What is Anthropology, anyway?

Anthropology!  Study of man, literally, from the Greek.  It’s the closest thing to a halfway point between the social sciences and the physical sciences, and, in my opinion, the humanities.  There are three main branches: Physical or Biological, which basically deals with primate evolution, Archaeology, which examines past civilizations, and Sociocultural, which is concerned with the varieties of present culture.  Underneath these are the subsets of linguistic anthropology (how speech and culture/people interact), medical anthropology (how medicine and culture/people interact), ethnomusicology (how music and culture interact), and forensic anthropology (investigating crimes through human remains).

I am interested in sociocultural anthropology, and honestly know little about the other sub-fields.  Some schools’ programs require a broad base of knowledge and others encourage specialization, so I’m unsure whether primate evolution will figure largely in my future education.  Anyway, cultural anthropologists used to focus primarily on traveling to “uncivilized” places to document and “uncover” foreign cultures, like the Trobriand Islanders (the famous project of a famous anthropologist named Malinowski).  For awhile now, it has been quite clear that there are no more “undiscovered” islands, and no more “untouched” peoples.  Anthropology has been reinventing itself as an analyzer of present culture, even of the anthropologist’s own culture, and as a means of comparing cultures and assessing the way they are changing.

So how is it different from a “hard” social science like sociology, or even political science or economics, which all study present society?  This is a question I struggled with for awhile.  And while I recognize that my answer makes large generalizations, it is helpful to me.  The difference hinges on ethnography, or the documenting of a culture, literally “writing down a nation” (more Greek).  Ethnography is, and always has been, the form most central to cultural anthropology; it is a full and detailed scientific portrait of a person, a moment, a people, a place.  Whereas social sciences rely more on statistics and quantitative analysis, the ethnography allows the anthropologist to study society as a story, much like a literary critic analyzes a novel.  It is a more qualitative analysis.  (This is why I think that at least the sociocultural branch of anthropology really borders on the arts and humanities.)

The last thing I’d like to point to in describing my personal favorite perspectives on anthropology is the idea of “public anthropology.”  There are also movements for “public sociology” and a “public academy” in general, in which the observations and ideas of professors are not in service of an obscure and esoteric culture of academia, nor bought by the state to carry out research, but are directly communicated to people outside the academy, to engage and motivate and inspire them, to help them be self-aware and elicit beneficial social change.   This is exactly what I would love to do, as a writer, a researcher, a teacher.