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Before any of these struggles could flourish, something fundamental, some flash of insight, had to challenge and, in time, shatter the intellectual foundations that supported archaic beliefs as irrelevant to our lives today as the notions of 19th-century clergymen, certain that the earth was but 6, years old. We live today in the social landscape of their dreams. If you find it normal, for example, that an Irish boy would have an Asian girlfriend, or that a Jewish friend might find solace in the Buddhist dharma, or that a person born into a male body could self-identify as a woman, then you are a child of anthropology.
And if you believe that wisdom may be found in all spiritual traditions, that people in all places are always dancing with new possibilities for life, that one preserves jam but not culture, then you share a vision of compassion and inclusion that represents perhaps the most sublime revelation of our species, the scientific realization that all of humanity is one interconnected and undivided whole. Widely acknowledged as the father of American cultural anthropology, Franz Boas was the first scholar to explore in a truly open and neutral manner how human social perceptions are formed, and how members of distinct societies become conditioned to see and interpret the world.
What, he asked, was the nature of knowing? Who decided what was to be known? How do seemingly random beliefs and convictions converge into this thing called culture, a term that he was the first to promote as an organizing principle, a useful point of intellectual departure.
Far ahead of his time, Boas recognized that every distinct social community, every cluster of people distinguished by language or adaptive inclination, was a unique facet of the human legacy and its promise.
Each was a product of its own history. None existed in an absolute sense; every culture was but a model of reality. We create our social realms, Boas would say, determine what we then define as being common sense, universal truths, the appropriate rules and codes of behavior.
Beauty really does lie in the eye of the beholder. Race and gender are cultural constructs, derived not from biology but born in the realm of ideas. Critically, none of this implied an extreme relativism, as if every human behavior must be accepted simply because it exists.
Boas never called for the elimination of judgment, only its suspension so that the very judgments we are ethically and morally obliged to make as human beings may be informed ones. Even as he graced the cover of Time magazine in , a German Jew in exile from a homeland already dripping in blood, Boas railed against the cruel conceits and stupidity of scientific racism.
Every culture was a unique expression of the human imagination and heart. Each was a unique answer to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive? When asked that question, humanity responds in 7, different languages, voices that collectively comprise our repertoire for dealing with all the challenges that will confront us as a species.
Boas would not live to see his insights and intuitions confirmed by hard science, let alone define the zeitgeist of a new global culture. What if, like Katherine Dunham, we located our work wherever it was needed and in whatever form it could do the most benefit, which might include schools, the concert stage, streets in East St. Louis, and living rooms in Chicago? Toward the end of the semester, I brought the ten students in the seminar to New York City on a field trip where we encountered real-life contexts similar to the ones navigated by the individuals we read about in our assigned ethnographies.
A primary goal of this clinic is to fight the stigmas associated with drug use and sex work. Despite our well-drawn plans for the visit, after meeting over lunch with a small group of staff and program participants at the clinic, we ended up on a van ride from East Harlem to the Bronx, the duration of which was three times as long as expected.
When we arrived at our destination to observe the process of street-side service delivery, we found a lone outreach worker in an idling van but no outreach site.
We got to work setting up a table with educational materials and hygiene products at the most optimal spot on the block. As a moderate rain started to fall, Tony, the lead outreach worker, taught us how to tilt back the hard, rubbery head of the practice dummy to administer overdose prevention from an inhaler.
This was not what we had anticipated. We were welcomed by adult and youth program coordinators who explained the intricate familial, social, and economic dynamics of New York City ball culture. These truncated examples are just what happens when you are in the field, where a field trip and fieldwork share similar concerns. Things rarely go according to plan, and we are often challenged to find a language that corresponds to the terms we employ in our disciplinary conversations even when we assume we are theorizing with the terms that accurately explain what matters to folks we encounter in the field life.
Here, too, it was the interactions that occurred in between the intended purposes of our field trip that revealed the most about the contours of a place and the investments of the people there. The students said that it was on the drive from East Harlem to the Bronx that they really understood the price participants had to pay as they made difficult decisions in support of their self-recovery.
Even within one country or society, people may disagree about how they should speak, dress, eat, or treat others. Anthropologists want to listen to all voices and viewpoints in order to understand how societies vary and what they have in common. Sociocultural anthropologists often find that the best way to learn about diverse peoples and cultures is to spend time living among them. They try to understand the perspectives, practices, and social organization of other groups whose values and lifeways may be very different from their own.
The knowledge they gain can enrich human understanding on a broader level. Linguistic anthropologists study the many ways people communicate across the globe. They are interested in how language is linked to how we see the world and how we relate to each other.
This can mean looking at how language works in all its different forms, and how it changes over time. It also means looking at what we believe about language and communication, and how we use language in our lives. This includes the ways we use language to build and share meaning, to form or change identities, and to make or change relations of power. For linguistic anthropologists, language and communication are keys to how we make society and culture.
Applied or practicing anthropologists are an important part of anthropology. Each of the four subfields of anthropology can be applied. Applied anthropologists work to solve real world problems by using anthropological methods and ideas. For example, they may work in local communities helping to solve problems related to health, education or the environment. They might also work for museums or national or state parks helping to interpret history.
They might work for local, state or federal governments or for non-profit organizations.
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