Chapter 1: Anthropology and Human Diversity

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Learning Objectives:
After reading this chapter, students are expected to:
1. gain knowledge on the definition and significance of Anthropology
2. trace the historical background of Anthropology
3. learn the pioneers of Anthropology, their theories and works
4. discuss the specializations of Anthropology
5. understand the conditions of human diversity
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What is Anthropology?
The word anthropology comes from the Greek words “anthropos” which means “man” and “logos”
meaning study of.

Anthropology is a scholarly discipline that aims to describe in the broadest sense what it means
to be holistic, comparative, and evolutionary.

"Anthropology is perhaps the last of the great nineteenth-century conglomerate disciplines still
for the most part organizationally intact. Long after natural history, moral philosophy, philology,
and political economy have dissolved into their specialized successors, it has remained a diffuse
assemblage of ethnology, human biology, comparative linguistics, and prehistory, held together
mainly by the vested interests, sunk costs, and administrative habits of academia, and by a
romantic image of comprehensive scholarship."

- Clifford Geertz

The Study of Man

Man is the main concern in the study of Anthropology. Man is studied and analyzed regardless of
his/her skin color, identity, commitment to ideology and all other aspects of him/her. It also involves
man’s biological foundations, physical similarities and differences, evolution and classifications.

History of Anthropology
Classical Greece
Marvin Harris, historian of anthropology, has two major frameworks within which empirical
anthropology has arisen:
Comparisons of people over space
Interest in long term human processes or, humans as viewed through time.

Herodotus considered to be the "father of history" and Tacitus, a Roman historian wrote
many of our only surviving contemporary accounts of several ancient Celtic and Germanic
peoples.

Herodotus first formulated some of the continuing problems of anthropology.

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Middle Ages
Medieval scholars may be considered predecessors of modern anthropology as well, insofar
as they conducted or wrote detailed studies of the customs of peoples considered
"different" from themselves in terms of geography. John of Plano Carpini reported of his
stay among the Mongols. His report was unusual in its detailed depiction of a non-European
culture.

Marco Polo's systematic observations of nature, anthropology, and geography are another
example of studying human variation across space. Polo's travels took him across such a
diverse human landscape and his accounts of the peoples he met as he journeyed were so
detailed that they earned for Polo the name "the father of modern anthropology."

The Enlightenment roots of the discipline

It took Immanuel Kant 25 years to write one of the first major treatises on anthropology,
his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Kant is not generally considered to be a
modern anthropologist, however, as he never left his region of Germany nor did he study
any cultures besides his own, and in fact, describes the need for anthropology as a corollary
field to his own primary field of philosophy. He did, however, begin teaching an annual
course in anthropology in 1772. Anthropology is thus primarily an Enlightenment and post-
Enlightenment endeavor.

Anthropology emerged from the development of natural history (expounded by authors

such as Buffon) that occurred during the European colonization of the seventeenth,
eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Programs of ethnographic study originated
in this era as the study of the "human primitives" overseen by colonial administrations.

Early anthropology was divided between proponents of unilinealism, who argued that all
societies passed through a single evolutionary process, from the most primitive to the most
advanced, and various forms of non-lineal theorists, who tended to subscribe to ideas such
as diffusionism. Most nineteenth-century social theorists, including anthropologists, viewed
non-European societies as windows onto the pre-industrial human past.

Pioneers in the study of Anthropology

1. Edward Tylor (1832-1917) Tylor, a British anthropologist who was born in London,
became interested in anthropology in 1856 while accompanying the British ethnologist
Henry Christy on a scientific journey through Mexico. In 1861, he wrote his first book
Anahuac, or Mexico and the Mexicans. He served as the first professor of anthropology at
the University of Oxford from 1896 to 1909. Tylor's studies on the subject of animism and
his definition of culture were important early contributions to the field of anthropology. He
defined culture as a complex whole that includes knowledge, art, morals, law, custom, and
any other capabilities and habits acquired by (humans) as (members) of society.

2. Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942), Polish-born British anthropologist, considered as

the founder of the “functional” school of anthropology, which maintains that human
institutions should be observed in the context of the culture as a whole. Bronislaw Kasper
Malinowski was born in Kraków, Poland, and studied at the universities of Kraków, Leipzig,
and London. In 1914 he took part in an expedition to New Guinea and Melanesia and spent
the next four years studying the peoples of the Trobriand Islands of the southwest Pacific.

3. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955), British social anthropologist, born in Birmingham,

England, and educated at the University of Cambridge. He was a follower of the French
sociologist Émile Durkheim, who believed that scientific methods should be applied to the
study of a society and its common values, otherwise known as its “collective

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consciousness.” He also studied the Aboriginal Australians, describing his own conclusions
and the findings of other researchers in his important work. He compared society to a
human anatomy which each system is important in maintaining harmony.

4. Claude Lévi-Strauss, born in 1908, Belgian-born French anthropologist and leading

proponent of the structural approach to social anthropology. His work scaffolds the theory
that the various human cultures and their language patterns, myths, and behaviors are
part of a common framework (or structure) underlying all human life.

5. Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881), American anthropologist, born near Aurora, New
York, and studied at Union College. He examined the kinship systems prevailing among
Native Americans led him to carry out an exhaustive investigation of the kinship systems
of the entire world that resulted in his monumental descriptive work, Systems of
Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1870). Morgan wrote a book Ancient
Society (1877) depicting the social evolution of the human family and human mating
systems have evolved through fixed, successive stages of promiscuity, group marriage,
polygamy, and monogamy, which subsequently caused much controversy among scholars.

6. Franz Boas (1858-1942), German American anthropologist and ethnologist, born in

Minden, and educated at the universities of Heidelberg, Bonn, and Kiel. In 1883-1884 he
conducted a scientific exploration of the Baffin Island region of the Arctic. Two years later
he immigrated to the United States and studied the Kwakiutl and other tribes in British
Columbia.

7. Ruth Benedict (1887-1948), American anthropologist. Ruth Fulton Benedict was born
in New York City and educated at Vassar College and Columbia University. Her most
important fieldwork was done on trips that she made to the reservations of various Native
American groups between 1922 and 1939. She stressed that every society has its own
configurations which totally influence human behavior, attitudes and values.

Specialization of Anthropology
1. Physical or Biological Anthropology – is the field of anthropology that looks at human
beings as biological organisms and tries to discover what characteristics make us different
other organisms and what characteristics we share. The focus on biological variation unites
in five special interests within biological anthropology:

Human evolution
Human genetics
Human growth and development
Human biological plasticity
Biology, evolution, behavior, and social life of monkeys, apes and other nonhuman
primates.

2. Archaeology- a cultural anthropology of human past involving the analysis of material

remains left behind by earlier human societies.
Archeologists also reconstruct behavior patterns and life styles of the past by
excavating.
Excavation can document changes in economic, social and political activities.
Fossils are remnants of the past that have organic life that endured the test of
time and forces of nature.
Artifacts are man-made remains of prehistoric times that have withstood through
time. Examples of artifacts are tools, pottery, etc.

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Stonehenge Could Have Been Resting Place for Royalty

May 30, 2008 — Archaeologists at the University of Sheffield have revealed new
radiocarbon dates of human cremation burials at Stonehenge, which indicate that the
monument was used as a cemetery from its inception just after 3000 B.C. until well after
the large stones went up around 2500 B.C.

The Sheffield archaeologists, Professor Mike Parker-Pearson and Professor Andrew

Chamberlain, believe that the cremation burials could represent the natural deaths of a
single elite family and its descendants, perhaps a ruling dynasty. One clue to this is the
small number of burials in Stonehenge´s earliest phase, a number that grows larger in
subsequent centuries, as offspring would have multiplied.
Many archaeologists previously believed that people had been buried at Stonehenge only
between 2700 and 2600 B.C., before the large stones, known as sarsens, were put in
place. The new dates provide strong clues about the original purpose of the monument
and show that its use as a cemetery extended for more than 500 years.
The earliest cremation burial dated — a small pile of burned bones and teeth —
came from one of the pits around Stonehenge´s edge known as the Aubrey Holes and
dates to 3030-2880 B.C., roughly the time when Stonehenge's ditch-and-bank monument
was cut into Salisbury Plain.
The second burial, from the ditch surrounding Stonehenge, is that of an adult and
dates to 2930-2870 B.C. The most recent cremation comes from the ditch´s northern side
and was of a 25-year-old woman; it dates to 2570-2340 B.C., around the time the first
arrangements of sarsen stones appeared at Stonehenge.
This is the first time any of the cremation burials from Stonehenge have been
radiocarbon dated. The burials dated were excavated in the 1950s and have been kept at
the nearby Salisbury Museum.
Another 49 cremation burials were dug up at Stonehenge during the 1920s, but
all were put back in the ground because they were thought to be of no scientific value.
Archaeologists estimate that up to 240 people were buried within Stonehenge, all as
cremation deposits.
The latest findings are the result of the Stonehenge Riverside Project, a
collaboration between five UK universities, which is funded by the National Geographic
Society and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), with support from English
Heritage. The project´s last digging season near Stonehenge saw excavation of houses at
nearby Durrington Walls, the precise dating of Stonehenge's cursus — the ditched
enclosure nearly two miles long that has long puzzled archaeologists — and new
discoveries about the "Cuckoo Stone" and the timber monuments south of Woodhenge.
Professor Mike Parker-Pearson, from the Department of Archaeology at the
University of Sheffield, who leads the Stonehenge Riverside Archaeological Project, said:
"I don´t think it was the common people getting buried at Stonehenge — it was clearly a
special place at that time. One has to assume anyone buried there had some good
credentials.
"The people buried here must have been drawn from a very small and select living
population. Archaeologists have long speculated about whether Stonehenge was put up
by prehistoric chiefs — perhaps even ancient royalty — and the new results suggest that
not only is this likely to have been the case but it also was the resting place of their mortal
remains."
Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080529195341.htm

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3. Linguistic Anthropology- the field of anthropology concerned with the study of human
languages through time and space.
Historical Linguistics- considers variation, such as the changes in sounds,
grammar, and vocabulary.
Socioliguistics- investigates relationships between social and linguistic
variations.

4. Cultural Anthropology- the study of human culture through time and space.
Cultural anthropologists utilize two kinds of activity to study and interpret cultural
diversity.
Ethnography provides an account of a particular community, society or culture.
Ethnology refers to the cross-cultural comparison and the comparative study of
ethnographic data, of society and culture.

5. Applied Anthropology- the application of anthropological data, perspectives, theory, and

methods to identify, assess, and solve contemporary social problems.

Figure 1. World Congress of Indigenous Peoples

In 1992 indigenous peoples from around the world gathered in the town of Kari-Oca outside of
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, at the World Congress of Indigenous Peoples. They drafted documents
and signed petitions stating their shared views on respect for land and natural resources, world
economic development, and the rights of indigenous cultural groups to determine their own
futures.

Anthropology as a Science
Anthropology uses scientific approach and methods in studying and analyzing human beings. The
science of anthropology aims to:
1. explain the occurrence of human life and culture
2. categorize the variables in order to achieve revealing general construction
3. discover the origins of the changes and processes which are of characteristics of the
classified data
4. describe the course of change that are likely to be examined
How can anthropologists engaged in fieldwork avoid influencing the people they seek to study?
The only way anthropologists can avoid influencing the people they study is to stay
studiously neutral and objective, as an outsider looking in. This is incredibly difficult to achieve.
Anthropologists must avoid any emotional involvement with their subjects, however slight.
Otherwise, their objectivity is compromised.

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Two Approaches of Anthropological Study

Emic: a research approach that investigates how local people think
Etic: a research approach that focuses on the researcher’s interpretations and
explanations of the phenomena

Steps in Scientific Investigation

1. Defining the problem
2. Reviewing of literature
3. Selecting a research design (Observation, Participant observation, Interview, Historical
Method, Comparative Method, Archival Research and Content Analysis)
4. Gathering of data
5. Analyzing of data

Do you know that…

Anthropology has undergone dramatic changes in recent years. One important change is a shift
in emphasis away from the study of tribal peoples and toward the study of urban societies and
ethnic minorities. At the same time, anthropologists have shown a new concern for issues such
as gender; economic, social, and cultural development, mainly in the developing world;
industrial working conditions; and health care (medical anthropology). The discipline is
becoming increasingly multidisciplinary in its approaches, but it still encompasses the four
traditional subfields of anthropology: archaeology, physical anthropology, linguistic
anthropology, and cultural anthropology.

Understanding Human Diversity

Anthropologists have particular ways of approaching their studies. They compare differences
among human societies to get an understanding of human and cultural diversity. They also study
the full breadth of human existence, past and present. In addition, anthropologists try to appreciate
all peoples and their cultures and to discourage judgments of cultural superiority or inferiority.

A. Making comparisons
B. Examining many perspectives
C. Avoiding cultural bias
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Reading Selection No. 1

APPLYING PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGY

Dr. Enrique G. Oracion
Silliman University

After I received a confirmation that the theme of the 2011 UGAT Conference will center
on public anthropology, I began to seriously search for materials about it is so I can write a paper
for the occasion. My initial reading says that it is about extending anthropological knowledge and
expertise to certain public beyond the academe. When I was In Hong Kong as a United Board
Fellow I had a close and personal encounter with some organized groups of overseas Filipino
workers (OFWs), especially the domestic helpers, while I professionally and intellectually enriched
myself in my interaction with anthropologists and administrators of the Department of
Anthropology of The Chinese University of Hong Kong which served as my host institution.

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Outside of the university I did a study on the Sinulog Festival in Hong Kong by the
organized OFWs which they hold annually since 2009. It was in the course of my interviews and
involvement in their various social and cultural activities and as honorary advisor to one group that
I also learned about problems confronting them that are personal, relational, financial and work-
related. I did not only submit for publication my Sinulog article in the Asian Anthropology journal
in Hong Kong but I also contributed brief articles to a newsletter of an alliance of groups of OFWs
and a Filipino newspaper distributed free in Hong Kong to share my anthropological impressions
about them. I have been known to some OFWs as a professor from Silliman University and an
anthropologist who was doing research in Hong Kong.

I was fondly called Dokie by those who were closer to me. This title was recognizing my
academic background but at the same time signifying my acceptance to some OFW groups whom
I was associating with every Sunday and statutory holidays in Central or elsewhere when they were
free from work. This was different in campus where I was formally addressed as Doctor and we
were intellectualizing anthropological concepts such as cultural heritage and diaspora. Among the
domestic helpers who did not personally know me and who perhaps presumed that I was also a
migrant worker or a seafarer, addressed me Kuya which means older brother—generally used to
refer to Filipino male strangers in Hong Kong and even in Luzon area (aside to refer to a
consanguinal brother).

Given the foregoing description of public anthropology as engaging with the public, then
my activities together with and for the OFWs in Hong Kong can perhaps qualify as a practice of
this dimension of the discipline. But I want to further prove that since every anthropologist very
well knows that ethnographic fieldwork always involves direct engagement with a particular
community or group of people. And why the term “public” has to be tagged before the name
anthropology when this field by itself is inherently about engaging a certain public, like other social
sciences, becomes a valid question. Incidentally, anthropologists are not well appreciated with
what they are doing because many publics have no idea beforehand what anthropology exactly is
and what anthropologists are good for.

Let me reiterate what anthropologists have said what non-anthropologists say about
anthropology. Dr. Carole McGranahan, in her introductory notes on public anthropology published
in Indian Journal (2006), observes that people tend to pause and wonder upon hearing the term
“anthropology”. This was the reaction I likewise noticed from some of my OFW friends the first
time we met when they asked me about my profession. Some thought of anthropologists who are
interested of tribal people and exotic cultures. Moreover, others perceived anthropologists as
intellectuals who are confined in universities teaching or doing fieldwork but publishing their
outputs only in journals or books, and presenting papers in conferences among fellow
anthropologists.

It is no wonder a few of my OFW friends questioned why an anthropologist like me was in

Hong Kong and interested to research about what they are doing (not to mention their cultural
performances). I should have been with certain indigenous peoples in Philippine hinterlands and
not with the OFWs in this ultra-modern city. And this type of public will continue to have this
stereotype about us if we insist our intellectual supremacy or isolation and circulate the results of
our researches only among ourselves or within the academe. They cannot appreciate that current
anthropology is actually about the whole of human life, society and culture which can cover both
village communities and highly urbanized cities like Hong Kong. So unless the public understands

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and appreciates what anthropology is, this discipline will continue to be intellectually high and
detach from the public.

But working with the public further create a question if that is not applied anthropology.
As I searched for the difference between applied anthropology and public anthropology to clarify
the matter, I found instead more about their similarity, i.e., to promote the welfare of certain
public. For instance, applied anthropology is described in an introductory textbook of anthropology
as the utilization of anthropological theory and data “to propose solutions to practical problems”.
And applied anthropologists said that through the years this field has improved its approaches
starting from the use of experts in generating scientific knowledge up to involving the community
in the whole process of knowledge production and dissemination. It is an engagement with the
public. Given such similarity one cannot avoid but asks why there is a need to recreate the field of
public engagement and give it a new name.

But so much of the debate about which is which, the point I want to raise is that the
convergence of applied anthropology and public anthropology in the long run can help transform
the stereotypes that still associate anthropology with the exotic and the primitive. But if one insists
on the difference, perhaps a more important distinction is what Dr. Robert Borofsky, one of those
promoting public anthropology practice, calls public accountability in this practice where the
benefits of ethnographic writing are given back to certain public which may be measured by the
amount of difference it makes to the lives of people beyond the academe that may take various
forms. When I wrote and published about the cultural activities of the domestic helpers in Hong
Kong I was primarily inspired of promoting them as a people with beautiful and diverse culture that
may eventually erase the stereotypical view and self-prophesized identity of their being good only
in domestic work.

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