Chinese, Mandarin

Spanish

English

Hindi

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Portuguese

Bengali

Russian

Japanese

Punjabi

German

Javanese

Malay

Telugu

Vietnamese

Korean

French

Marathi

Tamil

Urdu

Turkish

Italian

Chinese, Yue / Cantonese

Thai

Gujarati

Chinese, Jin

Chinese, Min Nan

Persian, Dari

Persian, Western

Polish

Pashto

Kannada

Chinese, Xiang

Malayalam

Sundanese

Hausa

Odia

Burmese

Chinese, Hakka

Ukrainian

Bihari, Bhojpuri

Tagalog

Yoruba

Bihari, Maithili

Uzbek

Sindhi

Amharic

Fula

Romanian

Oromo

Igbo

Azerbaijani

Chinese, Gan

Dutch

Kurdish, Central

Kurdish, Northern

Kurdish, Southern

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Lahnda, Saraiki

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Greek, Modern

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Akan, Fante

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Chinese, Min Bei

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Marwari, Dhundhari

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Chinese, Min Dong

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Balochi

Anthropology

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	Think for a minute about the last time you saw an image of an African person. Was it, perhaps, an image of wide-eyed girl in tattered clothing in an advertisement from a development agency requesting a charitable donation? Or maybe it was a news media photograph of a child soldier wielding an AK-47 in a conflict zone in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or another African country. Africa is still popularly represented as a dark place full of deprivation and crisis. Africans are frequently infantilized as simple children who need the support and tutelage of White Western helpers. But isn’t it true, you may say, that poverty and violent conflicts are widespread in Africa? Isn’t the representation accurate to some degree?
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	The most troubled places on the African continent are the places where European colonialism was most brutal and violent. In what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Belgian king <OpenstaxTerm>Leopold II</OpenstaxTerm> oversaw a reign of terror against the local peoples, encouraging their enslavement for the lucrative rubber trade. Elsewhere in Africa, European colonial governments stole land from local peoples and confined them to reservations, forcing them to work on European plantations in order to pay taxes to the colonial government. Colonial officials fomented conflict by privileging some ethnic groups and repressing others. Where you see violence and conflict in Africa today, the roots can often be traced to the colonial period. Is this painful history included in American representations of Africa?
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	Moreover, there are many bright spots in Africa, places such as Ghana and Botswana, with growing economies and stable democracies. Would it surprise you to learn that Ghana has a space program? That there are more mobile phones than people in Kenya? That several electric cars are manufactured in Africa?
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	Similar distortions are applied to Native Americans, frequently represented as victims of history, poor and helpless, in need of outside help. The primitivist gaze shapes the representation of Native Americans in museums, which often feature dioramas of humble people with stone tools, buckskin clothes, and tepees, either living a simple life close to nature or engaged in tribal warfare, their bodies painted with vibrant colors. Of course, Native Americans do not live this way now, but these are the images that come to mind in the popular imagination. It is of course important for non-Native Americans to learn about the cultures of Native peoples before and during their contact with European settlers, but it is equally important to understand the legacies of history in the contemporary living conditions and activities of Native communities. Rather than seeing Native peoples as passive victims, popular culture should also depict the dynamic and creative responses of Native Americans to the forms of cultural violence enacted against them.
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<OpenstaxFigure id="fig-00001" src="https://openstax.org/apps/archive/20240226.174525/resources/ebf372aa48c923043d2fb2c598bb4f624fbf749e" alt="A bowl of Navajo mutton stew with blue corn. A piece of flat bread is on the side of the bowl." mediaType="image/jpeg" width="800" height="600" />
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	<strong>Figure 1.7</strong> One example of a healthy Native American dish is Navajo mutton stew with blue corn and dry bread. (credit: “Mutton Stew with Blue Corn and Dry Bread” by Neeta Lind/flickr, CC BY 2.0)
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	For instance, did you know that a Native food movement is surging across the United States, both on Native reservations and in American cities? Native food activists such as Karlos <OpenstaxTerm>Baca</OpenstaxTerm> and Sean <OpenstaxTerm>Sherman</OpenstaxTerm> are reviving and reinventing the balanced, healthy cuisines of their ancestors, featuring dishes such as braised elk leg and maple red corn pudding. Sherman and his partner, Dana <OpenstaxTerm>Thompson</OpenstaxTerm>, have founded the nonprofit group <OpenstaxTerm>North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS)</OpenstaxTerm>, devoted to preserving Native foodways. The group offers opportunities for tribes to set up Native cuisine restaurants, providing jobs and profits to communities with high unemployment. Watch this <a href="https://openstax.org/r/sheansherman">video</a> to learn more about Sean Sherman and the Native Food movement.
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	Like primitivism, orientalism has endured in American and European cultures. In the two decades following the al-Qaeda attacks on American targets on September 11, 2001, the most prominent example of orientalism in American culture has been the stereotype that <OpenstaxEm>all</OpenstaxEm> Islamic peoples are fanatical and violent. The indiscriminate application of this stereotype to Islamic peoples across the Middle East was a major contributor to the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, a country that had nothing at all to do with the September 11 attacks. To promote the invasion, politicians used the orientalist notion that Iraq was a violent and irrational country stockpiling weapons of mass destruction (which turned out to be false). As the war raged on, the Iraqi people came to be categorized as either “unlawful combatants” or helpless victims of a cruel dictator. American officials argued that Iraqis needed the help of American troops to save them from their subjugation and teach them democracy.
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	For many Europeans and Americans, these forms of <OpenstaxTerm>ethnocentric bias</OpenstaxTerm> distort views of peoples living in large geographical regions of the globe. Misunderstanding other cultures this way can result in policies and military actions that do not achieve desired results. Moreover, ethnocentric bias promotes and reinforces inequality among social groups within multicultural societies. When people with certain ethnic or racial identities are seen as helpless or violent, they face discrimination in their pursuit of education, employment, and justice.
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1.4.1 Primitivism and Orientalism in Popular Culture

1 What Is Anthropology?

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

1.1.1 The Heart of Anthropology: Central Narrative and Commitments

1.1.2 Central Commitment #1: Exploring Sociocultural Diversity

1.1.3 Central Commitment #2: Understanding How Societies Hold Together

1.1.4 Central Commitment #3: Examining the Interdependence of Humans and Nature

1.2 The Four-Field Approach: Four Approaches within the Guiding Narrative

1.2.1 Biological Anthropology

1.2.2 Archaeology

1.2.3 Cultural Anthropology

1.2.4 Linguistic Anthropology

1.2.5 How the Four Fields Work Together: The Example of Race

1.3 Overcoming Ethnocentrism

1.3.1 Enculturation and Ethnocentrism

1.3.2 Primitivism and Orientalism

1.4 Western Bias in Our Assumptions about Humanity

1.4.2 The Bias of Backwardness

1.5 Holism, Anthropology’s Distinctive Approach

1.5.1 Society as an Integrated Whole

1.5.2 Sources of Contradiction, Conflict, and Change

1.6 Cross-Cultural Comparison and Cultural Relativism

1.6.1 Relativism Is Not “Anything Goes”

1.6.2 Morality, Activism, and Cultural Relativism

1.7 Reaching for an Insider’s Point of View

1.7.1 The Challenge of Representing Others

1.7.2 Collaborative Methods of Representation

1.7.3 Working across Cultures toward Common Goals

1.7.4 Suggested Readings

2 Methods: Cultural and Archaeological

2.1 Archaeological Research Methods

2.1.1 Archaeological Techniques

2.1.2 Archaeological Dating Methods

2.2 Conservation and Naturalism

2.2.1 Early Efforts

2.2.2 Salvage Anthropology

2.2.3 Museum Collections

2.2.4 Interpretation and Voice

2.3 Ethnography and Ethnology

2.3.1 The Development of Ethnography and Ethnology

2.3.2 Perspective and Interpretation in Ethnography

2.4 Participant Observation and Interviewing

2.4.1 Participant Observation

2.4.2 Interviewing Informants

2.4.3 Ethical Considerations

2.5 Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis

2.5.1 Differences between Quantitative and Qualitative Information

2.5.2 Modeling

2.5.3 The Science of Anthropology

2.6 Collections

2.6.1 Archives

2.6.2 Three-Dimensional Collections

2.6.3 Ownership

2.6.4 Suggested Readings

3 Culture Concept Theory: Theories of Cultural Change

3.1 The Homeyness of Culture

3.2 The Winkiness of Culture

3.3 The Elements of Culture

3.3.1 Culture Is What We Make

3.3.2 Culture Is What We Do

3.3.3 Culture Is What We Think

3.4 The Aggregates of Culture

3.4.1 Symbols

3.4.2 Ritual

3.4.3 Social Structure

3.5 Modes of Cultural Analysis

3.5.1 Evolution, Adaptation, and Historical Particularism

3.5.2 Functionalism

3.5.3 Structuralism

3.5.4 Ontology

3.6 The Paradoxes of Culture

3.6.1 Paradox 1: Culture Is Continuous, but It Changes

3.6.2 Paradox 2: Culture Is Bounded but Mobile

3.6.3 Paradox 3: Culture Is Consensual but Contested

3.6.4 Paradox 4: Culture Is Shared, but It Varies

3.6.5 Suggested Readings

4 Biological Evolution and Early Human Evidence

4.1 What Is Biological Anthropology?

4.1.1 Looking to the Deep Past

4.1.2 Exploring What It Means to Be Human

4.2 What’s in a Name? The Science of Taxonomy

4.2.1 Defining the Science of Taxonomy

4.2.2 Defining a Species

4.3 It’s All in the Genes! The Foundation of Evolution

4.3.1 The Units of Life

4.3.2 Gregor Mendel and the Laws of Heredity

4.3.3 Mendelian Inheritance in Humans

4.4 Evolution in Action: Past and Present

4.4.1 Early Evolutionists and the Fixity of Species

4.4.2 Charles Darwin’s Role in Changing Views of the Natural World

4.4.3 Understanding Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection

4.5 What Is a Primate?

4.5.1 What Is a Primate?

4.5.2 Primate Behavioral Variation

4.5.3 Explaining Primate Success

4.5.4 Primate Classification and Taxonomy

4.6 Origin of and Classification of Primates

4.6.1 Understanding Concepts of Time

4.6.2 Fossils and Dating Methods

4.6.3 Making Sense of Fossils