and finally the entire troop began washing sweet potatoes as well. The ability to benefit from experience confers a tremendous adaptive advantage, permitting the avoidance of fatal mistakes. Faced with environmental change, humans and other primates don’t have to wait for a genetic or physiological response. They can modify learned behavior and social patterns instead. Although humans employ tools much more than any other animal does, tool use also turns up among several nonhuman species, including birds, beavers, sea otters, and especially apes (see Mayell 2003). Humans are also not the only animals that make tools with a specific purpose in mind. Chimpanzees living in the Tai forest of Ivory Coast make and use stone tools to break open hard, golfball-sized nuts (Mercader, Panger, and Boesch 2002). At specific sites, the chimps gather nuts, place them on stumps or flat rocks, which are used as anvils, and pound the nuts with heavy stones. The chimps must select hammer stones suited to smashing the nuts and carry them to where the nut trees grow. Nut cracking is a learned skill, with mothers showing their young how to do it. In 1960, Jane Goodall (1996) began observing wild chimps—including their tool use and hunting behavior—at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, East Africa. The most studied form of ape tool making involves “termiting,” in which chimps make tools to probe termite hills. They choose twigs, which they modify by removing leaves and peeling off bark to expose the sticky surface beneath. They carry the twigs to termite hills, dig holes with their fingers, and insert the twigs. Finally, they pull out the twigs and dine on termites that were attracted to the sticky surface. Given what is known about ape tool use and manufacture, it is almost certain that early hominins shared this ability, although the first evidence for hominin stone tool making dates back only 2.5 million years. In addition, bipedalism (moving around upright on two legs) would have permitted the carrying and use of tools and weapons against predators and competitors in an open grassland habitat. The apes have other abilities essential to culture. Wild chimps and orangs aim and throw objects. Gorillas build nests, and they throw branches, grass, vines, and other objects. Hominins have elaborated the capacity to aim and throw, without which we never would have developed projectile technology and weaponry—or baseball. Like tool making, hunting once was cited as a distinctive human activity not shared with the apes. Again, however, primate research shows that other primates, especially chimpanzees, are habitual hunters. For example, in Uganda’s Kibale National Park chimps form large hunting parties, including an average of 26 individuals (almost always adult and adolescent males). Most hunts (78 percent) result in at least one prey item being caught—a much higher success rate than that among lions (26 percent), hyenas (34 percent), or cheetahs (30 percent). Chimps’ favored prey there is the red colobus monkey (Mitani and Watts 1999). Archaeological evidence suggests that humans hunted by at least 2.5 million years ago, based on stone meat-cutting tools found at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.
kot31030_ch02_023-045.indd Page 31
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:33:25 PM user-s173
Culture’s Evolutionary Basis
31
Given our current understanding of chimp hunting and tool making, we can infer that hominids may have been hunting much earlier than the first archaeological evidence attests. However, because chimps typically devour the monkeys they kill, leaving few remains, we may never find archaeological evidence for the first hominin hunt, especially if it was done without stone tools.
How We Differ from Other Primates Although chimps often share meat from a hunt, apes and monkeys (except for nursing infants) tend to feed themselves individually. Cooperation and sharing are much more developed among humans. Until fairly recently (12,000 to 10,000 years ago), all humans were hunter-gatherers who lived in small social groups called bands. In some world areas, the hunter-gatherer way of life persisted into recent times, permitting study by ethnographers. In such societies, men and women bring resources back to the camp and share them. Everyone shares the meat from a large animal. Nourished and protected by younger band members, elders live past reproductive age and are respected for their knowledge and experience. Humans are among the most cooperative of the primates— in the food quest and other social activities. As well, the amount of information stored in a human band is far greater than that in any other primate group. Another difference between humans and other primates involves mating. Among baboons and chimps, most mating occurs when females enter estrus, during
Tool use by chimps. These chimps in Liberia are using stone tools to crack palm nuts, as described in the text.
kot31030_ch02_023-045.indd Page 32
32
Chapter 2
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:33:26 PM user-s173
Culture
which they ovulate. In estrus, the vaginal area swells and reddens, and receptive females form temporary bonds with, and mate with, males. Human females, by contrast, lack a visible estrus cycle, and their ovulation is concealed. Not knowing when ovulation is occurring, humans maximize their reproductive success by mating throughout the year. Human pair bonds for mating are more exclusive and more durable than are those of chimps. Related to our more constant sexuality, all human societies have some form of marriage. Marriage gives mating a reliable basis and grants to each spouse special, though not always exclusive, sexual rights in the other. Marriage creates another major contrast between humans and nonhuman primates: exogamy and kinship systems. Most cultures have rules of exogamy requiring marriage outside one’s kin or local group. Coupled with the recognition of kinship, exogamy confers adaptive advantages because it creates ties between the spouses’ different kin groups. Their children have relatives, and therefore allies, in two kin groups rather than just one. The key point here is that ties of affection and mutual support between members of different local groups tend to be absent among primates other than Homo. Other primates tend to disperse at adolescence. Among chimps and gorillas, females tend to migrate, seeking mates in other groups. Humans also choose mates from outside the natal group, and usually at least one spouse moves. However, humans maintain lifelong ties with sons and daughters. The systems of kinship and marriage that preserve these links provide a major contrast between humans and other primates. Table 2.1 lists differences in the cultural abilities of humans and chimpanzees, our nearest relatives.
TA B L E 2 . 1 Cultural Features of Chimpanzees (Rudimentary) and Humans (Fully Developed) Chimpanzees
Humans
Cultural Learning
Rudimentary
Fully developed
Tool Use
Occasional
Habitual
Tool Manufacture
Occasional: hammer stones, termiting
Habitual and sophisticated
Aimed Throwing
Occasional objects, not tools
Projectile technology
Hunting
Significant, but no tools
Basic hominin subsistence strategy, with tools
Food Sharing
Meat sharing after hunt
Basic to human life
Cooperation
Occasional in hunting
Basic to human life
Mating and Marriage
Female estrus cycle, limited pair bonds
Year-round mating, marriage, and exogamy
Kin Ties
Limited by dispersal at adolescence
Maintained through sons and daughters
kot31030_ch02_023-045.indd Page 33
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:33:26 PM user-s173
Universality, Generality, and Particularity
33
Universality, Generality, and Particularity Anthropologists agree that cultural learning is uniquely elaborated among humans and that all humans have culture. Anthropologists also accept a doctrine termed in the 19th century “the psychic unity of man.” This means that although individuals differ in their emotional and intellectual tendencies and capacities, all human populations have equivalent capacities for culture. Regardless of their genes or their physical appearance, people can learn any cultural tradition. To understand this point, consider that contemporary Americans and Canadians are the genetically mixed descendants of people from all over the world. Our ancestors were biologically varied, lived in different countries and continents, and participated in hundreds of cultural traditions. However, early colonists, later immigrants, and their descendants all have become active participants in American and Canadian life. All now share a common national culture. To recognize biopsychological equality is not to deny differences among populations. In studying human diversity in time and space, anthropologists distinguish among the universal, the generalized, and the particular. Certain biological, psychological, social, and cultural features are universal, found in every culture. Others are merely generalities, common to several but not all human groups. Still other traits are particularities, unique to certain cultural traditions.
Universals and Generalities Biologically based universals include a long period of infant dependency, year-round (rather than seasonal) sexuality, and a complex brain that enables us to use symbols, languages, and tools. Among the social universals is life in groups and in some kind of family (see Brown 1991). Generalities occur in certain times and places but not in all cultures. They may be widespread, but they are not universal. One cultural generality that is present in many but not all societies is the nuclear family, a kinship group consisting of parents and children. Although many middle-class Americans ethnocentrically view the nuclear family as a proper and “natural” group, it is not universal. It was absent, for example, among the Nayars, who live on the Malabar Coast of India. Traditionally, the Nayars lived in female-headed households, and husbands and wives did not live together. In many other societies, the nuclear family is submerged in larger kin groups, such as extended families, lineages, and clans. Societies can share the same beliefs and customs because of borrowing or through (cultural) inheritance from a common cultural ancestor. Speaking English is a generality shared by North Americans and Australians because both countries had English settlers. Another reason for generalities is domination, as in colonial rule, when customs and procedures are imposed on one culture by another one that is more powerful. In many countries, use of the English language reflects colonial history. More recently, English has spread through diffusion (cultural borrowing) to many other countries, as it has become the world’s foremost language for business and travel.
kot31030_ch02_023-045.indd Page 34
34
Chapter 2
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:33:26 PM user-s173
Culture
Particularity: Patterns of Culture A cultural particularity is a trait or feature of culture that is not generalized or widespread; rather it is confined to a single place, culture, or society. Yet because of cultural borrowing, which has accelerated through modern transportation and communication systems, traits that once were limited in their distribution have become more widespread. Traits that are useful, that have the capacity to please large audiences, and that don’t clash with the cultural values of potential adopters are more likely to be borrowed than others are. Still, certain cultural particularities persist. One example would be a particular food dish (e.g., pork barbeque with a mustard-based sauce available only in South Carolina, or the pastie—beef stew baked in pie dough characteristic of Michigan’s upper peninsula). Besides diffusion which, for example, has spread McDonald’s food outlets, once confined to San Bernadino, California, across the globe, there are other reasons why cultural particularities are increasingly rare. Many cultural traits are shared as cultural universals and as a result of independent invention. Facing similar problems, people in different places have come up with similar solutions. Again and again, similar cultural causes have produced similar cultural results. At the level of the individual cultural trait or element (e.g, bow and arrow, hot dog, MTV), particularities may be getting rarer. But at a higher level, particularity is more obvious. Different cultures emphasize different things. Cultures are integrated and patterned differently and display tremendous variation and diversity. When cultural traits are borrowed, they are modified to fit the culture that adopts them. They are reintegrated—patterned anew—to fit their new setting. MTV in Germany or Brazil isn’t at all the same thing as MTV in the United States. As was stated in the earlier section “Culture Is Integrated,” patterned beliefs, customs, and practices lend distinctiveness to particular cultural traditions. Consider universal life-cycle events, such as birth, puberty, marriage, parenthood, and death, that many cultures observe and celebrate. The occasions (e.g., marriage, death) may be the same and universal, but the patterns of ceremonial observance may be dramatically different. Cultures vary in just which events merit special celebration. Americans, for example, regard expensive weddings as more socially appropriate than lavish funerals. However, the Betsileo of Madagascar take the opposite view. The marriage ceremony is a minor event that brings together just the couple and a few close relatives. However, a funeral is a measure of the deceased person’s social position and lifetime achievement, and it may attract a thousand people. Why use money on a house, the Betsileo say, when one can use it on the tomb where one will spend eternity in the company of dead relatives? How unlike contemporary Americans’ dreams of home ownership and preference for quick and inexpensive funerals. Cremation, an increasingly common option in the United States, would horrify the Betsileo, for whom ancestral bones and relics are important ritual objects. Cultures vary tremendously in their beliefs, practices, integration, and patterning. By focusing on and trying to explain alternative customs, anthropology forces us to reappraise our familiar ways of thinking. In a world full of cultural diversity, contemporary American culture is just one cultural variant, more powerful perhaps, but no more natural, than the others.
kot31030_ch02_023-045.indd Page 35
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:33:26 PM user-s173
Culture and the Individual: Agency and Practice
35
Culture and the Individual: Agency and Practice Generations of anthropologists have theorized about the relationship between the “system,” on one hand, and the “person” or “individual” on the other. The system can refer to various concepts, including culture, society, social relations, or social structure. Individual human beings always make up, or constitute, the system. But, living within that system, humans also are constrained (to some extent, at least) by its rules and by the actions of other individuals. Cultural rules provide guidance about what to do and how to do it, but people don’t always do what the rules say should be done. People use their culture actively and creatively, rather than blindly following its dictates. Humans aren’t passive beings who are doomed to follow their cultural traditions like programmed robots. Cultures are dynamic and constantly changing. People learn, interpret, and manipulate the same rule in different ways—or they emphasize different rules that better suit their interests. Culture is contested: Different groups in society struggle with one another over whose ideas, values, goals, and beliefs will prevail. Even common symbols may have radically different meanings to different individuals and groups in the same culture. Golden arches may cause one person to salivate while another plots a vegetarian protest. The same flag may be waved to support or oppose a given war. Even when they agree about what should be done, people don’t always do as their culture directs or as other people expect. Many rules are violated, some very often (for example, automobile speed limits). Some anthropologists find it useful to distinguish between ideal and real culture. The ideal culture consists of what people say they should do and what they say they do. Real culture refers to their actual behavior as observed by the anthropologist. Culture is both public and individual, both in the world and in people’s minds. Anthropologists are interested not only in public and collective behavior but also in how individuals think, feel, and act. The individual and culture are linked because human social life is a process in which individuals internalize the meanings of public (i.e., cultural) messages. Then, alone and in groups, people influence culture by converting their private (and often divergent) understandings into public expressions (D’Andrade 1984). Conventionally culture has been seen as social glue transmitted across the generations, binding people through their common past, rather than as something being continually created and reworked in the present. The tendency to view culture as an entity rather than as a process is changing. Contemporary anthropologists now emphasize how day-to-day action, practice, or resistance can make and remake culture (Gupta and Ferguson, eds. 1997b). Agency refers to the actions that individuals take, both alone and in groups, in forming and transforming cultural identities. The approach to culture known as practice theory (Ortner 1984) recognizes that individuals within a society or culture have diverse motives and intentions and different degrees of power and influence. Such contrasts may be associated with gender, age, ethnicity, class, and other social variables. Practice theory focuses on how such varied individuals—through their ordinary and extraordinary actions and practices—manage to influence, create, and transform the world they live in. Practice theory appropriately
kot31030_ch02_023-045.indd Page 36
36
Chapter 2
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:33:26 PM user-s173
Culture
recognizes a reciprocal relation between culture (the system—see above) and the individual. The system shapes how individuals experience and respond to external events, but individuals also play an active role in how society functions and changes. Practice theory recognizes both constraints on individuals and the flexibility and changeability of cultures and social systems.
Levels of Culture We distinguish between different levels of culture: national, international, and subcultural. In today’s world these distinctions are increasingly important. National culture embodies those beliefs, learned behavior patterns, values, and institutions that are shared by citizens of the same nation. International culture extends beyond and across national boundaries. Because culture is transmitted through learning rather than genetically, cultural traits can spread through borrowing or diffusion from one group to another. Because of diffusion, migration, colonialism, and globalization, many cultural traits and patterns have acquired international scope. The contemporary United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Australia share cultural traits they have inherited from their common linguistic and cultural ancestors in Great Britain. Roman Catholics in many different countries share beliefs, symbols, experiences, and values transmitted by their church. The World Cup has become an international cultural event, as people in many countries know the rules of, play, and follow soccer. Cultures also can be smaller than nations (see Jenks 2005). Although people who live in the same country share a national cultural tradition, all cultures also contain diversity. Individuals, families, communities, regions, classes, and other groups within a culture have different learning experiences as well as shared ones. Subcultures are different symbol-based patterns and traditions associated with particular groups in the same complex society. In large or diverse nations such as the United States or Canada, a variety of subcultures originate in region, ethnicity, language, class, and religion. The religious backgrounds of Jews, Baptists, and Roman Catholics create subcultural differences between them. While sharing a common national culture, U.S. northerners and southerners also differ in their beliefs, values, and customary behavior as a result of national and regional history. French-speaking Canadians sometimes pointedly contrast with English-speaking people in the same country. Italian Americans have ethnic traditions different from those of Irish, Polish, and African Americans. Nowadays, many anthropologists are reluctant to use the term subculture. They feel that the prefix sub- is offensive because it means “below.” Subcultures thus may be perceived as “less than” or somehow inferior to a dominant, elite, or national culture. In this discussion of levels of culture, I intend no such implication. My point is simply that nations may contain many different culturally defined groups. As mentioned earlier, culture is contested. Various groups may strive to promote the correctness and value of their own practices, values, and beliefs in comparison with those of other groups or the nation as a whole.
kot31030_ch02_023-045.indd Page 37
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:33:26 PM user-s173
Ethnocentrism, Cultural Relativism, and Human Rights
37
Ethnocentrism, Cultural Relativism, and Human Rights Ethnocentrism is the tendency to view one’s own culture as superior and to apply one’s own cultural values in judging the behavior and beliefs of people raised in other cultures. We hear ethnocentric statements all the time. Ethnocentrism contributes to social solidarity, a sense of value and community, among people who share a cultural tradition. People everywhere think that the familiar explanations, opinions, and customs are true, right, proper, and moral. They regard different behavior as strange, immoral, or savage. Often other societies are not considered fully human. Their members may be castigated as cannibals, thieves, or people who do not bury their dead. Among several tribes in the Trans-Fly region of Papua New Guinea homosexuality was valued over heterosexuality (see the chapter in this book on gender). Men who grew up in the Etoro tribe (Kelly 1976) favored oral sex between men, while their neighbors the Marind-anim encouraged men to engage in anal sex. (In both groups heterosexual coitus was stigmatized and allowed only for reproduction.) Etoro men considered Marind-anim anal sex to be disgusting, while seeing nothing abnormal about their own oral homosexual practices. Opposing ethnocentrism is cultural relativism, the viewpoint that behavior in one culture should not be judged by the standards of another culture. This position also
The notion of indigenous intellectual property rights (IPR) has arisen in an attempt to conserve each society’s cultural base, including its medicinal plants, which may have commercial value. Shown here is the hoodia plant, a cactus that grows in the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa. Hoodia, which traditionally is used by the San people to stave off hunger, is used now in diet pills marketed on the Internet.
kot31030_ch02_023-045.indd Page 38
38
Chapter 2
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:33:26 PM user-s173
Culture
can present problems. At its most extreme, cultural relativism argues that there is no superior, international, or universal morality, that the moral and ethical rules of all cultures deserve equal respect. In the extreme relativist view, Nazi Germany would be evaluated as nonjudgmentally as Athenian Greece. In today’s world, human rights advocates challenge many of the tenets of cultural relativism. For example, several societies in Africa and the Middle East have traditions of female genital modification (FGM). Clitoridectomy is the removal of a girl’s clitoris. Infibulation involves sewing the lips (labia) of the vagina, to constrict the vaginal opening. Both procedures reduce female sexual pleasure, and, it is believed in some cultures, the likelihood of adultery. Such practices have been opposed by human rights advocates, especially women’s rights groups. The idea is that the tradition infringes on a basic human right—disposition over one’s body and one’s sexuality. Some African countries have banned or otherwise discouraged the procedures, as have Western nations that receive immigration from such cultures. Similar issues arise with circumcision and other male genital operations. Is it right for a baby boy to be circumcised without his permission, as has been done routinely in the United States? Is it proper to require adolescent boys to undergo collective circumcision to fulfill cultural tradition, as has been done in parts of Africa and Australia? Some would argue that the problems with relativism can be solved by distinguishing between methodological and moral relativism. In anthropology, cultural relativism is not a moral position, but a methodological one. It states: To understand another culture fully, you must try to see how the people in that culture see things. What motivates them—what are they thinking—when they do those things? Such an approach does not preclude making moral judgments or taking action. When faced with Nazi atrocities, a methodological relativist would have a moral obligation to stop doing anthropology and take action to intervene. In the FGM example, one only can understand the motivations for the practice by looking at the situation from the point of view of those who engage in it. Having done this, one then faces the moral question of whether to intervene to stop it. We should recognize as well that different people and groups living in the same society— for example, women and men, old and young, the more and less powerful—can have widely different views about what is proper, necessary, and moral (see Hunt 2007). The idea of human rights invokes a realm of justice and morality beyond and superior to the laws and customs of particular countries, cultures, and religions (see R. Wilson, ed. 1996). Human rights include the right to speak freely, to hold religious beliefs without persecution, and not to be murdered, injured, or enslaved or imprisoned without charge. Such rights are seen as inalienable (nations cannot abridge or terminate them) and international (larger than and superior to individual nations and cultures). Four United Nations documents describe nearly all the human rights that have been internationally recognized. Those documents are the U.N. Charter; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; and the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Alongside the human rights movement has arisen an awareness of the need to preserve cultural rights. Unlike human rights, cultural rights are vested not in individuals but in groups, such as religious and ethnic minorities and indigenous societies. Cultural rights include a group’s ability to preserve its culture, to raise its children in the ways of its forebears, to continue its language, and not to be deprived of its economic base by the nation
kot31030_ch02_023-045.indd Page 39
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:33:26 PM user-s173
Mechanisms of Cultural Change
39
in which it is located (Greaves 1995). The related notion of indigenous intellectual property rights (IPR) has arisen in an attempt to conserve each society’s cultural base— its core beliefs, knowledge, and practices (see Merry 2006). Much traditional cultural knowledge has commercial value. Examples include ethnomedicine (traditional medical knowledge and techniques), cosmetics, cultivated plants, foods, folklore, arts, crafts, songs, dances, costumes, and rituals (see Nazarea 2006). According to the IPR concept, a particular group may determine how indigenous knowledge and its products may be used and distributed and the level of compensation required. The notion of cultural rights is related to the idea of cultural relativism, and the problem discussed previously arises again. What does one do about cultural rights that interfere with human rights? I believe that anthropology’s main job is to present accurate accounts and explanations of cultural phenomena. The anthropologist doesn’t have to approve infanticide, cannibalism, or torture to record their existence and determine their causes and the motivations behind them. However, each anthropologist has a choice about where he or she will do fieldwork. Some anthropologists choose not to study a particular culture because they discover in advance or early in fieldwork that behavior they consider morally repugnant is practiced there. Anthropologists respect human diversity. Most ethnographers try to be objective, accurate, and sensitive in their accounts of other cultures. However, objectivity, sensitivity, and a cross-cultural perspective don’t mean that anthropologists have to ignore international standards of justice and morality. What do you think?
Mechanisms of Cultural Change Why and how do cultures change? One way is diffusion or borrowing of traits between cultures. Such exchange of information and products has gone on throughout human history because cultures never have been truly isolated. Contact between neighboring groups has always existed and has extended over vast areas (Boas 1940/1966). Diffusion is direct when two cultures trade with, intermarry among, or wage war on one another. Diffusion is forced when one culture subjugates another and imposes its customs on the dominated group. Diffusion is indirect when items or traits move from group A to group C via group B without any firsthand contact between A and C. In this case, group B might consist of traders or merchants who take products from a variety of places to new markets. Or group B might be geographically situated between A and C, so that what it gets from A eventually winds up in C, and vice versa. In today’s world, much international diffusion is indirect—culture spread by the mass media and advanced information technology. Acculturation, a second mechanism of cultural change, is the exchange of cultural features that results when groups have continuous firsthand contact. The cultures of either or both groups may be changed by this contact (Redfield, Linton, and Herskovits 1936). With acculturation, parts of the cultures change, but each group remains distinct. One example of acculturation is a pidgin, a mixed language that develops to ease communication between members of different cultures in contact. This usually happens in situations of trade or colonialism. Pidgin English, for example, is a simplified form of English. It blends English grammar with the grammar of a native language. Pidgin English was first used for commerce in Chinese ports. Similar pidgins developed later in Papua New
kot31030_ch02_023-045.indd Page 40
40
Chapter 2
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 6:37:32 PM user-s173
Culture
Guinea and West Africa. In situations of continuous contact, cultures have also exchanged and blended foods, recipes, music, dances, clothing, tools, and technologies. Independent invention—the process by which humans innovate, creatively finding solutions to problems—is a third mechanism of cultural change. Faced with comparable problems and challenges, people in different societies have innovated and changed in similar ways, which is one reason cultural generalities exist. One example is the independent invention of agriculture in the Middle East and Mexico. Over the course of human history, major innovations have spread at the expense of earlier ones. Often a major invention, such as agriculture, triggers a series of subsequent interrelated changes. These economic revolutions have social and cultural repercussions. Thus in both Mexico and the Middle East, agriculture led to many social, political, and legal changes, including notions of property and distinctions in wealth, class, and power (see Naylor 1996).
Globalization The term globalization encompasses a series of processes, including diffusion, migration, and acculturation, working to promote change in a world in which nations and people are increasingly interlinked and mutually dependent. Promoting such linkages are economic and political forces, as well as modern systems of transportation and communication. The forces of globalization include international commerce and finance,
Globalization includes the internationalization of people and cultures through transnational migration and developments in commerce, transportation, and communication. This photo of Chinese youth in an Internet café was taken in Prato, Tuscany, Italy, on July 21, 2006. For what purposes do you think these teenagers use these computers?
kot31030_ch02_023-045.indd Page 41
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 6:37:36 PM user-s173
41
Globalization
travel and tourism, transnational migration, the media, and various high-tech information flows (see Appadurai, ed. 2001; Friedman and Friedman 2008; Scholte 2000). During the Cold War, which ended with the fall of the Soviet Union, the basis of international alliance was political, ideological, and military. More recent international pacts have shifted toward trade and economic issues. New economic unions (which have met considerable resistance in their member nations) have been created through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the European Union (EU). Communication systems and the media play a significant role in today’s process of globalization. Long-distance communication is easier, faster, and cheaper than ever, and extends to remote areas. I can now e-mail or call families in Arembepe, Brazil, which lacked phones or even postal service when I first began to study the community. The mass media help propel a globally spreading culture of consumption. Within nations and across their borders, the media spread information about products, services, rights, institutions, lifestyles, and the perceived costs and benefits of globalization. Emigrants transmit information and resources transnationally, as they maintain their ties with home (phoning, faxing, e-mailing, making visits, sending money). In a sense such people live multilocally—in different places and cultures at once. They learn to play various social roles and to change behavior and identity depending on the situation (see Cresswell 2006). The effects of globalization are broad and not always welcome. Local people must cope increasingly with forces generated by progressively larger systems— region, nation, and world. An army of outsiders now intrudes on people everywhere. Tourism has become the world’s number one industry (see Holden 2005). Economic development agents and the media promote the idea that work should be for cash rather than mainly for subsistence. Indigenous peoples and traditional societies have devised various strategies to deal with threats to their autonomy, identity, and livelihood (Maybury-Lewis 2002). New forms of political mobilization and cultural expression, including the rights movements discussed previously, are emerging from the interplay of local, regional, national, and international cultural forces (see Ong and Collier, eds. 2005).
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY The Advent of Behavioral Modernity
S
cientists agree that (1) around six million years ago, our hominin ancestors originated in Africa, and as apelike creatures they became habitual bipeds; (2) by 2.5 million years ago, still in Africa, hominins were
making crude stone tools; (3) by 1.7 million years ago, hominins had spread from Africa to Asia and eventually Europe; and (4) sometime after 200,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans (AMHs) evolved from ancestors who had remained in Africa. Like earlier hominins (Homo erectus), AMHs spread out from Africa. Eventually they Continued
kot31030_ch02_023-045.indd Page 42
42
Chapter 2
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 6:37:39 PM user-s173
Culture
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY replaced—perhaps in some cases interbreeding with—nonmodern human types, such as the Neandertals in Europe and the successors of Homo erectus in the Far East. There is disagreement, however, about when, where, and how early AMHs achieved behavioral modernity—relying on symbolic thought, elaborating cultural creativity, and as a result becoming fully human in behavior as well as in anatomy. Was it as much as 165,000 or as little as 45,000 years ago? Was it in Africa, the Middle East, or Europe? What triggered the change: a genetic mutation, population increase, competition with nonmodern humans, or some other cause? The traditional view has been that modern behavior originated fairly recently, perhaps 45,000–40,000 years ago, and only after Homo sapiens pushed into Europe. This theory of a “creative explosion” is based on finds such as the impressive cave paintings at Lascaux, Chauvet Cave, and other sites in France and Spain (Wilford 2002). However, recent discoveries outside Europe suggest a much older, more gradual evolution of modern behavior. Anthropologist Richard G. Klein of Stanford University is a leading advocate for the idea that human creativity dawned suddenly, in Europe around 45,000 years ago. Prior to this time, Klein thinks Homo had changed very slowly in anatomy and behavior. After this “dawn of culture,” human anatomy changed little, but behavior started changing dramatically (Klein with Edgar 2002). Indeed, by 40,000 years ago AMHs in Europe were making varied tools that display a pattern of abstract and symbolic thought. Their modern behavior included burying their dead with ceremonies, adorning their bodies with paints and jewelry, and making figurine images of fertile females. Their cave paintings displayed im-
Continued
ages from their minds, as they remembered the hunt, and events and symbols associated with it. To explain such a flowering of creativity, Klein proposes a neurological hypothesis. About 50,000 years ago, he thinks, a genetic mutation acted to rewire the human brain, possibly allowing for an advance in language. Improved communication, in Klein’s view, could have given people “the fully modern ability to invent and manipulate culture” (quoted in Wilford 2002). Klein thinks this genetic change probably happened in Africa and then allowed “human populations to colonize new and challenging environments” (quoted in Wilford 2002). Reaching Europe, the rewired modern humans met and replaced the resident Neandertals. Klein recognizes that his genetic hypothesis “fails one important measure of a proper scientific hypothesis—it cannot be tested or falsified by experiment or by examination of relevant human fossils” (quoted in Wilford 2002). AMH skulls from the time period in question show no change at all in brain size or function. Questioning Klein’s views are discoveries made in Africa and the Middle East during the last 30 years. These finds provide substantial evidence for earlier (than in Europe) modern behavior, in the form of finely made stone and bone tools, selfornamentation, and abstract carvings. Surveying African archaeological sites dating to between 300,000 and 30,000 years ago, Sally McBrearty and Alison Brooks (2000) conclude that what might appear to be a sudden event in Europe actually rested on a slow process of cultural accumulation within Africa, where Homo sapiens became fully human long before 40,000 years ago. At South Africa’s Blombos Cave, for example, an archaeological team led by
kot31030_ch02_023-045.indd Page 43
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 6:37:41 PM user-s173
Summary
Christopher Henshilwood found evidence that AMHs were making bone awls and weapon points more than 70,000 years ago. Three points had been shaped with a stone blade and then finely polished. Henshilwood thinks these artifacts indicate symbolic behavior and artistic creativity— people trying to make beautiful objects (Wilford 2002). In 2007 anthropologists reported the discovery of even earlier evidence (dating back to 164,000 b.p.) for behavioral modernity in a cave site at Pinnacle Point, South Africa. The cave yielded small stone bladelets, which could be attached to wood to make spears, as well as red ochre, a pigment often used for body paint. Also significant is the ancient diet revealed by remains from this seaside site. For the first time, we see early representatives of H. sapiens subsisting on a variety of shellfish and other marine resources. According to paleoanthropologist Curtis Marean, who led the discovery team, once early humans knew how to make a living from the sea, they could use coastlines as productive home ranges and move long distances (Guyot and Hughes 2007). Cultural advances would have facilitated the spread of AMHs out of Africa. Such advances had reached the Middle East by 43,000 years ago, where, in Turkey and Lebanon, Steven Kuhn, Mary Stiner, and David Reese (2001) found
43
evidence that coastal people made and wore beads and shell ornaments (see also Mayell 2004). Some of the shells were rare varieties, white or brightly colored. Body ornaments could have been part of a system of communication, signaling group identity and social status. Such communication through ornamentation implies “the existence of certain [modern] cognitive capacities” (Stiner and Kuhn, quoted in Wilford 2002; Kuhn, Stiner, and Reese 2001). According to archaeologist Randall White, early personal adornment in Africa and the Middle East shows that the capacity for human creativity existed among AMHs long before they reached Europe (Wilford 2002). AMHs honed their cultural abilities, which enabled them to maintain a common identity, communicate ideas, and organize their societies into “stable, enduring regional groups” (quoted in Wilford 2002). Symbolic thought and cultural advances were expressed most enduringly in artifacts, ornamentation, and art. The origin of behavioral modernity continues to be debated. We see, however, that archaeological work in many world areas suggests strongly that neither anatomical modernity nor behavioral modernity was a European invention. Africa’s role in the origin and development of humanity has been prominent for millions of years of hominin evolution.
Summary 1. Culture, which is distinctive to humanity, refers to customary behavior and beliefs that are passed on through enculturation. Culture rests on the human capacity for cultural learning. Culture encompasses rules for conduct internalized in human beings, which lead them to think and act in characteristic ways.
kot31030_ch02_023-045.indd Page 44
44
Chapter 2
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:33:26 PM user-s173
Culture
2. Although other animals learn, only humans have cultural learning, dependent on symbols. Humans think symbolically—arbitrarily bestowing meaning on things and events. By convention, a symbol stands for something with which it has no necessary or natural relation. Symbols have special meaning for people who share memories, values, and beliefs because of common enculturation. 3. Cultural traditions mold biologically based desires and needs in particular directions. Everyone is cultured, not just people with elite educations. Cultures may be integrated and patterned through economic and social forces, key symbols, and core values. Cultural rules don’t rigidly dictate our behavior. There is room for creativity, flexibility, diversity, and disagreement within societies. Cultural means of adaptation have been crucial in human evolution. Aspects of culture also can be maladaptive. 4. The human capacity for culture has an evolutionary basis that extends back at least 2.5 million years—to early tool makers whose products survive in the archaeological record (and most probably even further back—based on observation of tool use and manufacture by apes). Humans share with monkeys and apes such traits as manual dexterity (especially opposable thumbs), depth and color vision, learning ability based on a large brain, substantial parental investment in a limited number of offspring, and tendencies toward sociality and cooperation. 5. Many hominin traits are foreshadowed in other primates, particularly in the African apes, which, like us, belong to the hominid family. The ability to learn, basic to culture, is an adaptive advantage available to monkeys and apes. Chimpanzees make tools for several purposes. They also hunt and share meat. Sharing and cooperation are more developed among humans than among the apes, and only humans have systems of kinship and marriage that permit us to maintain lifelong ties with relatives in different local groups. 6. Using a comparative perspective, anthropology examines biological, psychological, social, and cultural universals and generalities. There also are unique and distinctive aspects of the human condition (cultural particularities). North American cultural traditions are no more natural than any others. Levels of culture can be larger or smaller than a nation. Cultural traits may be shared across national boundaries. Nations also include cultural differences associated with ethnicity, region, and social class. 7. Ethnocentrism describes judging other cultures by using one’s own cultural standards. Cultural relativism, which anthropologists may use as a methodological position rather than a moral stance, is the idea of avoiding the use of outside standards to judge behavior in a given society. Human rights are those based on justice and morality beyond and superior to particular countries, cultures, and religions. Cultural rights are vested in religious and ethnic minorities and indigenous societies, and IPR, or intellectual property rights, apply to an indigenous group’s collective knowledge and its applications. 8. Diffusion, migration, and colonialism have carried cultural traits and patterns to different world areas. Mechanisms of cultural change include diffusion, acculturation, and independent invention. Globalization describes a series of processes that promote change in a world in which nations and people are interlinked and mutually dependent.
kot31030_ch02_023-045.indd Page 45
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:33:26 PM user-s173
Key Terms
45
Key Terms acculturation (p. 39) core values (p. 27) cultural relativism (p. 37) cultural rights (p. 38) diffusion (p. 39) enculturation (p. 23) ethnocentrism (p. 37) generality (p. 33) globalization (p. 40) hominid (p. 29)
hominins (p. 29) human rights (p. 38) independent invention (p. 40) intellectual property rights (IPR) (p. 39) international culture (p. 36) national culture (p. 36) particularity (p. 33) subcultures (p. 36) symbol (p. 24) universal (p. 33)
Go to our Online Learning Center website at www.mhhe.com/kottak for Internet resources directly related to the contents of this chapter.
kot31030_ch03_046-070.indd Page 46
C
H
A
7/28/09
P
T
3:30:32 PM user-s173
E
R
/Users/user-s173/Desktop
3
Ethics and Methods ❖ Ethics and Anthropology ❖ Research Methods in Physical Anthropology and Archaeology
❖ Ethnographic Techniques Observation and Participant Observation
Multidisciplinary Approaches
Conversation, Interviewing, and Interview Schedules
Primatology
The Genealogical Method
Anthropometry
Key Cultural Consultants
Bone Biology
Life Histories
Molecular Anthropology Paleoanthropology
Local Beliefs and Perceptions, and the Ethnographer’s
Survey and Excavation
Problem-Oriented Ethnography
❖ Kinds of Archaeology
Longitudinal Research
❖ Dating the Past
Team Research
Relative Dating Absolute Dating ❖ Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology
❖ Survey Research Anthropology Today: Archaeologist in New Orleans Finds a Way to Help the Living
❖ Ethnography: Anthropology’s Distinctive Strategy
T
his chapter begins with a consideration of the ethical dimensions of anthropology, then turns to a discussion of research methods in physical anthropology, archaeology, and cultural anthropology. (Linguistic methods are discussed in Chapter 10.) As the main organization representing the breadth of anthropology (all four subfields, academic and applied dimensions), the American Anthropological Association (AAA) believes that generating and appropriately using knowledge of the peoples of the world, past and present, is a worthy goal. The mission of the AAA is to advance anthropological research and encourage the spread of anthropological knowledge through publications, teaching, public education, and application. Part of that mission is to help educate AAA members about ethical obligations and challenges (http://www. aaanet.org). 46
kot31030_ch03_046-070.indd Page 47
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:58:38 PM user-s173
Ethics and Anthropology
47
Ethics and Anthropology Anthropologists increasingly are mindful of the fact that science exists in society, and in the context of law and ethics. Anthropologists can’t study things simply because they happen to be interesting or of value to science. As anthropologists conduct research and engage in other professional activities, ethical issues inevitably arise. Anthropologists typically have worked abroad, outside their own society. In the context of international contacts and cultural diversity, different value systems will meet, and often compete. To guide its members in making decisions involving ethics and values, the AAA offers a Code of Ethics. The most recent code, approved in 2009, points out that anthropologists have obligations to their scholarly field, to the wider society and culture, and to the human species, other species, and the environment. The AAA code’s stated aim is to offer guidelines and to promote discussion and education rather than to investigate allegations of misconduct. The code addresses several contexts in which anthropologists work. Some of its main points may be highlighted. Anthropologists should be open and honest about their research projects with all parties affected by the research. These parties should be informed about the nature, procedures, purpose(s), potential impacts, and source(s) of support for the research. Researchers should not compromise anthropological ethics in order to conduct research. They should pay attention to proper relations between themselves as guests and the host nations and communities where they work. The AAA does not advise anthropologists to avoid taking stands on issues. Indeed, seeking to shape actions and policies may be as ethically justifiable as inaction.
The full Code of Ethics is available at the AAA website http://www.aaanet.org/issues/ policy-advocacy/Code-of-Ethics.cfm. Physical anthropologists and archaeologists, in particular, often work as members of international teams (see Dalton 2006). These teams typically include researchers from several countries, including the host country—the place (e.g., Ethiopia) where the research takes place. In paleoanthropology (aka human paleontology)—the study of human evolution through the fossil record—physical anthropologists and archaeologists often work together. Although the physical anthropologists are more interested in bones and the archaeologists in artifacts, their work may proceed jointly, as they try to infer the relation between the physical and cultural features of the remains they are examining. Anthropologists must inform officials and colleagues in the host country about the purpose, funding, and likely results, products, and impacts of their research. They need to negotiate the matter of where the materials produced by the research will be analyzed and stored—in the host country or in the anthropologists’ country—and for how long. To whom do research materials such as bones, artifacts, and blood samples belong? What kinds of restrictions will apply to their use? Contemporary anthropologists recognize that informed consent (agreement to take part in the research—after having been informed about its nature, procedures, and possible impacts) should be obtained from anyone who provides information or who might be affected by the research. Although nonhuman primates can’t give
kot31030_ch03_046-070.indd Page 48
48
Chapter 3
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:58:38 PM user-s173
Ethics and Methods
informed consent, primatologists still must take steps to ensure that their research doesn’t endanger the animals. Either government agencies or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) may be entrusted with protecting primates. If this is the case, the anthropologist will need their permission and informed consent to conduct research. With living humans, informed consent is a necessity, not only in gathering information, but especially in obtaining biological samples, such as blood or urine. The research subjects must be told how the samples will be collected, used, and identified, and about the potential costs and benefits to them. Informed consent is needed from anyone providing data or information, owning materials being studied, or otherwise having an interest that might be affected by the research. To assist some peoples, an international movement now advocates on behalf of indigenous peoples and formerly colonized areas. It is appropriate for North American anthropologists working in another country to (1) include host country colleagues in their research planning and requests for funding, (2) establish truly collaborative relationships with those colleagues and their institutions before, during, and after field work, (3) include host country colleagues in dissemination, including publication, of the research results, and (4) ensure that something is “given back” to host country colleagues. For example, research equipment and technology are allowed to remain in the host country. Or funding is provided for host country colleagues to do research, attend international meetings, or visit foreign institutions—especially those where their international collaborators work. Even with broad efforts to respect diverse value systems and acknowledge the contributions of the host country and its colleagues, ethical issues continue to arise. Lawsuits against museums by groups seeking the repatriation of remains and artifacts have now become common (see Rothstein 2006). Peru, for instance, sued Yale University to recover objects removed during the exploration of Machu Picchu (an important Peruvian archaeological site) by Yale explorer Hiram Bingham in 1912. Native Australians have argued that images of native Australian fauna, such as the emu and kangaroo, belong exclusively to the Aboriginal people (Brown 2003). Michael F. Brown (2003) describes efforts by Hopi Indians to control and restrict historic photos of secret religious ceremonies.
Research Methods in Physical Anthropology and Archaeology There are all sorts of specialized research interests, topics, and methods within both physical anthropology and archaeology. (Given space limitations only some of them can be covered here.)
Multidisciplinary Approaches Scientists from diverse fields—for example, soil science and paleontology (the study of ancient life through the fossil record)—collaborate with anthropologists in the study of sites where fossils or artifacts have been found. Palynology, the study of ancient
kot31030_ch03_046-070.indd Page 49
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:58:38 PM user-s173
Research Methods in Physical Anthropology and Archaeology
49
plants through pollen samples, is used to determine a site’s environment at the time of occupation. Physical anthropologists and archaeologists turn to physicists and chemists for help with dating techniques. Physical anthropologists representing a subspecialty known as bioarchaeology may complement the picture of ancient life at a particular site by examining human skeletons to reconstruct their physical traits, health status, and diet (Larsen 2000). Evidence for social status may endure in hard materials— bones, jewels, buildings—through the ages. During life, bone growth and stature are influenced by diet. Genetic differences aside, taller people often are that way because they eat better than shorter people do. Differences in the chemical composition of groups of bones at a site may help distinguish privileged nobles from less fortunate commoners. To reconstruct ancient biology and ways of life, physical anthropologists, archaeologists, and their collaborators analyze the remains of humans, plants, and animals, as well as such artifacts (manufactured items) as ceramics, tiles, casts, and metals. Visible remains found at archaeological sites include animal and human bones, rocks, charcoal from ancient fires, remains in burials and storage pits, and worked stone and bone. Archaeologists today also can draw on microscopic evidence, such as fossil pollen, phytoliths (plant crystals), and starch grains. A phytolith (“plant stone”) is a microscopic crystal found in many plants, including wheat, maize, rice, beans, squash, manioc (cassava), and other early domesticates. Because phytoliths are inorganic and do not decay, they can reveal which plants were present at a given site even when no other plant remains survive. Phytoliths can be recovered from teeth, tools, containers, ritual objects, and garden plots. Starch grain analysis, another useful technique, recovers microfossils of food plants from the stone tools used to process them. Starch grains preserve well in areas, e.g., the humid tropics, where other organic remains typically decay. These grains have been recovered from stone cutting and grinding tools, attached to pottery fragments and basketry, and in human coprolites (ancient feces) (Bryant 2003, 2007a, 2007b). Vaughn Bryant (2007b) presents a strong case for the importance of such microscopic evidence in studying the past. As one example, he cites Bonnie Williamson’s analysis of Middle to Late Stone Age tools found at the Rose Cottage cave site in South Africa. Examining hundreds of stone tools, Williamson found that many of them still had residues stuck to their cutting edges. Contradicting the prevailing assumption that such tools were used mainly to hunt and butcher game animals, Williamson found that over 50 percent of all the residues were from plants. The blood (animal) residues on the tools were few compared with the starch grain evidence for plant usage. This study and a later one by Williamson suggested an important role for women (in gathering and processing plant foods) in early cultures. Anthropologists also work with geologists, geographers, and other scientists, for example, in using satellite images to find ancient footpaths, roads, canals, and irrigation systems as well as patterns of flooding and deforestation, which can then be investigated on the ground. Aerial photos (taken from airplanes) and satellite images are forms of remote sensing used in site location. Anthropologists have used satellite imagery to identify, and then investigate on the ground, regions where deforestation is especially
kot31030_ch03_046-070.indd Page 50
50
Chapter 3
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:58:38 PM user-s173
Ethics and Methods
severe and where people and biodiversity, including nonhuman primates, may be at risk (Green and Sussman 1990; Kottak 1999; Kottak, Gezon, and Green 1994).
Primatology Primate behavior has been observed in zoos (e.g., de Waal 1998) and through experimentation (e.g., Harlow 1971), but the most significant studies have been done in natural settings, among free-ranging apes, monkeys, and lemurs. Since the 1950s, when primatologists began their shift from zoos to natural settings, numerous studies have been done of apes (chimps, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons), monkeys (e.g., baboons, macaques), and lemurs (e.g., Madagascar’s indrii, sifaka, and ring-tailed lemurs). Arboreal primates (those that spend most of their time in the trees) are difficult to see and follow, but they typically make a lot of noise. Their howls and calls can be studied and teach us about how primates communicate. Studies of primate social systems and behavior, including their mating patterns, infant care, and patterns of contact and dispersal, suggest hypotheses about behavior that humans do or do not share with our nearest relatives—and also with our hominid ancestors.
Anthropometry Physical anthropologists use various techniques to study nutrition, growth, and development. Anthropometry is the measurement of human body parts and dimensions, including skeletal parts (osteometry). Anthropometry is done on living people as well as on skeletal remains from sites. Body mass and composition provide measures of nutritional status in living people. Body mass is calculated from height and weight. The body mass index (kg/m2) is the ratio of weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared. An adult body mass above 30 is considered at risk of overweight, while one below 18 is at risk of underweight or malnutrition.
Bone Biology Central to physical anthropology is bone biology (or skeletal biology)—the study of bone as a biological tissue, including its genetics; cell structure; growth, development, and decay; and patterns of movement (biomechanics) (Katzenberg and Saunders, eds. 2000). The interpretation of fossil remains relies on understanding the structure and function of the skeleton. Paleopathology is the study of disease and injury in skeletons from archaeological sites. Some forms of cancer leave evidence in the bone. Breast cancer, for example, may spread (metastasize) skeletally, leaving holes or lesions in bones and skull. Certain infectious diseases (e.g., syphilis and tuberculosis) also mark bone, as do injuries and nutritional deficiencies (e.g., rickets, a vitamin D deficiency that deforms the bones). In forensic anthropology, physical anthropologists work in a legal context, assisting coroners, medical examiners, and law enforcement agencies in recovering, analyzing, and identifying human remains and determining the cause of death (Blau and Ubelaker 2008; Komar and Buikstra 2008). The television series Bones offers a view of such
kot31030_ch03_046-070.indd Page 51
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:58:38 PM user-s173
Research Methods in Physical Anthropology and Archaeology
51
Two adult femora. The top one is normal in size and shape. The bottom one shows swelling and a ragged surface resulting from the chronic bacterial infection called osteomyelitis. These bones are from the Mississippian period Hazel site in Arkansas.
work through the character Temperance Brennan, whose creator is anthropologist Kathy Reichs.
Molecular Anthropology Molecular anthropology uses genetic analysis (of DNA sequences) to assess evolutionary links. Through molecular comparison, evolutionary distance among living species, along with dates of most recent common ancestry, can be estimated. Molecular studies also have been used to assess and date the origins of modern humans and to examine their relation to extinct human groups such as the Neandertals, which lived in Europe between 130,000 and 28,000 years ago. Molecular anthropologists examine relationships among ancient and contemporary populations and among species. It’s well established, for example, that humans and chimpanzees have more than 98 percent of their DNA in common. Molecular anthropologists also reconstruct waves and patterns of migration and settlement. A haplogroup is a biological lineage (a large group of related people) defined by a specific cluster of genetic traits that occur together. Native Americans have four major haplogroups, which also are linked to East Asia. For nonhuman primates, molecular anthropologists use DNA sequences to identify parentage, and to calculate kinship and degree of inbreeding within primate colonies. Molecular anthropologists also use “genetic clocks” to estimate divergence time (date of most recent common ancestry) among species (e.g., humans, chimps, and gorillas—5 million to 8 million years ago) and of various human groups (e.g., Neandertals and modern humans).
Paleoanthropology Paleoanthropologists study early hominids through fossil remains. Fossils are remains (e.g., bones), traces, or impressions (e.g., footprints) of ancient life. Typically, a team
kot31030_ch03_046-070.indd Page 52
52
Chapter 3
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:58:38 PM user-s173
Ethics and Methods
composed of scientists, students, and local workers participates in a paleoanthropological study. Such teams may include physical anthropologists, archaeologists, paleontologists, geologists, palynologists, paleoecologists, physicists, and chemists. Paleontologists help locate fossil beds containing remains of animals that can be dated and that are known to have coexisted with hominids at various time periods. Good preservation of faunal remains may suggest that hominid fossils have survived as well. Sometimes it’s impossible to date the hominid fossils and artifacts found at a given site by using the most accurate and direct (radiometric) methods. In this case, comparison of the faunal remains at that site with similar, but more securely dated, fauna at another site may suggest a date for those animal fossils and the hominids and artifacts associated with them (see Gugliotta 2005).
Survey and Excavation Once potential sites have been identified, more intensive surveying begins in the search for hominid traces—bones or tools. Only hominids work rock to make tools and move rock fragments over long distances (see Watzman 2006). Some early hominid sites are strewn with thousands of tools. Typically, archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, and paleontologists combine both local (excavation) and regional (systematic survey) perspectives. They recognize that sites may not be discrete and isolated, but parts of larger systems.
Systematic Survey Archaeologists and paleoanthropologists have two basic field work strategies: systematic survey and excavation. Systematic survey provides a regional perspective by gathering information on settlement patterns over a large area. Settlement pattern refers to the distribution of sites within a region. Regional surveys reconstruct settlement patterns by addressing several questions: Where were sites located? How big were they? What kinds of buildings did they have? How old are the sites? Ideally, a systematic survey involves walking over the entire survey area and recording the location and size of all sites. From artifacts found on the surface, the surveyor estimates when each site was occupied.
Excavation During an excavation, scientists recover remains by digging through the layers of deposits that make up a site. These layers or strata are used to establish the time order of the materials encountered during the dig. This relative chronology is based on the principle of superposition: In an undisturbed sequence of strata, the oldest layer is on the bottom. Each successive layer above is younger than the one below. Thus, artifacts and fossils from lower strata are older than those recovered from higher strata in the same deposit. This relative time ordering of material remains lies at the heart of archaeological, paleoanthropological, and paleontological research. The archaeological and fossil records are so rich, and excavation is so laborintensive and expensive, that nobody digs a site without a good reason. Sites are excavated because they are endangered, or because they answer specific research
kot31030_ch03_046-070.indd Page 53
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:58:38 PM user-s173
Research Methods in Physical Anthropology and Archaeology
53
At San Ignacio, archaeology students excavate a section of the Cahal Pech Maya site in western Belize. The students are volunteers, mostly from the United States. The work is under the direction of the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance Project.
questions (see Sabloff 2008). Cultural resource management (CRM) focuses on managing the preservation of archaeological sites that are threatened by modern development. Many countries require archaeological impact studies before construction can take place. If a site is at risk and the development cannot be stopped, CRM archaeologists are called in to salvage what information they can from the site. (See the box at the end of this chapter.) Another reason a site may be chosen for excavation is that it is well suited to answer specific research questions. An archaeologist studying the origins of agriculture wouldn’t want to excavate a large, fortified hilltop city with a series of buildings dating to a period well after the first appearance of farming communities. Rather, he or she would look for a small hamlet-size site located near good farmland and a water source. Such a site would have evidence of an early occupation dating to the period when farming communities first appeared in that region.
kot31030_ch03_046-070.indd Page 54
54
Chapter 3
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:58:38 PM user-s173
Ethics and Methods
Kinds of Archaeology Archaeologists pursue diverse research topics, using a wide variety of methods. Experimental archaeologists try to replicate ancient techniques and processes (e.g., tool making) under controlled conditions. Historical archaeologists use written records as guides and supplements to archaeological research. They work with remains more recent—often much more recent—than the advent of writing. Colonial archaeologists, for instance, use historical records as guides to locate and excavate postcontact sites in North and South America, and to verify or question written accounts. Classical archaeologists usually are affiliated with university departments of classics or the history of art, rather than with anthropology departments. These classical scholars focus on the literate civilizations of the Old World, such as Greece, Rome, and Egypt. Classical archaeologists often are as (or more) interested in art—styles of architecture and sculpture—as in the social, political, and economic variables that typically interest the anthropologist. Underwater archaeology is a growing field that investigates submerged sites, most often shipwrecks. Special techniques, including remotely operated vehicles like the one shown in the movie Titanic, are used, but divers also do underwater survey and excavation.
Dating the Past The archaeological record hasn’t revealed every ancient society that has existed on Earth; nor is the fossil record a representative sample of all the plants and animals that ever have lived. Some species and body parts are better represented than others are, for many reasons. Hard parts, such as bones and teeth, preserve better than do soft parts, such as flesh and skin. The chances of fossilization increase when remains are buried in a newly forming sediment, such as silt, gravel, or sand. Good places for bones to be buried include swamps, floodplains, river deltas, lakes, and caves. The species that inhabit such areas have a better chance to be preserved than do animals that live in other habitats. Fossilization also is favored in areas with volcanic ash. Once remains do get buried, chemical conditions must be right for fossilization to occur. If the sediment is too acidic, even bones and teeth will dissolve. The study of the processes that affect the remains of dead animals is called taphonomy, from the Greek taphos, which means “tomb.” Such processes include scattering by carnivores and scavengers, distortion by various forces, and the possible fossilization of the remains. The conditions under which fossils are found also influence the fossil record. For example, fossils are more likely to be uncovered through erosion in arid areas than in wet areas. Sparse vegetation allows wind to scour the landscape and uncover fossils. The fossil record has been accumulating longer and is more extensive in Europe than in Africa because civil engineering projects and fossil hunting have been going on longer in Europe than in Africa. A world map showing where fossils have been found does not indicate the true range of ancient animals. Such a map tells us more about ancient geological activity, modern erosion, or recent human activity—such
kot31030_ch03_046-070.indd Page 55
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:58:38 PM user-s173
Dating the Past
55
as paleontological research or road building. In considering the primate fossil record in later chapters, we’ll see that certain areas provide more abundant fossil evidence for particular time periods. This doesn’t necessarily mean that primates were not living elsewhere at the same time. Nor does failure to find a fossil species in a particular place always mean that species did not live there. In the words of paleoanthropologist Christopher Stringer, “absence of evidence does not necessarily prove evidence of absence” (quoted in Gugliotta 2005). We’ve seen that paleontology is the study of ancient life through the fossil record and that paleoanthropology is the study of ancient humans and their immediate ancestors. These fields have established a time frame, or chronology, for the evolution of life. Scientists use several techniques to date fossils. These methods offer different degrees of precision and are applicable to different periods of the past.
Relative Dating Chronology is established by assigning dates to geologic layers (strata) and to the material remains, such as fossils and artifacts, within them. Dating may be relative or absolute. Relative dating provides a time frame in relation to other strata or materials rather than absolute dates in numbers. Many dating methods are based on the geological study of stratigraphy, the science that examines the ways in which earth sediments accumulate in layers known as strata (singular, stratum). Soil that erodes from a hillside into a valley covers, and is younger than, the soil deposited there previously. Stratigraphy permits relative dating. That is, the fossils in a given stratum are younger than those in the layers below them and older than those in the layers above them. We may not know the exact or absolute dates of the fossils, but we can place them in time relative to remains in other layers. Changing environmental forces, such as lava flows and the alternation of land and sea, cause different materials to be deposited in a given sequence of strata; this allows scientists to distinguish between the strata. Remains of animals and plants that lived at the same time are found in the same stratum. When fossils are found within a stratigraphic sequence, scientists know their dates relative to fossils in other strata; this is relative dating. When fossils are found in a particular stratum, the associated geological features (such as frost patterning) and remains of particular plants and animals offer clues about the climate at the time of deposition.
Absolute Dating Fossils can be dated more precisely, with dates in numbers (absolute dating), by using several methods. For example, the 14C, or carbon-14, technique is used to date organic remains. This is a radiometric technique (so called because it measures radioactive decay). 14C is an unstable radioactive isotope of normal carbon, 12C. Cosmic radiation entering the earth’s atmosphere produces 14C, and plants take in 14C as they absorb carbon dioxide. 14C moves up the food chain as animals eat plants and as predators eat other animals.
kot31030_ch03_046-070.indd Page 56
56
Chapter 3
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:58:38 PM user-s173
Ethics and Methods
With death, the absorption of 14C stops. This unstable isotope starts to break down into nitrogen (14N). It takes 5,730 years for half the 14C to change to nitrogen; this is the half-life of 14C. After another 5,730 years only one-quarter of the original 14C will remain. After yet another 5,730 years only one-eighth will be left. By measuring the proportion of 14C in organic material, scientists can determine a fossil’s date of death, or the date of an ancient campfire. However, because the half-life of 14C is short, this dating technique is less dependable for specimens older than 40,000 years than it is for more recent remains. Fortunately, other radiometric dating techniques are available for earlier periods. One of the most widely used is the potassium-argon (K/A) technique. 40K is a radioactive isotope of potassium that breaks down into argon-40, a gas. The half-life of 40 K is far longer than that of 14C—1.3 billion years. With this method, the older the specimen, the more reliable the dating. Furthermore, whereas 14C dating can be done only on organic remains, K/A dating can be used only for inorganic substances: rocks and minerals. 40 K in rocks gradually breaks down into argon-40. That gas is trapped in the rock until the rock is heated intensely (as with volcanic activity), at which point it may escape. When the rock cools, the breakdown of potassium into argon resumes. Dating is done by reheating the rock and measuring the escaping gas. In Africa’s Great Rift Valley, which runs down eastern Africa and in which early hominid fossils abound, past volcanic activity permits K/A dating. In studies of strata containing fossils, scientists find out how much argon has accumulated in rocks since they were last heated. They then determine, using the standard 40K deterioration rate (half-life), the date of that heating. Considering volcanic rocks at the top of a stratum with fossil remains, scientists establish that the fossils are older than, say, 1.8 million years. By dating the volcanic rocks below the fossil remains, they determine that the fossils are younger than, say, 2 million years. Thus, the age of the fossils is set at between 2 million and 1.8 million years. Note that absolute dating is that in name only; it may give ranges of numbers rather than exact dates. Many fossils were discovered before the advent of modern stratigraphy. Often we can no longer determine their original stratigraphic placement. Furthermore, fossils aren’t always discovered in volcanic layers. Like 14C dating, the K/A technique applies to a limited period of the fossil record. Because the half-life of 40K is so long, the technique cannot be used with materials less than 500,000 years old. Other radiometric dating techniques can be used to cross-check K/A dates, again by using minerals surrounding the fossils. One such method, uranium series dating, measures fission tracks produced during the decay of radioactive uranium (238U) into lead. Two other radiometric techniques are especially useful for fossils that cannot be dated by 14C (up to 40,000 before the present, or b.p.) or 40K (more than 500,000 b.p.). These methods are thermoluminescence (TL) and electron spin resonance (ESR). Both TL and ESR measure the electrons that are constantly being trapped in rocks and minerals (Shreeve 1992). Once a date is obtained for a rock found associated with a fossil, that date also can be applied to that fossil. The time spans for which the various absolute dating techniques are applicable are summarized in Table 3.1.
kot31030_ch03_046-070.indd Page 57
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:58:38 PM user-s173
Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology
57
TA B L E 3 . 1 Absolute Dating Techniques Technique
Abbreviation
Materials Dated
Effective Time Range
Carbon-14
14
Organic materials
Up to 40,000 years
C 40
Potassium-argon
K/A and
Volcanic rock
Older than 500,000 years
Uranium series
238
Minerals
Between 1,000 and 1,000,000 years
Thermoluminescence
TL
Rocks and minerals
Between 5,000 and 1,000,000 years
Electron spin resonance
ESR
Rocks and minerals
Between 1,000 and 1,000,000 years
U
K
Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology Cultural anthropology and sociology share an interest in social relations, organization, and behavior. However, important differences between these disciplines arose from the kinds of societies each traditionally studied. Initially sociologists focused on the industrial West; anthropologists, on nonindustrial societies. Different methods of data collection and analysis emerged to deal with those different kinds of societies. To study large-scale, complex nations, sociologists came to rely on questionnaires and other means of gathering masses of quantifiable data. For many years sampling and statistical techniques have been basic to sociology, whereas statistical training has been less common in anthropology (although this is changing somewhat as anthropologists increasingly work in modern nations). Traditional ethnographers studied small, nonliterate (without writing) populations and relied on ethnographic methods appropriate to that context. “Ethnography is a research process in which the anthropologist closely observes, records, and engages in the daily life of another culture—an experience labeled as the fieldwork method—and then writes accounts of this culture, emphasizing descriptive detail” (Marcus and Fischer 1986, p. 18). One key method described in this quote is participant observation—taking part in the events one is observing, describing, and analyzing. Anthropology started to separate from sociology around 1900. Early students of society, such as the French scholar Émile Durkheim, were among the founders of both sociology and anthropology. Comparing the organization of simple and complex societies, Durkheim studied the religions of Native Australians (Durkheim 1912/2001), as well as mass phenomena (such as suicide rates) in modern nations (Durkheim 1897/1951). Eventually anthropology would specialize in the former, sociology in the latter.
kot31030_ch03_046-070.indd Page 58
58
Chapter 3
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:58:38 PM user-s173
Ethics and Methods
Ethnography: Anthropology’s Distinctive Strategy Anthropology developed into a separate field as early scholars worked on Indian (Native
American) reservations and traveled to distant lands to study small groups of foragers (hunters and gatherers) and cultivators. Traditionally, the process of becoming a cultural anthropologist has required a field experience in another society. Early ethnographers lived in small-scale, relatively isolated societies with simple technologies and economies. Ethnography thus emerged as a research strategy in societies with greater cultural uniformity and less social differentiation than are found in large, modern, industrial nations. Traditionally, ethnographers have tried to understand the whole of a particular culture (or, more realistically, as much as they can, given limitations of time and perception). To pursue this goal, ethnographers adopt a free-ranging strategy for gathering information. In a given society or community, the ethnographer moves from setting to setting, place to place, and subject to subject to discover the totality and interconnectedness of social life. By expanding our knowledge of the range of human diversity, ethnography provides a foundation for generalizations about human behavior and social life. Ethnographers draw on varied techniques to piece together a picture of otherwise alien lifestyles. Anthropologists usually employ several (but rarely all) of the techniques discussed below (see also Bernard 2006; Wolcott 2008).
Ethnographic Techniques The characteristic field techniques of the ethnographer include the following: 1. 2.
3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
Direct, firsthand observation of behavior, including participant observation. Conversation with varying degrees of formality, from the daily chitchat that helps maintain rapport and provides knowledge about what is going on, to prolonged interviews, which can be unstructured or structured. The genealogical method. Detailed work with key consultants, or informants, about particular areas of community life. In-depth interviewing, often leading to the collection of life histories of particular people (narrators). Discovery of local (native) beliefs and perceptions, which may be compared with the ethnographer’s own observations and conclusions. Problem-oriented research of many sorts. Longitudinal research—the continuous long-term study of an area or site. Team research—coordinated research by multiple ethnographers.
Observation and Participant Observation Ethnographers must pay attention to hundreds of details of daily life, seasonal events, and unusual happenings. They should record what they see as they see it. Things never will seem quite as strange as they do during the first few weeks in the field. The ethnographer eventually gets used to, and accepts as normal, cultural patterns that
kot31030_ch03_046-070.indd Page 59
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:58:38 PM user-s173
Ethnographic Techniques
59
Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), who was born in Poland but spent most of his professional life in England, did fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands from 1914 to 1918. Malinowski is generally considered to be the father of ethnography. Does this photo suggest anything about his relationship with Trobriand villagers?
initially were alien. Staying a bit more than a year in the field allows the ethnographer to repeat the season of his or her arrival, when certain events and processes may have been missed because of initial unfamiliarity and culture shock. Many ethnographers record their impressions in a personal diary, which is kept separate from more formal field notes. Later, this record of early impressions will help point out some of the most basic aspects of cultural diversity. Such aspects include distinctive smells, noises people make, how they cover their mouths when they eat, and how they gaze at others. These patterns, which are so basic as to seem almost trivial, are part of what Bronislaw Malinowski called “the imponderabilia of native life and of typical behavior” (Malinowski 1922/1961, p. 20). These features of culture are so fundamental that natives take them for granted. They are too basic even to talk about, but the unaccustomed eye of the fledgling ethnographer picks them up. Thereafter, becoming familiar, they fade to the edge of consciousness. Initial impressions are valuable and should be recorded. First and foremost, ethnographers should try to be accurate observers, recorders, and reporters of what they see in the field. Ethnographers strive to establish rapport, a good, friendly working relationship based on personal contact, with their hosts. One of ethnography’s most characteristic procedures is participant observation, which means that we take part in community life as we study it. As human beings living among others, we cannot be totally impartial and detached observers. We take part in many events and processes we are observing and trying to comprehend. By participating, we may learn why people find such events meaningful, as we see how they are organized and conducted.
kot31030_ch03_046-070.indd Page 60
60
Chapter 3
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:58:39 PM user-s173
Ethics and Methods
In Arembepe, Brazil, I learned about fishing by sailing on the Atlantic with local fishers. I gave Jeep rides to malnourished babies, to pregnant mothers, and once to a teenage girl possessed by a spirit. All those people needed to consult specialists outside the village. I danced on Arembepe’s festive occasions, drank libations commemorating new births, and became a godfather to a village girl. Most anthropologists have similar field experiences. The common humanity of the student and the studied, the ethnographer and the research community, makes participant observation inevitable.
Conversation, Interviewing, and Interview Schedules Participating in local life means that ethnographers constantly talk to people and ask questions. As their knowledge of the local language and culture increases, they understand more. There are several stages in learning a field language. First is the naming phase—asking name after name of the objects around us. Later we are able to pose more complex questions and understand the replies. We begin to understand simple conversations between two villagers. If our language expertise proceeds far enough, we eventually become able to comprehend rapid-fire public discussions and group conversations. One data-gathering technique I have used in both Arembepe and Madagascar involves an ethnographic survey that includes an interview schedule. In 1964, my fellow field workers and I attempted to complete an interview schedule in each of Arembepe’s 160 households. We entered almost every household (fewer than 5 percent refused to participate) to ask a set of questions on a printed form. Our results provided us with a census and basic information about the village. We wrote down the name, age, and gender of each household member. We gathered data on family type, religion, present and previous jobs, income, expenditures, diet, possessions, and many other items on our eight-page form. Although we were doing a survey, our approach differed from the survey research design routinely used by sociologists and other social scientists working in large, industrial nations. That survey research, discussed below, involves sampling (choosing a small, manageable study group from a larger population). We did not select a partial sample from the total population. Instead, we tried to interview in all households in the community (that is, to have a total sample). We used an interview schedule rather than a questionnaire. With the interview schedule, the ethnographer talks face to face with people, asks the questions, and writes down the answers. Questionnaire procedures tend to be more indirect and impersonal; often the respondent fills in the form. Our goal of getting a total sample allowed us to meet almost everyone in the village and helped us establish rapport. Decades later, Arembepeiros still talk warmly about how we were interested enough in them to visit their homes and ask them questions. We stood in sharp contrast to the other outsiders the villagers had known, who considered them too poor and backward to be taken seriously. Like other survey research, however, our interview schedule did gather comparable quantifiable information. It gave us a basis for assessing patterns and exceptions in village life. Our schedules included a core set of questions that were posed to
kot31030_ch03_046-070.indd Page 61
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:58:39 PM user-s173
Ethnographic Techniques
61
In Bundu Tuhan, Malaysia, Dr. Amity Doolittle of Yale University interviews informants in May 1996. Doolittle’s research examines the factors that influence how rural people use natural resources.
everyone. However, some interesting side issues often came up during the interview, which we would pursue then or later. We followed such leads into many dimensions of village life. One woman, for instance, a midwife, became the key cultural consultant we sought out later when we wanted detailed information about local childbirth. Another woman had done an internship in an Afro-Brazilian cult (candomblé) in the city. She still went there regularly to study, dance, and get possessed. She became our candomblé expert. Thus, our interview schedule provided a structure that directed but did not confine us as researchers. It enabled our ethnography to be both quantitative and qualitative. The quantitative part consisted of the basic information we gathered and later analyzed statistically. The qualitative dimension came from our follow-up questions, open-ended discussions, pauses for gossip, and work with key consultants.
The Genealogical Method As ordinary people, many of us learn about our own ancestry and relatives by tracing our genealogies. Various computer programs now allow us to trace our “family tree” and degrees of relationship. The genealogical method is a well-established ethnographic technique. Early ethnographers developed notation and symbols to deal with kinship, descent, and marriage. Genealogy is a prominent building block in the social organization of nonindustrial societies, where people live and work each day with their close kin. Anthropologists need to collect genealogical data to understand current
kot31030_ch03_046-070.indd Page 62
62
Chapter 3
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:58:39 PM user-s173
Ethics and Methods
social relations and to reconstruct history. In many nonindustrial societies, kin links are basic to social life. Anthropologists even call such cultures “kin-based societies.” Everyone is related, and spends most of his or her time with relatives. Rules of behavior attached to particular kin relations are basic to everyday life (see Carsten 2004). Marriage also is crucial in organizing nonindustrial societies because strategic marriages between villages, tribes, and clans create political alliances.
Key Cultural Consultants Every community has people who by accident, experience, talent, or training can provide the most complete or useful information about particular aspects of life. These people are key cultural consultants, also called key informants. In Ivato, the Betsileo village in Madagascar where I spent most of my time, a man named Rakoto was particularly knowledgeable about village history. However, when I asked him to work with me on a genealogy of the 50 to 60 people buried in the village tomb, he called in his cousin Tuesdaysfather, who knew more about that subject. Tuesdaysfather had survived an epidemic of influenza that ravaged Madagascar, along with much of the world, around 1919. Immune to the disease himself, Tuesdaysfather had the grim job of burying his kin as they died. He kept track of everyone buried in the tomb. Tuesdaysfather helped me with the tomb genealogy. Rakoto joined him in telling me personal details about the deceased villagers.
Life Histories In nonindustrial societies as in our own, individual personalities, interests, and abilities vary. Some villagers prove to be more interested in the ethnographer’s work and are more helpful, interesting, and pleasant than others are. Anthropologists develop likes and dislikes in the field as we do at home. Often, when we find someone unusually interesting, we collect his or her life history. This recollection of a lifetime of experiences provides a more intimate and personal cultural portrait than would be possible otherwise. Life histories, which may be recorded or videotaped for later review and analysis, reveal how specific people perceive, react to, and contribute to changes that affect their lives. Such accounts can illustrate diversity, which exists within any community, since the focus is on how different people interpret and deal with some of the same problems. Many ethnographers include the collection of life histories as an important part of their research strategy.
Local Beliefs and Perceptions, and the Ethnographer’s One goal of ethnography is to discover local (native) views, beliefs, and perceptions, which may be compared with the ethnographer’s own observations and conclusions. In the field, ethnographers typically combine two research strategies, the emic (nativeoriented) and the etic (scientist-oriented). These terms, derived from linguistics, have been applied to ethnography by various anthropologists. Marvin Harris (1968/2001) popularized the following meanings of the terms: An emic approach investigates how local people think. How do they perceive and categorize the world? What are their rules for
kot31030_ch03_046-070.indd Page 63
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:58:39 PM user-s173
Ethnographic Techniques
63
behavior? What has meaning for them? How do they imagine and explain things? Operating emically, the ethnographer seeks the “native viewpoint,” relying on local people to explain things and to say whether something is significant or not. The term cultural consultant, or informant, refers to individuals the ethnographer gets to know in the field, the people who teach him or her about their culture, who provide the emic perspective. The etic (scientist-oriented) approach shifts the focus from local observations, categories, explanations, and interpretations to those of the anthropologist. The etic approach realizes that members of a culture often are too involved in what they are doing to interpret their cultures impartially. Operating etically, the ethnographer emphasizes what he or she (the observer) notices and considers important. As a trained scientist, the ethnographer should try to bring an objective and comprehensive viewpoint to the study of other cultures. Of course, the ethnographer, like any other scientist, is also a human being with cultural blinders that prevent complete objectivity. As in other sciences, proper training can reduce, but not totally eliminate, the observer’s bias. But anthropologists do have special training to compare behavior between different societies. What are some examples of emic versus etic perspectives? Consider our holidays. For North Americans, Thanksgiving Day has special significance. In our view (emically) it is a unique cultural celebration that commemorates particular historical themes. But a wider, etic, perspective sees Thanksgiving as just one more example of the postharvest festivals held in many societies. Another example: Local people (including many Americans) may believe that chills and drafts cause colds, which scientists know are caused by germs. In cultures that lack the germ theory of disease, illnesses are emically explained by various causes, ranging from spirits to ancestors to witches. Illness refers to a culture’s (emic) perception and explanation of bad health, whereas disease refers to the scientific (etic) explanation of poor health, involving known pathogens. Ethnographers typically combine emic and etic strategies in their fieldwork. The statements, perceptions, categories, and opinions of local people help ethnographers understand how cultures work. Local beliefs are also interesting and valuable in themselves. However, people often fail to admit, or even recognize, certain causes and consequences of their behavior. This is as true of North Americans as it is of people in other societies.
Problem-Oriented Ethnography Although anthropologists are interested in the whole context of human behavior, it is impossible to study everything. Most ethnographers now enter the field with a specific problem to investigate, and they collect data relevant to that problem (see Chiseri-Strater and Sunstein 2001; Kutsche 1998). Local people’s answers to questions are not the only data source. Anthropologists also gather information on factors such as population density, environmental quality, climate, physical geography, diet, and land use. Sometimes this involves direct measurement—of rainfall, temperature, fields, yields, dietary quantities, or time allocation (Bailey 1990; Johnson 1978). Often it means that we consult government records or archives. The information of interest to ethnographers is not limited to what local people can and do tell us. In an increasingly interconnected and complicated world, local
kot31030_ch03_046-070.indd Page 64
64
Chapter 3
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:58:39 PM user-s173
Ethics and Methods
people lack knowledge about many factors that affect their lives. Our local consultants may be as mystified as we are by the exercise of power from regional, national, and international centers.
Longitudinal Research Geography limits anthropologists less now than in the past, when it could take months to reach a field site, and return visits were rare. New systems of transportation allow anthropologists to widen the area of their research and to return repeatedly. Ethnographic reports now routinely include data from two or more field stays. Longitudinal research is the long-term study of a community, region, society, culture, or other unit, usually based on repeated visits. One example of such research is the longitudinal study of Gwembe District, Zambia. This study, planned in 1956 as a longitudinal project by Elizabeth Colson and Thayer Scudder, continues with Colson, Scudder, and their associates of various nationalities. Thus, as is often the case with longitudinal research, the Gwembe study also illustrates team research—coordinated research by multiple ethnographers (Colson and Scudder 1975; Scudder and Colson 1980). In this study, four villages in different areas have been followed for more than five decades. Periodic village censuses provide basic data on population, economy, kinship, and religious behavior. Censused people who have moved are traced and interviewed to see how their lives compare with those of people who have stayed in the villages. A series of different research questions have emerged, while basic data on communities and individuals continue to be collected. The first focus of study was the impact of a large hydroelectric dam, which subjected the Gwembe people to forced resettlement. The dam also spurred road building and other activities that brought the people of Gwembe more closely in touch with the rest of Zambia. In subsequent research Scudder and Colson (1980) examined how education provided access to new opportunities as it also widened a social gap between people with different educational levels. A third study then examined a change in brewing and drinking patterns, including a rise in alcoholism, in relation to changing markets, transportation, and exposure to town values (Colson and Scudder 1988).
Team Research As mentioned, longitudinal research often is team research. My own field site of Arembepe, Brazil, for example, first entered the world of anthropology as a field-team village in the 1960s. It was one of four sites for the now defunct Columbia-CornellHarvard-Illinois Summer Field Studies Program in Anthropology. For at least three years, that program sent a total of about 20 undergraduates annually, the author included, to do brief summer research abroad. We were stationed in rural communities in four countries: Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru. Since my wife, Isabel WagleyKottak, and I began studying it in 1962, Arembepe has become a longitudinal field site. Three generations of researchers have monitored various aspects of change and development. The community has changed from a village into a town and illustrates the process of globalization at the local level. Its economy, religion, and social life have been transformed (see Kottak 2006).
kot31030_ch03_046-070.indd Page 65
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 7:33:01 PM user-s173
Survey Research
65
Brazilian and American researchers worked with us on team research projects during the 1980s (on television’s impact) and the 1990s (on ecological awareness and environmental risk perception). Graduate students from the University of Michigan have drawn on our baseline information from the 1960s as they have studied various topics in Arembepe. In 1990 Doug Jones, a Michigan student doing biocultural research, used Arembepe as a field site to investigate standards of physical attractiveness. In 1996–1997, Janet Dunn studied family planning and changing female reproductive strategies. Chris O’Leary, who first visited Arembepe in summer 1997, investigated a striking aspect of religious change there—the arrival of Protestantism; his dissertation (O’Leary 2002) research then examined changing food habits and nutrition in relation to globalization. Arembepe is thus a site where various field workers have worked as members of a longitudinal team. The more recent researchers have built on prior contacts and findings to increase knowledge about how local people meet and manage new circumstances.
Survey Research As anthropologists work increasingly in large-scale societies, they have developed innovative ways of blending ethnography and survey research (Fricke 1994). Before examining such combinations of field methods, let’s consider survey research and the main differences between survey research and ethnography. Working mainly in large, populous nations, sociologists, political scientists, and economists have developed and refined the survey research design, which involves sampling, impersonal data collection, and statistical analysis. Survey research usually draws a sample (a manageable study group)
Janet Dunn, one of many anthropologists who have worked in Arembepe. Where is Arembepe, and what kinds of research have been done there?
kot31030_ch03_046-070.indd Page 66
66
Chapter 3
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:58:40 PM user-s173
Ethics and Methods
from a much larger population. By studying a properly selected and representative sample, social scientists can make accurate inferences about the larger population. In smaller-scale societies and communities, ethnographers get to know most of the people. Given the greater size and complexity of nations, survey research cannot help being more impersonal. Survey researchers call the people they study respondents. These are people who respond to questions during a survey. Sometimes survey researchers interview them personally. Sometimes, after an initial meeting, they ask respondents to fill out a questionnaire. In other cases researchers mail or e-mail questionnaires to randomly selected sample members or have paid assistants interview or telephone them. In a random sample, all members of the population have an equal statistical chance of being chosen for inclusion. A random sample is selected by randomizing procedures, such as tables of random numbers, which are found in many statistics textbooks. Probably the most familiar example of sampling is the polling used to predict political races. The media hire agencies to estimate outcomes and do exit polls to find out what kinds of people voted for which candidates. During sampling, researchers gather information about age, gender, religion, occupation, income, and political party preference. These characteristics (variables—attributes that vary among members of a sample or population) are known to influence political decisions. Many more variables affect social identities, experiences, and activities in a modern nation than in the small communities where ethnography grew up. In contemporary North America hundreds of factors influence our behavior and attitudes. These social predictors include our religion; the region of the country we grew up in; whether we come from a town, suburb, or city; and our parents’ professions, ethnic origins, and income levels. Ethnography can be used to supplement and fine-tune survey research. Anthropologists can transfer the personal, firsthand techniques of ethnography to virtually any setting that includes human beings. A combination of survey research and ethnography can provide new perspectives on life in complex societies (large and populous societies with social stratification and central governments). Preliminary ethnography also can help develop culturally appropriate questions for inclusion in surveys. In any complex society, many predictor variables (social indicators) influence behavior and opinions. Because we must be able to detect, measure, and compare the influence of social indicators, many contemporary anthropological studies have a statistical foundation. Even in rural fieldwork, more anthropologists now draw samples, gather quantitative data, and use statistics to interpret them (see Bernard 2006; Bernard, ed. 1998). Quantifiable information may permit a more precise assessment of similarities and differences among communities. Statistical analysis can support and round out an ethnographic account of local social life. However, in the best studies, the hallmark of ethnography remains: Anthropologists enter the community and get to know the people. They participate in local activities, networks, and associations in the city, town, or countryside. They observe and experience social conditions and problems. They watch the effects of national and international policies and programs on local life. The ethnographic method and the emphasis on personal relationships in social research are valuable gifts that cultural anthropology brings to the study of any society.
kot31030_ch03_046-070.indd Page 67
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:58:40 PM user-s173
67
Survey Research
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Archaeologist in New Orleans Finds a Way to Help the Living One role for anthropologists is to help communities preserve their culture in the face of threat or disaster. The following account describes the work of an anthropologist doing public archaeology in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Cultural resource management, as discussed here, is one form of applied anthropology: the application of anthropological perspectives, theory, methods, and data to identify, assess, and solve social problems.
“T
hat’s a finger bone.”
Shannon Lee Dawdy kneeled in the forlorn Holt graveyard to touch a thimblesize bone poking up out of the cracked dirt. She examined it without revulsion, with the fascination of a scientist and with the sadness of someone who loves New Orleans. Dr. Dawdy, a 38-year-old assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, is one of the more unusual relief workers among the thousands who have come to the devastated expanses of Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. She is officially embedded with the Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] as a liaison to the state’s historic preservation office. Her mission is to try to keep the rebuilding of New Orleans from destroying what is left of its past treasures and current culture. While much of the restoration of the battered Gulf Coast is the effort of engineers and machines, the work of Dr. Dawdy, trained as an archaeologist, an anthropologist and a historian, shows that the social
sciences have a role to play as well. “It’s a way that archaeology can contribute back to the living,” she said, “which it doesn’t often get to do.” Holt cemetery, a final resting place for the city’s poor, is just one example of what she wants to preserve and protect. Other New Orleans graveyards have gleaming mausoleums that keep the coffins above the marshy soil. But the coffins of Holt are buried, and the ground covering many of them is bordered with wooden frames marked with makeshift headstones. Mourners decorate the graves with votive objects: teddy bears for children and an agglomeration of objects, including ice chests, plastic jack-o’-lanterns and chairs, on the graves of adults. There is the occasional liquor bottle. . . . Many of the objects on the graves were washed away by the storm, or shifted from one part of the graveyard to another. Dr. Dawdy has proposed treating the site as archaeologists would an ancient site in which objects have been exposed on the surface by erosion. Before the hurricanes, the cemetery was often busy, a hub of activity on All Soul’s Day, when people came to freshen the grave decorations. “The saddest thing to me now was how few people we see,” she said, looking at the empty expanse and the scarred live oaks. “I realize we’re having enough trouble taking care of the living,” she added, but the lack of activity in a city normally so close to the spirits of the past “drove home how far out of whack things are.” . . . Treating Holt as an archaeological site means the government should not treat the votive artifacts as debris, she said, but as the religious artifacts that they are, with some effort to restore the damaged site, to Continued
kot31030_ch03_046-070.indd Page 68
68
Chapter 3
8/28/09
7:52:22 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/AUGUST/27:08:09/MHDQ170 AM user-s173
Ethics and Methods
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY find the objects and at least record where they came from. FEMA simply tries to clean up damaged areas, and its Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Teams—called Dmort—deal with the bodies of the dead and address problems in cemeteries that might lead to disease. If such places are destroyed, Dr. Dawdy said, “then people don’t feel as connected there.” She added that they might be more willing to come back to a damaged city if they felt they were returning to a recognizable home. Though she has deep emotional ties to New Orleans, Dr. Dawdy was born in Northern California. She came here in 1994 to write her master’s thesis for the College of William & Mary, and, “I wrote it all day,” she said. “If I had written a minimum of five pages, I could come out for a parade at night.” Over the eight weeks it took to finish the project, she said: “I fell in love with New Orleans. I really consider it the home of my heart.” She started a pilot program at the University of New Orleans, working with city planners and grants for research projects that involved excavation, oral history and hands-on work with the city to safeguard its buried treasures. She left that job to earn a double doctorate at the University of Michigan in anthropology and history that focused on French colonial times in New Orleans, then landed a coveted faculty position at the University of Chicago. . . . Even before Hurricane Katrina, Dr. Dawdy had found ways to return to New Orleans. In 2004, she made an intriguing discovery while researching a possible archaeological site under an old French Quarter parking garage slated for demolition. Property records and advertisements from
Continued
the 1820s said that the site had been the location of a hotel with an enticing name: the Rising Sun Hotel. Dr. Dawdy found a January 1821 newspaper advertisement for the hotel in which its owners promised to “maintain the character of giving the best entertainment, which this house has enjoyed for twenty years past.” It went on: “Gentlemen may here rely upon finding attentive Servants. The bar will be supplied with genuine good Liquors; and at the Table, the fare will be of the best the market or the season will afford.” . . . New Orleans, she noted, has always been known for its libertine lifestyle. The French all but abandoned the city as its colony around 1735 as being unworthy of the nation’s support as a colony. Novels like “Manon Lescaut” portrayed the city as a den of iniquity and corruption, and across Europe, “they thought the locals were basically a bunch of rogues, immoral and corrupt,” Dr. Dawdy said. She added that she saw parallels to today, as some skepticism emerges about rebuilding the city. Dr. Dawdy characterized that posture as, “Those people in New Orleans aren’t worth saving, because they’re all criminals anyway.” But even if the devastation makes it hard to envision the road back, the city, she said, is worth fighting for. “The thing about New Orleans that gives me hope is they are so tied to family, place, history,” Dr. Dawdy said. “If anyone is going to stick it out, out of a sense of history, out of a sense of tradition, it is New Orleans.” Source: “Archaeologist in New Orleans Finds a Way to Help the Living,” by John R. Schwartz from The New York Times, January 3, 2006. Copyright © 2006 The New York Times. Reprinted by permission.
kot31030_ch03_046-070.indd Page 69
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:58:40 PM user-s173
Summary
69
Summary 1. Because science exists in society, and in the context of law and ethics, anthropologists can’t study things simply because they happen to be interesting or of scientific value. Anthropologists have obligations to their scholarly field, to the wider society and culture (including that of the host country), and to the human species, other species, and the environment. 2. Physical anthropologists and archaeologists pursue diverse research topics, using varied methods and often working together. At an archaeological site, physical anthropologists may complement the picture of ancient life by examining skeletons to reconstruct their physical traits, health status, and diet. Remote sensing may be used to locate ancient footpaths, roads, canals, and irrigation systems, which can then be investigated on the ground. 3. Studies of primates suggest hypotheses about behavior that humans do or do not share with our nearest relatives—and also with our hominid ancestors. Anthropometry, the measurement of human body parts and dimensions, is done on living people and on skeletal remains from sites. 4. Central to physical anthropology is bone biology—the study of bone genetics; cell structure; growth, development, and decay; and patterns of movement. Paleopathology is the study of disease and injury in skeletons from archaeological sites. Molecular anthropology uses genetic analysis (of DNA sequences) to assess evolutionary relationships. 5. Archaeologists combine both local (excavation) and regional (systematic survey) perspectives. Sites are excavated because they are in danger of being destroyed or because they address specific research interests. There are many kinds of archaeology, such as historical, classical, and underwater archaeology. 6. The fossil record is not a representative sample of all the plants and animals that have ever lived. Hard parts, such as bones and teeth, preserve better than soft parts, such as flesh and skin, do. Anthropologists and paleontologists use stratigraphy and radiometric techniques to date fossils. Carbon-14 (14C) dating is most effective with fossils less than 40,000 years old. Potassium-argon (K/A) dating can be used for fossils older than 500,000 years. 7. Ethnographic methods include firsthand and participant observation, rapport building, interviews, genealogies, work with key consultants or informants, collection of life histories, discovery of local beliefs and perceptions, problemoriented and longitudinal research, and team research. Ethnographers work in communities and form personal relationships with local people as they study their lives. 8. An interview schedule is a form an ethnographer completes as he or she visits a series of households. Key consultants, or informants, teach us about particular areas of local life. Life histories dramatize the fact that culture bearers are individuals. Such case studies document personal experiences with culture and culture change. Genealogical information is particularly useful in societies in which principles of kinship and marriage organize social and political life. Emic
kot31030_ch03_046-070.indd Page 70
70
Chapter 3
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 4:58:40 PM user-s173
Ethics and Methods
approaches focus on native perceptions and explanations. Etic approaches give priority to the ethnographer’s own observations and conclusions. Longitudinal research is the systematic study of an area or site over time. 9. Traditionally, anthropologists worked in small-scale societies; sociologists, in modern nations. Different techniques developed to study such different kinds of societies. Anthropologists do their fieldwork in communities and study the totality of social life. Sociologists use surveys and study samples to make inferences about a larger population. Anthropologists may employ ethnographic procedures to study cities, towns, or rural areas.
Key Terms absolute dating (p. 55) anthropometry (p. 50) bone biology (p. 50) complex societies (p. 57) cultural consultant (p. 63) emic (p. 62) etic (p. 63) excavation (p. 52) fossils (p. 51) genealogical method (p. 61) informed consent (p. 47) interview schedule (p. 60) key cultural consultants (p. 62) life history (p. 62)
longitudinal research (p. 64) molecular anthropology (p. 51) paleoanthropology (p. 47) paleontology (p. 48) paleopathology (p. 50) participant observation (p.57) random sample (p. 66) relative dating (p. 55) sample (p. 65) stratigraphy (p. 55) survey research (p. 65) systematic survey (p. 52) taphonomy (p. 54) variables (p. 66)
Go to our Online Learning Center website at www.mhhe.com/kottak for Internet resources directly related to the content of this chapter.
kot31030_ch04_071-091.indd Page 71
C
H
A
7/28/09
P
3:31:13 PM user-s173
T
E
R
/Users/user-s173/Desktop
4
Evolution, Genetics, and Human Variation ❖ The Origin of Species Theory and Fact ❖ Genetics Mendel’s Experiments Independent Assortment ❖ Population Genetics ❖ Mechanisms of Genetic Evolution Natural Selection
Mutation Random Genetic Drift Gene Flow ❖ Human Biological Adaptation Genes and Disease Lactose Tolerance Anthropology Today: Genetic Study Bolsters Columbus Link to Syphilis
C
ompared with other animals, humans have uniquely varied ways—cultural and biological—of evolving, of adapting to environmental stresses. Exemplifying cultural adaptation, we manipulate our artifacts and behavior in response to environmental conditions. We turn up thermostats or travel to Florida in the winter. We turn on fire hydrants, swim, or ride in air-conditioned cars to escape the summer’s heat. Although such reliance on culture has increased in the course of human evolution, people haven’t stopped adapting biologically. As in other species, human populations adapt genetically in response to environmental forces, and individuals react physiologically to stresses. Thus, when we work in the sun, sweating occurs spontaneously, cooling the skin and reducing the temperature of subsurface blood vessels. We are ready now for a more detailed look at the principles that determine human biological adaptation, variation, and change.
The Origin of Species During the 18th century, many scholars became interested in human origins, biological diversity, and our position within the classification of plants and animals. At that time, the commonly accepted explanation for the origin of species came from Genesis, the first book of the Bible: God had created all life during six days of Creation. According to creationism, biological similarities and differences originated at the Creation. Characteristics of life forms were seen as immutable; they could not change. Through calculations based on genealogies in the Bible, the biblical scholars James 71
kot31030_ch04_071-091.indd Page 72
72
Chapter 4
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 5:15:46 PM user-s173
Evolution, Genetics and Human Variation
According to creationism all life originated during the six days of creation described in the Bible. Catastrophism proposed that fires and floods, including the biblical deluge involving Noah’s ark (depicted in this painting by the American artist Edward Hicks), destroyed certain species.
Ussher and John Lightfoot even purported to trace the Creation to a very specific time: October 23, 4004 b.c., at 9 a.m. Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778) developed the first comprehensive (and still influential) classification, or taxonomy, of plants and animals. He grouped life forms on the basis of similarities and differences in their physical characteristics. He used traits such as the presence of a backbone to distinguish vertebrates from invertebrates and the presence of mammary glands to distinguish mammals from birds. Linnaeus viewed the differences between life forms as part of the Creator’s orderly plan. He thought that biological similarities and differences had been established at the time of Creation and had not changed. Fossil discoveries during the 18th and 19th centuries raised doubts about creationism. Fossils showed that different kinds of life once had existed. If all life had originated at the same time, why weren’t ancient species still around? Why weren’t contemporary plants and animals found in the fossil record? A modified explanation combining creationism with catastrophism arose to replace the original doctrine. In this view, fires, floods, and other catastrophes, including the biblical flood involving Noah’s ark, had destroyed ancient species. After each destructive event, God had created again, leading to contemporary species. How did the catastrophists explain certain
kot31030_ch04_071-091.indd Page 73
7/23/09
/Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-0 /Users/user-s173/Desktop/TEMPWORK/JULY/22:07:09/MHDQ152/MHDQ152-09 5:15:46 PM user-s173
The Origin of Species
73
clear similarities between fossils and modern animals? They argued that some ancient species had managed to survive in isolated areas. For example, after the biblical flood, the progeny of the animals saved on Noah’s ark spread throughout the world.
Theory and Fact The alternative to creationism and catastrophism was transformism, also called evolution. Evolutionists believe that species arise from others through a long and gradual process of transformation, or descent with modification. Charles Darwin became the best known of the evolutionists. However, he was influenced by earlier scholars, including his own grandfather. In a book called Zoonomia published in 1794, Erasmus Darwin had proclaimed the common ancestry of all animal species. Charles Darwin also was influenced by Sir Charles Lyell, the father of geology. During Darwin’s famous voyage to South America aboard the Beagle, he read Lyell’s influential book Principles of Geology (1837/1969), which exposed him to Lyell’s principle of uniformitarianism. Uniformitarianism states that the present is the key to the past. Explanations for past events should be sought in the long-term action of ordinary forces that still operate today. Thus, natural forces (rainfall, soil deposition, earthquakes, and volcanic action) gradually have built and modified geological features such as mountain ranges. The earth’s structure has been transformed gradually through natural forces operating for millions of years (see Weiner 1994). Uniformitarianism was a necessary building block for evolutionary theory. It cast serious doubt on the belief that the world was only 6,000 years old. It would take much longer for such ordinary forces as rain and wind to produce major geological changes. The longer time span also allowed enough time for the biological changes that fossil discoveries were revealing. Darwin applied the ideas of uniformitarianism and long-term transformation to living things. He argued that all life forms are ultimately related and that the number of species has increased over time. (For more on science, evolution, and creationism, see Futuyma 1995; Gould 1999; Wilson 2002.) Charles Darwin provided a theoretical framework for understanding evolution. He offered natural selection as a powerful evolutionary mechanism that could explain the origin
