1. The Study of Pretty Much Everything
Anthropology 101
The Study of Pretty Much Everything

2. What is Anthropology? The study of the human condition
Comes from “anthropos” (Greek for “man”) and “ology”- (the study of)
A branch of the social sciences
Focus is on the development of human form and culture past and present
Split into four sub-disciplines

3. Cultural Anthropology
The study of living cultures
Focus on social behavior and how they identify themselves, both within their society and to the world

4. Linguistic Anthropology
The study of human language and communication
Includes the physiological relationship of the brain to speech
Explores cultural significance of language and the movement of cultural groups

5. Biological Anthropology
The study of human physical form and behavior
Includes evolutionary history and population genetics
Forensics
Primatology

6. Archaeology
The study of past cultures and peoples through their material remains
Studied through careful survey and excavation

7. But not all anthropologists practice each individual sub-discipline!
Huh?
All sub-disciplines practice anthropology- which is the governing principle behind the study of mankind
But not all anthropologists practice each individual sub-discipline!
(You can be an anthropologist without being an archaeologist, but you can't be an archaeologist without being an anthropologist. Get it?)

8. What is Culture? The key concept in anthropology
Explains how people's activities, behaviors, and beliefs are linked
Makes up our beliefs and assumptions about how the world operates- informs our actions (past and future)

9. Culture is learned
Culture includes all learned behaviors (not genetic)
Example: a sneeze is genetic, but your reaction “Bless you” “Salut” or “Gesundheit” is cultural

10. Culture is Shared Core ideas and behaviors are shared within a society
Most enculturation occurs in childhood
Children learn through imitation, experimentation, and interpretation

11. Culture is Integrated as a Society
The knowledge and values of a people operate together to create and maintain a functioning society
Not every person reproduces cultural traits exactly the same, but they tend to work towards the same goals and ideals

12. Culture is Adaptive
Culture is a learned series of behaviors adopted to cope with the natural and social environment
Cultural adaptations are fluid and always changing

13. Culture is Symbolic
Your cultural education teaches you the codes to understanding what your symbols mean
Symbolism is one way of communicating information about how to act and theminterpret the world
Language and art are both symbolic
Symbols may be unique to a culture or shared between
This picture □ is a symbol, to you it may mean a box or square, but to an Egyptian it means “house”

14. Cultural Relativism
Each culture has its own history of development; their values and adaptations are unique to what worked for them
Ethnocentrism means interpreting and judging another culture by your own cultural standards
Anthropology tries to recognize this bias and view each culture in their own right and from their perspective
The concept was created by anthropologist Franz Boas in the early 20th Century
Key concept in anthropology

15. Culture is Patterned and Structured
Infrastructure
Structure
Superstructure
Ways to deal with subsistence, getting and using resources
Social and Political organizational systems
Understanding of supernatural world and symbolic thought

16. Approaches to Anthropology
Ideational
Cognitive based
Culture is built from constructions in our subconscious understanding of the world
Adaptive
Activity based
Culture is a response to the physical conditions in a particular environment

17. History of Anthropological Thought
As old as classical philosophy- Nabonidus (538BC) considered first archaeologist
Interest in the material remains of the past began after the destruction of Pompeii in 79AD
During the Scientific Revolution ( 's) people started collecting and studying relics of the past
The first real scientific inquiry about man's development stemmed from the voyages of discovery and our first contact with indigenous peoples
In the 's, antiquarians began seriously looking for, collecting and displaying artifacts
This led to the development of scientific theories about the history of man and civilization

18. 19th Century Significant advances in knowledge of the world
CJ Thomsen- 3 age system (1819) Stone, Bronze, Iron Age
Boucher de Perthes- Antiquity of man (1850's)
Charles Darwin- Origin of Species (1859)
European interest in Classical archaeology
Schliemann's Troy (1870's)
Napoleon's Egypt (1798)
England in Greece (1800's)
North American survey of Native American sites and the “mound builders” (Squier & Davis-1850's, Cyrus Thomas- 1880's)

19. 19th Century Cultural Evolutionary Theory
Came from clash of European, Western, and Traditional worlds
A comparative method of defining humanity
Unilinear, tied to rise of nationalism and racism
“Social Darwinism” in contrast to Darwin's evolutionary theory
Tried to use biological justification to create social order
3 stages of man: savagery, barbarism, civilization
Grouping of current and past societies into bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states
Polygenesis (multiple origins for human beings, separate species)
Applied term “progress” to the “evolution” of savages to civilized
Ranked European Caucasians above all other races
Resulted in early 20th Century experiments with eugenics

20. Early 20th Century Culture History
In part, a response to culture evolution theory
Emphasized method of studying change in cultures; need to chronicle periods in material styles and traits (traditions) and their zone of outside influence (horizons)
Focus on reconstructing relationships in time and space between cultures and what causes material change
Influenced archaeological methodology
Migration vs. diffusion vs. independent creation
Flinders Petrie, Franz Boas (cultural relativism), V. Gordon Childe, Oscar Montelius, James A. Ford, Edward Tylor, A.V. Kidder, Gen. Pitt-Rivers, Mortimer Wheeler, Nels Nelson

21. The New Archaeology
Began in 1960's, made archaeology more of an anthropological discipline than the “handmaiden to history”
Leslie White, Julian Steward, and Marvin Harris developed theories of culture as adaptation to environment (culture materialism and neo- evolutionism)
Lewis Binford developed processual archaeology to make the study scientific and objective. Based on observation of activities and reconstruction from archaeological record. Positivist.
Ian Hodder developed postprocessualism, which tried to remain subjective, emphasizes that we cannot understand anything outside of our own experiences, so our study is merely a construction of another's reality. Relativist.

22. Questions?
What makes more sense to you? (Ideational vs. Adaptive, processual vs. postprocessual)
What kinds of circumstances may cause a culture to adapt or create a new technology?
Do you think we can really understand a past culture from reconstructing their lives?
Anything you don't quite understand?