Anthropology

UNIT TWO
Sub-fields of Anthropology
INTRODUCTION
• As a matter of fact, anthropology is the study of
the past and present of our humankind (Kottak,
2010). There are four major subfields of
anthropology, which are biological or physical
anthropology, socio-cultural anthropology,
archaeology, and linguistic anthropology.
I)Archaeological Anthropology
• Archaeological anthropology, often termed as 'anthropology of the
past', studies human activity through investigation of physical
evidence. It is considered a branch of anthropology in the North
America and Asia, while in Europe archaeology is viewed as a
discipline in its own right or grouped under other related
disciplines, such as history.
• It traces the origin, growth and development of culture in the past.
• Archaeologists study artifacts and ecofacts to get clues about values,
beliefs, and norms; in general, about the cultures of societies that
existed in the past
• Artifact is an object made by a human being, typically one of
cultural or historical interest.
• Eco-facts , in , is a material that is, usually, along with bones of
some animals, minerals, and herbs.(i.e It is organic.)
Subfields of Archaeology
• Archaeology has also its own subfields or areas of specialties. The most
important ones include Prehistoric Archaeology, Historical Archaeology
ethno-archaeology
• Prehistoric archaeology is the study of the past before historical records
began. It is a field of research that looks at all the pre-urban societies of the
world. . It focuses on entire period called prehistory- between 6,000 years
ago and the time of the first stone tools (the first artifacts), around 2.5
million years ago.
• Historical archaeology is a form of archaeology dealing with places,
things, and issues from the past or present when written records and oral
traditions can inform and contextualize cultural material. These records can
both complement and conflict with the archaeological evidence found at a
particular site. It takes advantage of the fact that about 6,000 years ago,
some human groups invented language and began to write down things that
can tell about the past.
• Ethno-archaeologists study material culture of current societies (e.g.,
pottery products) to understand the cultures (life styles) of past societies.
II)Linguistic Anthropology
• Linguistic anthropology (LA) is an approach to the study
of language that focuses on the relation between
language, society, and culture. It tries to understand
languages variation in their structures, units, and
grammatical formations. It gives special attention to the
study of unwritten languages.
• Linguistic anthropology is divided into four distinct
branches or areas of research: Structural or Descriptive
Linguistics, Historical Linguistics, Ethno-Linguistics,
and Socio-linguistics.
Structural /Descriptive/ Linguistics
• Descriptive linguistics is a subfield of linguistics that
studies and describes language in structural terms. In its
investigation of linguistic structure, descriptive
linguistics emphasizes the primacy of speech, the
adoption of a synchronic approach, and the description
of language and dialect systems as they are found to be
spoken.
• It examines systems like, grammatical systems, and the
meanings attached to words in specific languages to
understand the structure and set of rules of given
language.
Ethno-linguistics
• Ethno linguistics (sometimes called cultural linguistics)
is an area of anthropological linguistics that studies the
relationship between a language and the nonlinguistic
cultural behavior of the people who speak that language.
• What are the applications of Cultural
Linguistics?
▫ Thus far, the approach of cultural linguistics has been
adopted in several areas of applied linguistic research,
including intercultural communication, second language
learning, teaching English as an international language,
and world englishes.
Socio-linguistics
• Sociolinguistics is the study of the connection
between language and society and the way
people use language in different social
situations. It asks the question, "How does
language affect the social nature of human
beings, and how does social interaction shape
language?".
Historical linguistics
• Historical linguistics is the scientific study of
how languages change over time, which seeks to
understand the relationships among languages
and to reconstruct earlier stages of languages.
III)Socio-Cultural Anthropology
• Socio-cultural anthropology studies contemporary societies
and cultures throughout the world.
• This usually means spending a long period (a year or more)
living as closely as possible with the community being studied;
learning the language if necessary; sharing the activities of
daily life; observing and participating in the texture of social
interactions; and identifying underlying patterns.
• Socio-cultural anthropologists engage in two aspects of study:
• Ethnography (based on field work) : explores cultural
phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study
• Ethnology (based on cross-cultural comparison) :compares
and analyzes the characteristics of different peoples and the
relationships between them
IV)Physical/Biological Anthropology
• Physical anthropologists study how culture and
environment have influenced biological evolution and
contemporary human variations.
• Physical anthropology is essentially concerned with two
broad areas of investigation: human evolution and
genetics
• A) Human evolution is the evolutionary process within
the history of primates that led to the emergence of
Homo sapiens as a distinct species of the hominid
family, which includes the great apes. This process
involved the gradual development of traits such as
human bipedalism and language, as well as
interbreeding with other hominins
Subfields of Human Evolution

• Human evolution is further divided into two specialties:

Paleoanthropology and Primatology
• Palaeoanthropology (paleo meaning “old”) is the study
of human biological evolution through the analysis of fossil
remains from prehistoric times to determine the missing
link that connect modern human with its biological
ancestors.
• Primatology studies about primates or recent human
ancestors to explain human evolution.
• B)Genetics : concerns to investigate how and why the
physical traits of
• contemporary human populations vary throughout the
world. It focuses to examine the genetic materials of an
organism such as DNA and RNA.
Evolutionary and Paleo-anthropological
perspectives on human origin
• Evolution is the process by which different kinds of living organism are
believed to have developed from earlier forms during the history of the
earth.It has three major these attributes.
1) Replication ; The fact that life forms have offspring;
2) Variation: The fact that each offspring is slightly different from its parents,
and its siblings; and
3) Selection: The fact that not all offspring survive, and those that do tend to
be the ones best suited to their environment.

 The idea of natural selection or survival of the fittest theory by Darwin was
based on a few main points:
i. Often, traits are inheritable. Many features are inherited, or passed down
from parent to progeny, in living organisms.
ii. Organisms were capable of producing more offspring than can be sustained
by their habitats. Thus, in each generation, competition for limited
resources exists.
iii. The siblings vary and change over time in their inherited characteristics
NOTE
• A race is a group of organisms of the same species that
share similar physical (and genetic) attributes and
specific geographic regions.
• Adaptation is a process (behavioral and/or biological)
that increases the likelihood of survival for an organism.
In humans, adaptations include complex behavior, such
as making tools. These behaviors aren’t passed on
genetically but rather culturally.
• The Bergmann’s rule states that the organisms at
higher altitude should be larger and thicker than those
present near the equator. For eg., the population of
white-tailed deer is larger in Canada than Florida. This
principle was named after a German Biologist, Karl
Bergmann in the nineteenth century.
 Human Races : The history of racial typing
• By the mid-1800s, naturalists began using a method of describing the
shape of the head called the cephalic index, a ratio measurement of the
length and width of the head. Dolichocephalic peoples had long and
narrow heads (like most northern Europeans), and brachycephalic peoples
tended to have broad heads — like many southern Europeans
• Social Darwinism : the theory that individuals, groups, and peoples are
subject to the same Darwinian laws of natural selection as plants and
animals. Now largely discredited, social Darwinism was advocated by
Herbert Spencer and others in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and
was used to justify political conservatism, imperialism, and racism and to
discourage intervention and reform.
• Eugenics; a method of improving the human race, eugenics was increasingly
discredited as unscientific and racially biased during the 20th century, especially
after the adoption of its doctrines by the Nazis in order to justify their treatment of
Jews, disabled people, and other minority groups.
• Using eugenics as the basis for its acts, the Nazi party killed millions of
Jewish people, Gypsies and others it considered inferior in an attempt to
create a master race.
Does race exist in anthropology?

• The history of anthropology has been closely identified with the

study of race. In the early twenty-first century the concept of race is
highly contested among anthropologists, some of whom claim that it
does not exist in anthropology. This is due to the following two
reasons :
1. Genetic differences don’t mean a lot, biologically. No matter
how the father is from Asia and the mother is from
Africa ,the offspring will be just a race of human being .A
CAW or horse will not born, it will be just a human being.
2. cultural behavior isn’t genetically linked to those
geographical differences. cultural behavior isn‘t geneticallyl
inked to those geographical differences. Most of human
behavior isn‘t biologically determined or filtered in through
thenatural environment - most of it is culturally learned
So what?
• Rather than talk about races, physical anthropologists
more commonly talk today of ancestry, a more general
term that recognizes the reality of some geographically
specific human adaptations but doesn’t turn them into
loaded; black-and-white races.
• Ancestry assessment represents a major component of
forensic anthropological analysis of recovered human
remains. Interpretations of ancestry, together with other
aspects of the biological profile, can help narrow the
search of missing persons and contribute to eventual
positive identification.
What is to be human?

• Anthropology contains several fields and sub-fields, all dealing with

different topics. But in general, Anthropologists ask all sorts of questions
about people! Anthropology is the study of people, in all times and in all
places. There are 4 fields in Anthropology, and each asks different types of
questions. Here are just a few examples:
o Why do people differ in their beliefs and behaviors?
o Were ancient human bodies different from ours?
o Why do these commonalties and variations exist in the first place? (In other
o worlds, why aren't all human cultures the same?)
o How does humanity change through time? (Is it still evolving, and if
o so, how?)
o Where has Humanity been, and what can that show us about where
humanity is going? (That is, what can we learn about ourselves today, from
the past?)
o In order to address these questions, we should rely on key
o anthropological concepts of comparative approach (cultural relativism) and
evolution.
Note that
• Cultural relativism is the idea that a person's beliefs and
practices should be understood based on that person's own
culture. Proponents of cultural relativism also tend to argue
that the norms and values of one culture should not be
evaluated using the norms and values of another.
• Evolution is another key concept in anthropology which,
together with the cultural relativism allows us to address the
afore-mentioned fundamental questions regarding our distant
origin, current stage of growth, forms of adaptation, and
predict future direction of development
The bio-cultural animal

• Humanity stands for the human species, a group

of life forms with the following characteristics:
o Bipedalism (walking on two legs);
o Relatively small teeth for primates of our size;
o Relatively large brains for primates of our size;
o Using modern language to communicate ideas;
and
o Using complex sets of ideas called culture to
survive.
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