The examples and perspective in this intro (lede) & the Overview section deal primarily with the United States and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please improve this article and discuss the issue on the talk page. (August 2011)

Anthropology  /ænθrɵˈpɒlədʒi/ is the academic study of humanity. It deals with all that is characteristic of the human experience, from physiology and the evolutionary origins to the social and cultural organization of human societies as well as individual and collective forms of human experience. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences.^[1] The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos (ἄνθρωπος), "man", understood to mean humankind or humanity, and -logia (-λογία), "discourse" or "study."

Anthropology's basic concerns are the definition of human life and origin, how social relations among humans are organized, who the ancestors of modern Homo sapiens are, what the characterizations of human physical traits are, how humans behave, why there are variations among different groups of humans, how the evolutionary past of Homo sapiens has influenced its social organization and culture and so forth.^{[citation needed]}

Anthropology originated in the colonial encounter between Western people and colonized non-western peoples, as Europeans tried to understand the origins of observable cultural diversity. Today anthropology is a global discipline, and anthropologists study both Western and non-Western societies.

In the United States, where anthropology was first defined as a discipline, the field is traditionally divided into four sub-fields: cultural anthropology, archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and biological anthropology.^[2] In Europe the discipline originated as ethnology and was originally defined as the study of social organization in non-state societies, later redefined as social anthropology. Socio-cultural anthropology is considered anthropology proper in most of Europe, and in the parts of the world that were influenced by the European tradition.^[3]

Socio-cultural anthropology has been heavily influenced by structuralist and post-modern theories, as well as a shift toward the analysis of modern societies. During the 1970s and 1990s, there was an epistemological shift away from the positivist traditions that had largely informed the discipline.^[4] During this shift, enduring questions about the nature and production of knowledge came to occupy a central place in cultural and social anthropology. In contrast, archaeology and biological anthropology remained largely positivist. Due to this difference in epistemology, anthropology as a discipline has lacked cohesion over the last several decades.

Subfields[link]

In the United States, anthropology is traditionally divided into four sub-fields, each with additional branches: biological or physical anthropology, social anthropology or cultural anthropology, archaeology and anthropological linguistics.^[2] These fields frequently overlap, but tend to use different methodologies and techniques.

Cultural Anthropology[link]

Cultural anthropology is also called socio-cultural anthropology or social anthropology (especially in the United Kingdom). It is the study of culture, and is based mainly on ethnography. Ethnography can refer to both a methodology and a product of research, namely a monograph or book. Ethnography is a grounded, inductive method that heavily relies on participant-observation. Ethnology involves the systematic comparison of different cultures. The process of participant-observation can be especially helpful to understanding a culture from an emic point of view, which would otherwise be unattainable by simply reading from a book. In some European countries, all cultural anthropology is known as ethnology (a term coined and defined by Adam F. Kollár in 1783).^[5]

The study of kinship and social organization is a central focus of cultural anthropology, as kinship is a human universal. Cultural anthropology also covers economic and political organization, law and conflict resolution, patterns of consumption and exchange, material culture, technology, infrastructure, gender relations, ethnicity, childrearing and socialization, religion, myth, symbols, values, etiquette, worldview, sports, music, nutrition, recreation, games, food, festivals, and language (which is also the object of study in linguistic anthropology).

Physical anthropology[link]

Biological Anthropology and Physical Anthropology are synonymous terms to describe anthropological research focused on the study of humans and non-human primates in their biological, evolutionary, and demographic dimensions. It examines the biological and social factors that have affected the evolution of humans and other primates, and that generate, maintain or change contemporary genetic and physiological variation.^[6]

Archaeological anthropology[link]

Archaeology is the study of human history and its artifacts. Archaeologists typically look at the material remains of human groups in order to find out how people lived. Pieces of pottery, tools, and other artifacts that are left behind give clues about the social and cultural lives of past societies ^[7]

Linguistic anthropology[link]

Linguistic anthropology (also called anthropological linguistics) seeks to understand the processes of human communications, verbal and non-verbal, variation in language across time and space, the social uses of language, and the relationship between language and culture. It is the branch of anthropology that brings linguistic methods to bear on anthropological problems, linking the analysis of linguistic forms and processes to the interpretation of sociocultural processes. Linguistic anthropologists often draw on related fields including sociolinguistics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, semiotics, discourse analysis, and narrative analysis.^[8]

Commonalities between subfields[link]

Because anthropology developed from so many different enterprises (see History of Anthropology), including but not limited to fossil-hunting, exploring, documentary film-making, paleontology, primatology, antiquity dealings and curatorship, philology, etymology, genetics, regional analysis, ethnology, history, philosophy, and religious studies,^[9][10] it is difficult to characterize the entire field in a brief article, although attempts to write histories of the entire field have been made.^[11]

Because of the holistic nature of anthropological research, all branches of anthropology have widespread practical application in diverse fields. This is known as applied anthropology. Thus military expeditions employ anthropologists to discern strategic cultural footholds; marketing professionals employ anthropology to determine propitious placement of advertising; and humanitarian agencies depend on anthropological insights as means to fight poverty. Examples of applied anthropology are ubiquitous.

Focused in a positive light, Anthropology is one of the few places where humanities, social, and natural sciences are forced to confront one another. As such, anthropology has been central in the development of several new (late 20th century) interdisciplinary fields such as cognitive science,^[12] global studies, and various ethnic studies.

Basic trends[link]

There are several characteristics that tend to unite anthropological work. One of the central characteristics is that anthropology tends to provide a comparatively more holistic account of phenomena and tends to be highly empirical.^[13] The quest for holism leads most anthropologists to study a particular place, problem or phenomenon in detail, using a variety of methods, over a more extensive period than normal in many parts of academia.

In the 1990s and 2000s (decade), calls for clarification of what constitutes a culture, of how an observer knows where his or her own culture ends and another begins, and other crucial topics in writing anthropology were heard. It is possible to view all human cultures as part of one large, evolving global culture. These dynamic relationships, between what can be observed on the ground, as opposed to what can be observed by compiling many local observations remain fundamental in any kind of anthropology, whether cultural, biological, linguistic or archaeological.^[14]

Biological anthropologists are interested in both human variation^[15] and in the possibility of human universals (behaviors, ideas or concepts shared by virtually all human cultures)^[16] They use many different methods of study, but modern population genetics, participant observation and other techniques often take anthropologists "into the field," which means traveling to a community in its own setting, to do something called "fieldwork." On the biological or physical side, human measurements, genetic samples, nutritional data may be gathered and published as articles or monographs.

At the same time, anthropologists urge, as part of their quest for scientific objectivity, cultural relativism, which has an influence on all the sub-fields of anthropology. This is the notion that particular cultures should not be judged by one culture's values or viewpoints, but that all cultures should be viewed as relative to each other. There should be no notions, in good anthropology, of one culture being better or worse than another culture.^[17]

Ethical commitments in anthropology include noticing and documenting genocide, infanticide, racism, mutilation including circumcision and subincision, and torture. Topics like racism, slavery or human sacrifice, therefore, attract anthropological attention and theories ranging from nutritional deficiencies^[18] to genes^[19] to acculturation have been proposed, not to mention theories of colonialism and many others as root causes of Man's inhumanity to man. To illustrate the depth of an anthropological approach, one can take just one of these topics, such as "racism" and find thousands of anthropological references, stretching across all the major and minor sub-fields.^[20][21]

Along with dividing up their project by theoretical emphasis, anthropologists typically divide the world up into relevant time periods and geographic regions. Human time on Earth is divided up into relevant cultural traditions based on material, such as the Paleolithic and the Neolithic, of particular use in archaeology. Further cultural subdivisions according to tool types, such as Olduwan or Mousterian or Levalloisian help archaeologists and other anthropologists in understanding major trends in the human past. Anthropologists and geographers share approaches to Culture regions as well, since mapping cultures is central to both sciences. By making comparisons across cultural traditions (time-based) and cultural regions (space-based), anthropologists have developed various kinds of comparative method, a central part of their science.

Anthropological Organizations[link]

Contemporary anthropology is an established science with academic departments at most universities and colleges. The single largest organization of Anthropologists is the American Anthropological Association (AAA), which was founded in 1903.^[22] Membership is made up of anthropologists from around the globe.^[23]

In 1989, a group of European and American scholars in the field of anthropology established the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) which serves as a major professional organization for anthropologists working in Europe. The EASA seeks to advance the status of anthropology in Europe and to increase visibility of marginalized anthropological traditions and thereby contribute to the project of a global anthropology or world anthropology.

Hundreds of other organizations exist in the various sub-fields of anthropology, sometimes divided up by nation or region, and many anthropologists work with collaborators in other disciplines, such as geology, physics, zoology, paleontology, anatomy, music theory, art history, sociology and so on, belonging to professional societies in those disciplines as well.^[24]

History[link]

The first use of the term "anthropology" in English to refer to a natural science of humanity was apparently in 1593, the first of the "logies" to be coined.^[25] It took Immanuel Kant 25 years to write one of the first major treatises on anthropology, his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.^[26] Kant is not generally considered to be a modern anthropologist, however, as he never left his region of Germany nor did he study any cultures besides his own, and in fact, describes the need for anthropology as a corollary field to his own primary field of philosophy.^[27] He did, however, begin teaching an annual course in anthropology in 1772. Anthropology is thus primarily an Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment endeavor.

Cannibalism among "the savages" in Brazil, as described and pictured by André Thévet.

Historians of anthropology, like Marvin Harris,^[28] indicate two major frameworks within which empirical anthropology has arisen: interest in comparisons of people over space and interest in longterm human processes or humans as viewed through time. Harris dates both to Classical Greece and Classical Rome, specifically Herodotus, often called the "father of history" and the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote many of our only surviving contemporary accounts of several ancient Celtic and Germanic peoples. Herodotus first formulated some of the persisting problems of anthropology.^[29]

Medieval scholars may be considered forerunners of modern anthropology as well, insofar as they conducted or wrote detailed studies of the customs of peoples considered "different" from themselves in terms of geography. John of Plano Carpini reported of his stay among the Mongols. His report was unusual in its detailed depiction of a non-European culture^[30]

Marco Polo's systematic observations of nature, anthropology, and geography are another example of studying human variation across space.^[31] Polo's travels took him across such a diverse human landscape and his accounts of the peoples he met as he journeyed were so detailed that they earned for Polo the name "the father of modern anthropology."^[32]

Another candidate for one of the first scholars to carry out comparative ethnographic-type studies in person was the medieval Persian scholar Abū Rayhān Bīrūnī in the 11th century, who wrote about the peoples, customs, and religions of the Indian subcontinent. According to Akbar S. Ahmed, like modern anthropologists, he engaged in extensive participant observation with a given group of people, learnt their language and studied their primary texts, and presented his findings with objectivity and neutrality using cross-cultural comparisons.^[33] However, others argue that he can hardly be considered an anthropologist in the conventional sense.^[34] He wrote detailed comparative studies on the religions and cultures in the Middle East, Mediterranean and especially South Asia.^[35][36] Biruni's tradition of comparative cross-cultural study continued in the Muslim world through to Ibn Khaldun's work in the 14th century.^[33][37]

Most scholars^{[citation needed]} consider modern anthropology as an outgrowth of the Age of Enlightenment, a period when Europeans attempted systematically to study human behavior, the known varieties of which had been increasing since the 15th century as a result of the first European colonization wave. The traditions of jurisprudence, history, philology, and sociology then evolved into something more closely resembling the modern views of these disciplines and informed the development of the social sciences, of which anthropology was a part.

Developments in the systematic study of ancient civilizations through the disciplines of Classics and Egyptology informed both archaeology and eventually social anthropology, as did the study of East and South Asian languages and cultures. At the same time, the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment produced thinkers, such as Johann Gottfried Herder^[38] and later Wilhelm Dilthey, whose work formed the basis for the "culture concept," which is central to the discipline.^{[citation needed]}

Table of natural history, 1728 Cyclopaedia

Institutionally, anthropology emerged from the development of natural history (expounded by authors such as Buffon) that occurred during the European colonization of the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Programs of ethnographic study originated in this era as the study of the "human primitives" overseen by colonial administrations.

There was a tendency in late 18th century Enlightenment thought to understand human society as natural phenomena that behaved according to certain principles and that could be observed empirically. In some ways, studying the language, culture, physiology, and artifacts of European colonies was not unlike studying the flora and fauna of those places.

Early anthropology was divided between proponents of unilinealism, who argued that all societies passed through a single evolutionary process, from the most primitive to the most advanced, and various forms of non-lineal theorists, who tended to subscribe to ideas such as diffusionism.^[39] Most 19th-century social theorists, including anthropologists, viewed non-European societies as windows onto the pre-industrial human past.

As academic disciplines began to differentiate over the course of the 19th century, anthropology grew increasingly distinct from the biological approach of natural history, on the one hand, and from purely historical or literary fields such as Classics, on the other. A common criticism has been that many social science scholars (such as economists, sociologists, and psychologists) in Western countries focus disproportionately on Western subjects, while anthropology focuses disproportionately on the "Other";^[40] this has changed over the last part of the 20th century as anthropologists increasingly also study Western subjects, particularly variation across class, region, or ethnicity within Western societies, and other social scientists increasingly take a global view of their fields.

20th century[link]

In the 20th century, academic disciplines have often been institutionally divided into three broad domains. The natural and biological sciences seek to derive general laws through reproducible and verifiable experiments. The humanities generally study local traditions, through their history, literature, music, and arts, with an emphasis on understanding particular individuals, events, or eras.

The social sciences have generally attempted to develop scientific methods to understand social phenomena in a generalizable way, though usually with methods distinct from those of the natural sciences. In particular, social sciences often develop statistical descriptions rather than the general laws derived in physics or chemistry, or they may explain individual cases through more general principles, as in many fields of psychology. Anthropology (like some fields of history) does not easily fit into one of these categories, and different branches of anthropology draw on one or more of these domains.^[41]

Anthropology as it emerged amongst the Western colonial powers (mentioned above) has generally taken a different path than that in the countries of southern and central Europe (Italy, Greece, and the successors to the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires). In the former, the encounter with multiple, distinct cultures, often very different in organization and language from those of Europe, has led to a continuing emphasis on cross-cultural comparison and a receptiveness to certain kinds of cultural relativism.^[42]

In the successor states of continental Europe, on the other hand, anthropologists often joined with folklorists and linguists in building nationalist perspectives. Ethnologists in these countries tended to focus on differentiating among local ethnolinguistic groups, documenting local folk culture, and representing the prehistory of what has become a nation through various forms of public education (eg, museums of several kinds).^[43]

In this scheme, Russia occupied a middle position. On the one hand, it had a large region (largely east of the Urals) of highly distinct, pre-industrial, often non-literate peoples, similar to the situation in the Americas. On the other hand, Russia also participated to some degree in the nationalist (cultural and political) movements of Central and Eastern Europe. After the Revolution of 1917, anthropology in the USSR, and later the Soviet Bloc countries, were highly shaped by the requirement to conform to Marxist theories of social evolution.^[44]

Anthropological Traditions[link]

Britain[link]

Tylor and Frazer[link]

E. B. Tylor, 19th-century British anthropologist.

E. B. Tylor ( 2 October 1832 – 2 January 1917) and James George Frazer ( 1 January 1854 – 7 May 1941) are generally considered the antecedents to modern social anthropology in Britain. Though Tylor undertook a field trip to Mexico, both he and Frazer derived most of the material for their comparative studies through extensive reading, not fieldwork, mainly the Classics (literature and history of Greece and Rome), the work of the early European folklorists, and reports from missionaries, travelers, and contemporaneous ethnologists.

Tylor advocated strongly for unilinealism and a form of "uniformity of mankind".^[45] Tylor in particular laid the groundwork for theories of cultural diffusionism, stating that there are three ways that different groups can have similar cultural forms or technologies: "independent invention, inheritance from ancestors in a distant region, transmission from one race [sic] to another."^[46]

Tylor formulated one of the early and influential anthropological conceptions of culture as "that complex whole, which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."^[47] However, as Stocking notes, Tylor mainly concerned himself with describing and mapping the distribution of particular elements of culture, rather than with the larger function, and generally seemed to assume a Victorian idea of progress rather than the idea of non-directional, multilineal cultural development proposed by later anthropologists.

Tylor also theorized about the origins of religious feelings in human beings, proposing a theory of animism as the earliest stage, and noting that "religion" has many components, of which he believed the most important to be belief in supernatural beings (as opposed to moral systems, cosmology, etc.). Frazer, a Scottish scholar with a broad knowledge of Classics, also concerned himself with religion, myth, and magic. His comparative studies, most influentially in the numerous editions of The Golden Bough, analyzed similarities in religious belief and symbolism globally. Neither Tylor nor Frazer, however, was particularly interested in fieldwork, nor were they interested in examining how the cultural elements and institutions fit together.

Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown[link]

Toward the turn of the 20th century, a number of anthropologists became dissatisfied with this categorization of cultural elements; historical reconstructions also came to seem increasingly speculative. Under the influence of several younger scholars, a new approach came to predominate among British anthropologists, concerned with analyzing how societies held together in the present (synchronic analysis, rather than diachronic or historical analysis), and emphasizing long-term (one to several years) immersion fieldwork. Cambridge University financed a multidisciplinary expedition to the Torres Strait Islands in 1898, organized by Alfred Court Haddon and including a physician-anthropologist, William Rivers, as well as a linguist, a botanist, other specialists. The findings of the expedition set new standards for ethnographic description.

A decade and a half later, Polish anthropology student Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942) was beginning what he expected to be a brief period of fieldwork in the old model, collecting lists of cultural items, when the outbreak of the First World War stranded him in New Guinea. As a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire resident on a British colonial possession, he was effectively confined to New Guinea for several years.^[48]

He made use of the time by undertaking far more intensive fieldwork than had been done by British anthropologists, and his classic ethnography, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) advocated an approach to fieldwork that became standard in the field: getting "the native's point of view" through participant observation. Theoretically, he advocated a functionalist interpretation, which examined how social institutions functioned to satisfy individual needs.

British social anthropology had an expansive moment in the Interwar period, with key contributions coming from the Polish-British Bronisław Malinowski and Meyer Fortes^[49]

A. R. Radcliffe-Brown also published a seminal work in 1922. He had carried out his initial fieldwork in the Andaman Islands in the old style of historical reconstruction. However, after reading the work of French sociologists Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Radcliffe-Brown published an account of his research (entitled simply The Andaman Islanders) that paid close attention to the meaning and purpose of rituals and myths. Over time, he developed an approach known as structural functionalism, which focused on how institutions in societies worked to balance out or create an equilibrium in the social system to keep it functioning harmoniously. (This contrasted with Malinowski's functionalism, and was quite different from the later French structuralism, which examined the conceptual structures in language and symbolism.)

Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown's influence stemmed from the fact that they, like Boas, actively trained students and aggressively built up institutions that furthered their programmatic ambitions. This was particularly the case with Radcliffe-Brown, who spread his agenda for "Social Anthropology" by teaching at universities across the British Commonwealth. From the late 1930s until the postwar period appeared a string of monographs and edited volumes that cemented the paradigm of British Social Anthropology (BSA). Famous ethnographies include The Nuer, by Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, and The Dynamics of Clanship Among the Tallensi, by Meyer Fortes; well-known edited volumes include African Systems of Kinship and Marriage and African Political Systems.

Contemporary trends[link]

Max Gluckman, together with many of his colleagues at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and students at Manchester University, collectively known as the Manchester School, took BSA in new directions through their introduction of explicitly Marxist-informed theory, their emphasis on conflicts and conflict resolution, and their attention to the ways in which individuals negotiate and make use of the social structural possibilities.

In Britain, anthropology had a great intellectual impact, it "contributed to the erosion of Christianity, the growth of cultural relativism, an awareness of the survival of the primitive in modern life, and the replacement of diachronic modes of analysis with synchronic, all of which are central to modern culture."^[50]

Later in the 1960s and 1970s, Edmund Leach and his students Mary Douglas and Nur Yalman, among others, introduced French structuralism in the style of Lévi-Strauss; while British anthropology has continued to emphasize social organization and economics over purely symbolic or literary topics, differences among British, French, and American sociocultural anthropologies have diminished with increasing dialogue and borrowing of both theory and methods. Today, social anthropology in Britain engages internationally with many other social theories and has branched in many directions.

In countries of the British Commonwealth, social anthropology has often been institutionally separate from physical anthropology and primatology, which may be connected with departments of biology or zoology; and from archaeology, which may be connected with departments of Classics, Egyptology, and the like. In other countries (and in some, particularly smaller, British and North American universities), anthropologists have also found themselves institutionally linked with scholars of folklore, museum studies, human geography, sociology, social relations, ethnic studies, cultural studies, and social work.

Anthropology has been used in Britain to provide an alternative explanation for the Financial crisis of 2007–2010 to the technical explanations rooted in economic and political theory. Dr. Gillian Tett, a Cambridge University trained anthropologist who went on to become a senior editor at the Financial Times is one of the leaders in this use of anthropology.

France[link]

Émile Durkheim

Anthropology in France has a less clear genealogy than the British and American traditions, in part because many French writers influential in anthropology have been trained or held faculty positions in sociology, philosophy, or other fields rather than in anthropology.

Marcel Mauss[link]

Most commentators consider Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), nephew of the influential sociologist Émile Durkheim, to be the founder of the French anthropological tradition. Mauss belonged to Durkheim's Année Sociologique group. While Durkheim and others examined the state of modern societies, Mauss and his collaborators (such as Henri Hubert and Robert Hertz) drew on ethnography and philology to analyze societies that were not as 'differentiated' as European nation states.

Two works by Mauss in particular proved to have enduring relevance: Essay on the Gift, a seminal analysis of exchange and reciprocity, and his Huxley lecture on the notion of the person, the first comparative study of notions of person and selfhood cross-culturally.^[51]

Throughout the interwar years, French interest in anthropology often dovetailed with wider cultural movements such as surrealism and primitivism, which drew on ethnography for inspiration. Marcel Griaule and Michel Leiris are examples of people who combined anthropology with the French avant-garde. During this time most of what is known as ethnologie was restricted to museums, such as the Musée de l'Homme founded by Paul Rivet, and anthropology had a close relationship with studies of folklore.

Claude Lévi-Strauss[link]

Above all, Claude Lévi-Strauss helped institutionalize anthropology in France. Along with the enormous influence that his theory of structuralism exerted across multiple disciplines, Lévi-Strauss established ties with American and British anthropologists. At the same time, he established centers and laboratories within France to provide an institutional context within anthropology, while training influential students such as Maurice Godelier and Françoise Héritier. They proved influential in the world of French anthropology. Much of the distinct character of France's anthropology today is a result of the fact that most anthropology is carried out in nationally funded research laboratories (CNRS) rather than academic departments in universities

Other influential writers in the 1970s include Pierre Clastres, who explains in his books on the Guayaki tribe in Paraguay that "primitive societies" actively oppose the institution of the state. These stateless societies are not less evolved than societies with states, but chose to conjure the institution of authority as a separate function from society. The leader is only a spokesperson for the group when it has to deal with other groups ("international relations") but has no inside authority, and may be violently removed if he attempts to abuse this position.^[52]

The most important French social theorist since Foucault and Lévi-Strauss is Pierre Bourdieu, who trained formally in philosophy and sociology and eventually held the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France. Like Mauss and others before him, he worked on topics both in sociology and anthropology. His fieldwork among the Kabyle of Algeria places him solidly in anthropology, while his analysis of the function and reproduction of fashion and cultural capital in European societies places him as solidly in sociology.

Blumenbach's five races.

United States[link]

From its beginnings in the early 19th century through the early 20th century, anthropology in the United States was influenced by the presence of Native American societies.

Franz Boas, one of the pioneers of modern anthropology, often called the "Father of American Anthropology"

Cultural anthropology in the United States was influenced greatly by the ready availability of Native American societies as ethnographic subjects. The field was pioneered by staff of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology, men such as John Wesley Powell and Frank Hamilton Cushing.

Lewis Henry Morgan[link]

Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881), a lawyer from Rochester, New York, became an advocate for and ethnological scholar of the Iroquois. His comparative analyses of religion, government, material culture, and especially kinship patterns proved to be influential contributions to the field of anthropology. Like other scholars of his day (such as Edward Tylor), Morgan argued that human societies could be classified into categories of cultural evolution on a scale of progression that ranged from savagery, to barbarism, to civilization. Generally, Morgan used technology (such as bowmaking or pottery) as an indicator of position on this scale.

Franz Boas[link]

Franz Boas established academic anthropology in the United States in opposition to this sort of evolutionary perspective. His approach was empirical, skeptical of overgeneralizations, and eschewed attempts to establish universal laws. For example, Boas studied immigrant children to demonstrate that biological race was not immutable, and that human conduct and behavior resulted from nurture, rather than nature.

Influenced by the German tradition, Boas argued that the world was full of distinct cultures, rather than societies whose evolution could be measured by how much or how little "civilization" they had. He believed that each culture has to be studied in its particularity, and argued that cross-cultural generalizations, like those made in the natural sciences, were not possible.

In doing so, he fought discrimination against immigrants, blacks, and indigenous peoples of the Americas.^[53] Many American anthropologists adopted his agenda for social reform, and theories of race continue to be popular subjects for anthropologists today. The so-called "Four Field Approach" has its origins in Boasian Anthropology, dividing the discipline in the four crucial and interrelated fields of sociocultural, biological, linguistic, and archaic anthropology (e.g. archaeology). Anthropology in the United States continues to be deeply influenced by the Boasian tradition, especially its emphasis on culture.

Ruth Benedict in 1937

Boas used his positions at Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History to train and develop multiple generations of students. His first generation of students included Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Edward Sapir and Ruth Benedict, who each produced richly detailed studies of indigenous North American cultures. They provided a wealth of details used to attack the theory of a single evolutionary process. Kroeber and Sapir's focus on Native American languages helped establish linguistics as a truly general science and free it from its historical focus on Indo-European languages.

The publication of Alfred Kroeber's textbook, Anthropology, marked a turning point in American anthropology. After three decades of amassing material, Boasians felt a growing urge to generalize. This was most obvious in the 'Culture and Personality' studies carried out by younger Boasians such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. Influenced by psychoanalytic psychologists including Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, these authors sought to understand the way that individual personalities were shaped by the wider cultural and social forces in which they grew up.

Though such works as Coming of Age in Samoa and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword remain popular with the American public, Mead and Benedict never had the impact on the discipline of anthropology that some expected. Boas had planned for Ruth Benedict to succeed him as chair of Columbia's anthropology department, but she was sidelined by Ralph Linton, and Mead was limited to her offices at the AMNH.

Canada[link]

Canadian anthropology began, as in other parts of the Colonial world, as ethnological data in the records of travellers and missionaries. In Canada, Jesuit missionaries such as Fathers LeClercq, Le Jeune and Sagard, in the 17th century, provide the oldest ethnographic records of native tribes in what was then the Domain of Canada.

George Mercer Dawson[link]

True anthropology began with a Government department: the Geological Survey of Canada, and George Mercer Dawson (director in 1895). Dawson's support for anthropology created impetus for the profession in Canada. This was expanded upon by Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, who established a Division of Anthropology within the Geological Survey in 1910.

Edward Sapir[link]

Anthropologists were recruited from England and the USA, setting the foundation for the unique Canadian style of anthropology. Scholars include the linguist and Boasian Edward Sapir.

Other countries[link]

Anthropology in Greece and Portugal is greatly influenced by British anthropology.^{[citation needed]} In Greece, there was since the 19th century a science of the folklore called laographia (laography), in the form of "a science of the interior", although theoretically weak; but the connotation of the field deeply changed after World War II, when a wave of Anglo-American anthropologists introduced a science "of the outside".^[54] In Italy, the development of ethnology and related studies did not receive as much attention as other branches of learning.^[55]

Germany and Norway are the countries that showed the most division and conflict between scholars focusing on domestic socio-cultural issues and scholars focusing on "other" societies.^{[citation needed]}. Some German and Austrian scolars have increased cultural anthropology as both legal anthropology reagarding "other" societies and anthropology of Western civilization.^[56]

Post–World War II[link]

Before WWII British 'social anthropology' and American 'cultural anthropology' were still distinct traditions. After the war, enough British and American anthropologists borrowed ideas and methodological approaches from one another that some began to speak of them collectively as 'sociocultural' anthropology.

In the 1950s and mid-1960s anthropology tended increasingly to model itself after the natural sciences. Some anthropologists, such as Lloyd Fallers and Clifford Geertz, focused on processes of modernization by which newly independent states could develop. Others, such as Julian Steward and Leslie White, focused on how societies evolve and fit their ecological niche—an approach popularized by Marvin Harris.

Economic anthropology as influenced by Karl Polanyi and practiced by Marshall Sahlins and George Dalton challenged standard neoclassical economics to take account of cultural and social factors, and employed Marxian analysis into anthropological study. In England, British Social Anthropology's paradigm began to fragment as Max Gluckman and Peter Worsley experimented with Marxism and authors such as Rodney Needham and Edmund Leach incorporated Lévi-Strauss's structuralism into their work.

Structuralism also influenced a number of developments in 1960s and 1970s, including cognitive anthropology and componential analysis. Authors such as David Schneider, Clifford Geertz, and Marshall Sahlins developed a more fleshed-out concept of culture as a web of meaning or signification, which proved very popular within and beyond the discipline. In keeping with the times, much of anthropology became politicized through the Algerian War of Independence and opposition to the Vietnam War;^[57] Marxism became an increasingly popular theoretical approach in the discipline.^[58] By the 1970s the authors of volumes such as Reinventing Anthropology worried about anthropology's relevance.

Since the 1980s issues of power, such as those examined in Eric Wolf's Europe and the People Without History, have been central to the discipline. In the 1980s books like Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter pondered anthropology's ties to colonial inequality, while the immense popularity of theorists such as Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault moved issues of power and hegemony into the spotlight. Gender and sexuality became popular topics, as did the relationship between history and anthropology, influenced by Marshall Sahlins (again), who drew on Lévi-Strauss and Fernand Braudel to examine the relationship between social structure and individual agency. Also influential in these issues were Nietzsche, Heidegger, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, Derrida and Lacan.^[59]

In the late 1980s and 1990s authors such as George Marcus and James Clifford pondered ethnographic authority, in particular how and why anthropological knowledge was possible and authoritative. They were reflecting trends in research and discourse initiated by Feminists in the academy, although they excused themselves from commenting specifically on those pioneering critics.^[60] Nevertheless, key aspects of feminist theorizing and methods became de rigueur as part of the 'post-modern moment' in anthropology: Ethnographies became more reflexive, explicitly addressing the author's methodology, cultural, gender and racial positioning, and their influence on his or her ethnographic analysis. This was part of a more general trend of postmodernism that was popular contemporaneously.^[61] Currently anthropologists pay attention to a wide variety of issues pertaining to the contemporary world, including globalization, medicine and biotechnology, indigenous rights, virtual communities, and the anthropology of industrialized societies.

Controversies about its history[link]

Anthropologists, like other researchers (especially historians and scientists engaged in field research), have over time assisted state policies and projects, especially colonialism.^[62][63]

Some commentators have contended:

• That the discipline grew out of colonialism, perhaps was in league with it, and derived some of its key notions from it, consciously or not. (See, for example, Gough, Pels and Salemink, but cf. Lewis 2004).^[64]
• That ethnographic work was often ahistorical, writing about people as if they were "out of time" in an "ethnographic present" (Johannes Fabian, Time and Its Other).

Military[link]

Anthropologists' involvement with the U.S. government, in particular, has caused bitter controversy within the discipline. Franz Boas publicly objected to US participation in World War I, and after the war he published a brief expose and condemnation of the participation of several American archaeologists in espionage in Mexico under their cover as scientists.

But by the 1940s, many of Boas' anthropologist contemporaries were active in the allied war effort against the "Axis" (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan). Many served in the armed forces, while others worked in intelligence (for example, Office of Strategic Services and the Office of War Information). At the same time, David H. Price's work on American anthropology during the Cold War provides detailed accounts of the pursuit and dismissal of several anthropologists from their jobs for communist sympathies.

Attempts to accuse anthropologists of complicity with the CIA and government intelligence activities during the Vietnam War years have turned up surprisingly little (although anthropologist Hugo Nutini was active in the stillborn Project Camelot).^[65] Many anthropologists (students and teachers) were active in the antiwar movement. Numerous resolutions condemning the war in all its aspects were passed overwhelmingly at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA).

Professional anthropological bodies often object to the use of anthropology for the benefit of the state. Their codes of ethics or statements may proscribe anthropologists from giving secret briefings. The Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth (ASA) has called certain scholarship ethically dangerous. The AAA's current 'Statement of Professional Responsibility' clearly states that "in relation with their own government and with host governments ... no secret research, no secret reports or debriefings of any kind should be agreed to or given."

Anthropologists, along with other social scientists, are working with the US military as part of the US Army's strategy in Afghanistan.^[66] The Christian Science Monitor reports that "Counterinsurgency efforts focus on better grasping and meeting local needs" in Afghanistan, under the Human Terrain System (HTS) program; in addition, HTS teams are working with the US military in Iraq.^[67] In 2009, the American Anthropological Association's Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security and Intelligence Communities released its final report concluding, in part, that, "When ethnographic investigation is determined by military missions, not subject to external review, where data collection occurs in the context of war, integrated into the goals of counterinsurgency, and in a potentially coercive environment – all characteristic factors of the HTS concept and its application – it can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology. In summary, while we stress that constructive engagement between anthropology and the military is possible, CEAUSSIC suggests that the AAA emphasize the incompatibility of HTS with disciplinary ethics and practice for job seekers and that it further recognize the problem of allowing HTS to define the meaning of “anthropology” within DoD."^[68]

Major discussions[link]

Focus on other cultures[link]

Some authors argue that anthropology originated and developed as the study of "other cultures", both in terms of time (past societies) and space (non-European/non-Western societies).^[69] For example, the classic of urban anthropology, Ulf Hannerz in the introduction to his seminal Exploring the City: Inquiries Toward an Urban Anthropology mentions that the "Third World" had habitually received most of attention; anthropologists who traditionally specialized in "other cultures" looked for them far away and started to look "across the tracks" only in late 1960s.^[70]

Now there exist many works focusing on peoples and topics very close to the author's "home".^[59] It is also argued that other fields of study, like History and Sociology, on the contrary focus disproportionately on the West.^[71]

In France, the study of Western societies has been traditionally left to sociologists, but this is increasingly changing,^[72] starting in the 1970s from scholars like Isac Chiva and journals like Terrain ("fieldwork"), and developing with the center founded by Marc Augé (Le Centre d'anthropologie des mondes contemporains, the Anthropological Research Center of Contemporary Societies). The same approach of focusing on "modern world" topics by Terrain, was also present in the British Manchester School of the 1950s.^{[citation needed]}

Since the 1980s it has become common for social and cultural anthropologists to set ethnographic research in the North Atlantic region, frequently examining the connections between locations rather than limiting research to a single locale. There has also been a related shift toward broadening the focus beyond the daily life of ordinary people; increasingly, research is set in settings such as scientific laboratories, social movements, governmental and nongovernmental organizations and businesses.^[73]

See also[link]

Anthropology portal

	Book: Anthropology
Wikipedia books are collections of articles that can be downloaded or ordered in print.

This "see also" section may contain an excessive number of suggestions. Please ensure that only the most relevant suggestions are given and that they are not red links, and consider integrating suggestions into the article itself. (May 2012)

• American Anthropological Association (AAA)
• Anthropological Index Online (AIO)
• Anthrozoology
• Anthropological science fiction
• Applied anthropology
• Asociación de Antropólogos Iberoamericanos en Red, AIBR
• Ethnology
• Ethology
• Folklore
• Forensic anthropology
• Human ethology
• Human evolution
• Intangible Cultural Heritage
• Legal anthropology
• Madison Grant
• Memetics
• Philosophical anthropology
• Prehistoric medicine
• Sociology
• Systems theory in anthropology
• Theological anthropology, which is not part of anthropology but a sub-field of theology
• Periodic Table of Human Sciences / Anthropology in Tinbergen's four questions

References[link]

Further reading[link]

Dictionaries and encyclopedias[link]

• Barfield, Thomas (1997). The dictionary of anthropology. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing.
• Levinson, David and Melvin Ember. eds. (1996) Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology. (4 vols.) New York: Henry Holt.

Fieldnotes and memoirs of anthropologists[link]

• Barley, Nigel (1983) The innocent anthropologist: notes from a mud hut. London: British Museum Publications.
• Geertz, Clifford (1995) After the fact: two countries, four decades, one anthropologist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1967) Tristes tropiques. Translated from the French by John Russell. New York: Atheneum.
• Malinowski, Bronisław (1967) A diary in the strict sense of the term. Translated by Norbert Guterman. New York, Harcourt, Brace & World.
• Mead, Margaret (1972) Blackberry winter: my earlier years. New York: William Marrow.
• Mead, Margaret, (1977) Letters from the field, 1925 - 1975. New York: Harper & Row.
• Rabinow, Paul. (1977) Reflections on fieldwork in Morocco.

Histories[link]

• Asad, Talal, ed. (1973) Anthropology & the Colonial Encounter. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
• Barth, Fredrik, Andre Gingrich, Robert Parkin, One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French, and American anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• D'Andrade, R. "The Sad Story of Anthropology: 1950-1999." In E. L. Cerroni-Long, ed. Anthropological Theory in North America. Westport: Berin & Garvey 1999. Anthro.ucsd.edu
• Darnell, Regna. (2001) Invisible Genealogies: A History of Americanist Anthropology. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
• Harris, Marvin. (2001[1968]) The rise of anthropological theory: a history of theories of culture. AltaMira Press. Walnut Creek, CA.
• Kehoe, Alice B. (1998) The Land of Prehistory: A Critical History of American Archaeology.
• Lewis, Herbert S. (1998) "The Misrepresentation of Anthropology and its Consequences." American Anthropologist, 100: 716-731. Interscience.wiley.com, Lewis
• Lewis, Herbert S. (2004) "Imagining Anthropology's History." Reviews in Anthropology, v. 33.
• Lewis, Herbert S. (2005) "Anthropology, the Cold War, and Intellectual History. In R. Darnell & F.W. Gleach, eds. Histories of Anthropology Annual, Vol. I.
• Pels, Peter & Oscar Salemink, eds. (2000) Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology.
• Price, David. (2004) Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists.
• Stocking, George, Jr. (1968) Race, Culture and Evolution. New York: Free Press.
• Trencher, Susan. (2000) Mirrored Images: American Anthropology and American Culture, 1960-1980.
• Gisi, Lucas Marco. (2007) Einbildungskraft und Mythologie. Die Verschränkung von Anthropologie und Geschichte im 18. Jahrhundert, Berlin, New York: de Gruyter.

Textbooks and key theoretical works[link]

• Clifford, James and George E. Marcus (1986) Writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
• Harris, Marvin (1997) Culture, People, Nature: An Introduction to General Anthropology (7th Edition). Boston: Allyn & Bacon
• Salzmann, Zdeněk. (1993) Language, culture, and society: an introduction to linguistic anthropology. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Shweder, Richard A., and Robert A. LeVine, eds. (1984) Culture Theory: essays on mind, self, and emotion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

External links[link]

At Wikiversity you can learn more and teach others about Anthropology at:

The School of Anthropology

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Anthropology

• Webpage "History of German Anthropology/Ethnology 1945/49-1990
• American Anthropological Association Homepage Home page of largest professional organization of anthropologists
• European Association of Social Anthropologists
• American Association of Physical Anthropologists
• Australian Anthropological Society
• Iberoamerican Association of Anthropology AIBR
• European Association of Social Anthropologists
• Moving Anthropology Student Network - International Association of Social Anthropology Students
• Italian Institute of Anthropology
• National Association for the Practice of Anthropology
• The Royal Anthropological Institute Homepage—The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (RAI)
• The Society for Applied Anthropology
• Annual Review of Anthropology
• Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History Online collections database with detailed description and digital images for over 160,000 ethnographic artifacts.
• National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution Collects and preserves historical and contemporary anthropological materials that document the world's cultures and the history of anthropology
• The Anthropological Index Online Online biblographic database.
• Anthropology Researcher and Groups

Grant McCracken (full name Grant David McCracken) is an anthropologist, blogger and author. A member of Convergence Culture Consortium at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, McCracken has authored several books. He holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago. He has been the director of the Institute of Contemporary Culture and a senior lecturer at the Harvard Business School. He has been a consultant for many corporations, including the Coca-Cola Company, IKEA, Chrysler, Kraft, and Kimberly Clark. He lives in Rowayton, Connecticut.^[1]

Books[link]

He has written, among others:

• Culture and Consumption (1988)
• Big Hair (1996)
• Culture and Consumption II (2005)
• Flock and Flow (2006)
• Transformations: identity construction in contemporary culture (2008) Indiana University Press ISBN 978-0-253-21957-2
• Chief Culture Officer (2009)
• Culturematic (2012) Harvard Business Review Press ISBN 978-1-4221-4329-2

See also[link]

• Diderot Effect

References[link]

External links[link]

• This Blog Sits At The - McCracken's weblog
• Video (and audio) of interview/conversation with McCracken and Kerry Howley on Bloggingheads.tv

This article about a writer of non-fiction is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Major Tom Harnett Harrisson DSO OBE (26 September 1911 – 16 January 1976) was a British polymath. In the course of his life he was an ornithologist, explorer, journalist, broadcaster, soldier, guerrilla, ethnologist, museum curator, archaeologist, documentarian, film-maker, conservationist, and writer. Although often described as an anthropologist, and sometimes referred to as the "Barefoot Anthropologist", his degree studies at University of Cambridge, before he left to live in Oxford, were in ecology. He was a founder of the social observation organisation Mass Observation.

Early life and education[link]

Tom Harrisson was born in Argentina, educated in England at Harrow School and Pembroke College, Cambridge, conducted ornithological and anthropological research in Sarawak (1932) and the New Hebrides (1933–5), spent much of his life in Borneo (mainly Sarawak) and finished up in the US, the UK and France, before dying in a road accident in Thailand.

In 1937, Harrisson, with Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge, founded Mass-Observation, a project to study the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain.^[1]

Military service[link]

During the Second World War Harrisson continued directing Mass-Observation and was Radio critic for The Observer from May 1942 until June 1944. For much of this time he was in the army and gave up reviewing on leaving the UK. After service in the ranks he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Reconnaissance Corps on 21 November 1943.^[2] He had been recruited (some sources say by a confusion of names, despite his apparent suitability) for a plan to use the native peoples of Borneo against the Japanese. He was attached to Z Special Unit (also known as Z Force), part of the Services Reconnaissance Department (SRD: a branch of the combined Allied Intelligence Bureau in the South West Pacific theatre). On 25 March 1945, he was parachuted with seven Z Force operatives from a Consolidated Liberator onto a high plateau occupied by the Kelabit people. An autobiographical account of this operation (SEMUT I, one of four SEMUT operations in the area) is given in World Within (Cresset Press, 1959); there are also reports — not always flattering — from some of his comrades. His efforts to rescue stranded American airmen shot down over Borneo are a central part of "The Airmen and the Headhunters," an episode of the PBS television series Secrets of the Dead.^[3] The recommendation for his Distinguished Service Order which was gazetted on 6 March 1947 (and dated 2 November 1946) describes how from his insertion until 15 August 1945 the forces under his command protected the flank of Allied advances, and caused severe disruption to Japanese operations.^[4][5]

Ethnological work[link]

Following the war, he was Curator of the Sarawak Museum 1947–1966 (although he did not relinquish his commission until 14 March 1951^[6]). In the 1950s and 1960s Tom and Barbara Harrisson undertook pioneering excavations in the West Mouth of the Great Cave at Niah, Sarawak. Their most important discovery was a human skull in deposits dated by radiocarbon to about 40,000 years ago, the earliest date for modern humans in Borneo. The results of their excavations were never published in an appropriate manner leading to uncertainty and doubts as to their results; however, they are largely vindicated by results of excavations carried out by the Niah Cave Project from 2000–2003. Three films (amongst more made for British TV) record the Niah work^[7]

At the start of the Brunei Revolt in 1962, Resident John Fisher of the 4th Division of Sarawak called on the Dayak tribes for help by sending a boat with the traditional Red Feather of War up the Baram River. Tom Harrisson also arrived in Brunei. He summoned the Kelabits from the highlands around Bario in the 5th Division, the centre of his wartime resistance. Hundreds of Dayaks responded, and formed into companies led by British civilians all commanded by Harrisson. This force reached some 2,000 strong, and with excellent knowledge of the tracks through the interior (there were no roads), helped contain the rebels. and cut off their escape route to Indonesia.^[8]

Honours and legacy[link]

Harrisson was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 1959 New Year Honours, for his work as curator.^[9]

The title of his biography, The Most Offending Soul Alive, gives a flavour of the strong feelings he engendered, but he also had many admirers and is recognised as a pioneer in several areas.

Harrisson's series The Borneo Story was broadcast by BBC television in 1957. A documentary Tom Harrisson – The Barefoot Anthropologist, hosted by David Attenborough, was broadcast on BBC4 in the autumn of 2006.^[10]

Publications[link]

As well as numerous papers and monographs in scientific journals, especially the Sarawak Museum Journal, books he authored include:

• Harrisson, T.H. (1931). Birds of the Harrow District 1925-1930. Harrow School.
• Harrisson, T.H. (1933). Letter to Oxford. The Hate Press: Gloucestershire.
• Harrisson, Tom (1937). Savage Civilisation. Victor Gollancz: London.
• Madge, Charles; & Harrisson, Tom (1937). Mass-Observation. Frederick Muller: London.
• Harrisson, Tom (ed). (1938). Borneo Jungle. An account of the Oxford University expedition of 1932. Lindsay Drummond Ltd: London.
• Madge, Charles; & Harrisson, Tom (1939). Britain by Mass-Observation. Penguin: Harmondsworth.
• Harrisson, Tom (1943). Living Among Cannibals. George G. Harrap & Co: London.
• Harrisson, Tom (ed). (1943). The Pub and the People. Victor Gollancz: London.
• Harrisson, Tom (1959). World Within. A Borneo Story. Cresset Press: London.
• Harrisson, Tom (ed). (1959). The Peoples of Sarawak. Sarawak Museum: Kuching.
• Harrisson, Tom (1961). Britain Revisited. Victor Gollancz: London.
• Harrisson, Tom (1970). The Malays of South-West Sarawak before Malaysia. Macmillan: London.
• Harrisson, Tom (1976). Living through the Blitz, Collins, London; newly printed: Faber Finds 2010 ISBN 978-0-571-27103-0

Footnotes[link]

References[link]

• Green, Timothy (1970). The Adventurers. Four profiles of contemporary travellers.. Michael Joseph. London.
• Truscott, Jim (nd). Voices from Borneo. The Japanese War.accessed June 2007.
• Heimann, Judith M. (1999). The Most Offending Soul Alive: Tom Harrisson and His Remarkable Life. University of Hawai'i Press: Honolulu. ISBN 0-8248-2149-1. Also published (2002) in London by Aurum Press. ISBN 1-85410-841-7.

External links[link]

• The Mass Observation Archive
• Jock Marshall: One Armed Warrior, a biography of Harrisson's colleague Alan John (Jock) Marshall
• Harrisson: The Barefoot Anthropologist, BBC 4 TV biography, presented by David Attenborough (2007)
• Harrisson, Tom Harnett (1911–1976), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article by Judith M. Heimann, accessed 19 Feb 2007 (subscription required)

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2009)

Sir John (Jack) Rankine Goody (born 27 July 1919) is a British social anthropologist. He has been a prominent teacher at Cambridge University, he was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1976,^[1] and he is an associate of the US National Academy of Sciences. Among his main publications are Death, property and the ancestors (1962), Technology, Tradition, and the State in Africa (1971), The myth of the Bagre (1972) and The domestication of the savage mind (1977).^[1]

Biography[link]

Born on 27 July 1919, Goody grew up in Welwyn Garden City and St Albans, where he attended St Albans School . He went up to St John's College, Cambridge to study English Literature in 1938, where he came to know leftist intellectuals like Eric Hobsbawm.

Fighting in North Africa in World War II, he was captured by the Germans and spent three years in a prisoner-of-war camps.

Inspired by reading Frazer's Golden Bough and Gordon Childe, he transferred to Archaeology and Anthropology when he resumed university study in 1946. After fieldwork in Gonja in northern Ghana, Goody increasingly turned to comparative study of Europe, Africa and Asia.

Between 1954 and 1984, he taught social anthropology at Cambridge University, serving as the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology from 1973 until 1984.^[2] He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1976 and has also has been knighted by the Queen.^[1] He gave the Luce Lectures at Yale University—Fall 1987.

Goody has pioneered the comparative anthropology of literacy, attempting to gauge the causal preconditions and effects of writing as a technology. He also wrote substantially on the history of the family and the anthropology of inheritance. More recently, he has written on the anthropology of flowers and food.

Works[link]

Jack Goody explained social structure and social change primarily in terms of three major factors. The first was the development of intensive forms of agriculture that allowed for the accumulation of surplus – surplus explained many aspects of cultural practice from marriage to funerals as well as the great divide between African and Eurasian societies. Second, he explained social change in terms of urbanization and growth of bureaucratic institutions that modified or overrode traditional forms of social organization, such as family or tribe, identifying civilization as “the culture of cities”. And third, he attached great weight to the technologies of communication as instruments of psychological and social change. He associated the beginnings of writing with the task of managing surplus and, in an important paper with Ian Watt (Goody and Watt, 1963), he advanced the argument that the rise of science and philosophy in classical Greece depended importantly on their invention of an efficient writing system, the alphabet. Because these factors could be applied to either to any contemporary social system or to systematic changes over time, his work is equally relevant to many disciplines. David R. Olson, ed. Technology, Literacy and the evolution of society: implications of the work of Jack Goody. Michael Cole. Mahwah, New Jersey – London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associated, Publishers. http://www.psypress.com/shopping_cart/products/product_detail.asp?sku=&isbn=9780805854022. 

Books[link]

• 1956 The social organisation of the LoWiili (H.M.S.O.), 2nd ed. 1976 (London, published for the International African Institute by the Oxford U.P.)
• 1962 Death, Property and the Ancestors: A Study of the Mortuary Customs of the LoDagaa of West Africa (Stanford, Stanford University Press, ISBN 0-422-98080-3). reviews: [1] [2] [3]
• 1968 ed., Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press); translated into German and Spanish. reviews: [4] [5]

• 1971 Technology, Tradition, and the State in Africa (Oxford, Oxford University Press)

• 1972 The Myth of the Bagre (Oxford, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-815134-9). reviews: [6] [7] [8]

• 1973 ed., The Character of Kinship (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1973). reviews: [9] [10]

• 1976 Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain 1976 Cambridge University Press ISBN 0-521-29088-0

• 1977 The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977); translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Turkish.

• 1982 Cooking,Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press); translated into Spanish, French and Portuguese.

• 1983 The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press); translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese. review: [11]

• 1986 The Logic of Writing and the Organisation of Society (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press); translated into German, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese.
• The Interface Between the Written and the Oral 1987 Cambridge University Press ISBN 0-521-33794-1
• 1990 The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive: Systems of Marriage and the Family in the Pre-Industrial Societies of Eurasia (Studies in Literacy, the Family, Culture and the State) Cambridge University Press ISBN 0-521-36761-1
• 1993 The Culture of Flowers (Cambridge); translated into French and Italian.
• (1995) The Expansive Moment: The Rise of Social Anthropology in Britain and Africa, 1918-1970 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press) review: [12]
• 1996 The East in the West (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press); translated into French and Italian.
• 1997 Representations and Contradictions: Ambivalence towards Images, Theatre, Fictions, Relics and Sexuality (Oxford, Blackwell Publishers); translated into Spanish and French (Paris, La Découverte).
• 1998 Food and Love: A Cultural History of East and West (London, Verso). ISBN 1-85984-829-X
• 2000 The European Family: An Historico-anthropological Essay (Oxford, Blackwell Publishers).
• 2000 The Power of the Written Tradition (Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington and London)
• 2004 Islam in Europe Polity Press, Cambridge, 178pp. ISBN 0-7456-3193-2. review: [13]
• 2004 Capitalism and Modernity: the Great Debate (Cambridge, Polity Press)); translated into Turkish. *2004 Comparative Studies In Kinship ISBN 0-415-33010-6
• 2006 The Theft of History Cambridge University Press ISBN 0-521-87069-0

• 2010 Renaissances: The One or the Many? (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Selected articles[link]

• 1956 Jack Goody A Comparative Approach to Incest and Adultery, British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Dec., 1956), pp. 286–305 doi:10.2307/586694

• 1957 Fields of Social Control Among the LoDagaba The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 87, No. 1 (Jan. - Jun., 1957), pp. 75–104 doi:10.2307/2843972

• GOODY, J. 1959. The Mother's Brother and the Sister's Son in West Africa. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 89:61-88 response

• 1961 Jack Goody Religion and Ritual: The Definitional Problem The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Jun., 1961), pp. 142–164 doi:10.2307/586928

• 1963 Jack Goody, Ian Watt The Consequences of Literacy Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Apr., 1963), pp. 304–345

• 1969 Adoption in Cross-Cultural Perspective Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Jan., 1969), pp. 55–78

• 1972 Taboo Words Man, New Series, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Mar., 1972), p. 137

• 1973 Goody, J. [Polygyny, economy and the role of women]. In J. Goody (Ed.), The character of kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973

• 1973 Inheritance, Property, and Marriage in Africa and Eurasia Sociology, Vol. 3, No. 1, 55-76 (1969) DOI: 10.1177/003803856900300104
• Goody, Jack (1973) Bridewealth and Dowry in Africa and Eurasia in Bridewealth and Dowry, ed. J. Goody and S. Tambiah. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

• Jack Goody, Joan Buckley Cross-Sex Patterns of Kin Behavior: A Comment Cross-Cultural Research, Vol. 9, No. 3, 185-202 (1974) DOI: 10.1177/106939717400900301

• 1977 Ethnology and/or Cultural Anthropology in Italy: Traditions and Developments [and Comments and Reply] Vinigi Grottanelli, Giorgio Ausenda, Bernardo Bernardi, Ugo Bianchi, Y. Michal Bodemann, Jack Goody, Allison Jablonko, David I. Kertzer, Vittorio Lanternari, Antonio Marazzi, Roy A. Miller, Jr., Laura Laurencich Minelli, David M. Moss, Leonard W. Moss, H. R. H. Prince Peter of Greece and Denmark, Diana Pinto, Pietro Scotti, Tullio Tentori. Current Anthropology, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Dec., 1977), pp. 593–614

• 1989 Futures of the Family in Rural Africa Population and Development Review, Vol. 15, Supplement: Rural Development and Population: Institutions and Policy (1989), pp. 119–144 doi:10.2307/2807924

• 1991 Towards a Room with a View: A Personal Account of Contributions to Local Knowledge, Theory, and Research in Fieldwork and Comparative Studies Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 20, 1991, pp. 1–23

• 1992 Culture and its boundaries: a European view Social Anthropology 1 (1a),9–32. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8676.1992.tb00238.x

• 1994 Jack Goody, Cesare Poppi Flowers and Bones: Approaches to the Dead in Anglo-American and Italian Cemeteries Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Jan., 1994), pp. 146–175

• 1996 Comparing Family Systems in Europe and Asia: Are There Different Sets of Rules? Population and Development Review: 22 (1).

• 1996 Cognitive contradictions and universals: creation and evolution in oral cultures Social Anthropology Volume 4 Issue 1 Page 1-16, February 1996. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8676.1996.tb00310.x

• 2002 The Anthropology of the Senses and Sensations La Ricerca Folklorica, No. 45, Antropologia delle sensazioni (Apr., 2002), pp. 17–28 doi:10.2307/1480153

• 2004 The folktale and cultural history Cahiers de littérature orale n. 56 , pp. 53–66

• 2006 From misery to luxury Social Science Information, Vol. 45, No. 3, 341-348 DOI: 10.1177/0539018406066526

• 2006 Gordon Childe, the Urban Revolution, and the Haute Cuisine: An Anthropo-archaeological View of Modern History Comparative Studies in Society and History (2006), 48: 503-519 (Issue 03 - May 2006) Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S0010417506000211

Notes[link]

External links[link]

• Other articles: [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35]

• Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke, interview with Jack Goody. Chapter 1 of The New History: Confessions and Conversations (Polity Press, 2002). ISBN 0-7456-3020-0
• Maurice Bloch, Dan Sperber (to Jack Goody)Kinship and evolved psychological dispositions: The Mother's Brother controversy reconsidered Current Anthropology. 2002. 43 (4) 723-748
• Interview of Jack Goody by Eric Hobsbawm 18 May 1991 (film)
• Jack Goody at "Pioneers of Qualitative Research" from the Economic and Social Data Service

Kathleen Joan Toelle Reichs
Born	1950 (age 61–62) Chicago, Illinois, U.S. [1]
Occupation	Forensic Anthropologist Novelist Professor [1]
Nationality	American
Genres	Crime book years 1997-present
Notable work(s)	Break No Bones (2006)[1]
www.kathyreichs.com

Kathleen Joan Toelle "Kathy" Reichs ( /ˈraɪks/;^[2] born 1950) is an American crime writer, forensic anthropologist and academic .^[1] She is a professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, but is currently on indefinite leave.^[3] She divides her work time between the Laboratoire des Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale for the province of Quebec and her professorship at UNC Charlotte. She is one of the eighty-eight forensic anthropologists certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology^[4] and is on the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. Her schedule also involves a number of speaking engagements around the world. Reichs has been a producer for the TV series Bones.^[1] She has two daughters, Kerry and Courtney; and one son, Brendan. ^[5]

Academic career[link]

Reichs earned her Bachelors of Arts degree with a major in anthropology from American University in 1971. In 1972, she completed her Master of Arts in physical anthropology from Northwestern University, and in 1975 she completed her Ph.D. in physical anthropology from Northwestern University. Since then, Reichs has taught at Northern Illinois University, University of Pittsburgh, Concordia University, McGill University and is currently Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. In the past, Kathy Reichs has consulted for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in North Carolina.^[6]

Reichs has appeared in Tanzania to testify at the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.^[7] She has assisted Dr. Clyde Snow and the Foundation for Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology in an exhumation in the area of Lake Atitlan in the highlands of southwest Guatemala. She was a member of the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team assigned to assist at the World Trade Center disaster.

Academic papers[link]

• Quantified comparison of frontal sinus patterns by means of computed tomography. Forensic Science International 1993 Oct;61(2-3):141-68.
• Effect of age and osteoarthritis on bone mineral in rhesus monkey vertebrae. Journal of Bone and Mineral Research 1993 Aug;8(8):909-17.
• Forensic anthropology in the 1990s. The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology 1992 Jun;13(2):146-53.
• Treponematosis: a possible case from the late prehistoric of North Carolina. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 1989 Jul;79(3):289-303.
• Cranial suture eccentricities: a case in which precocious closure complicated determination of sex and commingling. Journal of Forensic Science 1989 Jan;34(1):263-73.
• Ontogenetic plasticity in nonhuman primates: I. Secular trends in the Cayo Santiago macaques. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 1987 Jul;73(3):279-87.

Academic books[link]

• Forensic Osteology: Advances in the Identification of Human Remains (1986)
• Hominid Origins: Inquiries Past and Present (Editor) (1983)

Novels[link]

In addition to technical books, Reichs has written sixteen novels to date, which have been translated into 30 languages.^[8] Her first novel, Déjà Dead, won the 1997 Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel.^[9]

The fictional heroine in her novels, Temperance "Tempe" Brennan, is also a forensic anthropologist. Her lifestyle closely mimics that of her creator,^[10][11] with Reichs stating that Brennan and she "have the same CV"^[10] and that "Some of Tempe's personality traits are also mine",^[11] but there are differences in their personal lives such as the character's alcoholism.^[10] A good portion of the novels are based on real life science, and Reichs has stated that she is "fastidiously conscientious about getting the science right".^[12] She has used experience from her career in her novels, and said about Déjà Dead that "Everything I describe in the book, I actually did".^[11] In the novel Grave Secrets she uses her experience from her visit to Guatemala.^[12] She´s also written two young adult novels named Virals (2010) and Seizure (2011) centered around Tempes´ grandniece Tory Brennan and a pack of her friends Ben, Hi(ram), Shelton and wolfdog Coop(er).