1.1 The Study of Humanity, or "Anthropology Is Vast"

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Define the study of anthropology in the broadest sense.
• Summarize the guiding narrative of anthropology.
• Restate and explain the central commitments of anthropology.

Anthropology is a vast field of study—so vast, in fact, that anthropology is interested in everything. Anthropology is unique in its enormous breadth and its distinctive focus. Consider other disciplines. In the arts and sciences, each discipline focuses on a discrete field of social life or physical phenomena. Economists study economics. Religious scholars study religion. Environmental scientists study the environment. Biologists study living organisms. And so on.

Anthropologists study all of these things. Put simply, anthropology is the study of humanity across time and space. Anthropologists study every possible realm of human experience, thought, activity, and organization. Human as we are, we can only engage in social and natural worlds through our human minds and human bodies. Even engagement with nonhuman realms such as astronomy and botany is conditioned by our human senses and human cognition and thus varies across different societies and different time periods.

You may be thinking, If anthropology is the human aspect of absolutely everything, then does anthropology encompass the other social disciplines, such as political science, religious studies, and economics? This is not the case. Certainly, anthropologists are frequently multidisciplinary, meaning that while their research and teaching are focused within the discipline of anthropology, they also engage with other disciplines and work with researchers and teachers in other fields. But the way that scholars in the other social disciplines approach their subject matter is different from the way anthropologists approach those same subjects.

The distinctive approach of anthropology relies on a central narrative, or story, about humanity as well as a set of scholarly commitments. This central story and these common commitments hold the discipline together, enabling anthropologists to combine insights from diverse fields into one complex portrait of what it means to be human.

Anthropology is everything, but it’s not just anything. Anthropology is the study of humanity guided by a distinctive narrative and set of commitments.