Introduction to Library Research in Anthropology

John M. Weeks

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367014209
• eBook ISBN: 9780429712982
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is an introduction to library research in anthropology written primarily for the undergraduate student about to begin a research project. It contains a summary description of the type of resource being discussed and its potential use in a research project.

1
What Is Anthropology?

Nancy Johnson Black

When undergraduate students are asked what comes to mind when they think of "anthropology," their responses usually range from 200,000 year old Neanderthals to exotic locations such as New Guinea, and extend to Hollywood's swashbuckling version of the archaeologist, Indiana Jones. These associations reflect some aspects of this discipline that have been popularized in recent years. While it is encouraging to think that the discipline conjures up some kind of mental image for undergraduates, it is somewhat disconcerting as an anthropologist to realize that students are often disappointed because I do not wear a pith helmet or sarong, and am not wrapped in a python.

The roots of anthropology go back as far as the Greeks in the fourth century B.C., although the discipline with its recognized body of knowledge, theory, and professionalism did not emerge as a distinct field until the late nineteenth century. Many scholars credit the Greek historian Herodotus (488-425 B.C.), who studied Egyptian and Persian civilizations, as the founder of anthropology. Indeed, the name of the discipline is derived from the Greek, anthropos, human, and logos, account, conveying the efforts to describe and to explain the regularities in human behavior. By the twentieth century, anthropology was well established as an academic discipline.

From its very beginning, anthropology in the United States has been associated with academic institutions, museums, scientific associations and government. Many museums such as the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, the University Museum at the University of Pennsylvania, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, have had strong departments of anthropology. Several libraries have similarly developed major collections of anthropological literature. The primary anthropological collection in the United States is generally considered to be at Harvard University's Tozzer Library. According to the American Anthropological Association, the largest professional organization of anthropologists logical Association, the largest professional organization of anthropologists in the world, more than 300 colleges and universities in the United States offer a major in anthropology and many more offer anthropology courses. In 1988, approximately 4,000 undergraduate students received degrees in anthropology, and some 375 doctoral degrees in anthropology were awarded.

There is general agreement among social scientists about the definition of anthropology. The discipline can be characterized as the study of human phenomena in its biological, social, and cultural aspects. As a social science, anthropology is concerned with the scientific study of the complexity of human life through time and space. Because of the diversity of humankind and the broad scope of its examination, anthropologists have had some difficulty reaching consensus about many aspects of their discipline, and the definition of culture is no exception. Most anthropologists would agree however with the early definition of culture by the nineteenth century English scholar Edward B. Tylor. Tylor viewed culture as a complex of commonly shared beliefs, values, customs, behavior, and artifacts, which are transmitted by humans over generations through learning. Culture may be thought of simply as information or ideas about how people behave or why people believe what they do and also helps us to understand the dynamic and changing aspects of culture.

Traditional Subdivisions of Anthropology

The field of anthropology was originally conceived of as a single field although currently the discipline is usually divided into two major spheres, cultural/social anthropology and physical anthropology. Each of the these large areas is further divided into a series of specialized subdisciplines with its own methods and techniques. Most anthropology departments at colleges and universities in the United States offer courses in four subdisiciplines: archaeology, cultural/social anthropology, physical/biological anthropology, and linguistics. The common thread which connects these different subdisciplines is the desire to increase knowledge of who we are as humans and how we came to be that way.

Archaeology

Prehistoric archaeology is concerned with the investigation of the history and behavior of a population through time and space based on material remains. Archaeologists describe and classify artifacts, examine the relationships among archaeological remains, and construct cultural chronologies in order to reconstruct cultural history, and to both describe and explain how past cultures lived and how or why they changed. Archaeologists rely primarily on excavation, survey, sampling techniques, and relative and chronometric dating. The subfield of archaeology encompasses archaeoastronomy, archaeozoology, historical archaeology, prehistoric archaeology, ethnoar-chaeology, salvage archaeology, conservation and cultural resource management, and nautical or underwater archaeology.

Cultural/Social Anthropology

Cultural/social anthropology is the dominant subfield, and is concerned with the description and analysis of contemporary societies and the underlying patterns of human behavior, past and present. Cultural anthropologists examine social relationships, the structure of society, and the function of individuals and cultural variables within a society. Ethnology, the investigation of patterns that underlie all human culture, provides the basis for hypotheses and theories about the human experience.

Research is generally qualitative and is based on ethnographic fieldwork because of the need to study peoples and remains in their natural environment. Fieldwork usually involves spending a full year observing and interviewing a particular group whose culture the anthropologist is trying to describe. The first task in doing fieldwork is for the anthropologists to learn the language in order to understand and communicate with the population being studied. Anthropologists may study a specific aspect of life such as religion, cultural definitions of gender, or economics as well as the way of life as a whole. Fieldwork is a rite of passage in itself and is one of the methodological characteristics of the discipline. Central concepts and components of sociocultural anthropology include kinship studies, ethology, folklore, ethnomusicology, ethnohistory, comparative religion, area studies, ethnic studies, economic anthropology, cultural ecology, and educational anthropology. An important focus of research over the last fifteen years concerns the position of women in society, the cultural construction of gender, and the identification of patrifocal bias in ethnographic description and anthropological theory.

Linguistics

Linguistic anthropology involves the study of the nature of language, relationships among human languages, and the history, development, and structure of languages. As it relates to anthropology, linguistics is a social science that examines the function of language, within a society, culture as revealed through language and the relationship of cultures through language. At a theoretical level, anthropology has often used concepts developed in the field of linguistics: in studying society as a system of communication, in defining the notion of structure, and in analyzing the way in which humans organize and classify their experience. An essential task of anthropologists has been to collect various forms of oral expression such as myths, folk, proverbs, and oral history. Fairly recent applications of linguistics involve the investigation of the capacity for language in other animals, particularly nonhuman primates. The standard divisions of linguistics are morphology, phonemics, phonetics, semantics, structural analysis, and syntax. Linguistic anthropology includes bilingualism, cognitive anthropology, communication theory, historical linguistics, lexicography, paralinguistics, psycholinguistics, semiotics, sociolinguistics, and symbolism.

Biological/Physical Anthropology

Biological or physical anthropology has many common interests with the natural and biological sciences from its examination of Homo sapiens as a species. Research concerns include our biological origins, evolutionary history, and genetic diversity as well as the physical variation, growth, and development of primates. Several branches of physical anthropology exist including: primatology, or the study of living nonhuman primates; human paleontology, or the search for fossil remains of early human species; forensic anthropology, or the identification victims of murders and accidents; and population genetics, or the study hereditary differences within and between human populations.

Relationships with Other Social Sciences

There are many similarities between anthropology and other social sciences. Sociology has many similar concerns and the two are usually differentiated by the study of modern versus traditional societies. However, anthropologists are clearly working in urban and industrial fields — conventionally the domain of sociologists. The concept of the state and of its origins in political science has been developed by anthropologists, and anthropology has examined various economic concepts and problems with a more comparative perspective. Similarly anthropology has influenced the development of a system of cross-cultural psychiatry or ethnopsychiatry within psychology, and psychology has offered anthropology new hypotheses for an interpretation of the concept of culture.

The connection with history has been a close one because anthropology was originally based on an evolutionist perspective. Anthropology has offered to historians new techniques of research on the analysis and criticism of oral tradition and has stimulated the development of ethnohistory. Both cultural anthropology and human geography place great importance on humans as they use space or act to transform the environment. It is significant that many early anthropologists, especially European, were originally geographers.

In summary, anthropologists may be identified primarily as social/cultural anthropologists who study the social, symbolic, and material lives of humans past and present, or as biological/physical anthropologists who study humanity as a biological phenomenon. Anthropologists tend to specialize within their subdivision and often will focus on a specific theoretical area, geographic region, or the comparative study of a limited number of human societies. The discipline has traditionally been associated with non-Western groups and exotic locations. However, more recently anthropologists have turned their attention to the position of peasant villages and cities within the context of larger regions and a world system. Activist anthropologists have called the attention of the general public to the plight of indigenous people in the contemporary world. One only need think of global issues that concern us all such as the destruction of tropical forests in Latin America and southeast Asia, and the systematic extermination and ethnocide of many indigenous groups to realize the relevance of anthropological subject matter to our own lives.

2
Libraries as Sources of Anthropological Information

The library, typically located at the center of a college or university campus, reflects the concept that all branches of knowledge gravitate around a central source of information. The traditional role of the library has been to collect, organize, and store books, journals, and other materials. Most important, the modem academic library is an information center where the student can go to find answers to specific questions. To fulfill these various roles, the library offers a number of services that can aid you in locating the information desired.

You should be familiar with the range of services provided by the campus library. Although facilities and the range of services offered may vary from campus to campus, there is usually one main library building. There may be other libraries devoted to specific programs such as natural science, humanities, medicine, law, and some of these may be further divided into departmental libraries such as chemistry, journalism, physics, or education.

Basic Library Services

Most campus libraries provide a series of basic library services. The following section discusses some of the services most commonly available to students:

Reference Area

Begin an investigation of your campus library system in the reference department at the main library. The Reference Department will probably have a variety of library brochures, maps, and other guides to familiarize you with the services being offered by your campus library. Most of the major reference material will be found here as well. Reference books are specialized library resources to assist you in obtaining information and in using the resources of the library. They are usually available to all library users on open shelves within a designated area, typically near the reference department Reference librarians provide assistance finding the reference materials that will answer your specific needs, or they will refer you to the person who can help you. You should never hesitate to ask a reference librarian for assistance.

Library Catalog

The catalog, probably the most important resource in your library, is a record of all books and other materials cataloged in a library. Because the information in a library catalog is presented in a standardized way, you will need to understand the format and the various pieces of information. The use of a library catalog is discussed further in Chapter 4.

Computerized Searching

A major use of computers is to search through various indexes and abstracts to locate pertinent titles of articles and books. Given the time and financial costs required to establish these computer search programs, libraries typically do not establish their own systems but use services of commercial firms for this purpose. The cost of a computer search varies with the database source and the amount of computer time used. Chapter 20, Online Databases, contains detailed information regarding computerized searching of anthropological literature.

Interlibrary Loan

All libraries would like to own everything a patron needs, but budget and space limit the size of any collection. Most academic and public libraries in the United States participate in systems through which they may borrow books and journals from other libraries. Most circulating books may be borrowed, and parts of them may be photocopied. Libraries will typically not loan entire journals or reference books, and sections of these may be photocopied. There is usually no charge for borrowing books, although photocopy costs may be charged. The charge for photocopies will vary from one library to another because fees are set by the lending library.

You must submit a written request on an interiibrary loan form. These forms should be completed with all the information requested. Different information will be requested for a book and a journal. In both cases, you will be asked to provide the source in which you found the citation. Missing information will cause a delay in getting the material. When you wish to get material on Interiibrary Loan, be certain to submit your request well in advance of the date when you need the materials. Interiibrary Loan requests usually take two to six weeks and sometimes longer.

Library Instruction

Most libraries provide some kind of instruction in the use of the library. This instruction may take various forms: booklets about the library; tours by librarians; self-guided tours using either a booklet or a cassette...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 What Is Anthropology? Nancy Johnson Black
• 2 Libraries as Sources of Anthropological Information
• 3 Library Research in Anthropology
• 4 Library Catalog
• Library Resources in Anthropology
• 5 Published Catalogs of Specialized Libraries
• 6 Guides to Archives and Manuscript Collections
• Guides to the Literature of Anthropology and Related Fields
• 8 Subject Bibliographies
• 9 Regional Bibliographies
• 10 Dictionaries and Encyclopedias
• 11 Handbooks
• 12 Book Reviews and Yearbooks
• 13 Indexes and Abstracts
• 14 Journal Literature
• 15 Biographical Information
• 16 Directories of Organizations and Associations
• 17 Government Documents, Julia Wallace
• 18 Atlases and Maps
• 19 Theses and Dissertations
• 20 Online Databases, Nancy K. Herther
• 21 Anthropological Films and Photography
• 22 Human Relations Area Files
• Inde