Holism, Anthropology’s Distinctive Approach Learning Outcomes By the end of this section, you will be able to: Define and give examples of holism. Analyze how different elements of society cohere with and reinforce one another. Identify how different elements of society can contradict one another, motivating social change. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe. Nearly 210 million people had fallen sick with the coronavirus and more than 4 million had died as of August 2021. Medical researchers are still studying the long-term effects of this illness on the lungs and brains of people who have recovered. Some have discovered psychological effects as well, such as increased risks for depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia. Beyond the medical realm, the effects of the pandemic reached into every aspect of our societies and our everyday lives. In societies all over the world, people were forced to remain at home, “ sheltering in place ” from the dangers of the disease. Businesses closed their doors to the public, and many shut down permanently, unable to pay their bills. By May 2020, nearly 50 million Americans had reported losing their jobs due to the pandemic. The epidemic of disease ballooned into an epidemic of grief as people mourned the loss of the those who had died and worried about those who had fallen sick. Stressed out by so many disruptions, some adults turned to alcohol and drugs, and addiction rates soared. Incidents of domestic violence escalated. Racial violence against Asian Americans increased as some Americans blamed China for the emergence and global spread of the disease. People everywhere reported feeling lonelier and more cut off from their friends and family members. And yet there were also some positive consequences. Because people were not driving as much, air quality improved in many urban areas, giving relief to many people who suffer from asthma. Looking up into the night sky, some people were able to see stars for the very first time. Some people reported valuing their friends and family members even more now that they could not spend time with them in person. New social media technologies spread, such as Zoom, and many people learned to use existing technologies such as FaceTime and Skype. People also became aware of the valuable contributions made by “essential workers” in drugstores, hardware stores, and grocery stores as well as hospitals and nursing homes. How did a virus cause so many changes? The various elements of society are entwined in a complex whole. Dramatic changes in one area, such as epidemic disease in the realm of public health, can trigger a chain of effects throughout other social realms, such as the family, the economy, religion, and the political system. You’ll recall the word holism from our earlier discussion about anthropology’s commitment to understanding how the many parts of society work together. Holism is a distinctive method of analysis that foregrounds the ever-changing relationships among different realms of culture. Society as an Integrated Whole Throughout the 2010s, infant death rates in certain rural areas in Africa decreased dramatically. While thrilled with this positive trend, researchers did not initially know how to explain it. Were mothers and fathers doing something different to promote the health of their babies? Were African governments providing better health services for infants? Were aid agencies providing more resources? None of these things seemed to be true in any significant way. The one thing that had changed in the areas with lower infant mortality was the spread of mobile phones. Could that have something to do with lower infant mortality? And if so, how? Researchers hypothesize that it wasn’t just the possession or use of mobile phones that was making the difference—it was the capability to use mobile money transfers and other fintech. If a baby had a fever in the middle of the night, the mother could now immediately text members of her extended family to organize the necessary funds to take the baby to a hospital for treatment. Quicker treatment meant a better chance for recovery. Something that does not appear to be directly related to infant health may in fact have a great impact on it. Recall from the beginning of this chapter our discussion of the very broad scope of anthropology. While other disciplines focus on one realm of society, such as medicine or technology, anthropology ranges across all realms of human thought and activity. Using the technique of holism, anthropologists ask how seemingly disparate elements of social life might be related in unexpected ways. In American and European cultures, the most common form of marriage is a union of two people. In the United States, many marriages end in divorce and most people then remarry, resulting in a cycle of marriage-divorce-remarriage called serial monogamy . In other cultures, however, a man may have more than one wife. It might be tempting to think that the dominant form of marriage in a culture is related to morality or gender relations. It turns out, however, that one very significant influence on marriage patterns is the food-getting strategy of a particular culture. In small-scale farming cultures, the marriage of one man to two or more women provides an abundance of children to help out with the work of weeding, watering, fertilizing, and guarding the crops (Boserup [1970] 2007; Goody 1976). In cultures where children contribute to food production, the marriage of one man to multiple women is more prevalent. This isn’t always the case, of course, as there are other factors that influence the form of marriage practiced in a culture, but the useful work of children does contribute to the popularity of this form of marriage. In the contemporary United States, by contrast, most people work not on farms but in offices, shops, and factories. Children are not valued as sources of household labor, and they are not legally permitted to work for wages. In fact, children can be viewed as a drain on the household, each one requiring a massive investment of resources in the form of health care, childcare, special equipment, educational opportunities, and expensive toys. In this context, the increased fertility of multiple wives might impoverish the household. Moreover, our fast-paced, capitalist economy requires a flexible and highly mobile work force. American workers can lose their jobs, and they must be prepared to move and retrain in order to find further work. Many Americans experience periods of uncertainty and precarity in their work lives, conditions that affect the livelihood of their households as well as their relationships with their marriage partners and children. Such a context contributes to smaller family size and fragile marriage bonds. The cycles of stability and disruption in American work life are mirrored in the cycles of marriage and divorce involved in serial monogamy. These are just two examples of why anthropologists are committed to taking such a broad view of the cultures they study. Often, the various realms of society are related in ways that are not at first apparent to the researcher. By specializing too narrowly on only one realm, the researcher might miss the wider forces that shape the object of study. Sources of Contradiction, Conflict, and Change Holistic analysis considers not only how the various features of culture hold together but also how change in one feature can generate cascading changes among others. Often, anthropologists begin their analysis by focusing on one significant change in the lives of a particular cultural group and then chart the ramifications of that change through various other realms of culture. Attiya Ahmad conducted research among South Asian women who migrate to the Middle East for jobs as housekeepers (2017). She writes about how these women adapt to a new culture and living situation in Kuwait and the disruptions they face when they return to their families and home cultures. On the job in Kuwait, these domestic workers must learn to speak Arabic, operate household gadgets, prepare an entirely different cuisine, respect Islamic norms and practices, and perform their appropriate gender role as female members of a Kuwaiti household. They face the cultural requirement that women should be naram , or soft and malleable, as they develop emotionally charged relationships with the various members of the household. These requirements bring about profound personal transformations for these women as they deal with the contradictions of being both successful wage earners and subordinated cultural others. The motivation to migrate is primarily financial: the need to pay for schooling, marriages, medical care, and other family expenses. While the women are working in Kuwait, their families become economically dependent on the money they send back home even as their emotional relationships with their family members become weaker and more difficult. When they return home, profoundly changed by their experiences in Kuwait, their natal families nonetheless expect them to behave exactly as they did before they left, observing the same gender and age-related norms that govern the household. This creates a sense of internal conflict for these women. Unable to truly reintegrate with their natal families, many either seek out new connections in their home communities or migrate back to Kuwait. Some begin learning more about Islam by attending special da’wa classes, where they meet other women in the same situation. Finding ethical inspiration in Islamic teachings, many do convert, against the objections of their natal families and their Kuwaiti employers. All cultures are constantly changing, with small changes in one realm snowballing into larger and larger changes within and beyond that culture. The Me Too movement is another good example. What began in 2006 as a call by American activist Tarana Burke for solidarity and empathy with victims of sexual harassment has now spread into many sectors of American society and across the globe. Initially focused on high-profile celebrities and the movie industry, the Me Too movement has raised awareness of widespread sexual harassment and assault in the fashion industry, churches, the finance industry, sports, medicine, politics, and the military. Activists press for legal changes to protect workers, especially whistleblowers who come forward with allegations of inappropriate sexual behavior. Evaluations of patriarchal and chauvinistic behavior in these institutional realms have sparked scrutiny of the more informal cultural norms of American romance and dating. The Me Too movement challenges the way Americans think about the gender roles of men and women, appropriate speech and gestures, and the distinction between public life and private life. The movement has prompted processes of dialogue and change in at least 28 other countries, including Afghanistan, China, Nigeria, and the Philippines. The global campaign has been interpreted differently in each of these cultural contexts as the transcultural intentions of American activists intersect with local norms of gender and sexuality. Indeed, some critique the Me Too movement as ethnocentric. Though the calls for reform resonated with French feminists, Me Too activism sparked a backlash among many other French people, with some men and even women arguing that French men should have the right to make sexually provocative comments and rub against women in public places. While many anthropologists actively support the Me Too movement, our methods of cross-cultural comparison call on us to set aside our personal values (at least temporarily) in order to understand how people in various cultural contexts interpret and act on the cross-cultural campaign against gender-based harassment and assault. This method of suspending personal values is key to understanding how all the elements of a particular culture interact with one another, including pressures from the outside. holism how the elements of human life are bound together to form distinctive cultures.

Social Sciences


Cross-Cultural Comparison and Cultural Relativism Learning Outcomes By the end of this section, you will be able to: Define the concept of relativism and explain why this term is so important to the study of anthropology. Distinguish relativism from the “anything goes” approach to culture. Describe how relativism can enlighten our approach to social problems. Recall our earlier discussion of cultural styles of clothing. American clothing style is related to American values. Ghanaian clothing style is related to Ghanaian values. We have seen how different realms of culture are interrelated, fitting together to form distinctive wholes. Anthropologists use the term cultural relativism to describe how every element of culture must be understood within the broader whole of that culture. Relativism highlights how each belief or practice is related to all of the other beliefs and practices in a culture. The anthropological commitment to relativism means that anthropologists do not judge the merits of particular beliefs and practices but rather seek to understand the wider contexts that produce and reinforce those elements of culture. Even when studying controversial topics such as piracy and guerilla warfare, anthropologists set aside their personal convictions in order to explore the complex web of cultural forces that determine why we do the things we do. Relativism Is Not “Anything Goes” Critics of the notion of relativism believe so strongly in their own cultural norms that they cannot set them aside, even temporarily. They argue that relativism is amoral, a refusal to condemn aspects of culture considered to be wrong and harmful. For them, relativism means “anything goes.” For anthropologists, cultural relativism is a rigorous mode of holistic analysis requiring the temporary suspension of judgment for the purposes of exploration and analysis. Anthropologists do not think that violent or exploitative cultural practices are just fine, but they do think that the reasons for those practices are a lot more complex than we might imagine. And frequently, we find that the judgmental interventions of ethnocentric outsiders can do more harm than good. Morality, Activism, and Cultural Relativism A striking example of the application of cultural relativism in anthropology is the controversy surrounding female genital cutting (FGC) , sometimes called female genital mutilation. FGC is a cultural practice in which an elder cuts a younger woman’s genitalia, removing all or part of the clitoris and labia. The practice is common in parts of Africa and the Middle East. FGC is not only extremely painful; it can also lead to infection, urination problems, infertility, and complications in childbirth. The World Health Organization and the United Nations condemn the practice as a form of violence against children, a danger to women’s health, and a violation of basic human rights. These organizations view FGC as a form of discrimination against women, enforcing extreme inequality among the sexes. Efforts to ban FGC have focused on educating parents and children about the medical harms associated with the practice. Local governments are encouraged to enact laws banning FGC and impose criminal penalties against the elders who perform it. Rendille Kenyan women attending a church dedication ceremony. (credit: “180818_TSCOKenya_EstherHavens_0997” by Ann/flickr, CC BY 2.0) Despite decades of campaigning against FGC, however, the practice remains widespread. If condemning FGC has not been effective in reducing it, then what can be done? Anthropologist Bettina Shell-Duncan has taken a more relativist approach, attempting to understand the larger cultural norms and values that make FGC such an enduring practice. Setting aside her personal opinions, Shell-Duncan spent long periods in African communities where FGC is practiced, talking to people about why FGC is important to them. She learned that FGC has different functions in different sociocultural contexts. Among the Rendille people of northern Kenya, many people believe that men’s and women’s bodies are naturally androgynous, a mix of masculine and feminine parts. In order for a girl to become a woman, it is necessary to remove the parts of female genitalia that resemble a man’s penis. Likewise, in order for a boy to become a man, the foreskin must be removed because it resembles the folds of female genitalia. Other societies value FGC for different reasons. Some Muslim societies consider FGC a form of hygiene, making a girl clean so that she can pray to Allah. Some communities see FGC as a way of limiting premarital sex and discouraging extramarital affairs. In the colonial period, when FGC was banned by the colonial government, some Kenyan girls practiced FGC on themselves as a form of resistance to colonial authority. As FGC is promoted and carried out by senior women in most contexts, the practice becomes a way for senior women to solidify power and exert influence in the community. People in communities practicing FGC are often aware of the efforts of outside groups to ban the practice. They know about medical complications such as the risk of infection. But the denunciations of outsiders often seem unconvincing to them, as those denunciations tend to ignore the cultural reasons for the endurance of FGC. People who practice FGC do not do it because they despise women or want to harm children. Shell-Duncan argues that parents weigh the risks and benefits of FGC, often deciding that the procedure is in the best interest of their child’s future. Personally, Shell-Duncan remains critical of FGC and works on a project with the Population Council designed to dramatically reduce the practice. Cultural relativism does not mean permanently abandoning our own value systems. Instead, it asks us to set aside the norms and values of our own culture for a while in order to fully understand controversial practices in other cultures. By suspending judgment, Shell-Duncan was able to learn two important things. First, while campaigns to eradicate FGC frequently target mothers, providing them with educational material about the medical risks involved, Shell-Duncan learned that the decision to go ahead with the procedure is not made by parents alone. A large network of relatives and friends may pressure a girl’s parents to arrange for the cutting in order to ensure the girl’s chastity, marriageability, and fertility. Secondly, Shell-Duncan learned that people who practice FGC do it because they want the best for their girls. They want their girls to be respected and admired, considered clean and beautiful, fit for marriage and childbearing. Shell-Duncan argues that outside organizations should reconsider their efforts, focusing more on communities than on individual parents. Awareness campaigns will be more effective if they resonate with local norms and values rather than dismissively condemning them as part of the whole culture of FGC. Some researchers urge anti-FGC activists to connect with local feminists and women’s groups in an effort to empower local women and localize the movement against FCG. Some alternative approaches press for more incremental forms of change, such as moving the practice to more sanitary conditions in clinics and hospitals and reducing the severity of the procedure to smaller cuts or more symbolic nicks. As this example illustrates, cultural relativism is not an amoral “anything goes” approach but rather a strategy for forming cross-cultural relationships and gaining deeper understanding. Once this foundation has been established, anthropologists are often able to revise their activist goals and more effectively work together with people from another culture in pursuit of common interests. cultural relativism understanding every element of culture within the broader whole of that culture. Cultural relativism highlights how each belief or practice is related to all of the other beliefs and practices in a culture.

Social Sciences


Reaching for an Insider’s Point of View Learning Outcomes By the end of this section, you will be able to: Define the notion of insider’s point of view . Critique the notion of insider’s point of view , explaining how it is never perfectly achievable. List and describe the distinctive methods anthropologists deploy in their attempts to represent an insider’s point of view Bettina Shell-Duncan’s work on FGC demonstrates the importance of setting aside your own values and opinions in order to see an issue from the point of view of those directly involved. This often means working across contexts, whether studying another group or another culture. Anthropologists across the four fields apply this technique. Cultural anthropologists talk to people and participate in social activities in order to understand cultural life. Archaeologists rely on artifacts and fossils to reconstruct the sociocultural life of peoples in earlier times and different places. Through these different methods, anthropologists all aim for the same thing: they want to understand the perspectives of the people who practice a particular culture, sometimes called an insider’s point of view . The Challenge of Representing Others The anthropological goal of representing an insider’s point of view is controversial. Is it truly possible to step outside your own identity to really understand a different perspective? How can a researcher from a particular culture possibly understand exactly how it feels to be a member of another culture? Even anthropologists who study their own cultures may find themselves researching people from different classes, ethnicities, or gender categories. Is it possible to accurately represent the perspectives of people whose lives are so different from your own? Is it ethical? Is it valuable? For decades, White European and American anthropologists conducted research and wrote ethnographies as if the challenge of representing cultures very different from their own was really no problem at all. Empowered by White privilege and ethnocentrism, many earlier anthropologists believed that long-term intensive fieldwork was enough to give them cross-cultural insight into the perspectives of the people they studied. Too frequently, those anthropologists reduced the complexity of the non-Western cultures they studied to just one point of view, as if the people in that society all interpreted their cultural rules the same way and never disagreed or changed the rules over time. In her book about Japanese culture, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), anthropologist Ruth Benedict describes Japanese people in terms of common personality traits, such as reverence for the emperor and a moral sense guided by shame. Critics have argued that her conclusions are skewed by her overreliance on very few informants, all of them Japanese people confined to internment camps during World War II. As we have explored in this chapter, every culture comprises multiple perspectives that often contradict one another, generating sociocultural conflict and change. Recognizing this situation, contemporary anthropologists often conduct research among several different subgroups and geographical locations, integrating insights from these various arenas into a comprehensive and dynamic view of cultural complexity. Then there is the question of deep-seated bias, often operating unconsciously among researchers and the people they study. Consider the situation above in which a White American anthropologist conducts research in an African country previously colonized by Europeans. European colonialism left behind a legacy of White privilege in postcolonial African countries. Earlier anthropologists did not often recognize how racialized power dynamics might shape their research and writing, distorting their representations of the peoples they studied. In the 1960s, anthropologists began to think more carefully about these issues, realizing that an insider’s point of view is never perfectly achievable. As human beings, our own perspectives are conditioned by our own enculturation, our own ways of seeing and thinking about the world around us. If an insider’s point of view is never really possible, should we give up on this aspirational goal of the discipline? In such a scenario, researchers would only study and write about people from the same sociocultural categories as themselves. So, for example, Americans would only research and write about other Americans. But are all Americans really members of the same sociocultural category? Could an upper-class Asian American from Manhattan research and write about a poor Black community in the Deep South? Could a Latino man write about a group of Latinx/Latina/Latino people consisting of all genders? American culture is not unique in its complex array of identities. In all cultures, people have multiple identities as members of multiple sociocultural categories. While you may be an insider within your culture in some respect, you may be an outsider by some other measure. The ethical question of who can represent who is riddled with difficulties. Moreover, resigning ourselves to studying “our own people,” whoever they might be, is tantamount to giving up on cross-cultural research and the insight, empathy, dialogue, and transformation that frequently result from it. Anthropological insights have been key to rethinking American notions of sexuality, family, and race, among so many other pressing issues. We need the skills of cross-cultural research now more than ever. While perfect representations of different communities and cultures may be impossible, many anthropologists now deploy innovative methods designed to address the problems of history and power at the heart of the discipline. The aim is not to achieve perfect ethnography but to work ethically and collaboratively to produce what contemporary cultural anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes has termed “good enough ethnography.” Collaborative Methods of Representation Faced with the challenges of representation, many anthropologists practice methods of collaboration with the individuals and groups that they study. Collaborative ethnography has a very long history in cultural anthropology, traceable all the way back to early Euro-American ethnographies of Native Americans. Often, anthropologists began their research by employing a local person as a translator or field assistant, a role that usually evolved into something much more cooperative. Francis La Flesche (credit: “Francis laflesche” by National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain) Researching the Omaha peoples in the early 20th century, anthropologist Alice Cunningham Fletcher began working with a young Omaha man, Francis La Flesche . Through their collaboration, La Flesche became an ethnographer himself. While most anthropologists of the day merely acknowledged their local collaborators (if they did even that), La Flesche became a full coauthor of their joint ethnography, The Omaha Tribe (1911). Today, anthropologists collaborate with the people they study in a number of ways. Some involve local people as readers and editors of their work, sometimes including community responses in the published ethnography. Some conduct focus groups to generate local feedback on particular chapters. Some anthropologists hold community meetings or forums to talk about the major themes and implications of their work. And some, like Fletcher, collaborate with members of the local community as equal coauthors on books and articles. Such methods strengthen ethnography by ensuring accuracy, promoting multiple perspectives, and striving to make anthropological work more relevant to the communities being studied. Collaboration also draws attention to the personal side of ethnography. Instead of extracting ethnographic “facts” from the process of fieldwork, many contemporary anthropologists focus on describing particular people, insightful conversations, and cooperative practices encountered in their research. Through this kind of representation, culture is represented as a constellation of personal perspectives, each one shaped by the position of each person in that community. Anthropologists also now acknowledge that ethnography is shaped by the personal background and identity of the researcher as well as the motivations and intended audience of the research. Collaborative anthropologists frequently describe their research in the first person, openly acknowledging how their personal and cultural biases influence their research. Anthropologist Luke E. Lassiter takes a collaborative approach in his study of the song and dance of contemporary Kiowa communities of southern Oklahoma (1998). Lassiter describes how he became interested in Kiowa song as a boy through his involvement in the Order of the Arrow, an affiliate of the Boy Scouts. Moving beyond the superficial representations of Native American culture in Boy Scout teachings, Lassiter went on to attend powwows, where he met singers and learned more about Kiowa culture. He developed a close friendship with renowned Kiowa singer Billy Evans Horse , who taught Lassiter how to sing Kiowa songs and encouraged him to pursue his interest in Kiowa culture in graduate school. Instead of foregrounding his own description of Kiowa song and dance, Lassiter highlights the individual experiences and opinions of his local collaborators as they describe how songs are created, passed down, and interpreted in the community. Collaborative anthropology is not only more ethical and accurate; it is also more socially conscious and political. When anthropologists collaborate as equals, they often become socially involved and politically committed to the welfare of the communities they study. There are various terms for this, among them engaged anthropology , public anthropology , anthropological advocacy , and applied anthropology . When those communities face struggles over land, food security, medical care, or human rights abuses, many anthropologists support their interests in a number of ways. Anthropologists often speak out publicly, write sympathetic ethnographies, testify in court, participate in protests, and coordinate with organizations that can provide material aid. Anthropologist Stuart Kirsch was researching magic and sorcery in a Yonggom village in Papua New Guinea when he became concerned about pollution from local copper and gold mines nearby (2018). As the community he was studying mobilized to protect their environment, Kirsch became involved in their lawsuit against the Australian owners of the mine. He contributed to a social and environmental impact study and advised lawyers representing the affected communities. He spoke out to local media and scholarly publications, explaining the environmental problems caused by pollution from the mine. Working across Cultures toward Common Goals Stepping back for a moment, consider the problems facing us as humans on our shared planet. Climate change threatens the survival of humanity and the biodiversity of plants and animals. Forms of deeply entrenched inequality fuel racial, ethnic, and class conflicts within and between nations. These are global problems, transnational problems, cross-cultural problems. Human beings need to find a way to communicate and cooperate across the sociocultural boundaries that divide us, always recognizing the power dynamics involved in that process. How can we do this? Anthropology teaches us that we may never understand exactly how it feels to be a member of a different culture or group within our own culture. But if we want to work together with people of different sociocultural backgrounds to solve these pressing global issues, we have to try. Long-term fieldwork and cross-cultural collaboration are not perfect solutions to the challenges of cross-cultural understanding, but these methods give us a place to begin. And anthropological methods and insights can be transformative, making possible the kinds of empathy and dialogue necessary to solve our global problems. The goal of this anthropology textbook is to guide you in this process of transformation as you learn about the cultural lives of the various peoples with whom you share this planet. Representation and Otherness List three characters from fictional movies or television shows who represent people from cultures different from your own. What adjectives would you use to describe these characters? How are they made to appear? How do they act? Are they central or marginal characters? What role does each play in the plot or theme? What might be the consequences of representing cultural groups in this way? Do you see evidence of ethnocentrism, primitivism, and/or orientalism as described in this chapter? Summary Anthropology is an incredibly broad discipline, covering the entire scope of human experience, but its enormity is controlled by a common narrative and set of three central commitments. The common narrative states that human beings have developed flexible biological and social features that have worked together in a wide variety of environmental and historical conditions to produce a diversity of cultures. The three central commitments are exploring sociocultural diversity, examining how societies hold together, and studying the interdependence of humans and nature. Anthropologists have developed four main approaches to pursuing anthropology’s common narrative, comprising the discipline’s four fields: biological anthropology, archaeology, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. Each of these fields generates a particular type of knowledge about the human experience that can be integrated with knowledge from the other three fields into a deeper, richer understanding of humanity’s central challenges, such as racial injustice and climate change. Getting at that deeper understanding, anthropologists learn to recognize their own biases as forms of ethnocentrism such as primitivism and orientalism. Rather than categorizing societies according to levels of sophistication (as European scholars did in the 19th century), contemporary anthropologists use holistic techniques of examination and analysis, seeking to understand how the various elements within a culture fit together and how these elements can contradict one another, provoking change. Effective holistic analysis requires a commitment to the method of cultural relativism, which requires a researcher to set aside their own personal values in order to appreciate another culture on its own terms. An important contribution to a rich appreciation of another culture is the input and participation of cultural insiders. The ethical challenges of understanding and representing another culture have led anthropologists to develop collaborative ways of working with cultural insiders, aimed at addressing the power asymmetries of fieldwork and ethnography. Critical Thinking Questions Suggested Readings Engelke, Matthew. 2018. How to Think Like an Anthropologist . Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hastrup, Kirsten, ed. 2014. Anthropology and Nature . Routledge Studies in Anthropology 14. New York: Routledge. Otto, Ton, and Nils Bubandt, eds. 2010. Experiments in Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology . Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. References Ahmad, Attiya. 2017. Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work, and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ball, Christopher. 2018. Exchanging Words: Language, Ritual, and Relationality in Brazil’s Xingu Indigenous Park . Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Bayly, Susan. 1999. Caste, Society, and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age . The New Cambridge History of India, vol. 4, no. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bielo, James S. 2018. Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park . New York: New York University Press. Boserup, Esther. (1970) 2007. Woman’s Role in Economic Development . London: Earthscan. Carr, E. Summerson. 2011. Scripting Addiction: The Politics of Therapeutic Talk and American Sobriety . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dillehay, Tom D., ed. 2017. Where the Land Meets the Sea: Fourteen Millennia of Human History at Huaca Prieta, Peru . Austin: University of Texas Press. Edwards, David B. 2017. Caravan of Martyrs: Sacrifice and Suicide Bombing in Afghanistan . Oakland: University of California Press. Fredericks, Rosalind. 2018. Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fuentes, Agustín. 2012. Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You: Busting Myths about Human Nature . Berkeley: University of California Press. Goody, Jack. 1976. Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haas, Randall, James Watson, Tammy Buonasera, John Southon, Jennifer C. Chen, Sarah Noe, Kevin Smith, Carlos Viviano Llave, Jelmer Eerkens, and Glendon Parker. 2020. “Female Hunters of the Early Americas.” Science Advances 6 (45): eabd0310. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abd0310. Halvaksz, Jamon. 2006. “Drug Bodies: Relations with Substance in the Wau Bulolo Valley.” Oceania 76 (3): 235–244. Heatherington, Tracey. 2010. Wild Sardinia: Indigeneity and the Global Dreamtimes of Environmentalism . Seattle: University of Washington Press. Isbell, Lynne A. 2009. The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent: Why We See So Well . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jablonski, Nina G. 2006. Skin: A Natural History . Berkeley: University of California Press. Keim, Curtis, and Carolyn Somerville. 2018. Mistaking Africa: Curiosities and Inventions of the American Mind . 4th ed. New York: Routledge. Kirsch, Stuart. 2018. Engaged Anthropology: Politics beyond the Text . Oakland: University of California Press. Lassiter, Luke E. 1998. The Power of Kiowa Song: A Collaborative Ethnography . Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Lassiter, Luke E. 2005. “Collaborative Ethnography and Public Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 46 (1): 83–106. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea . London: Routledge. Millar, Kathleen M. 2018. Reclaiming the Discarded: Life and Labor on Rio’s Garbage Dump . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Miller, Daniel. 2019. “Smartphones: The Cultural, Individual and Technical Processes That Make Them Smart.” The Conversation. January 8, 2019. https://theconversation.com/smartphones-the-cultural-individual-and-technical-processes-that-make-them-smart-106560. Mintz, Sidney W. 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History . New York: Viking. Mohr, Sebastian. 2018. Being a Sperm Donor: Masculinity, Sexuality, and Biosociality in Denmark . New York: Berghahn Books. Morgan, Marcyliena. 2009. The Real Hiphop: Battling for Knowledge, Power, and Respect in the LA Underground . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nittle, Nadra Kareem. 2021. “Common Arab Stereotypes in TV and Film.” ThoughtCo. March 18, 2021. https://www.thoughtco.com/tv-film-stereotypes-arabs-middle-easterners-2834648. Orser, Charles E., Jr. 2007. The Archaeology of Race and Racialization in Historic America . Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Peregrine, Peter Neal. 2018. “Boas, Franz (1858–1942).” In The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology , edited by Hilary Callan. Wiley Online Library. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea1299. Ralph, Laurence. 2014. Renegade Dreams: Living through Injury in Gangland Chicago . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism . New York: Vintage Books. Schaik, Carel van. 2004. Among Orangutans: Red Apes and the Rise of Human Culture . Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Singleton, Theresa A, ed. (1985) 2016. The Archaeology of Slavery and Plantation Life . New York: Routledge. Stanley, Henry Morton. 1878. Through the Dark Continent; or, The Sources of the Nile around the Great Lakes of Equatorial Africa and down the Livingstone River to the Atlantic Ocean . London. Torres, Jada Benn, and Gabriel A. Torres Colón. 2021. Genetic Ancestry: Our Stories, Our Pasts . New York: Routledge. Tourigny, Eric. 2020. “Do All Dogs Go to Heaven? Tracking Human-Animal Relationships through the Archaeological Survey of Pet Cemeteries.” Antiquity 94 (378): 1614–1629. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2020.191. insider’s point of view a goal of anthropological research, representing the perspectives of people who practice a particular culture.

Social Sciences


Introduction These archaeologists are working to uncover a fresco on a building in Pompeii, Italy. Pompeii was famously covered in ash when nearby Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE. The ash has preserved many structures and artifacts from the time. (credit: “Pompeii Restoration Work” by Justin Ennis/flickr, CC BY 2.0) Fieldwork is one of the most important practices of anthropology. While all of the subfields of anthropology conduct fieldwork in some form to gather information, each subfield may use different methods of conducting research. The concept of working in “the field” was traditionally based on the practice of traveling to distant regions to study other cultures within their native environmental contexts. In recent decades, “the field” has broadened to include diverse settings such as one’s hometown (as in urban anthropology), the Internet (visual or virtual anthropology), or collections in university archives and museums (ethnohistory or museum anthropology).

Social Sciences


Archaeological Research Methods Learning Outcomes By the end of this section, you will be able to: Describe archaeological techniques for uncovering artifacts. Explain the importance of context in making sense of artifacts and describe how researchers record content while working in the field. Describe the law of superposition as used in the field of archaeology. Describe the different types of relative dating methods used by archaeologists. Identify and briefly define four absolute or chronometric dating methods. Many people have an inherent fascination with the human past. Perhaps this fascination stems from the fact that people recognize themselves in the objects left behind by those who have lived before. Relics of past civilizations, in the form of human-made cultural artifacts , temples, and burial remains, are the means by which we can begin to understand the thoughts and worldviews of ancient peoples. In the quest to understand these ancient societies, human curiosity has sometimes led to fantastical myths about races of giant humans, dragons, and even extraterrestrial beings. In the realm of archaeology, less speculative methods are used to study the human past. Scientific approaches and techniques are the foundation of archaeology today. Archaeological Techniques In archaeology, the first step in conducting field research is to do a survey of an area that has the potential to reveal surface artifacts or cultural debris. Surveys can be done by simply walking across a field, or they may involve using various technologies, such as drones or Google Earth, to search for unusual topography and potential structures that would be difficult to see from the ground. Cultural artifacts that are found may become the basis for an archaeological excavation of the site. A random sampling of excavation units or test pits can determine a site’s potential based on the quantity of cultural materials found. GPS coordinates are often collected for each piece of cultural debris, along with notes on specific plants and animal found at the site, which can be indicators of potential natural resources. Features such as trails, roads, and house pits are documented and included in a full set of field notes. Government agencies have different protocols about what constitutes an archaeological site; the standard in many areas is six cultural objects found in close proximity to one another. When preparing a site for excavation, archaeologists will divide the entire site into square sections using a grid system, which involves roping off measured squares over the surface of the site. This grid system enables archaeologists to document and map all artifacts and features as they are found in situ (in the original location). All objects and features uncovered are assigned catalog or accession numbers, which are written on labels and attached to the artifacts. These labels are especially important if artifacts are removed from the site. Excavation is a slow process. Archaeologists work with trowels and even toothbrushes to carefully remove earth from around fragile bone and other artifacts. Soil samples may be collected to conduct pollen studies. Ecofacts —objects of natural origins, such as seeds, shells, or animal bones—found at a site may be examined by other specialists, such as zooarchaeologists , who study animal remains, or archaeobotanists , who specialize in the analysis of floral (plant) remains with an interest in the historical relationships between plants and people over time. Every cultural and natural object and feature is fully documented in the field notes, with its exact placement and coordinates recorded on a map using the grid system as a guide. These coordinates represent an object’s primary context . If uncovered objects are moved before documentation takes place, the archaeologist will lose the archaeological context of that object and its associated data. Archaeological context is the key foundation of archaeological principles and practice. In order to understand the significance and even age of artifacts, features, and ecofacts, one needs to know their context and association with other objects as they were found in situ. Objects that have been removed from their primary context are said to be in a secondary context . Careful and proper documentation is vitally important. This information becomes part of the archaeological record and guides and contributes to future research and analysis. This dig site in Vindolanda, England has yielded thousands of artifacts left behind by Roman occupiers in the years 85 – 370 CE. (credit: “Digging Archaeology 4” by Son of Groucho/flickr, CC BY 2.0) Archaeological Dating Methods Establishing the age of cultural objects is an important element of archaeological research. Determining the age of both a site and the artifacts found within is key to understanding how human cultures developed and changed over time. Other areas of science, such as paleontology and geology, also use dating techniques to understand animal and plant species in the ancient past and how the earth and animal species evolved over time. Relative Dating The earliest dating methods utilized the principles of relative dating , developed in geology. Observing exposed cliffsides in canyons, geologists noted layers of different types of stone that they called strata ( stratum in the singular). They hypothesized that the strata at the bottom were older than the strata higher up; this became known as the law of superposition . According to the law of superposition, not just geological layers but also the objects found within them can be assigned relative ages based on the assumption that objects in deeper layers are older than objects in layers above. The application of the law of superposition to archaeological fieldwork is sometimes called stratigraphic superposition . This method assumes that any cultural or natural artifact that is found within a stratum, or that cuts across two or more strata in a cross-cutting relationship , is younger than the stratum itself, as each layer would have taken a long time to form and, unless disturbed, would have remained stable for a very long time. Examples of forces that might cause disturbances in strata include natural forces such as volcanos or floods and the intervention of humans, animals, or plants. The law of superposition was first proposed in 1669 by the Danish scientist Nicolas Steno . Some of the first applications of this law by scholars provided ages for megafauna (large animals, most commonly mammals) and dinosaur bones based on their positions in the earth. It was determined that the mammalian megafauna and the dinosaur bones had been deposited tens of thousands of years apart, with the dinosaur remains being much older. These first indications of the true age of fossil remains suggested a revolutionary new understanding of the scale of geological time. It was eventually determined that if a specific set and sequence of strata is noted in several sites and over a large enough area, it can be assumed that the ages will be the same for the same strata at different locations in the area. This insight enabled geologists and archaeologists to use the structures of soils and rocks to date phenomena noted throughout a region based on their relative positions. Archaeologists call this method archaeological stratification , and they look for stratified layers of artifacts to determine human cultural contexts. Stratigraphic layers found below cultural layers provide a basis for determining age, with layers above assumed to be more recent than those below. According to the principle of superposition objects found at deeper layers (called stratum) are older than those found above. In this illustration, the pottery fragments in Stratum E can be assumed to be older than the shell buttons found in Stratum C. The objects nearest the surface (aluminum can, plastic bottle) are obviously most recent. (attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC BY NC-SA 4.0 license) Another method of dating utilized by archaeologists relies on typological sequences . This method compares created objects to other objects of similar appearance with the goal of determining how they are related. This method is employed by many subdisciplines of archaeology to understand the relationships between common objects. For example, typological sequencing is often conducted on spearpoints created by Indigenous peoples by comparing the types of points found at different locations and analyzing how they changed over time based on their relative positions in an archaeological site. Another form of typological sequencing involves the process of seriation . Seriation is a relative dating method in which artifacts are placed in chronological order once they are determined to be of the same culture. English Egyptologist, Flinders Petrie introduced seriation in the 19th century. He developed the method to date burials he was uncovering that contained no evidence of their dates and could not be sequenced through stratigraphy . To address the problem, he developed a system of dating layers based on pottery (see Figure 2.4). Petrie’s Egyptian pottery seriation method is built upon the observation that styles change with time. Petrie arranged pottery artifacts into similar groups based on stylistic features and placed them along a relative timeline based on these features. (credit: “Evolution of Egyptian prehistoric pottery styles, from Naqada I to Naqada II and Naqada III” by W. M. Flinders Petrie and A. C. Mace/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain) Typological sequences of pottery, stone tools, and other objects that survive in archaeological sites are not only used to provide dating estimates. They can also reveal much about changes in culture, social structure, and worldviews over time. For example, there are significant changes in stratigraphy during the agricultural age, or Neolithic period, at around 12,000 BCE. These changes include the appearance of tended soils, pollens that indicate the cultivation of specific plants, evidence of more sedentary living patterns, and the increased use of pottery as the storage of food and grain became increasingly important. Archaeological evidence also shows a growing population and the development of a more complex cultural and economic system, which involved ownership of cattle and land and the beginning of trade. Trade activities can be determined when pottery types associated with one site appear in other nearby or distant locations. Recognizing the connections between objects used in trade can shed light on possible economic and political interrelationships between neighboring communities and settlements. Chronometric Dating Methods Chronometric dating methods , also known as absolute dating methods , are methods of dating that rely on chemical or physical analysis of the properties of archaeological objects. Using chronometric methods, archaeologists can date objects to a range that is more precise than can be achieved via relative dating methods. Radiocarbon dating , which uses the radioactive isotope carbon-14 ( 14 C), is the most common method used to date organic materials. Once a living organism dies, the carbon within it begins to decay at a known rate. The amount of the remaining residual carbon can be measured to determine, within a margin of error of 50 years, when the organism died. The method is only valid for samples of organic tissue between 300 and 50,000 years old. To ensure accuracy, objects collected for testing are promptly sealed in nonporous containers so that no atmospheric organic substances, such as dust, pollen, or bacteria, can impact the results. Dating systems that measure the atomic decay of uranium or the decay of potassium into argon are used to date nonorganic materials such as rocks. The rates of decay of radioactive materials are known and can be measured. The radioactive decay clock begins when the elements are first created, and this decay can be measured to determine when the objects were created and/or used in the past. Volcanic materials are particularly useful for dating sites because volcanoes deposit lava and ash over wide areas, and all the material from an eruption will have a similar chemical signature. Once the ash is dated, cultural materials can also be dated based on their position relative to the ash deposit. The technique of dendrochronology relies on measuring tree rings to determine the age of ancient structures or dwellings that are made of wood. Tree rings develop annually and vary in width depending on the quantity of nutrients and water available in a specific year. Cross dating is accomplished by matching patterns of wide and narrow rings between core samples taken from similar trees in different locations. This information can then be applied to date archaeological remains that contain wood, such as posts and beams. Dendrochronology has been used at the Pueblo Bonita archaeological site in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, to help date house structures that were occupied by the Pueblo people between 800 and 1150 CE. The Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, based in Tucson, is the world’s oldest dendrochronology lab. Go on a tree-ring expedition! The most effective approach for dating archaeological objects is to apply a variety of dating techniques, which allows the archaeologist to triangulate or correlate data. Correlating multiple methods of dating provides strong evidence for the specific time period of an archaeological site. Strategy What It Is How It Is Seen How It Is Read Assumptions Dendrochronology Tree ring width pattern Growth in life, ring Count rings and measure 1 ring = 1 year; no duplication or missed rings; regional comparability 14 C Radioactive decay and atom counting Decay after death Count beta decay or 14 C per unit volume Half-life of 14 C- 12 C decay known; exchange with atmosphere and productions rates constant Chronometric Dating Techniques absolute dating methods (see also chronometric dating methods) dating methods that use physical and chemical properties of artifacts and structures modified by humans to establish their age without reference to other artifacts. For example, radiocarbon dating is used to date organic materials generally up to 50,000 years old. archaeobotanist a specialist who studies plants and seeds appearing in an archaeology site. archaeological context the place where an object was originally found, along with other associations, such as the stratum it was found in, specific features, and other objects associated with it. archaeological excavation the scientific process of uncovering artifacts and other biological and cultural remains in the historic and prehistoric past of human-inhabited sites. artifacts objects that are portable and show evidence of human cultural activity; for example, bones that show evidence of drawings sketched on them, stone tools, pottery, etc. chronometric dating methods dating methods used to analyze various physical or chemical characteristics of an artifact in order to assign a date or range of dates for its production. cross-cutting relationship a principle in geology and archaeology that suggests that a geologic or cultural feature that cuts across another feature is the more recently deposited of the two. dendrochronology an absolute dating technique that uses patterns of growth of tree rings and cross-dating to determine the approximate age of wood. ecofacts natural objects found at an archaeological site, such as seeds, bone, shells, etc., that show no sign of human craftsmanship. features cultural structures found at an archaeological site that are not movable or portable, such as parts of a temple, altars, tombs, etc. law of superposition the geological principle of stratigraphy that assumes that materials, normally rock layers, found beneath other materials are older that the materials on top. primary context the context of an artifact, feature, or site that has not been disturbed since its original deposition. radiocarbon dating a dating technique for organic substances that measures the decay of radioactive carbon in the sample; also called carbon-14 ( 14 C or C 14 ) dating. This is the most widely used technique for dating organic artifacts between 50 and 60,000 years old. relative dating describes methods of determining the relative order of past events through comparisons of two or more artifacts without determining their absolute age; e.g., sample 1 is older than sample 2 because sample 1 was found beneath sample 2. secondary context the context of a cultural or natural objects that has been moved or disturbed from its original location and is thus no longer associated with its place of origin; for example, a burial that has been moved from its original location due to geological shifts or natural disaster. seriation a relative dating method that places similar artifacts from the same area in a chronological sequence. strata plural of stratum ; in geology and archaeology, distinct layers of deposited natural or archaeological material. stratigraphic superposition a relative dating method that assumes that any cultural or natural artifact that is found within a stratum, or that cuts across two or more strata in a cross-cutting relationship, is younger than the stratum itself. stratigraphy the process of identifying the order and relative positions of strata. stratum singular of strata ; one specific layer of deposited natural or archaeological material. typological sequence a set or group of objects ordered according to their types. zooarchaeologist an archaeologist who specializes in the identification of animal remains at an archaeological site.

Social Sciences


Conservation and Naturalism Learning Outcomes By the end of this section, you will be able to: Describe conservation efforts undertaken in the United States in the 19th century. Define salvage anthropology and describe its origins and methods. Provide an example of an anthropologist who used their research to help the people they were studying. Explain why museums can be said to have created exhibits reflecting limited interpretations and describe efforts to correct this limitation. Early Efforts The conservation movement began in the 19th century as people in Europe and America began to realize that human settlement and the exploitation of the world’s natural resources had led to the destruction or endangerment of numerous animals, plants, and significant environments. Efforts began in the 1860s to understand and protect the remaining natural landscapes and habitats. These efforts were partly motivated by concern for wildlife and natural areas. However, also significant were the concerns of sporting organizations and recreationists. The primary aim of early conservation efforts was to preserve significant natural ecosystems for parks or wilderness areas so that sportspeople and outdoor enthusiasts would have places to hunt, fish, and explore. Many areas preserved by these early efforts are still protected today, such as Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks in the United States. An element of this early period of conservation was the effort to collect specimens for display in natural history museums. This collection effort was part of a movement known as naturalism , which seeks to understand the world and the laws that govern it by direct observation of nature. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a marked growth in naturalist collections worldwide as many cities and nations sought to establish and fill their own natural history museums. These collections have been particularly useful to zooarchaeologists and archaeobotanists, who use specimen collections of mammals, birds, fish, and plants to identify natural objects and animal remains found at human burial sites. Many archaeology labs have collections of animal skeletons for comparative anatomy, analysis, and identification (see Figure 2.5). Collections of bones, such as this collection of specimens from various animal species housed at the Wildlife Forensics Lab in Ashland, Oregon, serve as a useful resource for zooarchaeologists. (credit: “Wildlife Forensics Lab” by US Fish and Wildlife Service Headquarters/flickr, Public Domain) In addition to animal specimens, Native American baskets and other Indigenous art objects were collected and placed in natural history museums . When visiting the Auckland Museum in Auckland, New Zealand, visitors today encounter two large totem poles in the foyer. Northwest Coast totem poles are common in most older museums throughout the world. These totem poles were gathered from America’s Northwest Coast in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as part of the worldwide conservation and naturalism movement. Most museums sought to purchase such artifacts, but in some cases, artifacts were stolen when Indigenous owners were unwilling to sell them. Many natural history museums also established dioramas depicting both Indigenous peoples and animals in their “natural” world. The practice of installing dioramas of Indigenous people is now heavily criticized because of the implication that Indigenous peoples are akin to animals and plants. Many museums have stopped this practice and have even dropped the phrase natural history from their names. However, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York both maintain the designation and still display dioramas of Indigenous peoples. This diorama of Native Americans is on display in the Indiana State Museum in Indianapolis, Indiana. Such dioramas have come under criticism for the way that they depict Indigenous peoples and cultures. (credit: “Native Americans – Indiana State Museum – DSC00394” by Daderot/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain) Salvage Anthropology Connected to the collecting of Indigenous artifacts is a practice known as salvage anthropology . Salvage anthropology was an effort to collect the material culture of Indigenous peoples in the United States and other parts of the world who were believed to be going extinct in the later 19th century. During this period, many anthropologists dedicated themselves to collecting material objects, stories, language lists, and ethnographies from tribal peoples worldwide. Many collections were made through legitimate means, such as purchasing objects or sitting down with collaborators (called informants in older anthropological vernacular) to record traditional stories, but some collecting involved the theft of tribal cultural items or purchases from intermediary traders. Many of these anthropologists were hired by the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) , a division of the Smithsonian Institution, and spent considerable time living with Native peoples on the reservations that were by then home to most Native Americans. Language was a special research focus for linguists and anthropologists, as many Native languages were rapidly going extinct. Through analysis of language, an anthropologist can understand the meaning of words and their context as well as gain a sense of a culture’s philosophy and worldviews. Anthropologists were not paid well to do this work for the BAE. Some began supplementing their income by buying cultural objects at a low cost from the people they studied and selling those objects at a much higher rate to museums. This practice is now acknowledged as unethical and exploitative. The anthropological research of this period has also been criticized for focusing solely on cultural knowledge while ignoring the hardships faced by the culture. For example, few anthropologists chose to help their subjects address the circumstances of living in poverty on the reservations. Leonard J. Frachtenberg was an anthropologist working during the salvage anthropology period who did take action to help the people he was studying. Around the turn of the 20th century, Frachtenberg was conducting research to collect the languages of the people living on the Siletz Reservation , in Lincoln County, on Oregon’s coast. He worked extensively with collaborators from the Coos, Coquille, Lower Umpqua, and Alsea tribes—some of whom were living at the Siletz Reservation and some who had returned to their native lands—and published a series of oral histories based on his research. He also helped the tribes locate lost unratified treaties from the 1850s and use those treaties to successfully sue the federal government. In the treaties, the government had promised to pay the Indigenous peoples of Oregon’s coast for their ancestral land if they peacefully relocated to the Siletz Reservation. The people upheld their part of the bargain, but they never received any payment. Frachtenberg helped a Coquille man named George Wasson travel to Washington, DC, and locate copies of the treaties in the National Archives. In 1908, the tribes began the process of successfully suing the federal government for payment for their lands. This process took some 40 years to complete for many tribes, and not all tribes have been fairly paid to this day. Museum Collections Most of the materials collected by anthropologists during the period of salvage anthropology ended up in museums and university archives. Many natural history museums now display large dioramas featuring the material objects of numerous tribes. Museum research libraries house extensive collections of manuscripts and ethnographies. Archaeologists have contributed to these collections as well; many museums contain large collections of human remains. Indigenous peoples have criticized these collections, especially the gathering of human remains, which is seen as sacrilegious. Today, there are millions of sets of human remains (some full skeletons, but most single bones) in museum repositories that have never been studied and perhaps never will be. Anthropologists spent so much of their time in the early period collecting that they had little time to study or analyze what they found. Many collections were put in storage after the anthropologists who had gathered them moved on to a new project or passed away. There are currently millions of material artifacts and ethnographic manuscripts that have never been fully studied. These archived materials offer research opportunities for anthropologists as well as for Indigenous peoples, who are making use of these collections to help recover parts of their cultures that were lost due to the assimilation policies of the past 200 years. One person who has taken advantage of these archives is linguistic anthropologist Henry Zenk . Zenk has spent years studying the languages and cultures of the tribes of western Oregon, specifically the Chinook, Kalapuya, and Molalla tribes. He conducted research with the Grand Ronde tribe in the 1970s and 1980s and became a proficient speaker of Chinuk Wawa , a trade language spoken by tribes from southern Alaska to northern California and as far east as Montana. He has taught the language at the Grand Ronde Reservation for nearly 30 years. He is also one of the experts on the Kalapuya languages , spoken by the Kalapuya tribes of the Willamette and Umpqua Valleys, and in 2013, he began a project to translate the Melville Jacobs Kalapuya notebooks. Melville Jacobs was an anthropologist from the University of Washington who studied the languages of the Northwest Coast from 1928 until his death in 1971. He filled more than 100 field notebooks with information on the languages of the peoples of western Oregon, with a special focus on Kalapuya. Jacobs published a book of Kalapuya oral histories in 1945, Kalapuya Texts . He also worked with Kalapuya speaker John Hudson to translate numerous texts prepared by earlier anthropologists Leonard Frachtenberg and Albert Gatschet . Jacobs and Hudson were able to translate several of these previously gathered texts, but many remained untranslated when Hudson died in 1953. Zenk, along with colleague Jedd Schrock, spent many years first learning Kalapuya and then translating a set of the Jacobs notebooks that recorded the knowledge and history of a Kalapuya man named Louis Kenoyer . In 2017, Zenk and Schrock published My Life, by Louis Kenoyer: Reminiscences of a Grand Ronde Reservation Childhood . Zenk and Schrock’s work is a fine example of the research possibilities offered by the existing work of previous anthropologists. Zenk worked closely with the Grand Ronde tribe on this project and endeavored to make sure that the translation of Kenoyer’s story would benefit the people of the tribe to help them to better understand their own history. His research and work with members of the Grand Ronde tribe spanned 50 years, beginning with his PhD project, which involved extensive work with Grand Ronde members, who at the time were not a federally recognized tribe. In the 1990s, Zenk began working with the tribe to teach Chinuk Wawa to tribal members. The tribe today has an extensive language immersion project to teach the language to young people. Zenk has been a consistent influence, serving as advisor, teacher, master-apprentice instructor, and researcher. Zenk’s work has helped the tribe recover parts of its culture and history that had been lost for many decades. This page of an anthropologist’s field notebook from 1949 contains a travel itinerary for several months. Contemporary anthropologists are likely to have such information in digital format. (credit: “Field Notes – Mexico, 1949 (Page 180) BHL46264382” by James Arthur Peters/Biodiversity Heritage Library/Wikimedia Commons) Albert Gatschet 1832–1907 Albert Gatschet was a Swiss-American ethnologist who pioneered the scientific study of Native American languages. Here he is at age 61. (credit: “PSM V41 D306 Albert S Gatschet” by Popular Science Monthly /Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain) Personal History: Albert Gatschet was a Swiss philologist and ethnologist who emigrated to the United States in 1868. He had a great interest in linguistics and Native American languages, and he gained attention in 1872 for his comparative analysis of 16 southeastern tribal vocabularies, which opened up new areas of research in linguistics. In 1877, he was hired to work on the Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region as an ethnologist. He also collected many notebooks of languages from Native peoples in California and Oregon. He is most noted for his studies of the languages of the southeastern tribes and his ethnography of the Klamath Tribes of Oregon. Gatschet was fluent in numerous languages and published in English, French, and German in the United States and Europe during his career. He also became quite fluent in numerous Native languages. His first large work was Orts-etymologische Forschungen aus der Schweiz (Etymological research on place names from Switzerland, 1865–1867), a study of Swiss place names that is still the standard authority today. Area of Anthropology: Philology, ethnology, linguistics Accomplishments in the Field : One of Gatschet’s most significant analyses was of the southeastern tribal languages, principally the Timucua language of northern Florida. Based on analysis of the notes of the Catholic priest Father Pareja, who had collected language texts from the Timucua people in 1612–1614, Gatschet determined that Timucua was a distinct language group that had gone extinct. Gatschet also examined the Catawba language of South Carolina, concluding that it was related to the Siouan languages of the western Great Plains. From 1881 to 1885, Gatschet worked in Louisiana, discovering two new languages and completing ethnographic descriptions of the southern tribes. In 1886, he found the last speakers of the Biloxi and Tunica languages and related them to the Siouan languages as well. He published his studies of the Gulf tribes in the two-volume work A Migration Legend of the Creek Indians (1884, 1888). In 1877 and 1878, Gatschet spent time among the tribes of the Grand Ronde Reservation in Oregon. He collected some of the first professional field notes on the Kalapuya, Molala, and Shasta languages from some of the last speakers, and he published and made notes about the Kalapuya mounds. Upon leaving the reservation, he spent time researching the traditions of the Tualatin Kalapuya people in their traditional lands in the Tualatin Valley. He then went to the Klamath Reservation, where he collected field notes on the Klamath language. He worked his field notes into a two-part work, The Klamath Indians of Southwestern Oregon (1890), volume 2 of the US Department of the Interior’s Contributions to North American Ethnology . Gatschet was commissioned by the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) in 1891 to investigate the Algonquian people of the United States and Canada, a study he never fully completed. Illness forced him to retire, but near his death, he remained engaged in studies of Chinese languages. After his death, his wife, Louise Horner Gatschet, sold his field notes to the BAE. She was also hired by the BAE to help translate much of his work. Gatschet’s letters mention his wife being with him throughout his travels; she likely contributed in numerous ways to his field studies. Importance of His Work : Gatschet was one of the first professional anthropologists to visit many tribes and was able to collect ethnographies and narratives from peoples who were gone within the next decade. He analyzed language families in the field and provided early frameworks of connected languages. Gatschet’s work is fundamental to the study of the languages of western Oregon and the southeast Gulf area of the United States. His professional work, which applied rigorous methods to collect Native languages, predates much of the work of Franz Boas, who is credited with implementing scientific methods in the study of human societies. Interpretation and Voice There is increasing acknowledgement of the role of interpretation in the study of the human past. Although ideally grounded in well-conducted research and the best evidence available at the time, all conclusions about what might have been are based on the interpretations proposed by the authors of history. The backgrounds and viewpoints of those conducting research and publicizing findings play a significant role in the conclusions they reach and share with other scholars. Interpretation and perspective are affected by many factors, including racial category, nationality, religious beliefs, social status, political affiliation, ambitions, and education. For many years, anthropological studies were almost always conducted by White, male scholars who grew up in the Northern Hemisphere and were educated in the same system. These common backgrounds represent a significant interpretive bias. After being accessioned into museums, many collections of cultural artifacts have not been altered in more than 100 years. When these material objects were initially placed on display, choices about their arrangement and the written descriptions that accompanied them were made by museum curators. Most of these curators did not reach out to the originators of the artifacts or their descendants for input, and many exhibits do not accurately depict or describe the objects on display. Museum exhibits have been found to contain inaccurate information about objects’ material composition, makers, tribal cultures, collection sites, and proper use. Many other display objects are lacking this information altogether. Several museums are now seeking the help of Native people to better understand and more accurately tell the story of their collections. These Native perspectives are correcting misconceptions about the meaning and context of cultural artifacts and providing correct information about basic things such as the materials and processes used in the objects’ production. Native input is also guiding museums in making choices about how objects are arranged and displayed. This input has been invaluable in helping museums more accurately tell the stories and display the context of the peoples who originally created the objects on display. naturalism an approach that seeks to understand the world and the laws that govern it by direct observation of nature. oral histories histories of previous events, moral or ethical lessons, or stories of creation that are passed down by memorization. Many oral histories are also called mythologies, legends, texts, or folklore. salvage anthropology a particular period in early anthropological practices (1870s–1930s) during which tribal cultures were subject to extreme collecting from researchers. The practice occurred because of fears that Native cultures would go extinct and there would be nothing further to study.

Social Sciences


Ethnography and Ethnology Learning Outcomes By the end of this chapter, you will be able to: Identify early anthropological practices pertaining to ethnography. Define ethnology and provide examples of how it is used in anthropology. Describe efforts to achieve multiple perspectives in anthropological research. Define feminist anthropology and describe its aims. The Development of Ethnography and Ethnology As discussed in What is Anthropology? ethnography is a method used by cultural anthropologists to create a description of a culture or society. Ethnographers gather and utilize information from many sources, such as fieldwork, museum collections, government records, and archaeological data. In the 19th century, a form of ethnography developed that was called armchair anthropology , in which theories about human societies and human behaviors were proposed solely based on secondhand information. Lewis Henry Morgan is a well-known practitioner of this type of research. The content of his most famous publication, League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851), was gathered primarily from other books he read. Morgan did meet with Native peoples at various times in his career, but he did not conduct ethnographic research among the Iroquois before writing League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois . In the later 19th century, numerous anthropologists and other scholars undertook research projects with hundreds of tribes throughout the Americas, many of them by then living solely on federal reservations. Many of these researchers were influenced by Columbia University professor Franz Boas , a German scientist who was originally trained as a physicist but became most famous as an anthropologist. Boas insisted that scholars obtain ethnographical information directly from the peoples they aimed to write about, rather than collecting information from other published sources. Boas quickly established himself as a leader in the field of anthropology and eventually took an associate role at the federal Bureau of American Ethnology. Franz Boas is credited with establishing the standards of field research that became the foundation of contemporary anthropological practices. Here he is in 1915, 57 years old. (credit: “Franz Boas” by Canadian Museum of History/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain) Boas advocated for and published in all four fields of anthropology and asked many key questions in his scholarship. In his 1907 essay “ Anthropology ,” Boas identified two basic questions for anthropologists: “Why are the tribes and nations of the world different, and how have the present differences developed?” (Boas [1974] 1982, 269). Boas was responsible for hiring scholars and sending them out into the field to collect information about various Indigenous peoples. His standards of field research became the foundation of the contemporary science of anthropology. One area of interest for early anthropologists was the similarities and differences between various Indigenous societies. This interest in comparison led to a branch of anthropology called ethnology , which is a cross-cultural comparison of different groups. In early anthropology, ethnology’s aim was to understand how various Indigenous societies were related to one another. This included the relations among language dialects, dress, and appearance and to what degree and in what direction various tribes had migrated from one location to another. Early anthropologists explored these questions with the hope of tracking changes in tribal cultures. Another leading concern was how Native peoples initially got to the Americas. Anthropologists have used the practices of ethnology to establish relationships and shared cultural elements that help illuminate migration patterns of peoples from the “old” to the “new” world. Ethnology is still a common practice in linguistics, archaeology, and biological anthropology. Some additional uses of ethnology are fused with archaeological methods and analysis. Ethnoarchaeology is a form of archaeology in which, following methods largely created by American archaeologist Lewis Binford , archaeologists access ethnographic information about recent or existing human cultures to draw conclusions about human cultures in the archaeological past. In Binford’s 1978 study Nunamiut Ethnoarchaeology , he draws comparisons between the ways in which contemporary Indigenous peoples disposed of animal remains and the evidence observed in Nunamiut refuse sites. These comparisons inform a model that is used to understand more about how Indigenous peoples’ ancestors may have disposed of remains in the past. Such models are not perfect, but many Indigenous cultures have maintained aspects of their culture to the present day. Perspective and Interpretation in Ethnography Ethnography is still commonly used by cultural anthropologists. Practitioners today consult multiple informants during their research in order to gather a variety of perspectives on a culture or society. No one person has a full or authoritative view of their own culture; multiple viewpoints are essential to a full description. Many early anthropological studies only invited male perspectives, introducing a male bias into the resulting ethnographies. Now, anthropologists deliberately seek varied perspectives, consulting people of different genders and ages and who occupy different roles. Anthropologists can introduce significant bias into an ethnography. The most challenging aspect of fieldwork in cultural anthropology is to observe and study another culture without bias. Having an ethnocentric or etic perspective means someone is judging a culture according to the standards of their own culture and belief system. To observe a culture from the perspective of the people being researched is to have an emic perspective . For anthropologists to be effective researchers, they must be able to observe and gather data from unbiased and emic perspectives. In addition, an anthropologist’s interpretation of the information gathered can significantly alter their research findings. Earlier anthropologists were primarily male and White, so their findings were based on interpretations made through these lenses. Feminist anthropology attempts to address this male bias. Feminist anthropology is recognized as having begun as early as the 1850s, with attempts made (by male anthropologist) to include more information on women in their ethnographic research. In the 1920s, female anthropologists such as Zora Neale Hurston and Ruth Benedict began publishing in the field, but not until the 1928 publication of Margaret Mead ’s Coming of Age in Samoa did a female anthropologist gain prominence. This U.S. postage stamp honors anthropologist Margaret Mead. Mead was one of the first female anthropologists to be acknowledged for her work and insights. (credit: “Margaret Mead Stamp” by John Curran/flickr, CC BY 2.0) Women’s contributions and perspectives became much more pronounced in the later parts of the 20th century. Feminist anthropologists seek not only to claim a role for themselves in the field equal to that offered to men but also to expand the focal points of anthropological inquiry to include areas of life such as family, marriage, and child-rearing, as well as the economic and social roles played by women. The dominance of male anthropologists had biased analysis of human societies toward male-dominated roles and activities. Many early archaeological research, for example, assigned no role to women in early societies or assumed that women’s roles were limited to maintaining households and raising children. Evidence of women’s subsistence and economic activities was either not looked for or ignored. It was also assumed that women in early societies had subservient roles to men, when in fact most early societies have now been found to be very egalitarian, with equal status accorded to women and men. Feminist anthropology has both expanded research to include women’s roles and aimed to understand the gender roles in other societies on their own terms, rather than according to the gender roles of the researcher’s own society. Other perspectives emerged in anthropology in the 1970s as more members of minority groups began entering the field. One category of minority voices that has been a significant asset to anthropology is that of people with Indigenous ancestors. Practitioners with this type of background are part of a subfield called Indigenous anthropology . Indigenous anthropology is discussed in detail in Indigenous Anthropology . armchair anthropology a method of conducting anthropological research without doing fieldwork, relying instead on materials and documents previously collected by others. emic perspective viewing and attempting to evaluate other peoples and cultures according to the standards of those cultures; an “insider’s” point of view. ethnology the study of differences and relationships between various peoples, societies, and cultures. etic (or ethnocentric) perspective viewing a culture from the perspective of an outsider looking in. feminist anthropology an approach to anthropology that seeks to transform research methods and findings by engaging with more diverse perspectives and using insights from feminist theory. Indigenous anthropology the study of one’s own culture or society using anthropological methods. The term has come to mean any application of Indigenous knowledge, perspectives, and scholarship in anthropology. interpretation the act of explaining the meaning of something.

Social Sciences