Anthropology asks the largest question a discipline can ask: what does it mean to be human? It answers by looking everywhere. Anthropology is the study of humanity across all times and places, from fossil teeth millions of years old to group chats among teenagers in Lagos or Seoul. Other fields study one part of the human story: economics studies markets, psychology studies minds, history mostly studies written records. Anthropology tries to keep the pieces together and to include the vast stretches of human life that left no writing at all.

Holism and comparison

Two habits define the field. The first is holism: the view that any part of human life makes sense only in connection with the rest. A farming technique is tied to family structure, religious belief, diet, politics and the land itself. Change one and the others move. The second habit is comparison. An anthropologist who wants to know whether something is natural to humans, or merely familiar at home, looks at many societies before deciding. If a practice that seems universal turns out to be absent in a dozen places, it was never simply human nature.

Comparison also guards against a common mistake: treating one's own society as the standard by which every other is judged, a habit known as ethnocentrism. Anthropology began, in part, as a long effort to correct that habit with careful evidence about how differently people live.

The four fields

In the United States the discipline is usually divided into four fields, an arrangement promoted in the early twentieth century by the German American anthropologist Franz Boas. Cultural anthropology studies living societies: their customs, beliefs, institutions and ways of making meaning. Its main method is long-term fieldwork, covered later in this course. In Britain a closely related tradition is called social anthropology.

Biological anthropology studies human evolution, human genetic variation and our closest relatives, the other primates. It includes paleoanthropology, the study of fossil human ancestors, and primatology, the study of apes and monkeys. When Jane Goodall began observing chimpanzees at Gombe in Tanzania in 1960, she saw chimpanzees strip leaves from twigs and grass stems and use them to fish termites out of their mounds. That observation challenged the old belief that only humans make tools.

Archaeology studies past human life through the material things people left behind: tools, bones, pottery, buildings, seeds, even ancient garbage. Most of human history happened before writing, so for most of the past archaeology is the only witness. Two principles guide much of its work. Under the rule called superposition, in undisturbed deposits lower layers of earth were laid down earlier than the layers above them. And from the late 1940s, the American chemist Willard Libby's method of radiocarbon dating measured the decay of carbon 14 in once living material, letting archaeologists date wood, bone and charcoal up to roughly 50,000 years old.

Linguistic anthropology studies language in its social and cultural setting: how people speak, how languages change, and how speech both shapes and reflects social life. One famous and contested idea is linguistic relativity, linked to Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf. In its strong form, sometimes called linguistic determinism, it claims that language fixes the limits of thought. Few researchers accept that today. The weaker version holds that language influences habits of attention and memory without imprisoning thought, and this version has real experimental support. Speakers of languages that describe space by compass directions rather than by left and right, for example, tend to keep better track of which way they are facing.

Applied anthropology

Anthropology is not only an academic pursuit. Applied anthropologists work in public health, design, development, law and museums. One clear example links the field directly to human rights. Forensic anthropologists identify people and their causes of death from skeletal remains, estimating age, sex, height and injuries. After Argentina's military dictatorship fell in 1983, the American forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow helped train the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, founded in 1984, to exhume and identify people who had been "disappeared" by the regime. Their evidence was used in trials, and the team has since worked in dozens of countries. Bones, read carefully, gave families answers and courts proof.

Worked example: one valley, four lenses

Imagine a team studying a farming community in the Andes. A cultural anthropologist lives there for a year, learning how families share labor at harvest and what the festivals mean to the people who hold them. A linguistic anthropologist records how people move between Quechua and Spanish, noticing that Quechua dominates at home and Spanish appears with officials, a pattern that says something about power. An archaeologist excavates the terraces on the hillside and uses radiocarbon dates from charcoal in the lowest layers to show they were built centuries before the Spanish arrived. A biological anthropologist studies how bodies adapt to life at high altitude, where each breath holds less oxygen. Each lens alone gives a partial picture. Together, holism and comparison turn four studies into one account of how a community has lived on that mountain for a very long time.