Читать книгу Anthropology For Dummies - Cameron M. Smith - Страница 35

IN THIS CHAPTER

Studying humanity as a biological species

Unearthing humanity’s past

Distinguishing humans from animals through language

Investigating living societies

Anthropology, the study of humanity by humans, isn’t easy. Like any life form, the human species has many fascinating facets — from its biology to its language and deep history — and Western civilization has only been studying these facets in a truly systematic way for about 150 years. And much has changed even in those 150 years, both worldwide and within anthropology, such that anthropologists have to study the history of their own discipline to understand how much of what’s already been done is still important and what’s essentially out of date.

Still, anthropologists press on, believing that with care, diligence, sensitivity, a few research dollars, and plenty of graduate students willing to work for next to nothing, humanity can, indeed, learn important lessons about itself.

In this chapter, I describe the main ways that anthropologists examine humanity. Each of the subfields — physical anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and cultural anthropology — are normally the career of a single anthropologist, but a full understanding of our species demands that you combine information from all these fields (see Figure 3-1). Therefore, anthropologists often proudly tell you that they’re “four-field anthropologists,” focusing on one facet of humanity but tying their findings in with all others. In the same way, I’m going to break anthropology out into its four subfields — but remember, discoveries in these individual fields have effects on the others.

Illustration courtesy of Cameron M. Smith, PhD

FIGURE 3-1: Anthropology as a four-field discipline.