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Cultural anthropology.

Cultural Anthropology publishes ethnographic writing informed by a wide array of theoretical perspectives, innovative in form and content, and focused on both traditional and emerging topics. It also welcomes essays concerned with ethnographic methods and research design in historical perspective, and with ways cultural analysis can address broader public audiences and interests.

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Vol. 39 No. 1 (2024)

We present six original papers in this issue as well as the inaugural guest commentary.

When the Society for Cultural Anthropology selected our distributed, international editorial collective to lead Cultural Anthropology , they did so in part to support our commitment to opening channels of this crucial platform of our discipline beyond the scope of privileged, endowed higher educational institutions in the United States. As one step of this process, in this issue we provide space to the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma to describe their work since the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990. As Deanna L. Byrd, the NAGPRA Liaison-Coordinator and Research and Outreach Program Manager of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, and Ian Thompson, the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, writes, since that time, “Native American communities gained a measure of say in how ancestral burials are treated on federal lands. The law also established a mechanism to help Native American, Alaskan, and Native Hawaiian communities have open dialogue with institutions across the country about the return of their ancestors, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony.” 

In dialogue with critical disability studies, Eliza Williamson zooms in the everyday practices of Bahian mothers with children diagnosed with Congenital Zika Syndrome. Mothers, she shows, assert their children’s personhood by refusing their medically diagnosed lack of futurity through what she defines as habilitative care: “a bodymind potentializing set of practices” involving a myriad of “substances, technologies and techniques understood to encourage maximum potential development of embodied abilities in young disabled children.”

Leniqueca Welcome delves into unaccounted forms of violence on and in those “who occupy the category of poor black woman in Trinidad” to develop a “capacious, relational and historically layered” approach to entangled forms of gender-based violence and life searching. In so doing, a sharp critique of the masculinist state and legacies of colonial extraction emerges.

By spending time with loggers, timber industrialists, and state technocrats across Peru’s Amazonian region of Loreto, Eduardo Romero Dianderas tracks technical maneuvers and political controversies around timber volumetric calculation. Far from a mathematical abstraction, his ethnography invites us to think that the practice of volume-making—scaling, standardizing, and accounting for timber—is a contact zone in which “power, history and bodily experience” saturate a crucial operation for global environmental governance.

Focusing on demonstrations held outside Yangon, Myanmar, in favor of a plan to build a New Yangon City, Courtney Wittekind’s article intervenes in the binaries of “truth” versus “falsity” and “genuine” versus “fake” to advance an anthropological theorization of demonstration, speculation, and spectacle.

For centuries, the Curse of Ham, the originary anti-Black myth of the Abrahamic faiths, functioned as the foundational and legitimating narrative of white supremacist ideology across the African continent. To Justin Haruyama’s disconcertment, this was also the narrative invoked by some of his Zambian informants to explain the predicament of Black people today. In his paper for this issue, Haruyama stages a conversation with Black liberation theology to suggest that these narratives articulated, however, a profound refutation of liberal egalitarianism and, from the situated premises of a transnational Zambian perspective, put forward an alternative vision for a decolonial abolitionist anthropology.

In his article, Ramy Aly interrogates the anthropology of ethics and revolution in dialogue with a phenomenological and situated account of the 2011 January Egyptian Revolution. He does it through the experiences and narratives of those that were too young to take part in street protests and political movements but for whom the revolution still takes precedent in everyday practices of self-making.

Cover and table-of-contents image by Eduardo Romero Dianderas.

Guest Commentary

No stone unturned.

Habilitating Bodyminds, Caring for Potential: Disability Therapeutics after Zika in Bahia, Brazil

On and in their bodies: masculinist violence, criminalization, and black womanhood in trinidad, volumes: the politics of calculation in contemporary peruvian amazonia, “take our land” : fronts, fraud, and fake farmers in a city-to-come, anti-blackness and moral repair: the curse of ham, biblical kinship, and the limits of liberalism, the ordinariness of ethics and the extraordinariness of revolution: ethical selves and the egyptian january revolution at home and school, curated collections.

War on Palestine

Sovereignty

Reclaiming Hope

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5 Cultural Anthropology

Susan J. Rasmussen, Department of Anthropology, University of Houston, Houston, TX

• Published: 21 November 2012
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This overview of cultural anthropology begins with a brief discussion of historical, recent, and current trends in theory and method. Next, there is a critical analysis of two broad issues concerning the anthropological subject: namely, tensions between approaches and perspectives emphasizing the individual, practice, and agency, on the one hand, and those emphasizing collectivities, institutions, and structure, on the other; and tensions between shared universal themes, on the one hand, and local cultural variations, on the other. There follow illustrative examples from selected relevant topics, including enculturation, altered states, healing, the body and senses, and personhood. The chapter concludes with a brief sum-up and key questions for future directions in cultural anthropology.

Anthropology, the study of humankind at the most comprehensive and holistic level, is a broad discipline that straddles the social sciences and the humanities and is comprised of several subfields or branches: social/cultural or simply, cultural anthropology; linguistic anthropology; archaeology; and physical or bio-anthropology. Some anthropologists also recognize an additional branch called applied anthropology, which involves the application of anthropological concepts, theories, and methods to public policy recommendations; whereas others locate this latter specialty within each of the traditional four branches. Central to social/cultural anthropology are several key concepts: culture, cultural relativism, holism, field research or fieldwork, ethnography, ethnology, comparison, translation, and concern with both shared (universal) themes and local diversity or variations in the expression of culture and the organization of society. This chapter will examine cultural anthropology; it will particularly focus on concepts and issues concerning relationships between individuals, cultures, and collectivities as well as variations on universal themes.

Although in some respects, cultural anthropology's subject matter overlaps with its “sister” social sciences, sociology and psychology, its distinctiveness consists in its tendency toward more qualitative, micro-, small-scale, and intimate perspectives on cultural phenomena. Whereas most sociologists tend toward the study of groups and institutions as their subject or unit of analysis, and most psychologists focus on mental processes, most cultural anthropologists emphasize their holistic interconnections and work within a theoretical framework built on the culture concept .

The Concept of Culture

Although the culture concept , in its classic and reformulated senses, constitutes the unifying paradigm for all subfields or branches of anthropology, cultural anthropology is that branch that focuses most intently on contemporary (living) human cultural and social beliefs, knowledge, and practices through in-depth study of a single cultural setting, as well as comparative cross-cultural studies. Cultural anthropologists conduct ethnographic field research or “fieldwork,” which includes a method called participant-observation, involving intensive submersion in the everyday life of the community, and depending on the topic and setting of research, also additional techniques, such as guided conversations and more structured interviews, life histories, case studies, genealogies, censuses, and (in more complex settings) network analysis and snowball sampling. Ideally, anthropologists approach field research with an attitude called cultural relativism . Cultural relativism does not imply justifying practices that the researcher finds morally or ethically repugnant but, rather, involves refraining, in so far as possible, from judging cross-cultural practices solely from the standpoint of the researcher's own cultural values and being aware of one's own biases and their sources and effects on constructing ethnographic knowledge. In contemporary cultural relativism, there is particular effort made to refrain from ranking beliefs and practices across different cultural settings and in historical eras: ideally, the researcher analyzes social/cultural beliefs, knowledge, practices, and behavior in a variety of contexts: historical, political, social, psychological, and economic. On the other hand, some anthropologists today advocate “activist anthropology,” an approach involving greater engagement with political issues—for example, advocacy for indigenous peoples’ rights. There is much debate in the discipline concerning these issues (Bodley, 1975 ; Tsing 2005 ).

History of Cultural Anthropology and the Culture Concept

Until very recently, anthropology was primarily a western European science. Many concepts central to the discipline originated in philosophical concepts and political policies extending from classical Greece through the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. Although there are increasing influences from scholars from post-colonial backgrounds today, anthropology nonetheless owes much in its origin and development to these historical legacies in Europe: for example, tensions between the “sacred” and “secular” worldviews of the Medieval Catholic Church and the secular views of the Renaissance and ensuing Age of Reason, with the rise of science in western Europe between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, contributed to increasing interest in a human- and nature-centered universe. Discoveries by Charles Lyell, the geologist, suggested that the age of the Earth was much older than that proposed by the Church, and the evolutionary theory proposed by Charles Darwin, the naturalist, emphasized transformation, rather than immutability, of life forms and suggested long-term evolutionary interconnections. Much of this work was stimulated by European exploration and colonial domination, which promoted a growing interest in human physical and cultural variation and change. Eighteenth century philologists studied the history of languages, and, with the German Idealist philosophers, became interested in the connections between language, mind, and nation—for example, Kant's distinction between noumena (things or objects directly perceived in the world) and phenomena (things or ideas indirectly experienced) as well as Hegel's concept of zeitgeist or “spirit of the times or nation,” which associated culture, in its early conceptualization, with learning, language, individual psychological identity, and group affiliation. Naturalists pursued the connections among plant, animal, and human life. Many traveled on scientific exploratory expeditions beyond Europe.

The Main Issues

The problem for many theorists, in these contexts, was the following: how humans were similar, how they were different, why, and what shared universal themes and local variations implied. These conditions prompted the collection of data on this diversity—for example, flora, fauna, and folklore from the “folk” at home and from so-called “primitive” peoples abroad, for purposes of classification. Carolus von Linnaeus formulated botanical and zoological taxonomies, and the Romantic Nationalism movement encouraged the preservation of “quaint” customs from the rural peasants. Some early evolutionary anthropologists, such as Edward Tylor and James Frazer, interpreted exotic customs as “survivals” or remnants of past practices; ethnographic analogies were made between marginal practices assumed to derive from Europe's past and the practices of non-Western peoples, in grand schemes of the origins of culture. This early version of the comparative method, which featured ethnocentric and racist ranking of cultures and societies in an effort to find the origins of civilization, differed from the relativistic cross-cultural comparison as practiced by anthropologists today, whose purpose is not to rank or find origins but rather to yield insights into the range of human cultural and social behavior in terms of similarities and differences. At that time, anthropology was only beginning to emerge as an academic discipline at universities in Europe and the United States, and its branches or subfields of study had not yet become distinct; for example, biological or physical anthropology was not yet separate from cultural anthropology, and there was a conflation of physical characteristics with sociocultural phenomena—for example, a misguided equation made between physical attributes of so-called “race” and culture. In the first theoretical school called unilineal evolutionism in academic anthropology, which arose in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, peoples outside of Europe and their beliefs and practices, as representatives of earlier phases or stages of European institutions, beliefs, and practices, were thought to be capable of progress on the ladder of civilization but moving at different rates.

Additional processes—wider, wider demographic and economic changes in Europe from industrialization and bureaucratization in the nineteenth century—also encouraged the growth of the social sciences—for example, the rise of penal reform, and the disciplines of demography, sociology, and psychiatry (Foucault, 1978 ). Emile Durkheim (an early founder of anthropology and sociology) and his student Marcel Mauss were concerned with the perceived breakdown of reciprocity in European society in the wake of these changes. August Comte promoted positivist objective data collection. Karl Marx formulated his theory of alienation from the products of one's labor is his critique of capitalism.

All these questions were initially addressed in a context of domination: increasing colonialism by European state powers beyond Europe and nationalist domination by these state governments over marginalized rural peoples, so-called “peasants” or “folk,” in Europe itself. There was the view that administrators and missionaries shared a civilizing mission, popularly called the “White Man's Burden.” Many Victorian unilineal evolutionists at first worked at a distance from these remote locations, conducting armchair research; only a few of the early anthropologists conducted direct fieldwork.

Impacts on Culture Theories

These conditions had several consequences for early theories of culture. First, in Darwinian circles, at least, culture tended to be equated with race—the latter concept now recognized as a political device and an oversimplification, despite human physical variation. Second, for some time culture remained defined in the singular, in the Enlightenment sense of a civilization—that is, with implied greater or lesser degrees of cultivation—and having superior or inferior connotations, all based on very ethnocentric value judgments, with Europe believed to stand at the pinnacle or apex of development.

Beginning in the early twentieth century, anthropologists such as Franz Boas in the United States and Bronislaw Malinowski and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown in Britain spearheaded the newly diverging branch of (socio)cultural anthropology; they began to question the assumptions, theories, concepts, and methods of the nineteenth-century unilineal evolutionists and began to promote direct fieldwork and cultural relativism. Yet many, despite individual opposition to colonialism, continued to work for colonial administrations—for example, Evans-Pritchard ( 1940 ) among the Nuer in the then-Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. The concept of culture changed radically. The method of field research became mandatory for full professional status in cultural anthropology. Modern anthropology today owes a debt to these theorists, who reacted against previous Victorian anthropological paradigms of unilineal evolutionism—for example, “social Darwinism,” the distorted application of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory to human social practices. Franz Boas, a German-Jewish immigrant who had suffered from anti-Semitism, became interested in salvaging the cultures of the Native American Indians. Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish aristocrat who became stranded in the Trobriand Islands off Australia upon the outbreak of World War I, similarly experienced marginal status himself, began undertaking intensive fieldwork and local language study, and became interested in the function, rather than the origin, of practices such as ritual and economics. Both these theorists rejected the heretofore prevalent “armchair scholarship,” racism, and speculative grand generalizations on the origins and sequences of human culture.

In the United States, Boas's historical-particularism school of thought distinguished among culture, race, and language and advocated studying particular cultures and their histories directly, without ranking or proposing grand universal schemes of human origin or development. Boas and his colleagues and students also founded the subfield of culture and personality within cultural anthropology, which examined childrearing customs across diverse cultures, emphasizing learned cultural—rather than universal biological—influences on personality.

Anthropologies Across the Atlantic

Initially, ethnographies tended to describe entire cultures or communities comprehensively (Malinowski, 1926). Soon, however, cultural anthropologists began to focus intently on a specific problem or issue in anthropological theory, either drawing on their primary data from a single cultural/social setting in an ethnography or, in other cases, drawing on secondary data collected by several different researchers in several different cultural settings, in a cross-cultural comparison or ethnology. The ethnographies of Margaret Mead, a student of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict and an early theorist in the “culture and personality” school, examined concepts of adolescence and gender in Polynesian societies (Mead, 1928 , 1935 ), exploring how these differed from American psychologists’ concepts at that time. For example, Mead found that Samoan adolescents were permitted much more freedom and experienced less anxiety than their American counterparts, thereby suggesting, she argued, that the alleged stresses of adolescence were neither universal nor biologically based. Mead also studied gender constructs in three societies of New Guinea and argued that male and female roles were a result of nurture, rather than nature. Although some of Mead's findings were later disputed by other anthropologists (Freeman, 1983 ; Gewertz, 1983 ), her work was nonetheless important in its early questioning of widely held assumptions of universals in life course and gendered experiences.

In Britain, the structural-functionalist school of thought similarly opposed unilineal evolutionism, eschewing history and origins and instead, somewhat like Durkheim in France, advocated synchronic analysis of the structure and function of institutions in terms of how they promote harmonious continuity of society. Later, students of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown developed increasingly complex theories of the connections between social structure and cultural knowledge or belief: E.E. Evans-Pritchard, in his works on the ecology, political system, and religion of the Nuer people of the then-Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, described how local religion was refracted in social life and how local philosophy was not child-like but, rather, was metaphorical (Evans-Pritchard, 1940 , 1956 ). For example, when some Nuer say that “twins are birds,” they do not view them as equivalent but, rather, view human twins as anomalous, and thus analogous, to birds in that both share qualities such as multiple births, and both are believed to mediate, in the sky, between humans and Kwoth, or Spirit. In France, Durkheim and his students also emphasized the importance of “social facts,” from direct observation, and developed the concept of the collective unconscious as an overarching belief of a group, much more than a sum total of individual viewpoints. Durkheimian sociology also analyzed symbolic classifications as reflecting society, not nature—for example, spirit pantheons often reflect human social divisions.

Recent Trends in Modern Cultural Anthropology

From these insights, there emerged several important new understandings of culture. This concept became defined more in the plural than in the singular and acquired more neutral connotations, as denoting the sum total of a group's belief system. In the formulation of Clifford Geertz, founder of interpretive anthropology, culture is transmitted through learning and is widely shared (Geertz, 1973 ). In this formulation, the anthropologist “reads” a culture like a text—that is, as one would interpret and translate a poem or novel. Thus, the cultural anthropologist first interprets the local culture in the field in Geertz's words, reads it “over the shoulders of the native,” and then “translates” this into terms understood by his/her audience at home. Thus culture is like a literary text. In Geertz's textual approach, as in the pioneering Boasian schools of historical-particularism and culture and personality, the anthropologist seeks cultural relativism, but nonetheless still retains much authority as translator, and the culture concept, although more relativistic, tends to imply a monolithic homogeneity.

This more modern view of culture has been accompanied by important changes in anthropologists’ methods; “ethnography” has come to refer to several practices: fieldwork with participant-observation, the description of a cultural setting or community (usually focused on a specific issue or problem in anthropological theory), and the writing practice itself. Ethnology, more comparative work, draws more systematically on data from different settings to compare several distinct societies, to pursue cross-cultural comparisons of specified beliefs and practices. Notwithstanding their differences, both ethnography and ethnology are analytical, in the sense that they both engage wider issues and debates in anthropology. For example, the work of Mary Douglas ( 1966 ) examined the meanings of purity, pollution, and ritual restrictions called “taboos” in both historical and cross-cultural terms. In her theory of anomaly, Douglas argued that food taboos’ meanings, for example, do not arise from strictly hygienic or ecological conditions in local consciousness (even if one of their functions may be hygienic or ecological) but, rather, have to do with symbolic classification of human cultural systems; many forbidden foods, such as pork in Islam and Orthodox Judaism, are not easily classified and therefore are anomalous. Here, meaning rather than origin, cause, or function is important in cultural classification, recalling in some respects Durkheimian sociology and also Levi-Straussian structuralism.

Since approximately the mid-twentieth century, in addition to Geertz's comparative literature hermeneutic approach to culture as text, additional influences have derived from linguistics. French structuralism, brought by Claude Levi-Strauss ( 1963 ) to cultural anthropology, draws on principles and methods from linguistics: culture is seen as a system of communication, and meaning derives from contrast. In particular, Levi-Strauss analyzed the structure of myths and symbols to elicit meaning from binary oppositions, which revealed mythemes, or the smallest units of meaning in myth, which were analogous to the phonemic principle in linguistics. According to Levi-Strauss, this construction of meaning is a universal characteristic of all human mental logic, which finds expression in a variety of domains. Symbolic anthropologists and semioticians drew extensively on these ideas, applying them to ritual symbolism (V. Turner, 1967 ), kinship (D. Schneider, 1980 ), popular culture (Drummond, 1996 ), and advertising (Barthes, 1982 ).

Other trends have addressed ethnography. Until recently, much anthropological field research focused on small-scale and rural communities remote from the researcher's own (home) community. In current reformulations of culture, which have responded to new cultural formations such as globalization, borderlands, and dynamic practices (such as science and technology), the concept of culture has expanded to include more complex settings, such as urban milieu and even virtual, online communities; accordingly, fieldwork may now take place in any community—rural or urban, locally or abroad—and sites of fieldwork for cultural anthropologists today are expanding to include such places as scientific laboratories (Rabinow, 2003 ) and virtual communities, as well—for example, the Internet (Boellstorff, 2010 ).

There have also been changes in the writing of ethnographies, a practice following data collection in the field, in which the cultural anthropologist proceeds to analyze the data and write a description of a single cultural or community setting. This description, a literary genre using literary devices (Clifford & Marcus, 1986 ), has recently been the topic of much critical reflection in cultural anthropology. Classical or “realist” ethnographies—for example, those of Evans-Pritchard on the Nuer (1940, 1956) and of Malinowski on the Trobriand Islanders (1926, 1927)—tended to use rhetorical techniques similar to those used in a novel, which were previously considered objective, with only a single meaning determined by the author/researcher. More subjective reflections by the author/researcher, as well as his/her consultants and assistants in the field, initially were either omitted or appended in separate prefaces and afterwords (Evans-Pritchard, 1940 ; Marcus & Fischer, 1986 ). Recently, there have been efforts at greater experimentation in ethnographic writing projects—for example, including references to the personal experiences of the researcher, accounts of the circumstances of data collection, and recognition of local collaborators (Rabinow, 1977 ; Stoller, 1987 , 1989 ; Gottlieb & Graham, 1994 ; Marcus, 2005 ).

Most recently, the concept of culture has been undergoing additional revisions, for several reasons. The mid-to-late twentieth century saw liberation movements among colonized peoples, ethnic minorities, and women, who have contributed much more to cultural anthropological theory. Anthropologists now come from diverse backgrounds. Postcolonial, post-structural, post-modern, and gender studies have conducted critiques of the old canons, in some cases rejecting all the major schools of anthropological thought. Feminist anthropologists (Rosaldo & Lamphere, 1974 ; Butler, 1999 ) have critiqued androcentric male bias in some earlier anthropological works. Other scholars—for example, Byron Good ( 1994 ) in medical anthropology—have proposed replacing cultural belief with cultural knowledge to render anthropological concepts of non-Western systems more commensurate with Western systems. Talal Asad (in Clifford & Marcus, 1986 ) conducted a critique of the Geertzian interpretive anthropological concept of cultural translation, arguing that the translation of culture is not the same as the translation of language. Asad has also written a critique of the old structuralist binary opposition between “sacred” and “secular” in anthropological studies of religion and has questioned the assumption that secularism always produces greater liberty, drawing on examples from history, and arguing that there can be oppression in both religious and secular settings (Asad, 2003 ).

Interdisciplinary Links

In tandem with these trends, there have also occurred much cross-fertilization and interdisciplinary dialogue between the social sciences and humanities—particularly among anthropology, literary criticism, semiotics, and comparative literature. For example, the comparative literature scholar Edward Said ( 1978 ) in his work, Orientalism, critiqued some ethnographic portrayals of Middle Eastern peoples in an exaggerated exoticism (e.g., literary and historic portrayals of the Orient as sensual and the West as logical) and encouraged anthropologists to reflect more carefully on the history of their relationships with peoples glossed as “Other.” In his work “The Invention of Africa,” V.Y. Mudimbe ( 1988 ) explored the historical and social construction of the “idea” of Africa.

Additional influences have come from the Soviet Semioticians Mikhael Bakhtin and V.N. Volosinov, whose works written during Stalin's reign and later translated into English critiqued authoritarian forms of literary analysis: these scholars proposed locating meaning not in the text but rather in the utterance, suggested that meanings are not monolithic but are multiple, and that meanings are dialogically constructed by not solely the author but also by the reader and other forces such as the histories readers of a text bring to the interpretation of a literary work. These critiques, as well as wider political and economic processes of globalization, mass media and communications, and transcultural or transnational processes, such as accelerating labor migration and refugee flight of vulnerable peoples and human rights concerns, have encouraged moving toward a concept of culture emphasizing more process and practice—of culture as an encounter, as negotiable, and as relational (Eriksen, 2003 ; Gupta & Ferguson, 1997 ) rather than textual or structural in the older, static sense of this concept. Arjun Appadurai ( 1996 ), for example, has proposed new terms for culture such as ethnoscape and technoscape . These terms have not, however, replaced the term culture in the mainstream disciplinary discourses. But they have brought greater sensitivity to the need for specification in cultural analysis, and some anthropologists now tend to use “cultural” in the adjective form more often than as a noun to avoid the older totalizing, neatly bounded sense of this concept (Faubion, 2001 ; Rasmussen, 2008 ). However, locality remains important, albeit not as an isolated entity but more as a space of encounter. In these newer formulations, moreover, political-economy approaches emphasizing power and semiotic-expressive approaches emphasizing symbolism, once seen as oppositional, are often becoming intertwined (Rasmussen, 2001 ; Tsing, 2005 ). In these developments, a central concern has been with the units of analysis—that is, the anthropological subject.

The Anthropological Subject

Recurrent and emerging issues in the study of culture, society, and the individual.

Cultural anthropology, from its inception and throughout its transformations, has been concerned with what constitutes the human subject. As a science of anthropos (Rabinow, 2003 ), anthropology's most basic, pervasive concern has been with relationships among individuals, institutions, and belief/knowledge systems. In this focus on individual/culture/collectivity connections, two broad issues have reverberated throughout the discipline. First, there have been tensions between theories and concepts emphasizing personal/ individual agency and practice on the one hand and those emphasizing collective/institutional forces of structure and the group on the other. Second, there are debates over the extent of universals in human belief and practice, on the one hand, and the extent to which, and what explains, specific cultural differences in human belief and practice on the other. In this latter concern, studies have tended to emphasize either cultural universals (e.g., Levi-Strauss's analysis of myths as manifesting a universal human mental logic) or cultural specifics (e.g., Mead's ethnographic critique of T. Stanley Hall's theory of a universal, biologically based experience of adolescence). The individual/collectivity issue, its roots pervasive in social theory, is addressed here first, in terms of the tendency of the theoretical pendulum to swing back and forth between these two poles of emphasis. Addressed next is the problem of universals versus local cultural variations, with a particular focus here on approaches in the subfield of psychological anthropology within cultural anthropology.

Following discussions of these two theoretical issues pertaining to the individual in culture and society, there is a review of work relevant to these concerns: culture and personality and enculturation; altered states, including trance possession/mediumship and dreams and healing and medico-ritual specialists; and concepts of body, senses, and person/self. These topics, although not representative of all issues or topics in cultural anthropology, have received much attention, have raised key questions, and have suggested future directions in the discipline.

Collectivities and Individuals; Structure and Agency

Structure and agency constitute two main shapers of outcomes. Most theories tend to emphasize individual practice or collective social action. In this trend, there have been approximately three main positions taken. First is the position involving doctrines that social/cultural life is largely determined by social structure and that individual agency or practice can be explained as mostly the outcome of structure or institutions; examples include French Structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss, with its emphasis on universal mental logical structures; Durkheimian normative sociology and its influence in anthropology; the British social anthropological school of structural-functionalism (e.g., Radcliffe-Brown); and some Marxist theories.

The second position includes doctrines that reverse the above emphasis, stressing instead the capacity of individuals (individual agents) to construct and reconstruct their worlds, and the necessity of explanations in actors’ terms. Examples include utilitarianism as formulated by John Locke, and the associated Economic Man liberal and neo-liberal economic theories of cost–benefit analysis; ethnomethodology and related game theory studies of Frederik Barth (e.g., the individual flexibly wearing different “hats” of identity); and the dramaturgical concept of social action analogous to theatrical performance of Erving Goffman, centering on the human actor's presentation of self and impression-management on a kind of stage. These share an emphasis on the immediate situation and individual calculations during social interaction, a philosophical school of thought holding that utility entails the greatest happiness of the greatest number of persons and in which the assumption is that individuals rationally pursue their own interests and this seeps down to benefit all in the long term. Here, society is no more than an aggregation of individuals brought together in realization of individual goals. The focus is not on wider power structures, whether cultural/symbolic, social, or material.

The third major position on this issue includes doctrines that emphasize that these two processes and forces are complementary—that is, both structural influences on human action and individual agency are capable of changing social structure. In this view, there are moves toward emphasizing practice, process, and relations (e.g., post-structural and post-modern theorists such as Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu). In these works, a number of interesting formulations of alternatives to either extreme of emphasis have emerged; for example, Peter Berger and Steven Luckman in The Construction of Social Reality (1966) argued that society forms individuals, who create society in a continuous dialectic. Anthony Giddens ( 1984 ), in his concept of structuration, opposed the dualism of structure and agency out of hand, favoring a duality of structure in the sense that structure constitutes both the medium and the outcome of conduct it recursively organizes and structure constitutes rules and resources that do not exist outside actions but continuously impact its production and reproduction of action. Giddens also opposed analogies between social and physical structures (e.g., the British structural functional “machine” or “body” model of society). For Giddens, there is structure, but this is more fluid and negotiable. Even in these more nuanced approaches, the issue remains of not solely who we are but who we are in relation to ideas (cultural knowledge, or values), practice (agency), and structure (institutions).

One prominent concern, shown in the pervasive presence of the adjectives “structural” and “post-structural” in anthropology, has been with structure: what is it and from where does it derive? Also, how does one conceptualize the changing relationship between structure and agency? These concerns, still very much alive in cultural anthropology, can be traced back to the emergence of the social sciences as academic disciplines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As founder of both anthropology and sociology, Emile Durkheim ( 1895 , 1912 ) addressed the problem of social cohesion in so-called “poly-segmentary societies” that he considered based on mechanical solidarity, in contrast to the organic solidarity of modern societies with their division of labor (Parsons, 1965 , p. 39). Parsons traces Durkheim's early opposition to utilitarian and psychological explanations to other currents in French intellectual history—namely, Descartes, Rousseau, Saint-Simon, August Comte, and Fustel de Coulanges (Parsons, 1965 , pp. 39–65). His deep concern was to mediate between British empiricism and utilitarianism and German idealism.

The Issue of Structure

In his Rules of the Explanation of Social Facts (1895 [1958]), Durkheim critiques functional utilitarianism (Parsons, 1965 ) and, in my view, implicitly, also British structural-functionalism, by arguing there is more to interpreting social facts than social morphology; the utility of a social fact may lead to social insight, but it does not explain its origins. Function does not create the social fact; facts come from somewhere deeper. Prior forces must exist to produce the fact. Also, facts can exist without serving a purpose; they may have never been used or may have lost their utility—for example, because of this, causes of a social phenomenon and its function must be studied separately, and cause must be studied before its effects. Also confronted here is the issue of where social phenomena originate. Previously, Comte and Spencer asserted that society is a system derived from an individual psyche of humans set up to achieve certain goals. In their view, social theory is an extension of psychology. Durkheim disputes this argument: it is not individual wants and needs that dictate how humans act but social forces that transcend them; he asserted that it is not individual wants and needs that dictate how a human acts but, rather, social forces that transcend them. Only society remains to explain social life, as this pressures an individual to act and think in certain ways. This is accomplished through association. We are not merely the sum of our parts; in association, we act differently than we do as individuals. We become a separate entity that transcends our individuality. For example, this view would explain some unexpected election results as not resulting from the sum total of atomistic, individual opinions but instead from the work of structural facts (e.g., economic forces) and collective representations (e.g., cultural values) that transcend individuals’ consciousness and actions—in other words, a collective conscious in a kind of crowd psychology a la Gustav Lamont. Society is a given reality, having exteriority from the point of view of its own members, but it also regulates or constrains their action. This view is very opposed to a utilitarian view, as expressed by the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in her statement that “there is no society, only individuals and families.” For Durkheimians, by contrast, society is a system formed by association and a different reality with its own characteristics.

Yet Durkheim does not dismiss psychology completely; he believes it plays an important role in preparing for the study of social phenomena (Parsons, 1965 ). Indeed, Durkheim thought that the essential elements of culture and social structure are internalized as part of the individual personality. Nevertheless, an element of exteriority is involved in moral authority because, although internalized, the normative system must also objectively be part of a system extending beyond the individual (Baerveldt & Verheggen, 2011 ; Tavory, Jablonka, & Ginsburg, 2011 , this volume). It is not subjective in the sense of a purely private individual, for it is also a cultural object in sense relevant to idealistic tradition. For example, the meaning of success cannot be established without understanding the interplay between the motivation of the actor and the normative claims impinging on him from his social environment, expressed in the distinction made by a student of Durkheim's, Marcel Mauss, between two types of personhood/self: le moi (me) and la conception de la personne sociale (concept of social person). For, at the same time, as Nsamenang ( 2011 ) points out in the present volume, the social environment of any given actor of reference is composed of other actors whose action must be also analyzed as interactional. Anomie, or normlessness, thus makes achieving goals meaningless from lack of clear criteria.

Durkheim later theorized on religion, symbolic systems, and collective representations (1912 [1954]) and emphasized a theory of culture in relation to that of society. Here religion is the primordial matrix, from which principal elements of culture emerged by the process of differentiation—specifically, in totemism, the origin of religion. The classification in cultural belief/knowledge that distinguishes between sacred and profane is similar to the distinction between moral obligations and expediency or utility. For Durkheim and those influenced by this theorist, such as Marcel Mauss (1936) and later, Mary Douglas ( 1966 ), the quality of sacredness does not reside in any intrinsic properties of the object treated as sacred but, rather, in its properties as a symbol and its position to other objects, seen by Durkheim as collective representations, which became defined in recent and contemporary cultural anthropology as symbolic systems (Turner, 1967 ). In this formulation, there is a close integration between the religious system of representations and the structure of society itself, linked by the attitude of moral respect that Durkheim called “awe.” According to Durkheim, this integration is particularly close in primitive religion but also exists in others. Any cultural system must have a collective aspect, for symbolization that is wholly private is no longer cultural or even truly symbolic; this later influenced Clifford Geertz's ( 1973 ) concept of culture as shared, public, and translatable.

In the wake of this legacy, several more nuanced approaches to this issue have tended to retreat somewhat from the normative traditions of the Durkheimians and the British structural-functionalists and place greater emphasis on agency and practice, although differing nonetheless from the older ethnomethodological and utilitarian emphases, by giving some nods to the power of structure.

For example, in his work Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977), Pierre Bourdieu addressed continental philosophy as much as anthropology. But Bourdieu drew on the Marxist concept of habitus and also emphasized practice to explore the question of human agency. In Bourdieu's formulation, habitus consists of a system of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as principles of generation, and structuring of practices and representations that can be objectively regulated and regular without in any way being the product of obedience to rules. The term disposition signifies the special place the body occupies in habitus; dispositions are cultivated through interaction with a whole symbolically structural environment, and these cultivated dispositions become inscribed in body schema and in schemes of thought. For example, Bourdieu discusses the Kabyle sense of honor, emphasizing the dual location of honor in both the mind and the flesh. In Bourdieu's conception of habitus , mastery of body is essentially successful in corporation (literally, the taking into the body) of particular social meanings, inculcated through various bodily disciplines oriented to such mundane practices as standing, sitting, speaking, walking, and organization in space. In mastering the body, the child develops skills to act in and on the world. This is a dialectical process Bourdieu calls “the appropriating by the world of a body thus enabled to appropriate the world” (Bourdieu, 1977 , p. 89). Thus the ideology or culture is not only in our head but also in our bodies (e.g., is embodied), and although there is some room for agency, structure tends to reproduce itself.

Shared Universal Themes, Local Cultural, and Personal Variations

Another stream of thought in cultural anthropology, psychological anthropology (which arose from its ancestral school, culture, and personality) approaches the problem of the anthropological subject by focusing on individual mental aspects of humankind in learning the culture and weighs the relative power of shared universal common themes and local variations. The complex processes by which an individual acquires traits his or her society considers desirable—or undesirable—involve learning to experience the world in a particular way. Enculturation and socialization practices are one focus. These differ widely from culture to culture and are processes by which the individual learns knowledge, values, and skills required in a particular society. Because of this great variation, anthropologists have asked whether people who grow up in different societies learn to see the world differently. So completely does socialization shape our experience of the world that we come to see our own worldview as natural. Psychologically oriented cultural anthropologists have used cross-cultural studies as a basis for considering whether people universally perceive the world in the same way in some contexts, whether they think about it in same way, and whether concepts of person/self are universal.

The history of psychological anthropology has been marked by attempts to distinguish human universals from characteristics that are particular to specific, local populations of different cultural and community settings. One major focus in this debate has been Sigmund Freud's concept of the Oedipal complex. Freud thought that all male children are subject to the Oedipal complex, in which they sexually desire the mother and resent the father. Bronislaw Malinowski ( 1927 ) suggested that the Oedipal complex is associated with patrilineal inheritance, but some other anthropologists see what they consider to be Oedipal patterns cross-culturally in myths and dreams.

The Oedipal complex takes its name from the story of the Greek hero Oedipus, who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. Freud suggested that the Oedipal story expresses conflicts that are universal in the developmental cycle of males throughout the world. According to Freud, boys become sexually aroused by their mothers during intimate contact occasioned by maternal nurturing and, as a result, become envious of their fathers. Melford Spiro described the resulting conflict in the boy's mind: “As result of his wish to possess exclusive love of the mother, boy moreover develops wish to kill father and to replace him in his relationship with mother (in mind of little boy, to kill means to eliminate, to banish, to get rid of)” (Spiro, 1982 , p. 4). At the same time, the boy admires his father and seeks to emulate him.

Malinowski ([ 1927 ] 1955) rejected Freud's contention that the Oedipal complex is universal. Rather, he argued, the tension between father and son described by Freud results from European system of patrilineal inheritance, rather than from sexual competition for the mother. Because, under the patrilineal system, a boy inherits property and social status from his father, the boy feels resentment toward his potential benefactor, who has authority over him. At the same time, the father feels ambivalence toward his son, who will eventually assume control of his status and property as the father grows older and dies.

Among Trobriander Islanders, Malinowski noted, descent is matrilineal, which means a boy inherits status and property from his mother's brother rather than from his father. In the Trobriands, boys have warm, affectionate relationships with their fathers because they do not see them in authoritarian role (Malinowski, [ 1927 ] 1955, p. 31). By contrast, the relationship between the boy and his mother's brother is one of tension and conflict, as the boy will inherit his status and property through his mother's line, from the senior male, his maternal uncle. The maternal uncle is also in charge of disciplining the boy and feels ambivalent toward his heir, who will eventually displace him and take property away from his own son. According to Malinowski, it is competition over authority and status, rather than over sexual access to the mother, that is the source of anxiety between a boy and the man from whom will inherit his social position. Thus the Oedipal complex does not exist among matrilineal Trobriand Islanders.

Other anthropologists have more recently re-analyzed Malinowski's data to challenge his view that the Oedipal complex does not occur in matrilineal societies. For example, Annette Weiner ( 1976 ) found that fathers in the Trobriand Islands still maintain social, emotional, and economic ties with sons, despite the matrilineal emphasis, in gift-giving and other exchanges. Melford Spiro ( 1982 ) found that in their dreams, Trobriand subjects never dreamed of having sexual intercourse with their mothers but did have some sexual dreams about their sisters, despite strong sexual taboos between siblings. Brother–sister incest is also a prominent theme in Trobriand myths. Melford Spiro argues that the brother–sister incest theme in these dreams and myths suggests that sexual attraction and hostility are deflected from their true objects, mother and father, and displaced onto less threatening subjects, sister and maternal uncle. Thus Oedipal complex is not absent among Trobrianders; rather, it emerges in disguised form as love for one's sister and hostility toward one's mother's brother (Spiro, 1982 ).

Whether the Oedipal complex is universal continues to be debated in anthropology. Freud suggested that unconscious conflicts are expressed in dreams of individuals and myths of societies. Allen Johnson and Douglass Price-Williams ( 1996 ) conducted a cross-cultural survey of myths and tales and concluded that the Oedipal complex is indeed universally represented in these societies, suggesting that mother–son attraction and father–son hostility is a theme in all societies (Womack, 2001 , p. 186). This debate is not settled, however.

The foregoing debate raises wider issues, such as the relative influence of socialization and patterns of social organization on individual practices (Nsamenang, 2011 , this volume). Recall that Franz Boas, as founding father of American anthropology, in the early twentieth century emphasized the importance of culture. This insight influenced a number of anthropologists who studied the relationships among culture, childrearing practices, and adult personality. The works of those anthropologists became known as the culture-and-personality school. Although contemporary anthropologists reject these researchers’ overemphasis on uniformity within cultures and oversimplification of complex variables, the culture-and-personality school provided an important basis for development of psychological anthropology.

One topic within this school concerned defining “normal” and “deviant” behavior as shaped by socialization or enculturation. Ruth Benedict ( 1934 ) discussed how societies tolerate a range of behaviors considered normal and have means for dealing with behavior that violates the norm—sometimes providing a niche for those who do not conform to normative expectations; for example, some Native American Indians have very flexible concepts of gender roles in which biological men may become cultural females, formerly called “berdache” and now called “two spirits” (Whitehead in Ortner, 1981 ).

In some non-Western medicine, shamans or mediumistic healers treat a variety of disorders, both physical and psychological. Anthropologists (Harner, 1990 ; Kendall, 1989 ; Winkelman, 2000 ) have noted that shamanic healing can be effective, in part because it treats underlying tensions in the group instead of isolating the individual. Shamans also treat illnesses through medico-ritual therapies, such as spirit possession (Rasmussen, 1995 , 2001 ), that are similar to techniques used by Western psychotherapists.

Altered States (Spirit Possession/Mediumship/Shamanism; Dreams) and Healing

According to the widespread biomedical model, a human being is a physical entity, a thing existing apart from other such physical entities. These individualistic and Cartesian mind/body dualist views are reflected in the allopathic or biomedical model of healing, in which illness is treated as a failure of one's organs or of bodily mechanisms. For example, an illness may be diagnosed as a renal failure, a failure of kidneys to perform as they ordinarily do. Following from that diagnosis, treatment may be confined to repairing kidneys rather than treating the system that gave rise to failure of kidney to perform as expected. In fact, kidneys share a relationship with every other aspect of body, including the circulatory system, which delivers oxygen and other nutrients to kidneys, and lungs, which take in air and provide oxygen that every part of body requires (Womack, 2001 , p. 183).

By contrast, shamans or mediumistic healers trace the origins of illness to disrupted social relationships. This is an alien concept in Western bio- or allopathic medicine, which until recently has tended to emphasize isolated, biological causes of disease. Recent research is suggesting that although the biomedical tradition is necessary for healing some diseases, it is an oversimplification in some contexts of healing. Medical conditions such as cancer, hypertension, and asthma may be related to the expression or repression of emotions, which is also related to socialization and cultural expectations about the appropriate way to behave in social groups. Underlying the biomedical model is the idea that individuals are discrete units that stand in opposition to a culturally coherent group. This view is at variance with some other models, which view humans as members of groups, fulfilling their destinies only through social interaction.

Cross-cultural studies of medico-ritual healing through altered states of consciousness—namely, trance—illustrate these dynamics vividly. According to the established biomedical allopathic medical model, recall that illness tends to be classified as either physical or mental (organic or non-organic). Deviance from the ideal is often regarded as an individual problem rather than as an affliction of the group as a collectivity. Most societies do not, however, distinguish so neatly between physical (organic) and mental (non-organic) illness, nor do they always draw a rigid boundary between intentional and unintentional deviance. Treatment is usually aimed at identifying problematic relationships within the group. In these societies, the source of the problem is often attributed to outside forces, either naturalistic, human/social (personalistic), or spiritual—for example, malevolent ghosts or shades (Foster, 1977 ). Traditional mediumistic healers, widely called shamans in anthropology, frame their diagnoses and treatments in symbolic terms. The use of symbols in medico-ritual treatments express complex ideas in dramatic forms and allow indirect expression of emotional and social issues, (Turner, 1967 ), such as the unequal treatment of co-wives (Rasmussen, 1995 , 2001 , 2006 ).

By attributing illness or nonconforming behavior to demons or spirits, the shaman can diffuse and defuse the powerful emotions generated by competing interests and conduct psychotherapeutic healing. The shaman uses symbols to treat a disorder within the social context. For example, he/she might diagnose an illness as the result of not pleasing an ancestor. In so doing, the healer brings to the surface tensions underlying the illness or deviant action of patient undergoing the medico-ritual and addresses wider social conflicts.

Anthropologists have noted that many indigenous healers use techniques similar to those used in Western psychotherapy. In the former, symbols are used to communicate, whereas in the latter, medical terminology is used. For example, a shaman may perform a ritual drama by symbolically journeying into the realm of spirits. This journey is usually accompanied by percussion music, which encourages the patient and/or the healer to enter an altered state of trance, and malevolent spirits are dramatized with gestures and/or obliquely referred to in song verses (Rasmussen, 1995 ). Levi-Strauss ( 1963 ) explained the effectiveness of a shamanic treatment of a difficult labor among the Cuna Indians of Panama, who guided a woman through a potentially fatal childbirth through ritual use of symbols. The shaman made ritual figures, chanted invocations personifying the birthing woman's pains as important figures in local myth, and purified the birthing room by burning herbs. He changed the story of his journey to the realm of Muu, the female power responsible for forming the fetus. The shaman diagnosed the problem as Muu having exceeded her role and capturing the soul of the mother-to-be. Through the persuasiveness of these metaphoric chants, in which Muu is persuaded to release the woman's soul, and the shaman exhorted his spirit figures to help him rescue her soul, a successful childbirth occurs. These rituals, featuring spirit possession and mediumship, are often open to the public, and the audience may participate in the healing process through support for their person undergoing the healing. Whereas in Western psychotherapy the patient speaks, in this case the healer speaks (chants). Levi-Strauss analyzes the shaman's account of his journey into the abode of Muu as a description of the woman's body, and the patient understands this subconsciously and then relaxes, understands pain as not arbitrary but rather meaningful, and allows the birth to take place. Thus, in his symbolization, the shaman provides the sick woman with a language by means of which unexpressed, and otherwise inexplicable, psychic states can be immediately expressed (Levi-Strauss, 1963 , p. 198).

Another important altered state or out-of-body experience is dreams, but these are given diverse interpretations in different social and cultural settings. Thus, although dreams are individually experienced, they are culturally informed (Lohmann, 2003 , p. ix). Dreams are expressed in accordance with social values pertaining to communication, concepts of person, spirituality, and notions of public/private. Roles of dreams vary, from a casual topic of conversation, a psycho-analysis topic, to divine revelations, shamanic mediumistic journeys to heal, and political meetings. Dreams also allow many people to experience continued participation of ancestors in their daily lives, and this too may influence decision-making. Stewart and Strathern (in Lohmann, 2003 , pp. 43–61) examine dreams phenomenologically in two Melanesian societies, the Hagen and the Duna; here, the dead come to visit the living in dreams and may warn of future problems or attacks.

The spiritual and emotional connection of dreams is widespread. Roger Ivar Lohmann (in Lohmann, 2003 , pp. 189–211) presents a series of first-person spirit encounter narratives from Asabano culture. Asabano understand dreams to allow travel in a spiritual dimension, such that a personal soul can leave the body and contact other spirits. The Asabano spiritual world is rich in indigenous tradition but also reflects rapid cultural change they have seen in recent decades. Dreamed spiritual encounters predispose people to perceive spirit beings in waking life and are a significant cause of religious convictions.

Despite the diverse ways cultures influence and extract meanings from dreams, everywhere at least some dreams are understood as a means of actually traveling across spatial, temporal, and spiritual dimensions (Lohmann, 2003 ) Common dream experiences are of person/self in motion, being and doing what one cannot in alert consciousness. Thus dreams are experiences of some kind of transportation and transformation of body and soul. There are many shamanic dream journeys reported in anthropology of religion and medical anthropology from different parts of the world. Thus there are rich variations on common themes in cultural understandings and practices surrounding transformations of body, senses, and person or “self.”

Concepts of Body, Senses, and Personhood/Self

In anthropology, the body, senses, and personhood have been accorded central importance since approximately the nineteenth century. This interest developed along several lines. First, historically, anthropology has been more inclined to pose questions about the universal “essence” of humanity, as the context of European colonialism prompted early scholars to address problem of human universals of ontology (knowing; understanding) in relation to variations of social relationships. As a consequence, the ontological centrality of human embodiment became one focus in the quest of universals.

One early question raised concerned the range of social and cultural arrangements necessary for survival and reproduction of self and body. Several streams of study were important here: in nineteenth century unilineal evolutionism, there was a convergence of questions of universals in these theorists’ quest for universals in human origins. Central here was the relationship between culture and nature. In this, the body played a part, as it offered one solution to the problem of cultural relativism and psychic unity of humankind. But opposed to this was another line of development that contributed to anthropological study of the human body in nineteenth century social Darwinism during the Victorian period. There were three key ideas here: that human beings were essentially a part of nature, rather than outside it; in a distortion of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, there arose the theory of universality of the fittest and unequal ranking of cultures in terms of phases of progress to explain social change; and more recently, there have been studies in twentieth century physical anthropology of the expression of emotions in humans—for example, Konrad Lorenz on aggression.

Another question that directs anthropological attention to person/self and body has been, “What is it to be human?” In more recent structural and symbolic studies of the late twentieth century, theories such as Claude Levi-Strauss's proposed that humans are cultural because of meaning contrasts—specifically certain prohibitions (e.g., the incest taboo and purity and danger categories) (Levi-Strauss, 1963 ; Douglas, 1966 ). This focus on contradictions between body and soul, and instinct versus social solidarity, opposed civilization to nature and argued that categories of reality—for example, pure and impure, sacred and profane—reflected categories of culture, not nature.

Also relevant to these ideas was German romanticism of the nineteenth century, whose tripartite division of body ( Leib ), spirit ( Geist ), and soul ( Seele ) conveyed that idea that because humans are unfinished as biological creatures, not at home in nature, they require the protective canopy of institutions and culture. The point here is that the body is constructed by culture and society; the latter, with language, filter and buffer nature (Baerveldt & Verheggen, 2011 , this volume).

Now, from these streams of thought, three fundamental propositions have remained influential in anthropology and sociology: human embodiment creates a set of constraints, but also the body has the potential to be elaborated on by socio-cultural development—that is, in Western philosophical and social theory, the body generally appears as a constraint and potential; there are contradictions between human sexuality and socio-cultural requirements; and these natural facts are experienced differently according to the classification system (e.g., gender constructs). This insight lead to the issue of body as a classificatory system. Mary Douglas ( 1966 ), for example, theorized that humans respond to disorder, such as risk, uncertainty, and contradictions; their principal response was symbolic classification through the medium of the body itself; for example, the body becomes a central metaphor of political and social order (e.g., food taboos reflect the wider order).

The body has long been an important locus of discourse, not solely in biology and medicine but also in the human sciences, although in the latter it has often been denigrated. In the seventeenth century, rationalists believed that the sensuous body was an object to be distrusted because it led to subjective, rather than objective, perceptions. Also denigrated were the “lower senses”—that is, nonvisual sense modalities. But later there were trends toward greater attention to the body and extravisual modalities, as well, as a vital subject of cultural study. These trends arose from critiques of the rationalists—for example, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger.

Karl Marx suggested a dialectical relationship between the body and the social and natural worlds. For example, Marx recognized that it was only by attending to human engagement in sensuous practical (i.e., material) activity that he could understand “real, corporeal man.” In other words, Marx insisted that the body is not just there but acts upon the world and is, in turn, acted upon by the world that they body has helped to create. Marx saw this dialectic as mediated most fundamentally by human labor. However, subsequent writers have explored this dialectic in terms of a much broader compass; for example, Michel Foucault ( 1978 ) traced the historical development of scientific discourse (i.e., conversations that represent and study and form policies) and institutions impinging on the body in practices seemingly as disparate as sexuality, psycho-analysis, medicine, and the penal system, as well as physical spaces such as architecture. Scientific study involves surveillance and control, not merely knowledge, of the body. This is Foucault's concept of the panoptic gaze, power at different levels in the system.

In more recent social theory, most views of the body analyze this as not merely a natural object but as one socially, historically, and politically constituted. This idea animates the most recent and current (i.e., mid-to-late twentieth and twenty-first century) work on the body. Erving Goffman has described how the body forms the implicit foundation for stigma. Feminist theorists such as Susan Bordo ( 1993 ) examine more general representations of bodies—particularly of women's bodies—within myriad discourses and institutions, such as art, advertising, and popular romances, and ask how these shape both how women experience their bodies and how others treat them as embodied beings. Now, these writers insist that discourses and institutions impinge as powerfully as does (Marxian) labor process on how body is lived.

Also, another aspect of common ground shared by Marx and many of these writings is a dual concern with the ideological (symbolic and expressive) and material (political and economic) aspects, or, in Foucaultian terms, discourses and techniques of the lived body. But Marx's and Foucault's and many feminists’ body studies almost always and often implicitly concern the Western (Euro-American) body.

Finally, also relevant in developing a theory of body was the traditional emphasis in social/cultural anthropology on comparison and the study of small-scale, non-industrial, and more recently, of more industrial large-scale societies. Scholars from Marcel Mauss's ( 1935 ) “Techniques of the Body” have found that cross-culturally, the body is an important surface in which marks of social status, family, position, ritual prohibitions, social affiliation, and religious condition are displayed (e.g., tattoos in Polynesian societies). Mauss catalogued cross-cultural variations in bodily techniques for all manner of activities, from swimming to sex, emphasizing how powerfully each society inscribes itself on the body of each of its members and how resistant the body can be to altering techniques it “knows.” Although these processes are present everywhere, they are most obvious and directly expressed in smaller-scale societies. Mauss's point here was that these techniques are not consciously taught; rather, they are shaped by and express a habitus , a notion Mauss invented, but one that the French ethnographer and social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, as shown, later developed further.

The body has also become a popular focus in medical anthropology within both cultural and bio-anthropology, over the past several decades in particular, from concerns over AIDS and other pandemics. A seminal essay on the body in this area, “The Mindful Body” (1988), was authored by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock. This is an attempt to deconstruct, uncover, and problematize and ultimately to encourage resistance to conventional Cartesian concepts of the body heretofore accepted by earlier anthropologists. Scheper-Hughes and Lock label the failure of medical anthropology to critically examine accepted conceptions of the body as a “prolegomenon,” suggesting that the lack of more critical analysis of the body could lead to anthropology's falling prey to biological fallacy and related assumptions that are paradigmatic to biomedicine (Scheper-Hughes & Lock, 1988 , p. 6). This biological fallacy, the Cartesian mind–body split, has multiplied into a number of other binary relationships in Western societies, such as culture/nature; society/individual, spirit/matter, and so forth (Scheper-Hughes & Lock, 1988 , p. 10). These authors write this essay specifically because they see body concepts as being quite significant to anthropologists for understanding culture and societies, on the one hand, and for increasing knowledge of the cultural sources and meanings o health and illness, on the other (ibid., p. 8), and because they want to prescribe alternatives to accepted approaches and concepts.

These authors propose seeing the body as “physical and symbolic artifact, naturally and culturally produced” (ibid., p. 7). They conceptualize three distinct but related body perspectives anthropology should take in its study: the individual body; the social body; and the body politic. They assume that most humans have a concept of individual body—that is, they phenomenally lived experience of the body-self, separated into other body-selves. They highlight alternative ways of looking at the individual body-self and accounting for relations between mind, body, culture, nature, and society (ibid., p. 11). Recognizing different concepts (monistic, holistic, multiplistic) of body-self is key to any anthropological understanding of way societies diagnose and treat illness and the way they define health, the way they define selves as healthy and treat perceived individual and societal illnesses. These authors make a final suggestion that an exploration of body-image (body boundaries, distortions in body perceptions) is essential to the concept of individual body—for example, point out that a relationship between people's choice of symptoms and concepts of body image should be considered to come to a better understanding of social and cultural meanings of humanity and perceived threats to human health, well-being, and social integration (ibid., pp. 17–18).

Turning to their concept of the social body, Lock and Scheper-Hughes discuss how the body is culturally and socially representative, stating that “Cultural constructions of and about the body are useful in sustaining particular views of society and social relations” (ibid., p. 19). The body is used representationally to devise and justify social values (e.g., as in symbolic equations involving left and right handedness). Links have been made between health or sickness of individual bodies and social bodies for centuries. These authors suggest that most common symbolic use of body has been to classify and humanize living spaces (ibid., p. 21). Point to differences between ethnomedical and biomedical concepts of social relations in the healthy or sick body; for example, ethnomedical systems see social relations as inevitably linked to individual health and illness. They suggest that ethnomedical concepts seem to entail a unique kind of human autonomy (ibid., p. 21) that industrialized modern world has lost. These societies do not appear to experience the same sort of body alienations (anorexia, bulimia, etc.) experienced in Western societies, which seems also to be linked to capitalism and its regimentation. They point very specifically also to the body as machine metaphor as one of the sources of body alienation in industrialized societies. Their overall sentiment is that in industrialized Western society, “the human shape of things and even the human shape of humans is in retreat “(ibid., p. 23).

Expanding on the concept of social body, Scheper-Hughes and Lock use the concept of body politic to suggest that the relationship between social and individual bodies is more than metaphors and collective representations of natural and cultural (ibid., p. 23). This relationship is ultimately about power, about social control of bodies. Societies do not control bodies only in times of crisis but often aggressively reproduce and socialize kinds of bodies they need or require to sustain themselves (ibid., p. 25). Ways in which societies reproduce and socialize bodies are through body decoration and through constructing concepts of politically correct bodies. Although the politically correct body is often supposed to be healthy, it can actually mean grotesque distortions of human anatomy. The body politic has brutal ways of conforming individual bodies to requirement of socio-political establishment: medicine, criminal justice, psychiatry and various social sciences, and even torture. They further point out that, post-Malthus, the body-politic concept involves finding ways to control populations, involving control of sexuality, gender, and reproduction. These authors propose that an anthropology of the body involve a theory of emotions because emotions may provide a vital link, a bridge, between mind and body, individual, society, and body politic (ibid., p. 29). Tracking emotional states or altered states experienced in illness and healing is, as shown, another way anthropologists attempt to move beyond a restrictive, Cartesian viewpoint and re-explore notions of human agency in society.

Another trend, since around the 1970s, has been to question the classical supposition that rigorous research methods always result in objectively “true” observation. The concept of the sensuous body (i.e., focus on the senses in studies) emerged as a new site of cultural and political analysis. Initially, many works considered the body as a text that could be “read” hermeneutically and consequently tended to ignore context and multisensorial modalities. There have been calls for greater attention to not solely cataloguing local cultural concepts of body and senses into the ethnographic record but also incorporating them into anthropological theory. As Herzfeld ( 2001 , Chapter 11) notes, sight and writing have been widely associated with power; anthropology is primarily verbal and textual, but much cultural and social life is more complex and involves additional, extravisual, and nontextual sense modalities.

In response to these problems, there are attempts to consider how knowledge and perceptions of legitimacy and truth in many societies devolve from not simply vision and text, but also from modalities of smell, touch, taste, and hearing. Classen ( 1997 ) describes how historically and culturally in Euro-American philosophies and cultures, theories tend to be based in perceptions of the body and senses that are inflected with gendered values. For example, the sense modality of sight has in the west often been considered associated with masculine values and the sense modality of touch with feminine values. In pre-modern Europe, women were seen as the imperfect result of an insufficient amount of heat during the process of conception and gestation. Sex differences in temperature were drawn from Aristotle, Galen and other ancient authorities and supported by contemporary scholarship and folklore. The innate coldness of women was considered by physicians and philosophers to be the cause of particular characteristics of the female body: storing food as fat, menstrual blood, milk, enabling them to carry and nourish children (Classen, 1997 , p. 3). Because of this lack of heat rising up into their heads, women's bodies were allegedly broad at the bottom and narrow at the top. By contrast, “hot” men had narrow hips and broad shoulders; baldness was a sign of burning up of the hair on their heads. Heat also caused men's sexual organs to be external, whereas insufficient heat obliged women's sexual organs to remain within the body (Classen, 1997 , p. 3).

Among some other peoples, the thermal attributes of the body and the different senses are not conceived as hierarchically nor represented as rigidly in ranked or oppositional terms, as in the major European philosophical and scientific traditions, despite widespread cultural differentiation according to gender constructs—for example, the prevalent association in some cultures of written texts with scriptural scholarship. Rasmussen ( 2006 ) describes how, in Tuareg culture, visual and written texts are associated with Islamic scholarship and Qur'anic healing, which tends to be dominated by men, and touch in healing is more associated with female herbalists and other non-Qur'anic healers. All of these healers are respected and sought out by both women and men at different times; thus, here the sense modalities, although having associations, are not rigidly dichotomized by gender, nor are they hierarchically ranked. Although the Quranic healing by marabouts is often described as a science, nonetheless, non-Qu'ranic healing is not denigrated or considered less reliable but as specialized in healing certain ailments—for example, stomachaches and women's reproductive and marital problems (Rasmussen, 2006 ). Although Tuareg also differentiate according to gender and make gendered thermal/humoral associations in their counteractive medical system, there is marked absence of a deficiency model here. There is also flexibility according to context. In local counteractive theories of balance and harmony, for example, hot and cold states of the body and diseases are caused for men and women alike by an imbalance of these forces (Rasmussen, 2006 ). Women should ideally be cool, and men ideally warm, but even these ideals should not become too pronounced or intensified; for example, a man can become too hot and fall ill. The goal is to find equilibrium between hot and cold; one should avoid an excess of either thermal states.

Recently, there have been analyses of how anthropological and ethnographic knowledge systems are constructed through extravisual sense modalities. Paul Stoller ( 1987 , 1989 ) has described ethnographic insights from sound and taste. In his apprenticeship with a Songhai sorcerer/healer in Niger, he learned about ritual healing powers by tasting local herbs and listening to the healer's incantations and learned about social conflicts through the gustatory medium of food, when a co-wife of his field host prepared a bad sauce to express her anger at her husband. He also described vividly how Songhai cosmology/philosophy and medico-rituals later inspired him to cope with his cancer treatments in the United States (Stoller, 2004 ). Rasmussen ( 1999 ) analyzed the role of aroma as channeling communication in Tuareg society and also analyzed its role in constructing ethnographic knowledge; among the Tuareg, for example, scents are used to diagnose non-organic (mental) illnesses, and many pleasant scents are associated with spirits. Perfume and incense are used as a medium to communicate among humans and between humans and spirits—for example, in medico-ritual healing. Their use is taken seriously and are not merely aesthetics, an alternative, or less credible, in contrast to aromatherapy in the United States. Islamic scholars use scents to diagnose mental states. Diviners place scented bark inside their mouth to aid their memory in healing and place perfumes in cowrie shells to their tutelary spirits in a special pact that enables the diviner in a dream to foretell the future and conduct psycho-social counseling. Certain scents, however, are also considered dangerous, and aroma in general can also be used to express anti-social feelings, conflicts, and struggles. For example, many Tuareg believe that a person can catch illness through the scent of someone who already has the illness, somewhat like Victorian contagion theories. The aromas of certain medicinal trees are believed to cause infertility in young women; that is a reason given by some Tuareg for the predominance of older women in the herbal healing profession. The nose and mouth are the principal orifices through which disease and more general pollution (from both physiological and social sources) enter the body; for example, smith/artisans can convey anger at nobles’ not sharing food with them, even if food is out of sight, through smelling it. Thus one must hide food from smell and not solely from view. Also, local cultural values show great concern with protecting the body from what enters through the nose, as well as the mouth. In rural areas, most men wear a face-veil over the nose to protect from evil spirits and other malevolent powers, as well as to express respect and reserve, important values in the male gender role, particularly among nobles. Also, incense and perfume are believed to not just mask unpleasant odors but to actually dispel them, to repel evil spirits and disease; they work like a religious amulet. For example, incense is burned during weddings and passed around a circle of guests, who saturate their clothing with it. New mothers and babies also are protected from jealousy by incense burning nearby along with a metal knife stuck in the sand of the tent floor and Islamic amulets placed around it. Thus in Tuareg culture, society, ritual, and healing and sociability, aroma is not solely a part of cosmetics and aesthetics but also acts powerfully in medico-ritual and pharmaceutical contexts (Rasmussen, 1999 , 2006 ).

More broadly, the studies of these cultural uses of taste, the gustatory modality, and scent and the olfactory modality reveal magic, religion, and science as not so neatly opposed. Anthropologists should attempt to understand, represent, and take seriously other peoples’ ways of constructing experience and knowledge, and the study of sense modalities and body and person/self contribute profound insights into these issues.

This demonstrates the need, recognized widely in anthropology, to take analysis of the body to another level. The focus here is on the cultural construction of what it means to be a person, or human—that is, identity and expectations concerning how the person or “self” acts in cultural and social settings and how different cultures elaborate on this identity. Despite their very different approaches to this topic (philosophical approaches tend to be more influenced by European Enlightenment concepts and Anthropological approaches attempt to elicit more culturally relative concepts), there has been some influence of philosophy on anthropological theories, and both anthropology and philosophy share questions regarding how the concept of person is defined and used in social interaction. Both anthropology and philosophy, as heirs to Classical and Enlightenment theories predominantly from Western European historical and political and intellectual milieu, are concerned with distinguishing between continuity over time that enables social agents to characterize an individual as a person and with an epistemological problem posed by differences between social attributes and self-knowledge. For example, in an early study, Marcel Mauss distinguished between le moi and la conception sociale de la personne ; the former is the externally imposed cultural and social identity; the latter consists of one's self-definition or self-concept.

How is person/self relevant to the anthropological subject? Anthropology's primary concern is to examine comparatively and historically ideas about power, personhood, and agency, cultural ideas about how humans interact with each other in terms of self and social concepts of identity. For example, Evans-Pritchard ( 1940 , 1956 ) described the case of a man who had been missing for a long time from his Nuer community, for whom mortuary rituals were held, thereby defining his status as deceased. Even upon his return many years later, he remained defined as deceased and thus was no longer a full social person in the community of the living. In many cultures, there is no concept of what the English expression “self-made man” (or person) implies; rather, one's achievements cannot be isolated from the achievements of one's lineage or clan. Also, many cultural knowledge systems conceptualize components of personhood in distinctive ways: for example, in some communities in the Congo, a person's shadow is key to identity and cannot be stepped on or photographed without threatening one's identity (Jacobsen-Widding, in Jackson & Karp, 1990 ).

Historically, there have been at least three basic attempts to define personal identity in Western (i.e., Euro-American) philosophy since the Enlightenment that have influenced, to varying degrees, anthropology: (1) mental/idealist based; (2) material based; and (3) illusion, construct, or memory-based. First, those who define personal identity in mentalistic terms view our identity through time as a function of the continuity of our thoughts, beliefs, and feelings—for example, medieval religious theory of the soul as the seat of personal identity, where reason and will reside (e.g., St. Augustine) (later, Rene Descartes substituted mind for soul in this scheme). Next, those who explain personal identity in terms of the continuity of our bodies; according to this group, despite changes we undergo in growth and development, there is a basic physical unity of our identity that is responsible for our remaining the same person (e.g., Gilbert Ryle); this position opposes Cartesian and other older forms of dualism. Finally, some philosophers have argued that personal identity is just an illusion without an independent existence or substance. For example, Thomas Hume believed that all existence was a matter of perception. For John Locke, personal identity was seen as based on self-consciousness, in particular on the memories of past experiences. All these theories suggest a non-uniform (Western and other view of) notion of personal identity and self; even in our own culture, we can hardly sum up in one set of language terminology a unitary notion of self, because there has been historical change and internal cultural diversity even within that category commonly called “the West.” Thus the problem is how we know this: Which data do we examine? Useful are data from psycho-analysis; popular lay folk notions; childrearing advice; and healing systems. Thus one may tentatively generalize, with some caution, contemporary “Western” (i.e., Euro-American) notions of personhood as generally (albeit with exceptions) more individualistic (Battaglia, 1995 , Introduction) relative to some other cultural concepts of personhood. Yet neither Western nor non-Western concepts of personhood are unitary or static; everywhere, these concepts may change in relation to economics, history, politics, and social processes.

Thus, most recent and current studies of concepts of person/self attempt to elicit a fuller range of expression of person/self beliefs in different contexts, regardless of where these prevail. For example, according to Didier Kaphagawane (in Karp & Masolo, 1990 ), the work of early scholar Placide Tempels on Bantu philosophy tended to reproduce Enlightenment philosophical bias viewing a person as divided between mind or ideas and material body. Kaphagawane shows how, among the Bantu-speaking Chewa in Malawi, munthu denotes humans in certain situations but not others. Munthu refers to a person with social and morally valued qualities, not without them. Thus to state that someone is not a munthu does not imply he/she is not a human but, rather, that he/she lacks approved moral and social conduct. Thus personhood is not a stable category but is disputed and negotiated, and changes, even within a single community and during the same era.

In addition, most recent studies of personhood or concepts of person/self in anthropology have focused on factors that shape cross-cultural variations in definition of self/person. The question posed is, “Where do these concepts come from?” Based on her study of French-Portuguese bilingual speakers, Michele E.J. Koven (2000, p. 437) suggests that bilingualism allows people to express different kinds of selves in each language. Desjarlais ( 2000 , p. 467) suggests that actions and diffuse understandings they effect are commonly rooted in relations of differential powers and authorities. Alice, a resident of a shelter, had represented herself as “happy on the street” until authorities (police, psychiatrists, social workers) started to treat her badly by forcing her to take medications, confining her in psychiatric hospitals, and requiring her to follow the edicts of psychiatric and legal institutions (Desjarlais, 2000 , p. 468, quoted in Womack, 2001 , p. 184). Whereas Alice had seen her life on the streets as an expression of her competence, authorities viewed Alice as mentally ill and felt they were helping Alice by preventing her from engaging in what they saw as inappropriate social behavior.

Future Directions in Cultural Anthropology

These highlights in cultural anthropological studies share a concern with representing culture and society as more fluid, dynamic, and relational and a vision of individuals and collectivities as mutually influential. As noted, there have recently been critiques of all the canons of anthropological thought (culture and personality, Durkheimian, structural-functionalism, interpretive, and French structuralism schools) for oversimplifying the variables involved in studying culture and society and also for overestimating the degree of conformity and continuity in culture and society. In all societies, values are often contradictory. Culture and society and the persons comprising them can no longer be reduced to clear-cut, essentialized entities, and their localities are no longer always literal, geographical, or neatly bounded.

Thus many cultural anthropologists now recognize the need to explore the following questions:

What are some emerging new spaces or localities of culture?

Why, alongside resistance, dissent, and personal practice and agency, does society nonetheless tend to reproduce itself?

What leads some persons to internalize the rules or habitus of learned dispositions more fully and others less fully?

In globalization, what are some forces of relocalization, and how can scholars in their analyses escape this binary opposition?

How can scholars in their analyses, similarly, escape circular arguments concerning individual/culture/collectivities and local/universal processes?

How can the culture concept be reformulated to encompass virtual aspects of human life?

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200+ Cultural Anthropology Research Paper Topics

Aborigines Agricultural revolution Aleuts Algonguians Altamira cave Anasazi Anthropology of war Aotearoa (New Zealand) Ape culture Argentina Asante Asia Athabascan Australia Australian aborigines Aymara Balkans Baluchistan Berdache Brazil Bride price Cannibalism Caribs Caste system Celtic Europe Chachapoya Indians Chants Characteristics of culture Childhood Childhood studies Clans Class societies Collectors Complex Societies Configurationalism Copper Age Cross-cultural research Cuba Cults Cultural adaptation Cultural conservation Cultural constraints Cultural convergence Cultural ecology Cultural relativism Cultural traits Cultural tree of life Culture Culture and personality Culture area concept Culture change Culture of poverty Culture shock Cyberculture Darkness in El Dorado controversy Diffusionism Division of labor Dowry Egalitarian societies El Ceren Elders Emics Endogamy Eskimo acculturation Eskimos Ethnocentrism Ethnographer Ethnographic fieldwork Ethnographic writing Ethnography Ethnohistory Ethnology Etics Eudyspluria Exogamy Extended family Feasts and Festivals Feuding Fiji Folk culture Folk speech Folk speech Folkways Forms of family French structuralism Functionalism Gangs Genocide Gerontology Globalization Great Wall of China Guarani Nandeva Indians Gypsies Haidas Haiti Hinduism History of Anthropology Homosexuality Hopi Indians Horticulture Hottentots Huari [Wari] Human competition and stress Human life cycle Ik Indonesia Informants Inoku Village Intelligence Intensive agriculture Inuit IQ tests Iron Age Iroquois Irrigation Israel Jewelry Jews Kibbutz Kinship and descent Kinship terminology Koba Kula ring Kulturkreise !Kung Bushmen Kwakiutls Labor Language and culture Lapps Lascaux cave Maasai Mana Manioc beer Ma-ori Marquesas Marriage Matriarchy Mbuti Pygmies Memes Mexico Miami Indians Migrations Modal personality Mongolia Monogamy Mores Multiculturalism Mundugamor Music Native Peoples of Central and South America Native Peoples of the Great Plains Native Peoples of the United States Navajo Nomads Northern Iroquoian Nations Nuclear family Objectivity in ethnography Ojibwa Oldowan culture Olmecs Omaha Indians Onas Oral literature Orality and anthropology Ornamentation Pacific rim Pacific seafaring Panama Patriarchy Peasants People’s Republic of China and Taiwan Peyote rituals Plant cultivatiion Political organizations Political science Polyandry Polygamy Polygyny Polynesians Population explosion Potlatch Qing, the Last Dynasty of China Quechua Rank and status Rank Societies Rarotonga Rites of passage Role and status Sambungmachan Samburu Samoa San Bushmen Sardinia Sartono Secret societies Segmentary lineage systems Sex identity Sex roles Sexual harassment Sexuality Siberia Simulacra Slash-and-burn agriculture Slavery Social structures Sociobiology Stereotypes Structuralism Subcultures Sudanese society Symboling Tahiti Taj Mahal Tasmania Technology Textiles and clothing Tierra del Fuego Tikopia Tlingit Tlingit culture Tonga Transcultural psychiatry Travel Ubirr Untouchables Urban legends Vanishing cultures Venezuela Venus of Willendorf Verification in ethnography Villages Work and skills Yabarana Indians Yaganes Yanomamo Zande Zapotecs Zulu Zuni Indians

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Cultural anthropology is one of the four subdisciplines of anthropology. The other subdisciplines include biological anthropology, archaeology, and linguistic anthropology. Some anthropologists include a fifth subdiscipline, applied anthropology, although other anthropologists see applied anthropology as an approach that crosscuts traditional subdisciplinary boundaries rather than as a subdiscipline itself. In the United States, the subfields tend to be unified: Departments of anthropology include all of the sub-fields within their academic structures. In Europe, however, subdisciplines often reside in different academic departments. These differences between American and European anthropology are due more to historical than philosophical differences in how the discipline developed.

The central organizing concept of cultural anthropology is culture, which is ironic given that culture is largely an abstraction that is difficult to measure and even more difficult to define, given the high number of different definitions of the concept that populate anthropology textbooks. Despite over a century of anthropology, the most commonly used definition of anthropology is Edward Burnett Tylor’s, who in 1871 defined culture as “that complex whole that includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by [humans] as members of a society.”

Tylor’s definition is resonant with contemporary anthropologists because it points to some important, universally agreed-upon aspects of culture, even though it does not satisfactorily define what culture is. Teachers of cultural anthropology often cite culture as a constellation of features that work together to guide the thoughts and behaviors of individuals and groups of humans. Aspects of culture often seen in introductory classes include: (1) Culture is commonly shared by a population or group of individuals; (2) cultural patterns of behavior are learned, acquired, and internalized during childhood; (3) culture is generally adaptive, enhancing survival and promoting successful reproduction; and (4) culture is integrated, meaning that the traits that make up a particular cultural are internally consistent with one another.

Nevertheless, anthropologists differ greatly in how they might refine their own definition of the culture concept. Anthropologists also differ in how they approach the study of culture. Some anthropologists begin with the observation that since culture is an abstraction that exists only in the minds of people in a particular society, which we cannot directly observe, culture must be studied through human behavior, which we can observe. Such an approach is often termed an objective, empiricist, or scientific approach and sometimes called an etic perspective. By etic, anthropologists mean that our understanding of culture is based upon the perspective of the observer, not those who are actually being studied.

Other anthropologists, while recognizing that culture is an abstraction and is difficult to measure, nevertheless hold that a worthy goal of anthropologists is to understand the structure of ideas and meanings as they exist in the minds of members of a particular culture. Such an approach is often labeled subjective, rationalist, or humanistic, and sometimes called an emic approach. By emic, anthropologists mean that the central goal of the anthropologist is to understand how culture is lived and experienced by its members.

Although these two approaches have quite different emphases, cultural anthropologists have traditionally recognized the importance of both styles of investigation as critical to the study of culture, although most anthropologists work only within one style.

How Cultural Anthropology Differs From Sociology

In many colleges and universities in the United States, sociology and anthropology are included under the same umbrella and exist as joint departments. This union is not without justification, as cultural anthropology and sociology share a similar theoretical and philosophical ancestry. In what ways is cultural anthropology different?

Cultural anthropology is unique because its history as a discipline lies in a focus on exploration of the “Other.” That is, the anthropologists of the 19th century took a keen interest in the lives and customs of people not descended from Europeans. The first anthropologists, E. B. Tylor and Sir James Frazer among them, relied mostly on the reports of explorers, missionaries, traders, and colonial officials and are commonly known as “armchair anthropologists.” It was not long, however, before travel around the globe to directly engage in the investigation of other human societies became the norm. The development of cultural anthropology is directly tied to the colonial era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The late 19th century was an era in which evolutionary theory dominated the nascent social sciences. The armchair anthropologists of the period were not immune from the dominant paradigm, and even scholars like Lewis Henry Morgan, who worked extensively and directly with American Indians, developed complicated typologies of cultural evolution, grading known cultures according to their technological accomplishments and the sophistication of their material culture. As is to be expected, Europeans were invariably civilized, with others categorized as being somewhat or extremely primitive in comparison. It was only as anthropologists began to investigate the presumably primitive societies that were known only through hearsay or incomplete reports that it was realized that such typologies were wildly inaccurate.

In the United States, the development of anthropology as a field-based discipline was driven largely by westward expansion. An important part of westward expansion was the pacification and extermination of the indigenous Native American cultures that once dominated the continent. By the late 1870s, the Bureau of American Ethnology was sponsoring trips by trained scholars, charged with recording the life-ways of American Indian tribes that were believed to be on the verge of extinction. This “salvage ethnology” formed the basis of American anthropology and led to important works such as James Mooney’s Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, published in 1896, and Edward Nelson’s The Eskimo about Bering Strait, published in 1899.

In Britain, some of the earliest investigations of aboriginal peoples were conducted by W. H. R. Rivers, C. G. Seligmann, Alfred Haddon, and John Meyers, members of the 1898 expedition to the Torres Straits. The expedition was a voyage of exploration on behalf of the British government, and for the anthropologists it was an opportunity to document the lives of the indigenous peoples of the region. This work later inspired Rivers to return to the Torres Straits in 1901 to 1902 to conduct more extensive fieldwork with the Toda. By the 1920s, scientific expeditions to remote corners of the world to document the cultures of the inhabitants, geology, and ecology of the region were commonplace. Many of these expeditions, such as the Steffansson-Anderson Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913 to 1918, have since proven invaluable, as they recorded the cultures of people only recently in con-tact with the European societies that would forever alter them.

Cultural anthropology, therefore, has its roots as a colonial enterprise, one of specializing in the study of small-scale, simple, “primitive” societies. This is, however, not an accurate description of contemporary cultural anthropology. Many anthropologists today work within complex societies. But the anthropology of complex societies is still much different than sociology. The history of working within small-scale, isolated cultural settings also led to the development of a particular methodology that is unique to cultural anthropology.

The fieldwork experiences of anthropologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were critical for the development of anthropology as a rigorous, scientific discipline. How does an outsider accurately describe cultural practices and an understanding of the significance of those practices for members of the culture studied? Achieving these goals meant living with and participating in the lives of the people in the study culture. It is this balance between careful observation and participation in the lives of a group of people that has become the cornerstone of modern cultural anthropology.

Called participant observation, the method is the means by which most of an anthropologist’s information about a society is obtained. Anthropologists often use other methods of data collection, but participant observation is the sole means by which anthropologists can generate both emic and etic understandings of a culture.

There are, however, no straightforward guidelines about how one actually goes about doing participant observation. Cultural settings, personal idiosyncrasies, and personality characteristics all ensure that fieldwork and participant observation are unique experiences. All anthropologists agree that fieldwork is an intellectually and emotionally demanding exercise, especially considering that fieldwork traditionally lasts for a year, and often longer. Participant observation is also fraught with problems. Finding the balance between detached observation and engaged participation can be extremely difficult. How does one balance the two at the funeral of a person who is both key informant and friend, for example? For these reasons, the fieldwork experience is an intense rite of passage for anthropologists starting out in the discipline. Not surprisingly, the intense nature of the fieldwork experience has generated a large literature about the nature of fieldwork itself.

Part of the reason for lengthy fieldwork stays was due to a number of factors, including the difficulty of reaching a field site and the need to acquire competence in the local language. However, as it has become possible to travel to the remotest corners of the globe with relative ease, and as anthropologists pursue opportunities to study obscure languages increasingly taught in large universities, and as it is more difficult to secure research funding, field experiences have generally become shorter. Some anthropologists have abandoned traditional participant observation in favor of highly focused research problems and archival research, made possible especially in areas where significant “traditional” ethnographic field-work has been done.

A second research strategy that separates cultural anthropology from other disciplines is holism. Holism is the search for systematic relationships between two or more phenomena. One of the advantages of lengthy periods of fieldwork and participant observation is that the anthropologist can begin to see interrelationships between different aspects of culture. One example might be the discovery of a relationship between ecological conditions, subsistence patterns, and social organization. The holistic approach allows for the documentation of systematic relationships between these variables, thus allowing for the eventual unraveling of the importance of various relationships within the system, and, ultimately, toward an understanding of general principles and the construction of theory.

In practical terms, holism also refers to a kind of multifaceted approach to the study of culture. Anthropologists working in a specific cultural setting typically acquire information about topics not necessarily of immediate importance, or even interest, for the research project at hand. Nevertheless, anthropologists, when describing the culture they are working with, will often include discussions of culture history, linguistics, political and economic systems, settlement patterns, and religious ideology. Just as anthropologists become proficient at balancing emic and etic approaches in their work, they also become experts about a particular theoretical problem, for which the culture provides a good testing ground, and they become experts about the cultural area, having been immersed in the politics, history, and social science of the region itself.

History of Cultural Anthropology

The earliest historical roots of cultural anthropology are in the writings of Herodotus (fifth century BCE), Marco Polo (c. 1254-c. 1324), and Ibn Khaldun (1332—1406), people who traveled extensively and wrote reports about the cultures they encountered. More recent contributions come from writers of the French Enlightenment, such as eighteenth century French philosopher Charles Montesquieu (1689-1755). His book, Spirit of the Laws, published in 1748, discussed the temperament, appearance, and government of non-European people around the world. It explained differences in terms of the varying climates in which people lived.

The mid- and late nineteenth century was an important time for science in general. Influenced by Darwin’s writings about species’ evolution, three founding figures of cultural anthropology were Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) in the United States, and Edward Tylor (1832-1917) and James Frazer (1854-1941) in England. The three men supported a concept of cultural evolution, or cumulative change in culture over time leading to improvement, as the explanation for cultural differences around the world. A primary distinction in cultures was between Euro-American culture (“civilization”) and non-Western peoples (“primitive”). This distinction is maintained today in how many North American museums place European art and artifacts in mainstream art museums, while the art and artifacts of non-Western peoples are placed in museums of natural history.

The cultural evolutionists generated models of progressive stages for various aspects of culture. Morgan’s model of kinship evolution proposed that early forms of kinship centered on women with inheritance passing through the female line, while more evolved forms centered on men with inheritance passing through the male line. Frazer’s model of the evolution of belief systems posited that magic, the most primitive stage, is replaced by religion in early civilizations which in turn is replaced by science in advanced civilizations. These models of cultural evolution were unilinear (following one path), simplistic, often based on little evidence, and ethnocentric in that they always placed European culture at the apex. Influenced by Darwinian thinking, the three men believed that later forms of culture are inevitably superior and that early forms either evolve into later forms or else disappear.

Most nineteenth century thinkers were “armchair anthropologists,” a nickname for scholars who learned about other cultures by reading reports of travelers, missionaries, and explorers. On the basis of readings, the armchair anthropologist wrote books that compiled findings on particular topics, such as religion. Thus, they wrote about faraway cultures without the benefit of personal experience with the people living in those cultures. Morgan stands out, in his era, for diverging from the armchair approach. Morgan spent substantial amounts of time with the Iroquois people of central New York. One of his major contributions to anthropology is the finding that “other” cultures make sense if they are understood through interaction with and direct observation of people rather than reading reports about them. This insight of Morgan’s is now a permanent part of anthropology, being firmly established by Bronislaw Malinowski (18841942).

Malinowski is generally considered the “father” of the cornerstone research method in cultural anthropology: participant observation during fieldwork. He established a theoretical approach called functionalism, the view that a culture is similar to a biological organism wherein various parts work to support the operation and maintenance of the whole. In this view a kinship system or religious system contributes to the functioning of the whole culture of which it is a part. Functionalism is linked to the concept of holism, the perspective that one must study all aspects of a culture in order to understand the whole culture.

The “Father” of Four-Field Anthropology

Another major figure of the early twentieth century is Franz Boas (1858-1942), the “father” of North American four-field anthropology. Born in Germany and educated in physics and geography, Boas came to the United States in 1887. He brought with him a skepticism toward Western science gained from a year’s study among the Innu, indigenous people of Baffin Island, Canada. He learned from that experience the important lesson that a physical substance such as “water” is perceived in different ways by people of different cultures. Boas, in contrast to the cultural evolutionists, recognized the equal value of different cultures and said that no culture is superior to any other. He introduced the concept of cultural relativism: the view that each culture must be understood in terms of the values and ideas of that culture and must not be judged by the standards of another. Boas promoted the detailed study of individual cultures within their own historical contexts, an approach called historical particularism. In Boas’s view, broad generalizations and universal statements about culture are inaccurate and invalid because they ignore the realities of individual cultures.

Boas contributed to the growth and professionalization of anthropology in North America. As a professor at Columbia University, he hired faculty and built the department. Boas trained many students who became prominent anthropologists, including Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. He founded several professional associations in cultural anthropology and archaeology. He supported the development of anthropology museums.

Boas was involved in public advocacy and his socially progressive philosophy embroiled him in controversy. He published articles in newspapers and popular magazines opposing the U.S. entry into World War I (1914-1918), a position for which the American Anthropological Association formally censured him as “un-American.” Boas also publicly denounced the role of anthropologists who served as spies in Mexico and Central America for the U.S. government during World War I. One of his most renowned studies, commissioned by President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), was to examine the effects of the environment (in the sense of one’s location) on immigrants and their children. He and his research team measured height, weight, head size and other features of over 17,000 people and their children who had migrated to the United States. Results showed substantial differences in measurements between the older and younger generations. Boas concluded that body size and shape can change quickly in response to a new environmental context; in other words, some of people’s physical characteristics are culturally shaped rather than biologically (“racially”) determined.

Boas’ legacy to anthropology includes his development of the discipline as a four-field endeavor, his theoretical concepts of cultural relativism and historical particularism, his critique of the view that biology is destiny, his anti-racist and other advocacy writings, and his ethical stand that anthropologists should not do undercover research.

Several students of Boas, including Mead and Benedict, developed what is called the “Culture and Personality School.” Anthropologists who were part of this intellectual trend documented cultural variation in modal personality and the role of child-rearing in shaping adult personality. Both Mead and Benedict, along with several other U.S. anthropologists, made their knowledge available to the government during and following World War II (1939-1945). Benedict’s classic 1946 book, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword was influential in shaping U.S. military policies in post-war Japan and in behavior toward the Japanese people during the occupation. Mead likewise, offered advice about the cultures of the South Pacific to the U.S. military occupying the region.

The Expansion of Cultural Anthropology

In the second half of the twentieth century cultural anthropology in the United States expanded substantially in the number of trained anthropologists, departments of anthropology in colleges and universities, and students taking anthropology courses and seeking anthropology degrees at the bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral level. Along with these increases came more theoretical and topical diversity.

Cultural ecology emerged during the 1960s and 1970s. Anthropologists working in this area developed theories to explain cultural similarity and variation based on environmental factors. These anthopologists said that similar environments (e.g., deserts, tropical rainforests, or mountains) would predictably lead to the emergence of similar cultures. Because this approach sought to formulate cross-cultural predictions and generalizations, it stood in clear contrast to Boasian historical particularism.

At the same time, French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (b. 1908) developed a different theoretical perspective influenced by linguistics and called structuralism. Structuralism is an analytical method based on the belief that the best way to learn about a culture is by analyzing its myths and stories to discover the themes, or basic units of meaning, embedded in them. The themes typically are binary opposites such as life and death, dark and light, male and female. In the view of French structuralism these oppositions constitute an unconsciously understood, underlying structure of the culture itself. Levi-Strauss collected hundreds of myths from native peoples of South America as sources for learning about their cultures. He also used structural analysis in the interpretation of kinship systems and art forms such as the masks of Northwest Coast Indians. In the 1960s and 1970s French structuralism began to attract attention of anthropologists in the United States and has had a lasting influence on anthropologists of a more humanistic bent.

Descended loosely from these two contrasting theoretical perspectives—cultural ecology and French structuralism—are two important approaches in contemporary cultural anthropology. One approach, descended from cultural ecology, is cultural materialism. Cultural materialism, as defined by its leading theorist Marvin Harris (1927-2001), takes a Marxist-inspired position that understanding a culture should be pursued first by examining the material conditions in which people live: the natural environment and how people make a living within particular environments. Having established understanding of the “material” base (or infrastructure), attention may then be turned to other aspects of culture, including social organization (how people live together in groups, or structure) and ideology (people’s way of thinking and their symbols, or superstructure). One of Harris’ most famous examples of a cultural materialist approach is his analysis of the material importance of the sacred cows of Hindu India. Harris demonstrates the many material benefits of cows, from their plowing roles to the use of their dried dung as cooking fuel and their utility as street-cleaning scavengers, underlay and are ideologically supported by the religious ban on cow slaughter and protection of even old and disabled cows.

The second approach in cultural anthropology, descended from French structuralism and symbolic anthropology, is interpretive anthropology or intepretivism. This perspective, championed by Clifford Geertz (1926-2006), says that understanding culture is first and foremost about learning what people think about, their ideas, and the symbols and meanings important to them. In contrast to cultural materialism’s emphasis on economic and political factors and behavior, interpretivists focus on webs of meaning. They treat culture as a text that can only be understood from the inside of the culture, in its own terms, an approach interpretivists refer to as “experience near” anthropology, in other words, learning about a culture through the perspectives of the study population as possible. Geertz contributed the concept of “thick description” as the best way for anthropologists to present their findings; in this mode, the anthropologist serves as a medium for transferring the richness of a culture through detailed notes and other recordings with minimal analysis.

Late Twentieth and Turn of Century Growth

Starting in the 1980s, several additional theoretical perspectives and research domains emerged in cultural anthropology. Feminist anthropology arose in reaction to the lack of anthropological research on female roles. In its formative stage, feminist anthropology focused on culturally embedded discrimination against women and girls. As feminist anthropology evolved, it looked at how attention to human agency and resistance within contexts of hierarchy and discrimination sheds light on complexity and change. In a similar fashion, gay and lesbian anthropology, or “queer anthropology,” has exposed the marginalization of gay and lesbian sexuality and culture in previous anthropology research and seeks to correct that situation.

Members of other minority groups voice parallel concerns. African American anthropologists have critiqued mainstream cultural anthropology as suffering from embedded racism in the topics it studies, how it is taught to students, and its exclusion of minorities from positions of power and influence. This critique has produced recommendations about how to build a non-racist anthropology. Progress is occurring, with one notable positive change being the increase in trained anthropologists from minority groups and other excluded groups, and their rising visibility and impact on the research agenda, textbook contents, and future direction of the field.

Another important trend is increased communication among cultural anthropologists worldwide and growing awareness of the diversity of cultural anthropology in different settings. Non-Western anthropologists are contesting the dominance of Euro-American anthropology and offering new perspectives. In many cases, these anthropologists conduct native anthropology, or the study of one’s own cultural group. Their work provides useful critiques of the historically Western, white, male discipline of anthropology.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, two theoretical approaches became prominent and link together many other diverse perspectives, such as feminist anthropology, economic anthropology, and medical anthropology. The two approaches have grown from the earlier perspectives of cultural materialism and French structuralism, respectively. Both are influenced by postmodernism, an intellectual pursuit that asks whether modernity is truly progress and questions such aspects of modernism as the scientific method, urbanization, technological change, and mass communication.

The first approach is termed structurism, which is an expanded political economy framework. Structurism examines how powerful structures such as economics, politics, and media shape culture and create and maintain entrenched systems of inequality and oppression. James Scott, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Paul Farmer are pursuing this direction of work. Many anthropologists use terms such as social suffering or structural violence to refer to the forms and effects of historically and structural embedded inequalities that cause excess illness, death, violence, and pain.

The second theoretical and research emphasis, derived to some extent from interpretivism, is on human agency, or free will, and the power of individuals to create and change culture by acting against structures. Many anthropologists avoid the apparent dichotomy in these two approaches and seek to combine a structurist framework with attention to human agency.

The Concept of Culture

Culture is the core concept in cultural anthropology, and thus it might seem likely that cultural anthropologists would agree about what it is. Consensus may have been the case in the early days of the discipline when there were far fewer anthropologists. Edward B. Tylor (1832-1917), a British anthropologist, proposed the first anthropological definition of culture in 1871. He said that “Culture, or civilization … is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952, p. 81). By the 1950s, however, an effort to collect definitions of culture produced 164 different definitions. Since that time no one has tried to count the number of definitions of culture used by anthropologists.

In contemporary cultural anthropology, the theoretical positions of the cultural materialists and the interpretive anthropologists correspond to two different definitions of culture. Cultural materialist Marvin Harris defines culture as the total socially acquired life-way or life-style of a group of people, a definition that maintains the emphasis on the holism established by Tylor. In contrast, Clifford Geertz, speaking for the interpretivists, defines culture as consisting of symbols, motivations, moods, and thoughts. The interpretivist definition excludes behavior as part of culture. Again, avoiding a somewhat extreme dichotomy, it is reasonable and comprehensive to adopt a broad definition of culture as all learned and shared behavior and ideas.

Culture exists, in a general way, as something that all humans have. Some anthropologists refer to this universal concept of culture as “Culture” with a capital “C.” Culture also exists in a specific way, in referring to particular groups as distinguised by their behaviors and beliefs. Culture in the specific sense refers to “a culture” such as the Maasai, the Maya, or middle-class white Americans. In the specific sense culture is variable and changing. Sometimes the terms “microculture” or local culture are used to refer to specific cultures. Microcultures may include ethnic groups, indigenous peoples, genders, age categories, and more. At a larger scale exist regional or even global cultures such as Western-style consumer culture that now exists in many parts of the world.

Characteristics of Culture

Since it is difficult to settle on a neat and tidy definition of culture, some anthropologists find it more useful to discuss the characteristics of culture and what makes it a special adaptation on which humans rely so heavily.

Culture is based on symbols

A symbol is something that stands for something else. Most symbols are arbitrary, that is, they bear no necessary relationship to that which is symbolized. Therefore, they are cross-culturally variable and unpredictable. For example, although one might guess that all cultures might have an expression for hunger that involves the stomach, no one could predict that in Hindi, the language of northern India, a colloquial expression for being hungry says that “rats are jumping in my stomach.” Our lives are shaped by, immersed in, and made possible through symbols. It is through symbols, especially language, that culture is shared, changed, stored, and transmitted over time.

Culture is learned

Cultural learning begins from the moment of birth, if not before (some people think that an unborn baby takes in and stores information through sounds heard from the outside world). A large but unknown amount of people’s cultural learning is unconscious, occurring as a normal part of life through observation. Schools, in contrast, are a formal way to learn culture. Not all cultures throughout history have had formal schooling. Instead, children learned culture through guidance from others and by observation and practice. Longstanding ways of enculturation, or learning one’s culture, include stories, pictorial art, and performances of rituals and dramas.

Cultures are integrated

To state that cultures are internally integrated is to assert the principle of holism. Thus, studying only one or two aspects of culture provides understanding so limited that it is more likely to be misleading or wrong than more comprehensively grounded approaches. Cultural integration and holism are relevant to applied anthropologists interested in proposing ways to promote positive change. Years of experience in applied anthropology show that introducing programs for change in one aspect of culture without considering the effects in other areas may be detrimental to the welfare and survival of a culture. For example, Western missionaries and colonialists in parts of Southeast Asia banned the practice of head-hunting. This practice was embedded in many other aspects of culture, including politics, religion, and psychology (i.e., a man’s sense of identity as a man sometimes depended on the taking of a head). Although stopping head-hunting might seem like a good thing, it had disastrous consequences for the cultures that had practiced it.

Cultures Interact and Change

Several forms of contact bring about a variety of changes in the cultures involved. Trade networks, international development projects, telecommunications, education, migration, and tourism are just a few of the factors that affect cultural change through contact. Globalization, the process of intensified global interconnectedness and movement of goods, information and people, is a major force of contemporary cultural change. It has gained momentum through recent technological change, especially the boom in information and communications technologies, which is closely related to the global movement of capital and finance.

Globalization does not spread evenly, and its interactions with and effects on local cultures vary substantially, from positive change for all groups involved to cultural destruction and extinction for those whose land, livelihood and culture are lost. Current terms that attempt to capture varieties of cultural change related to globalization include hybridization (cultural mixing into a new form) and localization (appropriation and adaptation of a global form into a new, locally meaningful form).

Ethnography and Ethnology

Cultural anthropology embraces two major pursuits in its study and understanding of culture. The first is ethnography or “culture-writing.” An ethnography is an in-depth description of one culture. This approach provides detailed information based on personal observation of a living culture for an extended period of time. An ethnography is usually a full-length book.

Ethnographies have changed over time. In the first half of the twentieth century, ethnographers wrote about “exotic” cultures located far from their homes in Europe and North America. These ethnographers treated a particular local group or village as a unit unto itself with clear boundaries. Later, the era of so-called “village studies” in ethnography held sway from the 1950s through the 1960s. Anthropologists typically studied in one village and then wrote an ethnography describing that village, again as a clearly bounded unit. Since the 1980s, the subject matter of ethnographies has changed in three major ways. First, ethnographies treat local cultures as connected to larger regional and global structures and forces; second, they focus on a topic of interest and avoid a more holistic (comprehensive) approach; and third, many are situated within industrialized/post-industrialized cultures.

As topics and sites have changed, so have research methods. One innovation of the late twentieth century is the adoption of multi-sited research, or research conducted in more than one context such as two or more field sites. Another is the use of supplementary non-sited data collected in archives, from Internet cultural groups, or newspaper coverage. Cultural anthropologists are turning to multi-sited and non-sited research in order to address the complexities and linkages of today’s globalized cultural world. Another methodological innovation is collaborative ethnography, carried out as a team project between academic researchers and members of the study population. Collaborative research changes ethnography from study of people for the sake of anthropological knowledge to study with people for the sake of knowledge and for the people who are the focus of the research.

The second research goal of cultural anthropology is ethnology, or cross-cultural analysis. Ethnology is the comparative analysis of a particular topic in more than one cultural context using ethnographic material. Ethnologists compare such topics as marriage forms, economic practices, religious beliefs, and childrearing practices, for example, in order to discover patterns of similarity and variation and possible causes for them. One might compare the length of time that parents sleep with their babies in different cultures in relation to personality. Researchers ask, for example, if a long co-sleeping period leads to less individualistic, more socially connected personalities and if a short period of co-sleeping produces more individualistic personalities. Other ethnological analyses have considered the type of economy in relation to frequency of warfare, and the type of kinship organization in relation to women’s status.

Ethnography and ethnology are mutually supportive. Ethnography provides rich, culturally specific insights. Ethnology, by looking beyond individual cases to wider patterns, provides comparative insights and raises new questions that prompt future ethnographic research.

Cultural Relativism

Most people grow up thinking that their culture is the only and best way of life and that other cultures are strange or inferior. Cultural anthropologists label this attitude ethnocentrism: judging other cultures by the standards of one’s own culture. The opposite of ethnocentrism is cultural relativism, the idea that each culture must be understood in terms of its own values and beliefs and not by the standards of another culture.

Cultural relativism may easily be misinterpreted as absolute cultural relativism, which says that whatever goes on in a particular culture must not be questioned or changed because no one has the right to question any behavior or idea anywhere. This position can lead in dangerous directions. Consider the example of the Holocaust during World War II in which millions of Jews and other minorities in much of Eastern and Western Europe were killed as part of the German Nazis’ Aryan supremacy campaign. The absolute cultural relativist position becomes boxed in, logically, to saying that since the Holocaust was undertaken according to the values of the culture, outsiders have no business questioning it.

Critical cultural relativism offers an alternative view that poses questions about cultural practices and ideas in terms of who accepts them and why, and who they might be harming or helping. In terms of the Nazi Holocaust, a critical cultural relativist would ask, “Whose culture supported the values that killed millions of people on the grounds of racial purity?” Not the cultures of the Jewish people, the Roma, and other victims. It was the culture of Aryan supremacists, who were one subgroup among many. The situation was far more complex than a simple absolute cultural relativist statement takes into account, because there was not “one” culture and its values involved. Rather, it was a case of cultural imperialism, in which one dominant group claimed supremacy over minority cultures and proceeded to change the situation in its own interests and at the expense of other cultures. Critical cultural relativism avoids the trap of adopting a homogenized view of complexity. It recognizes internal cultural differences and winners/losers, oppressors/victims. It pays attention to different interests of various power groups.

Applied Cultural Anthropology

In cultural anthropology, applied anthropology involves the use or application of anthropological knowledge to help prevent or solve problems of living peoples, including poverty, drug abuse, and HIV/AIDS. In the United States, applied anthropology emerged during World War II when many anthropologists offered their expertise to promote U.S. war efforts and post-war occupation. Following the end of the war, the United States assumed a larger global presence, especially through its bilateral aid organization, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). USAID hired many cultural anthropologists who worked in a variety of roles, mainly evaluating development projects at the end of the project cycle and serving as in-country anthropologists overseas.

In the 1970s cultural anthropologists worked with other social scientists in USAID to develop and promote the use of “social soundness analysis” in all government-supported development projects. As defined by Glynn Cochrane, social soundness analysis required that all development projects be preceded by a thorough baseline study of the cultural context and then potential redesign of the project based on those findings. A major goal was to prevent the funding of projects with little or no cultural fit. The World Bank hired its first anthropologist, Michael Cernea, in 1974. For three decades, Cernea influenced its policy-makers to pay more attention to project-affected people and their culture in designing and implementing projects. He promoted the term “development induced displacement” to bring attention to how large infrastructure projects negatively affect millions of people worldwide and he devised recommendations for mitigating such harm.

Many cultural anthropologists are applying cultural analysis to large-scale institutions (e.g., capitalism and the media) particularly their negative social consequences, such as the increasing wealth gap between powerful and less powerful countries and between the rich and the poor within countries. These anthropologists are moving in a new and challenging direction. Their work involves the study of global—local interactions and change over time, neither of which were part of cultural anthropology’s original focus. Moreover, these cultural anthropologists take on the role of advocacy and often work collaboratively with victimized peoples.

Anthropologists are committed to documenting, understanding, and maintaining cultural diversity throughout the world as part of humanity’s rich heritage. Through the four-field approach, they contribute to the recovery and analysis of the emergence and evolution of humanity. They provide detailed descriptions of cultures as they have existed in the past, as they now exist, and as they are changing in contemporary times. Anthropologists regret the decline and extinction of different cultures and actively contribute to the preservation of cultural diversity and cultural survival.

Bibliography:

• Abélès, Mark. 1999. How the Anthropology of France Has Changed Anthropology in France: Assessing New Directions in the Field. Cultural Anthropology 14: 404–408.
• Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Asad, Talal, ed. 1992. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. 2nd ed. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
• Barnard, Alan. 2000. History and Theory in Anthropology. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Barrett, Stanley R. 2000. Anthropology: A Student’s Guide to Theory and Method. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Barth, Fredrik, Andre Gingrich, Robert Parkin, and Sydel Silverman. 2005. One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French, and American Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Beckett, Jeremy. 2002. Some Aspects of Continuity and Change among Anthropologists in Australia or ‘He-Who-Eats-From- One-Dish-With-Us-With-One-Spoon.’ The Australian Journal of Anthropology 13: 127–138.
• Blaser, Mario, Harvey A. Feit, and Glenn McRae, eds. 2004. In the Way of Development: Indigenous Peoples, Life Projects and Globalization. New York: Zed Books.
• Boas, F. (1940). Race, language, and culture. New York: Free Press.
• Borofsky, Robert, ed. 1994. Assessing Cultural Anthropology. New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Cernea, Michael. 1991. Putting People First: Social Variables in Development. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Fahim, Hussein, ed. 1982. Indigenous Anthropology in Non- Western Countries. Durham: Carolina Academic Press.
• Geertz, Clifford. 1995. After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• González, Roberto J., ed. 2004. Anthropologists in the Public Sphere: Speaking Out on War, Peace, and American Power. Austin: University of Texas Press.
• Goody, Jack. 1995. The Expansive Moment: Anthropology in Britain and Africa, 1918–1970. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson, eds. 1997. Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Hammond-Tooke, W. David. 1997. Imperfect Interpreters: South Africa’s Anthropologists: 1920–1990. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.
• Hannerz, Ulf. 1992. Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Harris, Marvin. 1968. The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company.
• Harrison, Ira E., and Faye V. Harrison, eds. 1999. African- American Pioneers in Anthropology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
• Inda, Jonathan Xavier, and Renato Rosaldo, eds. 2002. The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Company.
• Kroeber, Alfred. L., and Clyde Kluckhohn. 1952. Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Kuper, Adam. 1973. Anthropologists and Anthropology: The British School 1922–1972. New York: Pica Press.
• Kuwayama, Takami. 2004. Native Anthropology: The Japanese Challenge to Western Academic Hegemony. Melbourne, Australia: Trans Pacific Press.
• Lassiter, Luke Eric. 2005. The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Marcus, George E., and Michael M. J. Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Medicine, Beatrice, with Sue-Ellen Jacobs, ed. 2001. Learning to Be an Anthropologist and Remaining “Native.” Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
• Mingming, Wang. 2002. The Third Eye: Towards a Critique of “Nativist Anthropology.” Critique of Anthropology 22: 149–174.
• Mullings, Leith. 2005. Interrogating Racism: Toward an Antiracist Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 667–694.
• Patterson, Thomas C. 2001. A Social History of Anthropology in the United States. New York: Berg.
• Peirano, Mariza G. S. 1998. When Anthropology Is at Home: The Different Contexts of a Single Discipline. Annual Review of Anthropology 27: 105–128.
• Restrepo, Eduardo, and Arturo Escobar. 2005. “Other Anthropologies and Anthropology Otherwise:” Steps to a World Anthropologies Framework. Critique of Anthropology 25: 99–129.
• Robinson, Kathryn. 2004. Chandra Jayaawrdena and the Ethical “Turn” in Australian Anthropology. Critique of Anthropology 24: 379–402.
• Roseberry, William. 1997. Marx and Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 26: 25–46.
• Ryang, Sonia. 2004. Japan and National Anthropology: A Critique. New York: RoutledgeCurzon.
• Shanklin, Eugenia. 2000. Representations of Race and Racism in American Anthropology. Current Anthropology 41: 99–103.
• Spencer, Jonathan. 2000. British Social Anthropology: A Retrospective. Annual Review of Anthropology 29: 1–24.
• Stocking, George W., Jr. 1992. The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Yamashita, Shinji, Joseph Bosco, and J. S. Eades, eds. 2004. The Making of Anthropology in East and Southeast Asia. New York: Bergahn Books.

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Social anthropology articles from across Nature Portfolio

Social anthropology is the subdiscipline of anthropology that investigates the cultural properties of human societies. Topics include cultural norms, morals, laws and customs, and there is a particular focus on the comparative study of non-industrialised societies.

Latest Research and Reviews

Cross-cultural perception of strength, attractiveness, aggressiveness and helpfulness of Maasai male faces calibrated to handgrip strength

• Marina L. Butovskaya
• Victoria V. Rostovstseva
• Albert Davletshin

Artificial intelligence and illusions of understanding in scientific research

The proliferation of artificial intelligence tools in scientific research risks creating illusions of understanding, where scientists believe they understand more about the world than they actually do.

• Lisa Messeri
• M. J. Crockett

The golden section in the art of ancient Greece: an anthropometric study of the young warrior of Riace

• Alessandra Putrino
• Simona Zaami

The mothers: contesting health-illness status and cultural authority in the age of AIDS

• João Paulo Gugliotti
• Richard Miskolci

The cultural evolution of collective property rights for sustainable resource governance

Understanding the forces behind the successful governance of common-pool resources is crucial to sustainable development. This study reveals the importance of establishing and enforcing ‘access rights’ in the face of intergroup conflicts over resources to facilitate the evolution of sustainable ‘use rights’.

• Jeffrey Andrews
• Matthew Clark
• Monique Borgerhoff Mulder

Early humans out of Africa had only base-initial numerals

• One-Soon Her
• Yung-Ping Liang
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News and Comment

From equitable access to equitable innovation: rethinking bioengineering for global health

What does global health equity mean? In bioengineering, ‘equity’ is often interpreted as global ‘access’ to technologies, thereby neglecting wider structural inequalities. Here we suggest that concepts of equity need to be expanded to incorporate principles of equitable representation and recognition within the innovation ecosystem.

• Alice Street
• Maïwenn Kersaudy Kerhoas
• Zibusiso Ndlovu

Key points for an ethnography of AI: an approach towards crucial data

Recent years have seen an increase in calls for ethnography as a method to study Artificial Intelligence (AI). Scholars from diverse backgrounds have been encouraged to move beyond quantitative methods and embrace qualitative methods, particularly ethnography. As anthropologists of data and AI, we appreciate the growing recognition of qualitative methods. However, we emphasize the importance of grounding ethnography in specific ways of engaging with one’s field site for this method to be valuable. Without this grounding, research outcomes on AI may become distorted. In this commentary, we highlight three key aspects of the ethnographic method that require special attention to conduct robust ethnographic studies of AI: committed fieldwork (even if the fieldwork period is short), trusting relationships between researchers and participants, and, importantly, attentiveness to subtle, ambiguous, or absent-present data. This last aspect is often overlooked but is crucial in ethnography. By sharing examples from our own and other researchers’ ethnographic fieldwork, we showcase the significance of conducting ethnography with careful attention to such data and shed light on the challenges one might encounter in AI research.

• Roanne van Voorst
• Tanja Ahlin

Late Neolithic community, clay pipes and water diversion in monsoonal North Central China

Excavation and a geoarchaeological survey provide evidence of an early multi-levelled water management system in the Late-Holocene East Asian Monsoon region.

• Vernon L. Scarborough

Research codes and contracts do not guarantee equitable research with Indigenous communities

Research codes and contracts have been developed to protect Indigenous and marginalized peoples from exploitation and to promote inclusion, so that research will become more beneficial to them. We highlight three important but often overlooked challenges for such instruments, drawing on examples from the San of southern Africa.

• Stasja Koot
• Julie Grant
• David Mushavanga

Global supernatural beliefs

Supernatural beliefs shape how people understand the world, but there is debate regarding how these beliefs relate to the natural or social world. Jackson and colleagues quantitatively analysed the ethnographic record and found evidence that supernatural explanations are more commonly used for natural than for social phenomena.

• Matthew I. Billet
• Ara Norenzayan

Makeshift medicine is a response to US health system failures

The ‘makeshift medicine’ framework describes how individuals address healthcare needs when they are unable to access the US healthcare system. The framework is applied to gender-affirming care, the health of people who inject drugs and abortion access. Recommendations for future research, advocacy and policy are made.

• Patrick J. A. Kelly
• Katie B. Biello
• Jaclyn M. W. Hughto

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Flanagan, Mariah Camille (2017)  The religioscape of museums: understanding modern interactions with ancient ritual spaces .Undergraduate Thesis, University of Pittsburgh.

Merante, Monica M (2017)  A universal display? Investigating the role of Panathenaic amphorae in the British Museum . Undergraduate Thesis, University of Pittsburgh.

Deemer, Susanna (2016) Between Capitulation and Overt Action: An Ethnographic Case Study of the Chinese American Student Association at University of Pittsburgh. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Devlin, Hannah (2016)  Compositional analysis of Iroquoian pottery: determining functional relationships between contiguous sites.  Undergraduate Thesis, University of Pittsburgh.

Gallagher, Anna (2016)  The Biderbost site: exploring migration and trade on the social landscape of the Pacific Northwest. Undergraduate Thesis, University of Pittsburgh.

Hoadley, Elizabeth (2016)  Discrimination and modern Paganism: a study of religion and contemporary social climate.  Undergraduate Thesis, University of Pittsburgh.

Johnson, Rachel (2016) Households and Empire: A pXRF Study of Chimu Metal Artifacts from Cerro la Virgen. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Kerr, Jessica (2016) Mountain Dew and the Tooth Fairy: The Influence of Parent/child Relationships, Consumption Habits, and Social Image on Dental Caries in Rural Appalachia. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Kulig, Shannon (2015)  What were the elites doing? understanding Late Classic elite practices at Lower Dover, Belize. Undergraduate Thesis, University of Pittsburgh.

Kulig, Shannon (2015) Pottery at the Cayuga Site of Genoa Fort. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Ojeda, Lauren (2015) The Syndemic Nature of Mental Health in Bolivia. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Paglisotti, Taylor (2015) Gender, Sexuality, and Stigma: A Case Study of HIV/AIDS policy and discourse in Rural Tanzania. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Wasik, Kayla (2015) Understanding Activities and Purposes: An Analysis of Ground Stone from the Parker Farm and Carman Iroquoian Sites. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Bugos, Eva (2014)  “That’s what I look to her for:” a qualitative analysis of interviews from the Young Moms: Together We Can Make a Difference study.  Undergraduate Thesis, University of Pittsburgh.

Deahl, Claire (2014) A Study of Veterans Communities in Pittsburgh. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh. 

Fetterolf, Michael (2014) Healing Alzheimer’s. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Liggett, Sarah (2014) Creating an Armenian Identity: The Role of History, Imagination, and Story in the Making of ‘Armenian’. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Marler, Adrienne (2014) Illness Perceptions in Patients with Hepatobiliary Cancers. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Radomski, Julia (2014)  “Hay que cuidarse”: family planning, development, and the informal sector in Quito, Ecuador. Undergraduate Thesis, University of Pittsburgh.

Siegel, Nicole (2014) The Bathhouse and the Mikvah: The Creation of Identity. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Zhang, Zannan (2014) Functional Significance of the Human Mandibular Symphysis. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Chastain, Stephen (2013) The origin of the Mongolian steppe and its role in the adoption of domestic animals: paleoclimatology and niche construction theory. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Ferguson, Kayla (2013) The Use of English in Tamil Cinema. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Johnston, Graham (2013) Play, Boundaries, and Creative Thinking: A Ludic Perspective. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Willison, Megan (2013)  Understanding gendered activities from surface collections: an analysis of the Parker Farm and Carman Iroquoian sites.  Undergraduate Thesis, University of Pittsburgh.

Zajdel, Evan (2013)  Narrative threads: ethnographic tourism, Romani tourist tales, and fiber art.  Undergraduate Thesis, University of Pittsburgh.

Conger, Megan (2012) Considering Gendered Domains in Iroquois Archaeology: A Comparative Approach to Gendered Space in Central New York State. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.   

Fisher, Isaac (2012) Return of the Gift: Food Not Bombs and the Radical Nature of Sharing in the Society of Engineered Scarcity. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Neely, Sean (2012)  Spaces of becoming and being: the nature of shared experience in Czech society from 1918 to 1989. Undergraduate Thesis, University of Pittsburgh.

Rodriguez, Eric A. (2012)  Profitability and production in 19th century composite ships: the case study of the Austrian vessel, the Slobodna.  Undergraduate Thesis, University of Pittsburgh.

Bednar, Sarah E. (2011) Use and Perception of Teotihuacan Motifs in the Art of Piedras Negras, Tikal, and Copan. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Pallatino, Chelsea Leigh (2011)  The Evolution of La Donna: Marriage, Motherhood, and the Modern Italian Woman. Undergraduate Thesis, University of Pittsburgh.

Barca, Kathryn G. (2010) An Analysis of Iroquois Pottery Function at the Parker Farm Site (UB 643): Comparisons between Two Structures. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Cannon, Joshua Warren (2010)  Textile Production and Its Implications For Complex Social Organization.  Undergraduate Thesis, University of Pittsburgh.

Rodriguez, Erin Christine (2010)  Obsidian in Northern Ecuador: A Study of Obsidian Production and Site Function in Pambamarca.  Undergraduate Thesis, University of Pittsburgh.

Rodriguez, Erin Christine (2010) Households and Power among the Pre-Contact Iroquois. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Wicks, Emily (2010) From Use to Disuse: A Study of Pottery Found in Households and Middens at Two Cayuga Sites, Parker Farm (UB 643 and Carman (UB642). Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

MacCord, Katherine (2009)  Human Skeletal Growth: Observations from Analyses of Three Skeletal Populations.  Undergraduate Thesis, University of Pittsburgh.

Nichols, Teresa A (2009)  Declaring Indigenous: International Aspirations and National Land Claims Through the Lens of Anthropology.  Undergraduate Thesis, University of Pittsburgh.

Sporar, Rachael E. (2009) Bones Say It Best: Bioarchaeological Evidence for the Change European Colonialism Brought to the Indigenous Peoples of North America. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Stacy, Erin Michele (2009)  Stable Isotopic Analysis of Equid (Horse) Teeth from Mongolia.  Undergraduate Thesis, University of Pittsburgh.

Sudina, Tony (2008) The Utilitarian Characteristics of Iroquois Pottery Vessels. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Browne, Nathan C. (2007) An Architectural Analysis of Longhouse Form, Spatial Organization, and an Argument for Privatized Space in Northern Iroquoia. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Melly, Caroline M. (2007) Strategies of Non-African Development Agencies and Their Implications for Cultural Change in Nigeria.  Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Sadvari, Joshua W. (2007) Dental Pathology and Diet at the Site of Khirbat al-Mudayna (Jordan). Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Haines, Allison (2006) Assessing Osteophytosis in the Nubian Neolithic. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

O’Donnell, Kathryn (2006) Gendered Identity in Transitioning States: Women’s Reproductive Health Activism in Berlin. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Prakash, Preetam (2006) Relationships between Diet and Status at Copan, Honduras.  Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Birmingham, Katherine (2005) Retracing the Steps of Iroquois Potters: Highlighting Technical Choice in Iroquois Ceramic Studies.  Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Colatrella, Brittany (2005) From Hopelessness to Hopefulness: A personal dialogue on ending generational poverty. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Long, Autumn (2005) The Ethos of Land Ownership in a Rural West Virginia County: An Ethnographic Account.  Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Richter, Stephen (2004) Anasazi Cannibalism in the American Southwest: A Site-By-Site and Taphonomic Approach.  Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Sulosky, Carrie (2004) The Effects of Agriculture in Preceramic Peru.  Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Wiseman, Natalie (2004) Religious Syncretism in Mexico.  Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Hamm, Megan (2003) Egyptian Identity Vs. "The Harem Hootchi- kootch": Belly Dance in the Context of Colonialism and Nationalism in Egypt.  Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Michalski, Mark (2003) Anthropological Fact or Fiction: A Critical Review of the Evidence For and Against the Existence of Cannibalism in the British Navy.  Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Mueller-Heubach, Oliver Maximillian (2003) The Moravian Response to a Changing America as Seen Through Ceramics.  Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Shock, Myrtle (2003) Comparison of Lithic Debitage and Lithic Tools at Two Early Contact Period Cayuga Iroquois villages, the Parker Farm and Carman Sites.  Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Steinman, Joanna (2003) Feng Shui.  Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Strauss, Amy (2003) Greek Neolithic figurines from Thessaly.  Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Thompson, Ross (2003) Study of Arsenic in Hopi Artifacts.  Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Whitehead, Jeffrey (2003) We Owe It All to the Iroquois? Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Boswell, Jacob (2002) A Study of Changing Context: Adapting Eastern Medicine to a Western Setting. Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Persson, Ann S. (2001) A Beacon of Restoration: Archaeological Excavations at the John O'Neill Lighthouse Keeper's Residence, Havre de Grace, Maryland.  Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Unice, Lori Ann (2001) Dental Health Among the Monongahela: Foley Farm Phase II.  Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Asmussen, Heidi (1998) Toward an Understanding of Iroquois Plant Use: archaeobotanical material from the Carman Site, a Cayuga village in central New York.  Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Rockette, Bonny (1998) Huari Administrative Architecture: A Space Syntax Approach.  Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

West, Kate (1997) Faunal Analysis of the Carman Site: a Cayuga village site in central New York.  Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Norejko, Jay (1996) The Most Diverse Fauna of Plesiadapiformes (Mammalia: Primatomorpha) Ever Sampled from the Clarkforkian Land Mammal Age.  Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Kasperowski, Kris (1995) Stone Tool Manufacture at the Carman Site.  Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

Montag, Michelle (1995) Lithic Debitage Analysis of the Carman Site.  Anthropology Honors Paper, University of Pittsburgh.

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Anthropology Research Topics And Writing Ideas For Students

Writing an anthropology research paper is in a lot of ways similar to writing an argumentative essay in other disciplines. Usually, the significant difference between these essays is how you support your idea. While you may use only literature to prove your point in an argumentative essay, you may need to employ textual proofs from artifacts, ethnographies, etc., in an anthropology essay.

Research in anthropology could be thrilling, particularly if you have many anthropology project ideas. Anthropology studies the evolution of human culture and therefore provides a wide range of anthropology essay topics that spill into history, biology, sociology, etc. Many anthropological research projects borrow from other social sciences. It is easy to feel that overwhelming grip on your chest if you’re unable to choose an anthropology research topic.

How to Write an Anthropology Research Paper

Guide how to write an anthropology research paper, the excellent list of 110 anthropology research paper topics, physical anthropology research paper topics, medical anthropology research paper topics, cultural anthropology research paper ideas, best cultural anthropology essay topics, biological anthropology research paper topics.

• Forensic Anthropology Research Paper Topics

Are you worried because you don’t know how to write an anthropology paper? Writing an anthropology paper could be so much fun if you can nail the basics. It is not as bad as people paint it to be, especially if you get writing help from our professional writers . With the right anthropology paper format, anthropology research topics, and anthropology research paper examples, you’re set to go!

If you’re a big fan of doing lots of things in a short time and with fewer efforts, then you’re in the right place. This guide is full of the tips and skills you need to arrange your ideas properly. It also contains anthropology paper examples, anthropology paper topics, and other life-saving tips you may need. Ready to know how to start an anthropology research paper? Let’s delve right in!

How do you get started on an anthropology research paper? Below is the most comprehensive list on the internet to get you home and dry in record time!

• Review the Assignment Guidelines
• Develop a Topic
• Outline your Paper
• Do some Library Research
• Write a Rough Draft
• Write the Paper
• Edit the Paper

We shall shortly expound on this list to help you better understand them.

• Review the Assignment Guidelines: your professor may give you some guidelines to follow. To avoid deviating from the instructor’s expectations, spend some time reviewing your assignment guidelines so that you know the exact things you need to accomplish. For example, confirm if there are any stated anthropology research methods and the likes. It is beneficial to have a writing schedule. If you have a lot of time in your hands before the submission time, spreading out the workload will help to ease some of the stress. If you’re naturally a binge writer, sit at your computer early and bleed!
• Develop a Topic:  search for some anthropology research paper ideas and choose from the vast array of anthropology research topics available. Select a topic that revolves around a guiding question. This topic should connect on a deeper level to the theme of the course. The length requirement for the paper will help you know if your topic is too big, too small, or just good enough. For a short paper, you may want to focus on a particular culture or event in the context of a broader topic. Ensure that your thesis focuses on anthropology and that it draws from anthropological theories or ideas. Now, do a quick search to confirm if there are scholarly materials available for this topic. It is easier to write a paper with some available references.
• Introduction/Abstract
• Library Research: now, start the research on your topic, preferably from course materials. A bibliography at the end of a relevant course reading is also a great way to get other related materials. Depending on the requirement of the assignment, feel free to search for other books or articles.
• Write a Rough Draft: during your research, endeavor to make proper jottings and references, which will form the rough draft of your essay. A rough draft will help you create dots that you will be able to connect later on.
• Title: Usually on a separate page and contains the abstract.
• Introduction/Abstract : A short paragraph showing the road map of your thesis.
• Body: Leverages your thesis and presenting your research in a detailed and logical structure.
• Conclusion: The conclusion is a short paragraph that summarizes your fundamental theme and substantiates your thesis.
• References: A citation of the resources you used in your paper. Follow the referencing style which your instructor chooses.
• Edit the Paper:  you may engage any of your friends to help you go through your essay. Make some final checks such as the length requirement, the format and citation style, spelling and grammatical errors, logical flow of ideas and clarity, substantial support of the claim, etc. Once you edit your paper, turn it in and accept an A+!

Without further ado, here are 110 anthropology research paper topics for free! With 18 topics each from the six main subcategories of anthropology, you can’t get it wrong!

• Eugenics — its merits and demerits in the 21st-century world.
• Human Origin: Comparing the creationist versus evolutionist views on the origin of man.
• Ancient Egypt: The preservation of their dead and underlying beliefs.
• Homo habilis: Investigating Contemporary facts supporting their past existence.
• Drowning: Clarifying the cause of drowning by examining the physical and anatomical evidence.
• Smoking and its effects on the physical appearance of humans over decades of indulgence.
• Physical labor: Exploring its long-term impact on the physical appearance of humans.
• The relationship of Kyphosis with human senescence.
• Aging in Western Culture.
• Skin color: Exploring the influence of the environment on human skin color across continents.
• Species and language: Focus on ways species evolve across the world and ways language acquisition affects and influences culture.
• Abiogenesis: Research about abiogenesis and how it affects human development
• Animal stability: How captive animals are different from those that live in the wild.
• Henry Walter: The ways Henry Walter contributed to the field of physical anthropology.
• Cephalization: The process of cephalization and what it entails.
• Genotype: The environment correlation study.
• Genetics: What does genetic hijacking mean?
• Altruism: Do people learn altruism or it is an acquired state.
• Applying the Concepts of Ethnozoology in medicine.
• Critically Assessing the fundamental posits of critical medical anthropology (CMA).
• The 2014 Ebola virus outbreak in Africa: Evaluating the success of control interventions.
• Exploring the applications of Ethnobotany in medicine.
• Nuclear disaster: A research into the life of survivors of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986.
• HIV/AIDS: The reasons for prevalent societal infamy and the way forward.
• HIV/AIDS epidemic in Europe: Exploring the roles of commercial sex workers in the spread of the disease.
• Alternative medicine in China: A comparative review of its weaknesses and possible strengths in the light of Orthodox medicine.
• HIV/AIDS in Africa: A critical assessment of extensively troubled nations and populations.
• Depression in South-East Asia: Sheer social noise or severe threat?
• Adult’s onset diabetes: Research on how diabetes is a major health issue in aboriginal populations in The U.S and Canada.
• ARV rollout: The role of the ARV rollout and campaigns in Africa.
• Sexual diversity in Africa: Research on whether sexual diversity in Africa is being taken into account to help fight against AIDS.
• Chemicals and radiation waste: How the radiation waste and chemicals in the air are affecting people.
• Mercury poisoning: The effects of Mercury poisoning in Minamata, Japan, and the measures to help put the situation under control.
• Health: The health ramifications of adapting to ecology and maladaptation.
• Health: Domestic healthcare and health culture practices
• Clinic: Clinical interactions in social organizations.
• Growth: Difference between growth and development.
• Engineering: Genetic engineering and what it entails.
• Marriage: Marriage rituals in different cultures.
• Magic: Belief in magic and the supernatural.
• Mythologies: The effects it has on modern culture.
• Anthropology: How to use anthropology as forensic science.
• Heroes: Studies of heroes in different societies.
• Education: How education differs around the world.

Cultural anthropology discusses human societies and their cultural origin, vacation, history, and development. Here is a look at cultural Anthropology topics:

• Women in Africa: The various challenging roles that women in Modern Africa play and how they handle it.
• Homelessness: How homelessness affects and influences the culture and social landscapes.
• India: Methods and measures that India is taking to deal with the issue of homelessness and measures they have put in place to deal with social landscapers.
• Political science: Highlight and discuss the link between cultural anthropology and political science.
• Superstition: Research ways that superstition affects the way of life.
• Sexual discrimination: The evolution of sexual discrimination and its effects in modern times.
• African cultures: Investigating how different religions and beliefs impact African culture.
• Northern Nigeria: How the basic religious beliefs that influence forced nuptials among the children in North Nigeria.
• Gay marriage: The background on gay marriage and how it influences the cultural and social backgrounds.
• Racism: Explain racism and its existence in modern times.
• Religious practices: Ways how religious practices and beliefs affect culture.
• Culture shock: What it is and ways that people can work through it.
• Ethnocentrism: Ways that you can use to minimize it.
• Ancestors: A view of ancestors in African culture.
• Religion: Religious practices in a particular society.
• Culture: About the Rabari culture in India
• Definition of culture
• How culture anthropology links to political science
• Alcoholism: Looking into the socio-economic and cultural history in Eastern Europe.
• Assessing the effects of radioactivity on populations affected by the nuclear disaster of 2011 in Fukushima Daiichi.
• Gay marriage: Exploring the biological aspects of same-sex weddings in North America.
• Minamata disease: A critical look into the origin, populations affected, and transgenerational impact of this disease on Japan.
• Asthma disease in Yokkaichi: A critical look into the cause, people affected, and transgenerational effect on Japan.
• Itai-Itai disease: A critical look into the cause, populations affected, and transgenerational effect on Japan.
• Nuclear bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki: An investigation of the transgenerational effects on the health of affected victims to this present time.
• Cocaine use in America: A critical look into the health impact on American cocaine users.
• Making Marijuana use legal in America: Possible woes and beneficial outcomes.
• Cystic fibrosis: Justifications for its preponderance in white populations in America.
• Biological Anthropology: Research on the meaning and definition of biological Anthropology and how it influences different fields.
• Paleoanthropology: Explore ways Paleoanthropology uses fossil records to draw biological anthropology compassion and conclusions regarding human evolution.
• Human social structures: Explain the development of human social structures using biological anthropology.
• Biological anthropologies: Research on some primary geographical locations where biological anthropologies used to research their work.
• Human language: Research how biological anthropology helped in the development of human language and communication.
• Body projects: The changes and the valued attributes.
• Political ecology: The Vector-borne and infectious disease.
• Clinical Interactions: What are clinical interaction and social organization?

Forensic Anthropology Research Paper Ideas

• Radioactive Carbon dating: A critical assessment of the accuracy of this dating technique.
• Human Origin: Pieces of evidential support for Creationist and Evolutionist views on the origin of man.
• Assessing the accuracy of DNA evidence testing and matching on criminology.
• Neanderthals: Exploring environmental influences and migratory paths on their survival and appearance.
• Dating Techniques: A critical review of current archaeological dating techniques.
• Ancient Egypt Mummification: A critical look at the effectiveness of the methods used.
• Nuclear disaster: A research into the impact of radioactivity on life forms due to the atomic catastrophe Chernobyl in 1986.
• A critical look into recent evidence supporting the existence of Homo habilis in the past.
• Crime Scene Forensics: Recent advances in the detection of crime.
• Postmortem Changes: Investigating the primary agents responsible for biological changes in humans.
• Criminal procedure: Research a case with a confession scenario and highlight unique features of the case.
• Criminal procedure: Do your research on the criminal proceedings in a given area and what makes them effective.
• Computer forensic: Ways that the computer forensic help in preserving electronic evidence.
• Digital forensic: Research about the history and features of digital forensic.
• History: Ways that Israel presents itself as a leader in computer forensics.
• Oncology: The latest archaeological dating methods.
• DNA: How accurate is DNA evidence in the matching and testing criminology?
• Crime detention: The recent improvements of crime detection.

So here we are! Fifty juicy topics that are all eager to wear some flesh! Ready to have an A+? Let’s do it!

Are you stuck with writing your thesis? Just enter promo “ mythesis ” – that’s all you need to get a 20% discount for any anthropology writing assignment you might have!

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Course info.

• Prof. Graham Jones

Departments

• Anthropology

As Taught In

• Cultural Anthropology
• Social Anthropology

Learning Resource Types

Introduction to anthropology, research paper 1 - ritual ethnography.

For the first ethnographic research paper, choose a form of ritual (or expressive culture more broadly) to study anthropologically. You may want to pick a form of expressive culture you know well, or something you don’t know anything about (yet). The challenge is to identify how if creates meaning and enacts identity for people who produce and consume it. How does this form of expressive culture promote social cohesion or create social difference? Are there conflicting understandings or interpretations surrounding it?

You should collect qualitative data using one or more ethnographic methods illustrated in the class. This may involve a participant observation approach of taking part in an activity or event (or visiting a place where an activity routinely occurs) and documenting it with field notes and recordings (if permissible). It could also involve “virtual ethnography” of cultural practices online. Or it could be based on an interview or interviews. Then write a paper of approximately four pages analyzing your data. Analyze your particular case comparatively by employing concepts drawn from at least one of the course readings. You must explicitly cite at least one relevant reading. Presenting your findings in the space of four pages may require you to synthesize some of the primary data for the sake of brevity. 

You may do this project with a partner (no more than 2 people per group) for a shared grade, however the resulting paper should be slightly longer (1–2 pages), and both partners must contribute equally.

For the presentations, you should just plan to tell us—in 3 minutes or less—a bit about your particular case study and how you’re thinking about analyzing it. If you have specific questions about how to analyze your findings, please pose them in the presentation and we will try to give you immediate feedback.

If you need an extension beyond the due date to incorporate any feedback (or if you need to request an extension for any other reason), just let us know.

This paper is due during Session 13.

Student Examples

“Affirming Identity through the Ash Wednesday Ritual.” (PDF)

“Running for a Lifetime.” (PDF)

“Devotional: Anthropological Ritual Analysis.” (PDF)

“Uniforms in the Air Force.” (PDF)

Note: Student examples appear courtesy of MIT students and are anonymous unless otherwise requested.

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Program Requirements - Sociocultural

The uc davis sociocultural anthropology program requirements include successful completion of preliminary and qualifying examinations, a specified curriculum, periodic progress reviews, and a dissertation that earns faculty approval..

Students who are accepted into the Department of Anthropology's Sociocultural Wing graduate program begin by fulfilling core and sub-discipline requirements constituting a master's degree curriculum.

Program Structure

Each student admitted to the Graduate Program in the Department of Anthropology is responsible for knowing the curricular requirements. We encourage prospective students to make contact with currently enrolled graduate students, and to communicate with faculty members in relevant areas of specialization.

To obtain the master’s degree, students in Anthropology are required complete 36 units of upper division or graduate coursework. Of these 36 units, 18 must be from graduate courses (numbered in the 200s) and no more than 9 units can be for research (ANT 299). A minimum GPA of 3.0 must be maintained to remain in good standing, and students must enroll in 12 units per quarter. Students must be in residence for a minimum of three quarters and must pass a written preliminary examination. 

Master's Course Requirements

Preliminary exam - sociocultural.

At the end of spring quarter of their first year, students take a written preliminary exam in the form of a paper in which they must grapple with key concepts and themes within the discipline. Students define the topic in coordination with their Interim Major Professor and the Graduate Advisor. Two randomly selected faculty evaluate the paper on the basis of pass/potential fail. In potential fail cases, the entire faculty reads and evaluates the exam. All papers will be discussed at a Sociocultural Wing faculty meeting. Students may not repeat the exam. Should a student fail the exam, s/he is recommended for disqualification from the graduate program.

Ph.D. Course Requirements

Qualifying examination.

The Qualifying Examination (QE) is intended to test a student’s depth and breadth of knowledge that is required to undertake the dissertation research and writing. The QE should be scheduled by the 9th quarter of study.

The student assembles bibliographies in three fields and prepares two qualification essays (20-25 pages each) for the committee. Each essay is based on one of the critical theoretical and area concerns represented in the bibliography. These themes and issues may coincide with the student’s research interests and, together with members of her/his qualifying exam committee the student designs her/his bibliographies and writes her/his essays over the course of the Fall and Winter quarters of their third year of study. Final versions of the essays must be submitted to the student’s exam committee by the end of Winter Quarter.

Research Proposal

The student finalizes her/his research proposal. This final version extends the theoretical and methodological dimensions of the proposal. Extended proposals must be submitted to the student’s exam committee two weeks before the students Oral Exam.

The student is examined orally for a three-hour time period. During this time, exam committee members evaluate the student’s facility to delve deeper and extend beyond the material presented to date in her/his bibliographies, essays, and research proposal. Exams must be taken by the end of spring quarter of the third year of study.

Dissertation

After passing the Qualifying Examination, a student may apply to be advanced to candidacy for the Ph.D. degree. At that time, upon the recommendation of the student’s major professor in consultation with the graduate advisor, the dean of Graduate Studies appoints a committee to direct the student’s research and to guide preparation of the dissertation.