Anthropology, Characteristics of

Anthropology is the study of people, society, and culture through all time and everywhere around the world. Three of its main characteristics are an ongoing debate between evolutionism and cultural relativism, the use of cross-culture comparison, and ethnographic research based on “participant observation.”

Anthropology shares certain basic characteristics with her sister disciplines of biology, history, sociology, political science, and economics. These characteristics arise from a common Enlightenment heritage. One is an emphasis on collecting information by means of the human senses, rather than from revelation or authority. A second is the interplay between general understandings, usually labeled theory, and specific information, sometimes called data, used as evidence to support or to challenge a general understanding. And a third is the expectation that general understandings will change and improve as information becomes more complete.

These characteristics have not gone totally unchallenged in recent times. Influential thinkers sometimes come to be regarded as beyond criticism, their pronouncements deemed authoritative and not open to debate. In the anthropology of the 1970s, Karl Marx was deemed to be such an authority, and critics seemed to be worthy of excommunication. This phase passed with the fall of the Soviet Union. More recently, from the 1990s, the Enlightenment foundation has been attacked on philosophical grounds by postmodernism, which rejects knowledge gained through the senses and any formulations of general knowledge, and replaces them with analytic deconstruction and subjective expressionism and political commitment. This self-identified “experimental” phase has not as yet established a substantive alternative to Enlightenment anthropology, and so its offspring remains unknown.

With this background in mind, let us turn to the characteristics that distinguish anthropology from her sister disciplines. I will present this discussion in terms of three characteristics: first, the theoretical debate between evolutionism and cultural relativism; second, the analytical device of cross-cultural comparative analysis; and third, the methodological strategy of “participant observation.”