Overview
The most important concept in cultural anthropology is culture. Another important and related term in cultural anthropology is society. Culture is in daily use; we see or hear it on the internet, radio, television, newspapers, movies, magazines and in conversations that occur in homes, offices, restaurants, coffeehouses and schools as well as on the telephone or in text messages. The term is used in diverse languages worldwide, every day. It doesn’t, however, always mean the same thing. I have a lot to say about culture in this book. But to make sure you read and understand this most important term as intended, let me give a succinct definition now: Culture is learned, shared human behaviour and ideas, which can and do change with time.
Cultural anthropology is the study of human cultures, those shared behaviours and ideas that help people organise themselves; acquire food, clothing and shelter; and think about the world and their places within it. Cultural anthropology is also sometimes called social anthropology. Cultural and social anthropology, and sometimes sociocultural anthropology, mean the same thing and reflect the fact that culture and society are always linked in the real world. Society is a basic concept in the field. It refers to a group of people who establish boundaries that distinguish them from other groups of people. These boundaries are often defined by a common language or dialect, a shared sense of being one people with a common origin and past, a common belief system and a common culture. Members of societies sometimes, but not always, share a common government, economic system and homeland or territory. To the members of a society, culture is a set of shared ways of behaving and thinking that people learn from those around them.
Culture and society thus go together as elementary concepts in cultural anthropology, which is itself a branch of the discipline of anthropology. Anthropology is the scientific study of human beings and their closest relatives, both living and extinct, in the broadest sense possible. It focuses on what it means to be human, both as a member of the animal kingdom and as a species distinct from all others. Anthropology tracks humans in their diversity through time, across space and all the way to the very borders of the notion of a species. It takes into account every facet of human culture known and analyses each one in relation to all the others. It investigates our closest relatives in the animal world—apes and monkeys—to see what we share with them and how we differ. Anthropology describes and compares the languages of the world to understand their origins and development. It assesses the physical, technological and artistic things people make; when, where and how they live; and why they behave in certain ways. Anthropology looks at early members of the human lineage, including the nonhuman ancestors of everyone who is alive today. Anthropology, it has often been said, is ‘the most scientific of the humanities, the most humanist of the sciences’ (Wolf 1964, p. 88).
In this chapter, we address the relationship of cultural anthropology to general anthropology; enumerate basic principles of both; examine what makes the human species distinctive; introduce the four fields of anthropology and what their practitioners do; show the relevance of the other three fields to cultural anthropology; and discuss the dynamic aspect of culture. The chapter concludes with a discussion of other disciplines that study humanity and how they are similar or dissimilar to cultural anthropology.
The Species Known as ‘Us’
Humans are a single species. A species is any group of organisms with a distinctive, shared genetic heritage, called a genotype, which is transmitted via DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), molecules containing the material of heredity. DNA stores information. For that information to be transmitted from one generation to the next, reproduction needs to occur. Humans transmit their DNA by sexual reproduction. Not all species do that.
On the other hand, every species, including humans, is unique. Most anthropologists would agree that humanity’s distinctiveness lies at least partly in its mental ability when compared with other life forms. This mental ability has enabled us to change the planet, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. On the negative side, we are associated with climate change deriving from the unprecedented increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere since the early nineteenth century when production of goods like textiles, machines, vessels driven by steam power and iron founding became mechanised and dependent upon the combustion of fossil fuels such as coal, gasoline and oil. Humans alone cause massive oil spills and other forms of water pollution. Humans are also the only species to categorise members according to racial, ethnic and gender stereotypes. Stereotypes are simplified, usually pejorative, ideas about other groups that are believed to differ in fundamental ways from one’s own group. Stereotypes can affect people’s performance and self-esteem. For example, the stereotype that men are better than women at mathematics has been self-reinforcing, so that even women who are good maths students often quit taking classes because of the stereotype, not because of their lack of ability. This may be related to dominant cultural attitudes. For example, the gap between the sexes on maths tests in the United States is greater among whites than among Asian, Hispanic and African Americans. This suggests that the gap is not based on biology; it also highlights the dangers of stereotyping.
Another distinctive human characteristic is warfare on a large scale. Humans commit atrocities that have often been associated with racial and ethnic stereotypes that characterise the victims as less than human. These have been employed by political and military forces to justify wholesale slaughter, such as occurred in the death camps of World War II (1939–1945), where millions of Jews, Gypsies (sometimes called Roma or Sinti) and Slavs were gassed, starved or shot. Another example is the Srebrenica massacre (1995) during the Bosnian War, in which 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed. Before that was the massacre by Ottoman Turks of more than a million Armenians in World War I. To their persecutors, the victims had the wrong ethnicity, race or religion: they were believed to be less than fully human because of negative racial and ethnic stereotypes.
The good news is that stereotypes and the stigmas associated with ethnic and racial minorities and gender bias can change. It was virtually unthinkable for an African American to be elected President of the United States before the Civil Rights Movement in the second half of the twentieth century because of widespread prejudice against people of colour. With the election of Barack Obama in 2008 (who was re-elected in 2012), such a milestone was finally reached. Along similar lines, Kamala Harris became the first woman of colour to be nominated for Vice-President by a major American political party in 2020, and the first woman of colour to be elected Vice-President of the United States. Cultural anthropology has provided substantial evidence that racial, ethnic and gender stereotypes lack scientific validity and cross-cultural comparability. They nevertheless persist, for example, in segments of North American society as well as in other parts of the world and are often at the root of international misunderstandings today. In 2020, around 20,000,000 people participated across the United States in protests against racial violence and injustice against people of colour, especially by the police, in the wake of a video-taped killing in Minneapolis of an unarmed black man, George Floyd by a police officer, who was arrested, charged, and in 2021 convicted of Floyd’s murder. Similar demonstrations occurred in the United States and in several countries of the Global North (Figure 3.3) in 2020. Three-fourths of the US counties that had protests had white majorities, and more than 75% of those were 95% white. Those protests and the political ambience that resulted from them may lead to further positive changes with regard to equity, diversity and inclusion of racialised minorities in pluralistic societies of the Global North.
On the positive side, only human cleverness could have designed the great pyramid of Giza, written the Harry Potter books, developed the internet and cloned a sheep. Humans now permanently inhabit most of Earth’s landscapes.
More than 40,000 years ago, humans made seaworthy vessels that took them, for the first time ever, from Asia to Australia. From about 35,000 to 15,000 years ago, only humans knew about and could sew garments warm enough to endure the long, freezing-cold winters of the ice ages in Europe and Asia. About 15,000 years ago, humans were able to travel from Asia into North America via the landmass called Beringia.
Rapid human spread across and successful occupation of the various environments of Earth can be understood in terms of institutions. These are social organisations that mobilise people for specific purposes. Society consists of these. Simply stated, society is a group of persons organised for a purpose, and institutions effect or accomplish that purpose. Culture is the collective ways those same persons think and behave. These ways of thinking and behaving vary even inside a society. That is, culture is variable and shared unequally. This sort of intrasocietal variation can sometimes result in conflict, such that culture, in addition to being learned, shared and dynamic, is—in some instances—conflicted, or contested. Institutions allow people in society to live together according to rules, to accomplish the production and sharing of food and other forms of wealth, to minimise conflicts and to teach and learn socially approved ways to behave and think. Cultural anthropologists routinely study the institutions of society, for example, by looking at how and why people work, paint, gamble, marry, raise children, vote, pray, define proper behaviour and classify themselves and others. The study of people, in terms of their culture, societies and institutions, is encompassed by anthropology, an immensely broad field of study.
