Even though nearly all humans need the same things to survive, like food, water, and companionship, the ways people meet these needs can be very different. For example, everyone needs to eat, but people eat different foods and get food in different ways.
So anthropologists look at how different groups of people get food, prepare it, and share it. Anthropologists also try to understand how people interact in social relationships for example with families and friends. They look at the different ways people dress and communicate in different societies. Anthropologists sometimes use these comparisons to understand their own society. Many anthropologists work in their own societies looking at economics, health, education, law, and policy to name just a few topics.
When trying to understand these complex issues, they keep in mind what they know about biology, culture, types of communication, and how humans lived in the past. American anthropology is generally divided into four subfields. Each of the subfields teaches distinctive skills. However, the subfields also have a number of similarities. For example, each subfield applies theories, employs systematic research methodologies, formulates and tests hypotheses, and develops extensive sets of data.
Archaeologists study human culture by analyzing the objects people have made. They carefully remove from the ground such things as pottery and tools, and they map the locations of houses, trash pits, and burials in order to learn about the daily lives of a people.
Archaeologists collect the remains of plants, animals, and soils from the places where people have lived in order to understand how people used and changed their natural environments. The time range for archaeological research begins with the earliest human ancestors millions of years ago and extends all the way up to the present day. Like other areas of anthropology, archaeologists are concerned with explaining differences and similarities in human societies across space and time.
Biological anthropologists seek to understand how humans adapt to different environments, what causes disease and early death, and how humans evolved from other animals. To do this, they study humans living and dead , other primates such as monkeys and apes, and human ancestors fossils. They are also interested in how biology and culture work together to shape our lives. They are interested in explaining the similarities and differences that are found among humans across the world.
Through this work, biological anthropologists have shown that, while humans do vary in their biology and behavior, they are more similar to one another than different. Sociocultural anthropologists explore how people in different places live and understand the world around them. This is exactly what happened to Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski who, in the early 20th century, travelled from London to Papua New Guinea to study native patterns of exchange.
When the First World War broke out, he was unable to return to England but the Australian government gave him permission to study in the Trobriand Islanders, off the east coast of New Guinea.
For many, Malinowski is the grandaddy of modern anthropology. He removed the white lab coat of experimental science by clearly acknowledging his role in the production of scientific knowledge.
He was there, he gathered and interpreted the data and so he included his voice in his ethnographic writing. As American anthropologist Horace Miner demonstrates in his fantasy ethnography of the Nacirema people hint: say it backwards , magic and medicine have more in common than you might think. As such, culture is understood very simply as that which we do, think, say and feel.
I have lived in Spain for 15 months to learn about the lives of mounted bullfighters. Back in Australia, I went to every fixture of the South Australian National Football League one season to learn the role of alcohol in fan culture. I have also spent as little as two weeks catching rides in the cabs of train drivers to learn about fatigue at the controls, and I have interviewed animal owners about the risks they take to save their pets from bushfires.
I can explain why some football fans drink to dangerous excess, why metropolitan train drivers are loathe to report their fatigue and why some pet owners will run into burning homes to save their cat while their child waits in the car. Texas State offers coursework in archaeology concentrated in the geographic areas of Mesoamerica, North America, South America, and the Old World during the Paleolithic period. Biological anthropology is the study of humans within the framework of evolution, with an emphasis on the interaction between biology and culture.
Biological anthropology is subdivided into areas of specialty including human biological variation and adaptation, primatology, medical primatology, growth and development, functional morphology, osteology, forensic anthropology, and paleoanthropology. Texas State offers coursework in a number of these biological anthropology specializations.
Cultural anthropology deals primarily with all aspects of cultural variation in the present or recent past. Through a variety of theoretical approaches and research methods, anthropologists today study the cultures of people all over the world, including social, political, economic, and ideological facets of cultures.
Linguistic anthropology is an area of study within cultural anthropology that examines language structure, the use of language in given societies and social contexts, and the historical relationships of languages to one another. Texas State offers coursework on a variety of cultural and linguistic topics, including medical anthropology, sociolinguistics, gender studies, speech sounds, and economic anthropology.
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