Anthropology, Humanistic

As Eric Wolf notes in “Anthropology,” his 1964 essay, anthropology is “the most scientific of the humanities, the most humanist of the sciences.” Anthropologists have commonly taken into consideration the human condition—that which makes us distinctly human. However, maintaining balance between anthropology as a science that is concerned with causation, structure, function, and the predictability of human and cultural variation and anthropology as a humanity that is concerned with the function of human minds and how humans create their social and cultural worlds has not been easy. Historically, this has created a tension within anthropology, as anthropologists tend to conduct research toward one of these poles. At the same time, this underlying dichotomy propels the discipline and makes it distinct from both the natural sciences and the humanities.

From the earlier research of Ruth Benedict and Robert Redfield to the more recent research of Ruth Behar and Edith Turner, cultural anthropologists have long advocated humanistic concerns and approaches to the understanding of human thought and creativity from a distinctly insider's perspective. As is noted in the Society for Humanistic Anthropology's charter, humanistic anthropology “celebrates that human reality is something upon which we creative primates have real feedback effects: We can change our social and natural environment.” It takes the position, which is illustrated in the ethnographic and theoretical writing of the above anthropologists, [Page 170]too, that anthropological inquiry includes “promoting multicultural understanding and revealing the social blockages that are deleterious to our social and physical environment.” In essence, humanistic anthropological approaches reject blind positivistic scientific analyses, dogma in all manifestations, and extreme cultural relativism. Despite this long-standing position, humanistic anthropology did not become a concerted, self-consciously embraced approach until the early 1970s, which was due in large part to the efforts of Edith Turner.

Turner's humanistic orientation is rooted in symbolic, or interpretive, cultural analysis. The roots of this tradition can be seen in E. E. Evans-Pritchard's ethnographic writings on the Azande and the Nuer. Favoring interpretive analytical strategies, he rejected anthropology as a natural science and placed it within the humanities. His basic approach to the study of society, which is based on learning thought processes through the beliefs and opinions of members of the social group being studied, fits nicely with contemporary humanistic anthropological approaches to studying human cultural difference, because it emphasizes indigenous concepts and models of explanation.

As interpretive anthropology emerged from the margins of anthropological theory and practice in the early 1960s, humanistic approaches became even more central in cultural analyses. Although at that time, Mary Douglas, Victor Turner, and Clifford Geertz did not call themselves humanistic anthropologists, their theoretical and methodological practices have done much to shape humanistic anthropology today. In general, they contend that human culture is based on a system of symbols and meanings, which humans create and use to direct, organize, and give coherence to their lives. The emphasis is on meaning rather than on the materiality of human life or on innate structures of the mind. Each went in a distinctive direction with regard to symbolic analysis, while being anchored within a humanistic framework. Douglas combines Durkheimian functionalism with the ways that cultural symbols reflect social order, as best illustrated in her book Purity and Danger (1966). Through an exploration of beliefs about purity and pollution, she shows links between the human body and society. Turner, in contrast, focuses on ritual performance and practice but was less interested in symbols themselves, concentrating on what they mean to people as they use them and are inspired to action by them. By comparison, Geertz, drawing heavily from the sociologist Talcott Parsons and philosophers, such as Alfred Schutz, Gilbert Ryle, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, focuses on the interpretation of culture, which for him is a system of symbols and meanings that are publicly displayed in actions and objects created and made meaningful through human social interaction. In Interpretation of Cultures, Geertz seeks to understand culture in its own terms through a variety of analytical practices, not exclusively anthropological. Like Redfield before him, whose theories of Great and Little Traditions helped to democratize humanities scholarship, which focused on “high culture” rather than “low, mundane culture,” Geertz's thesis that ethnographies should be understood as texts to be read alongside the local, indigenous-produced texts helped break down the divisions between outside researcher and local insider-subject. One tour-de-force example of this trend in interpretive analysis that is well-grounded in humanities scholarship is Turner and Bruner's 1986 volume, The Anthropology of Experience, which includes chapters by the leading interpretive and humanistic anthropologists of the time: Renato Rosaldo, Barbara Myerhoff, James Fernandez, Barbara Babcock, and Geertz. The book breaks even more from the tradition of structuralism rooted in Émile Durkheim and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown to embrace Wilhelm Dilthey's “concept of an experience,Erlebnis, or what has been ‘lived through’ …[where the contributors] focus…more on experience, pragmatics, practice, and performance.”

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