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

Malagasy

Lahnda, Saraiki

Nepali

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Chittagonian

Zhuang

Khmer

Turkmen

Assamese

Madurese

Somali

Marwari

Bihari, Magahi

Haryanvi

Hungarian

Chhattisgarhi

Greek, Modern

Chewa

Dakhini

Akan, Twi

Akan, Fante

Kazakh

Chinese, Min Bei

Sylheti

Zulu

Czech

Kinyarwanda

Marwari, Dhundhari

Haitian Creole

Chinese, Min Dong

Ilocano

Quechua

Kirundi

Swedish

Hmong

Shona

Uyghur

Hiligaynon

Mossi

Xhosa

Belarusian

Balochi

Anthropology

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	In recent decades, some cultural anthropologists have come to focus on the nature of reality, including but not limited to human perspectives and experiences. <OpenstaxTerm>Ontology</OpenstaxTerm> is the study of the true nature of existence. In some cultures, for instance, the social world consists not only of embodied persons but also of spirit beings, such as ancestors and witches, who interact with people in mysterious ways. And in some cultures, people are not just bodies but assemblages that include souls, spirits, characters, or fates. <OpenstaxTerm>Ontological anthropology</OpenstaxTerm> explores how culture constructs our social and natural realities, what we consider real, and how we act on those assumptions. Reaching beyond human realities, ontological anthropology also attempts to include nonhuman perspectives, relationships, and forms of communication.
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	For instance, in his provocative ethnography <OpenstaxEm>How Forests Think</OpenstaxEm> (2013), anthropologist Eduardo <OpenstaxTerm>Kohn</OpenstaxTerm> describes how the web of life in the Amazon rainforest consists of continual communication among plants, animals, and humans. He examines how Amazonian peoples engage with dogs, spirits, the dead, pumas, rivers, and even sounds. Humans and these nonhuman beings are both antagonistic and interdependent in this interactive web. Predators and prey read one another’s behavior, interpreting intentions and motivations. Kohn’s effort is to get beyond conventional modes of human thought and language to understand how humans are embedded in nonhuman ecological realities.
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	<OpenstaxNoteTitle> Profiles in Anthropology </OpenstaxNoteTitle> <OpenstaxH3> Dame Mary Douglas 1921–2007 </OpenstaxH3>
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		<a href="https://www.openstax.org/r/wiki_Mary_Douglas">Dame Mary Douglas</a>.
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		Personal History: Mary Douglas was born in San Remo, Italy; her British parents had stopped off on their way home from Burma, where her father had been working as a colonial civil servant. As children, Mary and her younger sister lived with their mother’s parents in England until they were old enough to be sent to Catholic boarding school—a fairly common practice for the children of colonial officers. After the death of her mother and her dearly loved maternal grandfather, young Mary found security in the order and routine of the convent school (Lyons 2011). This respect for rules and order combined with a reverence for the Catholic Church to shape her lifelong commitment to studying the sacred aspects of the social order.
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		Area of Anthropology: At Oxford, Douglas studied with the prominent structural functionalist E. E. Evans-Pritchard. From him, she learned that African belief systems such as witchcraft were structured by an underlying logic. In this approach, the goal of fieldwork is to examine oral forms of culture as well as ritual and social practice in order to discern the underlying logic that governs culture as a whole. Douglass went to the Kasai region of what was then the Belgian Congo, where she studied how the Lele people used animals in practical and symbolic ways. She was particularly interested in a strange animal called the pangolin. Though a mammal, the pangolin has scales and no teeth.
	</OpenstaxParagraph><OpenstaxFigure id="fig-00002" src="https://openstax.org/apps/archive/20240226.174525/resources/68b7e93d7b5ceb17d6df0f949ff1cb7a716bd91a" alt="A color photograph of a small rat-shaped animal with large scales, a long tail, and a long snout. This one is walking across a muddy space of ground with plants in the background." mediaType="image/jpeg" width="549" height="366" />
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		Figure 3.11 This pangolin is classified as a mammal but has scales like a reptile or fish. Pangolin were considered sacred to the Lele people, who did not classify them as a food animal. (credit: Official photographer of the U.S. Embassy in Ghana/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
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		Douglas described how the Lele observed a fundamental distinction between edible and inedible animals. Animals who lived among humans, such as rats and domesticated chickens, were considered part of society and therefore inedible (most of the time). Only wild animals were considered food. Pangolins are wild animals, but the Lele did not eat them (usually). Why? Douglas argued that the weirdness of the pangolin made people single it out for special consideration. Pangolins have scales like fish, but they live on land and climb trees. They look vaguely reptilian, but they do not lay eggs, instead giving birth to live young. Rather than teeth, they have long snouts that they use to vacuum up small insects. Thus, the pangolin defied the conventional categories the Lele used for dividing up the animal world. This breach of categories made the pangolin both repellent and sacred to the Lele. Members of a special fertility cult engaged in rituals in which they ate pangolins to ingest the power of this anomalous animal.
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		As this examination of cultural categories and anomalies suggests, Douglas was also influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss and the approach of French structuralism. Like Lévi-Strauss, Douglas viewed culture as a coherent system of categories that were expressed in oral culture and social practice.
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		Accomplishments in the Field: Following her work on the Lele people, Douglas went on to conduct a broadly comparative study of objects, practices, and people that were considered ritually dangerous, subject to rules of prohibition called taboos. She showed how the subjects of taboos are often “matter out of place” (Douglas 1966, 44), things that defy conventional categories for dividing up the social and natural world. In her most famous work, <OpenstaxEm>Purity and Danger</OpenstaxEm> (1966), Douglas examines a wide range of taboos, such as rules against eating certain foods or engaging in sex at certain times or with certain persons. She examines the set of social and dietary rules established by ancient Hebrews, detailed in the book of Leviticus in the Old Testament. According to these rules, the Jewish people were forbidden from eating pigs, shellfish, and certain wild animals. They were not allowed to wear garments made of cloth that combined different fibers—such as, for example, a linen-cotton blend. Men were prohibited from having sex with menstruating women. In fact, women were considered so unclean during menstruation that anyone or anything that touched a menstruating woman became contaminated for the rest of that day.
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		What do all of these prohibitions have in common? Douglas shows how each forbidden object or condition produced discomfort because it transgressed conventional categories. Shellfish, for instance, are sea animals, but they don’t have fins or scales, and many of them do not swim. Menstruation is blood loss, but it does not indicate injury. Moreover, menstruation is hidden and connected to the dangerous states of pregnancy and childbirth. In Hebrew law, menstruation itself was considered a dangerous and contaminating exception to the purity of persons and objects.
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		In her later work, Douglas applied this style of analysis to a variety of other social phenomena, including humor and trickster figures. She argued that humor functions as a release for thoughts and actions that might threaten the social order. Whereas taboos regulate and prohibit interaction with dangerous objects, animals, and people, humor seeks to sap them of their dangerous power by making light of them.
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		Importance of Her Work: After more than 25 years of teaching at the University of London, Douglas moved to the United States, where she held positions at the Russell Sage Foundation and Northwestern University. She continued to publish widely on such topics as consumerism, environmental risk, and decision-making in bureaucracies. When she retired, she moved back to England. In 2006, she was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She died in 2007 at the age of 86.
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3.5.4 Ontology

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

3.1 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

3.6 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

Question	Answer
an approach that explores how culture constructs our social and natural realities, what we consider real, and how we act on those assumptions. Reaching beyond human realities, ontological anthropology also attempts to include nonhuman perspectives, relationships, and forms of communication.	ontological anthropology
the study of the nature of existence.	ontology