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FIRST EDITION
THE CREATURE
WITH IDEAS AND
POWER
AN INVESTIGATION OF
ANTHROPOLOGY AND
HUMAN CULTURE
By John Sheehan
State University of New York at Cortland
Bassim Hamadeh, CEO and Publisher
Michael Simpson, Vice President of Acquisitions
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Copyright © 2017 by Cognella, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced,
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identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Cover image copyright © Richard Throssel / Museum of Photographic Arts / Copyright in the Public Domain..
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-1-5165-0412-1 (pbk) / 978-1-5165-0413-8 (br)
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
V
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE EVOLUTION OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
68
CHAPTER ONE
THE NUTS AND BOLTS
2
CHAPTER EIGHT
BONDING HUMANS TOGETHER: FAMILY,
KINSHIP, AND MARRIAGE
CHAPTER TWO
THE BIOLOGICAL CREATURE
78
10
CHAPTER NINE
NATURE AND NURTURE: RACE, ETHNICITY, AND
CHAPTER THREE
WESTERN “TRUTH”
GENDER
88
22
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER FOUR
SELF, US, THEM, AND LAND
SOCIAL STRUCTURE, ART, AND RELIGION
108
32
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER FIVE
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
AN ETHNOLOGICAL CASE STUDY AND APPLIED
44
122
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER SIX
“TELLING” A STORY
ANTHROPOLOGY
54
ECONOMIES AND GOVERNMENT
134
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TH E C R E AT U R E W I T H I D E A S AN D PO W ER: A N I NV E S T I GAT I ON OF A NT HROP OL OGY A ND HUMA N CULT URE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE MODERN WORLD
144
BIBLIOGRAPHY
163
INTRODUCTION
W
hat is anthropology? Furthermore, why study it? These are familiar questions to many undergraduate students. Having been one myself, I am sympathetic to your plight. Few choose
to take a cultural anthropology class for reasons other than “my advisor suggested it.” My
question to you is why did your advisor suggest it? My job in this book is to help you realize why
that suggestion was a good one for your personal development as a student, as a worker, as a citizen,
and as a functional and informed participator in the strongest democracy this planet has ever known.
You have been endowed with power, power to access resources to build a successful life and power to
affect the life of billions by the choices you make in a democratic society. I wonder how many at the
undergraduate level have thought very deeply about that. I remember the football games, the parties,
the angst, and the time devoted to studies, trying to balance all of the competing activities for my time,
and trying to do it well. But now, with more years of experience under my belt, I think very deeply
about how important each individual’s role is in this “global village,” hence, my self-envisioned role as
a teacher and a mentor.
I see it as my task to help introduce you to your individual role, but really only in a small way, because
each of you must figure that out for yourselves. That is the responsibility of each individual in a society
that promotes the ideal of freedom. You have civil rights. That doesn’t mean that the government owes
you something just for being born. That is a sentiment smacking of unearned entitlement. What civil
rights offer you, in the truest sense, is that no one can put arbitrary obstacles in your path, based on
race, sex, gender, religion, etc., that can hamper you from becoming a fully functional, responsible, and
contributing member of your family, community, nation, and planet. That is your privilege and that is the
path to your happiness. We will refer to these ideas often in this course. Why study anthropology? It is
a gilded doorway to help you know yourself. To know yourself, you need to know where you are, where
you came from, and where you are going. The better you know yourself, the better your plans for the
future can become very realistic and attainable. Your decisions will become wiser and your community
will become stronger. Democracy is only an ideal that will survive as a result of well-educated and
wise individuals. You, as an individual, have a great opportunity. Your education at this institution is a
privilege that few on this planet can aspire to.
This course in cultural anthropology is part of a smorgasbord of disciplines that you will sample in
four years to enable you to know the very basics of many things that will help you choose a career for
which you are capable of performing well and happily. It is not a product that you have already paid
for like a pair of shoes in a shopping mall. It is not a negotiating table to haggle for better grades. It is
a doorway to your own self. It is up to you to make the most of this experience to expand who you are.
The liberal arts by definition are those disciplines that enable those individuals within a community to
explore, develop, and enjoy freedom of the mind and body. That is your privilege and your opportunity.
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TH E C R E AT U R E W I T H I D E A S AN D PO W ER: A N I NV E S T I GAT I ON OF A NT HROP OL OGY A ND HUMA N CULT URE
This book is designed to help you make the most of them, and to enjoy the football games and the
parties too!
So much for the pep talk. This book contains 13 chapters. The following list of the chapters lays
out the flow of information presented in this course.
Chapter 1: The Nuts and Bolts deals with the origins of the discipline of anthropology and
defines its four main sub-fields.
Chapter 2: The Biological Creature talks about the essence of physical anthropology and
biological anthropology: evolution, genetics, primatology, and the human mind.
Chapter 3: Western “Truth” deals with the contingent experiences of “reality” that all humans
have to make sense of in their lives, both those living today, as well as our ancestors from the past.
The focus in this chapter is the development of that notion of reality associated with Western
culture.
Chapter 4: Self, Us, Them, and Land deals primarily with how early tribal peoples derived
culture from their environmental experiences and how they defined themselves in relation to those
environments.
Chapter 5: Cultural Anthropology discusses the basic elements that make human societies,
both past and present, cohesive and how anthropologists study them.
Chapter 6: “Telling” a Story examines how artifacts removed from the ground and scientifically dated can augment the information humans share among themselves via oral and written
communications.
Chapter 7: The Evolution of Cultural Anthropology traces how anthropology as a discipline
came into being and how that discipline has evolved over time according to the cultural values of
the changing times.
Chapter 8: Bonding Humans Together: Family, Kinship, and Marriage deals with those
culturally derived bonds that “glue” humans together through time, space, and story.
Chapter 9: Nature and Nurture: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender discusses how our cultural
bonds and our genetic inheritances are constructed to give humans a sense of community and
legacy.
Chapter 10: Social Structure, Art, and Religion deals with how the structuring of a society
is linked culturally to the religion that that society conceives, and the art that that society projects
its belief through.
Chapter 11: An Ethnological Case Study and Applied Anthropology serves as an example of
how all of the sub-disciplines of cultural anthropology come together to tell the story of a people,
in this case, the Haudenosaunee.
Chapter 12: Economies and Government deals with how humans extract, use, and exchange
natural and social resources, and what rules apply to those resource utilizations, both locally and
non-locally through time.
Chapter 13: The Modern World grounds the student in the contemporary world. Ideas of
modernity, international integration, and environmental and ecological issues will be discussed.
CHAPTER ONE
THE NUTS AND BOLTS
Let’s return to the question, what is anthropology? Anthropology is
the study of humans, the biological and mental creature that humans
are, as well as all of the collective activities of that creature past and
present. The word anthropology is derived from two Greek roots:
anthropos—“man” or “human”—and logos—“the study of ” or “derived
from reason.” So everything that humans are, think, and do fall under
the umbrella discipline of anthropology. It is a pretty big field. In fact,
it is the largest field of study in the liberal arts, since all other fields
of human endeavor fall within its domain. Hence, every other field
of study is in some way anthropological. Because of this, one of the
key terms in the discipline of anthropology is holism. Holism is a
perspective in anthropology that attempts to study a culture by looking
at all parts of the system and seeing how those parts are interrelated.
Incidentally, any study that a student wishes to pursue, and any paper
that a student wishes to write, can ultimately be justified as an anthropological study.
The discipline of anthropology attempts to put human beings in a
perspective that makes sense to the individual as well as to the society.
2
It attempts to answer the contingent questions that each
of us asks in the course of our lifetime to make sense of
things, to create for ourselves that which is “real.” Who
am I? Why am I alive? What am I supposed to do? Am
I important? How am I like some people? Why am I
different from others? And perhaps the most important
FIG. 1.1. The Scream by Edvard Munch is the iconic
image of angst.
question, where do I go when I die? To me, an even more
important question is what should I do with the finite time
I have remaining in this physical container I call my body?
These are called contingent questions. Contingent, derived from the Latin word contingere, is derived
from the prefix con—“with”—and tingere—“to touch” and means “to have contact with” or “befall.”
Contingency has to do with those tangential factors in our lives that impinge upon us daily and may
or may not be out of our control. These include all events that are possible but uncertain. Contingent
feelings can lead us to inspiration and drive so that we can “rise to the occasion.” Or, they can fill us
with angst and dread and lead us to self-doubt, indecision, and paralysis. Angst is a feeling of anxiety
and is quite uncomfortable.
In dealing with feelings, humans construct symbolic images and artifacts to help channel those
feelings away from destructive patterns and into organized, and often, but not always, constructive
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TH E CR EAT U R E W I T H I D E A S AN D PO W ER: A N I NV E S T I GAT I ON OF A NT HROP OL OGY A ND HUMA N CULT URE
communally enacted rituals, customs, histories,
polities, and religions. A polity is simply a political
organization and is derived from the Greek word
polis—“city-state.” The term religion is both a very
simple and a very complex word due to its common use in meaning a spiritually organized group.
In its basic sense, religion is a Latin word religare,
derived from the prefix res, which means the “idea,
the concept, or the essence” of something, coupled
FIG. 1.2A AND 1.2B. Gangs such as the Crips and the Bloods
with the root ligare—to bind. Hence, a religion is
identify themselves via their “colors,” which on the face of it
a set of ideas and ideals to which one binds one’s
seems to be a benign way of identifying their respective groups
mind via an act of “ligio,” much like a ligament
via graphic symbols. But, woe betide the gang member wearing
the wrong “color” in the wrong territory. In this sense, gang colors
binds muscle tissue or a ligature binds up wounds
are “religious” symbols; they are strongly embedded with cultural
with stitches. The idea of ligatory binding can
meanings.
be expanded to the mental concept of “legis”lation—the ideas that bind people together
in a polity, an act of “legio.” The term republic
is derived from the prefix res, which means the
“idea, the concept, or the essence” of something
coupled with the root publicus—the people.
A republic is quite literally “the thing of the
people.” Religious ideas can also bind people to
a spiritual set of commandments and rituals such
as in Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and
Witchcraft as much as they can bind Democrats
and Republicans in a constitutional democracy.
Gangs such as the Crips and the Bloods or fraternities and sororities follow “religious” rules and
FIG. 1.3. Roman Legion.
rituals by the types of “colors” they wear or the
types of initiations they perform.
And ultimately, in ancient Rome itself, the religious ideals of the Roman people were upheld by
the “binding” enforced by the legion itself—that famous instrument of military binding.
Even modernity essentially practices science as a “religion,” by conforming to the rules and
rituals of the scientific method. By saying this, I am not declaring that fundamentalist monotheism
and evolution are equally true and valid religions. What I am saying is that both sets of ideas,
mutually antagonistic to many in contemporary culture, are, by definition, religions. I leave the
reader to discern how true any religion is. Scientists ascertain truth by a self-corrective process
called the scientific method.
T HE NUT S A ND BOLT S
5
The scientific method is a
means by which to investigate the
natural and social world involving
critical thinking, logical reasoning, and skeptical thought. This
approach to garnering knowledge
is in contrast to personal opinion
as well as religious or spiritual
revelation and religious or spiritual faith. An opinion is a belief
or judgment that rests on grounds
insufficient to produce complete
certainty. An opinion is not, by
definition, scientific, though it
FIG. 1.4B. Isaac Newton.
FIG. 1.4A. Albert Einstein.
may be. Testability of phenomena and verifiability of conclusions
according to prescribed norms by the scientific community are mandatory for ideas to become
accepted and scientific. Others must be able to come to your conclusions for science to contribute
to the body of knowledge accepted as “truth.” The beauty of scientific truth is that it is malleable;
it is susceptible to change and refinement according to more thoughtful and sophisticated experiments. Hence, the body of human knowledge based on reason is self-corrective as it increases. The
scientific method is fundamental to the human notion of “progress,” an idea that will be developed
more fully in Chapter 4.
Unlike scriptural and spiritual religion, skepticism lies at the heart of scientific inquiry.
Skepticism is the doctrine that true knowledge is uncertain. Incidentally, scriptural religions do
change over time. Although the Dead Sea Scrolls may be codified on paper, which means that the
words cannot change over time, social circumstances do change over time, and scriptural “truth”
changes while the words do not. For example, both the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek
New Testament forbid women to speak in a synagogue or a church, yet many reformed Jewish and
Christian denominations do ordain women to speak and preach in “holy” places. What has changed
with time in these instances is the culture, hence the interpretation of language, not the language
itself. Place, along with time, will be discussed in Chapter 4. Ironically, I do not claim that all
scientists accept the discoveries of others without prejudice and dispassion, especially radically new
theories. Scientists are human after all and the products of the cultures in which their minds were
trained. Charles Darwin was hounded and lampooned in his day by his “scientific” contemporaries,
that is, until his ideas grew to become the norm. Albert Einstein too was vilified for assailing the
sacrosanct laws of Isaac Newton with his new-fangled ideas about relativity, until repeated and
increasingly sophisticated tests continually confirmed Einstein’s formulas. Ironically, Einstein failed
to carry through to the logical conclusions the possibilities that his theories opened up because they
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TH E CR EAT U R E W I T H I D E A S AN D PO W ER: A N I NV E S T I GAT I ON OF A NT HROP OL OGY A ND HUMA N CULT URE
would do away with the notion of God that he had learned as a child. Others were left to take up
the reins of unsentimental science and pioneer onward where he feared to tread.
In the scientific method, there are two dispassionate and logical philosophical means of testing
proposed ideas—the inductive method and the deductive method. For the inductive method of
investigation, a scientist first makes observations, then collects data, and then proceeds to formulate a hypothesis. For the deductive method of investigation, a scientist first develops a theory
and then develops a specific hypothesis before finally testing it. The data collected in scientific
experiments are called variables. Variables are measured as carefully as possible with the highest
degree of sophistication possible for accuracy. Statistical analyses discern patterns among variables. Researchers use the observations about different variables to develop their hypotheses. A
hypothesis is an idea that correlates proposed patterns and relationships among observed data.
Testing these relationships and patterns is the fundamental operation of the scientific method.
If the conclusions of a hypothesis are found to be repeatable and valid, then that hypothesis can
be integrated with other repeatable and valid hypotheses into a theory. A theory is an accepted
pronouncement that explains natural and social phenomena. In this way, the corpus of human
knowledge is progressed.
Anthropology is one of the social sciences, along with history and sociology. The history of the
discipline of anthropology begins with the Medieval Period in Europe. Truth at that time was
garnered both spiritually and physically, that is, by the Bible and by scientists. Medieval scientists
often used the deductive method in experimenting with natural phenomena, that is, they reasoned
from God as the “Prime Mover” in all things, and all variables that
conflicted with their scriptural notion of deity were deemed corrupt
and discarded. This type of “spiritual” science was termed Scholasticism.
Scholasticism attempted to wed the rational discernment of the natural human mind, which included the great “pagan” Classical Greek and
Roman philosophers, with the revelation of codified scripture. The
Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas was the most noted Scholastic
thinker of the age.
This method of inquiry came under fire during the Renaissance
and the Protestant Reformation when literacy became the hallmark
of all those thinking intellectuals who were “protesting” against the
ideas of the Catholic Church. Religious reform led to political reform
and social reform. By the seventeenth century, observant scientists,
such as Isaac Newton, had begun to codify the laws of physics after
repeated hypotheses and theories continuously led to the same observable phenomena. With the irretrievable split between the Catholic
and Protestant churches during the Wars of Religion, science and the
scientific method displaced religious revelation from scriptures as the
source of truth in the natural world. This had profound consequences.
FIG. 1.5. Thomas Aquinas.
T HE NUT S A ND BOLT S
7
Since public truth was no longer to be found in the Bible, humans and
their scholarly activists, the Humanists, were determined to reconstruct
European societies on the principles of scientific observation. Spiritual belief
became a private affair. Church and state were to become separated. This new
philosophical view of the cosmos and its organization was called positivism.
Untrammeled by the dictates of organized religion, scientists grew excited and
optimistic about the new scientific pursuit of truth, hence the term positivism.
The eighteenth century French philosopher August Comte has been called
“the apostle of positivism.”
What Comte optimistically believed was that humans, by themselves and
FIG. 1.6. Auguste Comte.
using science as their guide, could develop egalitarian, prosperous, and happy
utopian societies throughout Europe and the world.
To develop these utopias, European leaders would wed the technological
advancements coming from the laboratories of mathematicians, biologists, chemists, and physicists
to the scientists of the new societies. These scholars of society were called sociologists. Sociology
became the discipline that studied the origin, development, organization, and functioning of the
new human societies. Historians would help ground these new social ideas upon the bedrock
of the lessons learned from old, documented, and analyzed events. History is the branch of
knowledge that records and explains past events. These physical and social scientists were men
who lived in urban societies; that is, they were specialists who were enabled to use their daily
hours in study and experimentation and not use their labors to work the fields in order to put
bread on their tables. That would be the social function of the peasants. It is ironic that the urban
scholars became the men to ponder natural law and not the brute workers in the fields. Their
conclusions, therefore, should not be surprising. Rather than live in a holistic harmony with a
spiritualized nature, as tribal societies do, these positivists demystified nature into a warehouse of
physical objects free for the taking by progressive societies. Progress entailed material expansion
of goods, extension of trade, acquisition of lands, and evangelization of progressive ideas. In this
process of progressive Western growth, social scientists bumped up against people as “primitive”
as their own tribal ancestors. What could be learned from them in order to holistically round out
their body of scientific knowledge and create the fully integrated and benign human “utopian”
civilization? Positivists needed to study these peoples. Thus anthropology was born. We will have
much more to say about positivistic progress.
Anthropology then, by studying humans through time, is really a study of how we all see ourselves in the here and now. Traditional anthropology is comprised of four main sub-fields: physical
anthropology, archeology, linguistic anthropology, and cultural anthropology. This book and this
course will focus primarily on the latter, cultural anthropology, but will include heavy dollops of the
other sub-fields in fleshing out the discipline. Here are the nuts and bolts:
Physical anthropology studies the human creature as a biological species. It focuses on the
evolution of humans through time and the resulting variations in the human creature that exist
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TH E CR EAT U R E W I T H I D E A S AN D PO W ER: A N I NV E S T I GAT I ON OF A NT HROP OL OGY A ND HUMA N CULT URE
today. This will raise the thorny questions about race and ethnicity that are prevalent today as well.
The word physical is derived from the Greek root: physica—“of nature” or “natural.”
Archeology studies prehistoric and historic life forms and cultures through the excavation of
fossils, artifacts, and material remains. It endeavors to tell the story of human lifestyles and history
where no written documents remain or ever existed. The word archeology is derived from two
Greek roots – archein—“to begin”—and logos—“the study of ” or “derived from reason.”
Linguistic anthropology studies the nature of language, both oral and written. In addition, linguistic anthropology studies how humans understand reality through language. The word language
is derived from the Latin root lingua—“tongue.”
Cultural anthropology studies the mental, social, and spiritual constructs of human societies
in both the past and the present. It focuses on how values, morals, and ethics are derived from
the environment and from our ancestral norms. These mental structures are collectively termed
“culture.” The word culture, derived from the root word “cult,” is ultimately derived from the Latin
root cultus—“to plant.” Culture is a set of ideas that are “planted” into our minds.
Having atomized the discipline into its major sub-fields, let’s look a little closer at each subfield in turn in the following chapters, after a chapter that looks at how contingency drives humans
to orient themselves in their environments and experiences.
T HE NUT S A ND BOLT S
KEY WORDS
9
Opinion
Angst
Physical anthropology
Anthropology
Polity
Archeology
Positivism
Contingent
Republic
Cultural anthropology
Religion
Deductive method
Scientific method
History
Skepticism
Holism
Sociology
Hypothesis
Theory
Inductive method
Variables
Linguistic anthropology
IMAGE CREDITS
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Fig. 1.1: Edvard Munch / Copyright in the Public Domain.
Fig. 1.2: ScottSteiner / Wikimedia Commons / Copyright in the Public Domain.
Fig. 1.2: Mattho69 / Wikimedia Commons / Copyright in the Public Domain.
Fig. 1.3: Copyright © 2006 by CristianChirita / Wikimedia Commons, (CC BY-SA 3.0) at
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Roman_turtle_formation_on_trajan_column.jpg.
Fig. 1.4A: Oren Jack Turner / Copyright in the Public Domain.
Fig. 1.4B: Godfrey Kneller / Copyright in the Public Domain.
Fig. 1.5: Carlo Crivella / Copyright in the Public Domain.
Fig. 1.6: Copyright in the Public Domain.