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Anthropology

<OpenstaxParagraph>
	By the end of this section, you will be able to:
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxUl>
	<OpenstaxLi>
		Explain the importance of culture to the concept of home.
	</OpenstaxLi>
	<OpenstaxLi>
		Identify the centrality of culture in the discipline of anthropology.
	</OpenstaxLi>
	<OpenstaxLi>
		Describe how each of the four fields deploys the concept of culture.
	</OpenstaxLi>
	<OpenstaxLi>
		Explain why culture feels familiar and “homey.”
	</OpenstaxLi>
</OpenstaxUl>
<OpenstaxFigure id="fig-00001" src="https://openstax.org/apps/archive/20240226.174525/resources/00f673f8740181694fffd9e8c7d8a5f305bce433" alt="The floor plan of a 21st-century middle-class American home. The floor plan depicts a one-floor house with a kitchen, four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a family room, den, steps down to a basement, and an attached two car garage." mediaType="image/png" width="1801" height="1123" />
<OpenstaxFigureText width="1801">
	<strong>Figure 3.2</strong> The floor plan of a typical 21st-century middle-class American house consists of many individual rooms, including three to four bedrooms, a large kitchen, a family room, and an attached garage. This floor plan depicts such a home. (attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC BY 4.0 license)
</OpenstaxFigureText>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	What place do you call home? For some people, home is a large, angular structure made of wood or brick, fixed on a permanent foundation of concrete, and rigged with systems to provide running water, electricity, and temperature control. Such houses have separate rooms for distinct activities, such as sleeping, bathing, eating, and socializing. Often, one bedroom is larger than the others and connected to its own bathroom. This is the “primary bedroom,” designed to accommodate a married couple while their children sleep in smaller bedrooms. The room for cooking (the kitchen) used to be separated from the room where people socialized (the living room or great room), as it was assumed that one person (the wife) would cook in the kitchen while another person (the husband) relaxed alone or with company in the living room. More recently, open-concept architecture has eliminated the wall separating the kitchen from the living room, as adults often cook together or socialize as one cooks and the other relaxes.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	In the 1960s, French scholar Pierre <OpenstaxTerm>Bourdieu</OpenstaxTerm> (1970) analyzed a typical house of a <OpenstaxTerm>Kabyle</OpenstaxTerm> family in northern Algeria. Traditional Kabyle houses were rectangular buildings made of stone and clay with tiled roofs. Inside, a waist-high dividing wall marked off one-third of the house. This marked-off section, set lower than the rest of the house and paved with flagstones, was the stable, where animals were kept at night. A farming people, the Kabyle kept oxen, cows, donkeys, and mules. Above the stable was a loft where women and children often slept, though arrangements for sleeping and marital sex tended to vary.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxFigure id="fig-00002" src="https://openstax.org/apps/archive/20240226.174525/resources/3f49ced672f1ca18273fdace11e88743d3f9ecf2" alt="A color photograph of a group of building in Algeria, built by the Kabyle people. The single-story buildings are constructed of stone with tile roofs. They stand very near to one another, with only narrow passageways separating them. Many are constructed in an L-shape, with two separate portions connecting at a right angle." mediaType="image/jpeg" width="800" height="800" />
<OpenstaxFigureText width="800">
	<strong>Figure 3.3</strong> These houses in Norther Algeria, built by the Kabyle people, are constructed of stone, and include open space for both animals and human inhabitants under a shared roof. (credit: PhR610/flickr, CC BY 2.0)
</OpenstaxFigureText>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	The floor of the larger section of the house was higher and paved with a layer of black clay and cow dung that women polished with a stone. This part was reserved for human use. In this larger, elevated section, a large weaving loom sat against the wall opposite the door. Facing east, this wall with the loom received the most light in the house. Guests and brides were seated here, as it was considered the nicest part of the house. Opposite the dividing wall in the larger section was the hearth, surrounded by cooking tools, lamps, and jars of edible grain. With the loom and the hearth, the main area of human activity in the house was associated with the work of women. Bourdieu explained that men were expected to remain outside the house from dawn to evening, working in the fields and associating with other men in public spaces. Women were supposed to remain in the home.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	In Bourdieu’s analysis, the <OpenstaxTerm>Kabyle house</OpenstaxTerm> was divided into two realms: a dark, low realm associated with animals and natural activities (sleeping, sex, childbirth, and death) and a lighter, higher realm associated with humans and cultural activities (weaving, cooking, brides, and guests).
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	Humans all over the world require a place to gather, work, socialize, and sleep. Some have Western-style houses, while others have compounds. Some live in tents made of wooden beams and covered with animal skins or cloth, in caves hollowed out of sandstone or volcanic rock, or in wooden structures built on stilts or in trees to avoid floods and predators. While these different forms of home are all designed to perform a common function as human living spaces, they are distinctively shaped by local environments and lifeways. Houses are most commonly built with locally available materials and designed to protect against local climatic conditions and predators. Over generations, people develop distinctive technologies to transform available materials into durable and functional homes. Different forms of family, different gender roles and relations, and different everyday activities determine the organization of space in these different homes. Dominant ideas about work, gender, marriage, parenting, hospitality, and status all shape the places we call home.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	Home, then, involves a combination of materials, technologies, social relationships, everyday practices, deeply held values, and shared ideas. In every culture, these features are uniquely combined to produce distinctive versions of home. Other combinations of features produce distinctive versions of clothing, food, work, and health. Growing up in a particular social group, a person learns these ways of living, eating, working, and so on and comes to consider them normal and natural. Anthropologists have a word for such integrated combinations of social and environmental features, and that word is <OpenstaxTerm>culture</OpenstaxTerm>. The ways of your culture are familiar to you, often so deeply ingrained that they come naturally. Culture itself feels like home.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	All four fields of anthropology are devoted to understanding human culture. <OpenstaxTerm>Biological anthropologists</OpenstaxTerm> are often interested in the emergence of culture in the course of human biological evolution. <OpenstaxTerm>Archaeologists</OpenstaxTerm> use material artifacts as keys to understanding the technologies, social practices, and ideas of ancient peoples. <OpenstaxTerm>Cultural anthropologists</OpenstaxTerm> often use participant observation to understand how the various features of culture fit together in contemporary societies. <OpenstaxTerm>Linguistic anthropologists</OpenstaxTerm> are interested in how language shapes and is shaped by other features in the constellation of culture.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	This chapter explores culture as a central concept in anthropology. We examine what distinguishes culture from other aspects of human experience and activity. In an effort to organize the vast array of things included in culture, we divide culture into three levels and consider how those levels fit together holistically—and what happens when they don’t. Finally, we identify a set of contradictions built into the concept of culture and see how those contradictions illuminate the nature of human social life.
</OpenstaxParagraph>

3.1 The Homeyness of 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

1.4.1 Primitivism and Orientalism in Popular Culture

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

3.2 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