Joy Hendry - Anthropology: A Beginners Guide

Anthropology

A Beginners Guide

A superb guide, one of the very few to combine biological and social approaches.

Dr David Shankland - Director of the

Royal Anthropological Institute

An excellent place to start discovering the range and depth of anthropological enquiry.

Professor Robert A. Foley - Director of the

Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies,

University of Cambridge

A wonderfully accessible introduction, with a clear focus on the needs of students first coming to the field.

Dr Faye Healey-Clough - Anthropology lecturer,

Gloucestershire College, UK

ONEWORLD BEGINNERS GUIDES combine an original, inventive and engaging approach with expert analysis on subjects ranging from art and history to religion and politics, and everything in between. Innovative and affordable, books in the series are perfect for anyone curious about the way the world works and the big ideas of our time.

aesthetics

africa

anarchism

aquinas

art

artificial intelligence

the bahai faith

the beat generation

biodiversity

bioterror & biowarfare

the brain

british politics

the buddha

cancer

censorship

christianity

civil liberties

classical music

climate change

cloning

cold war

conservation

crimes against humanity

criminal psychology

critical thinking

daoism

democracy

descartes

dyslexia

energy

engineering

the enlightenment

epistemology

european union

evolution

evolutionary psychology

existentialism

fair trade

feminism

forensic science

french literature

genetics

global terrorism

hinduism

history of science

humanism

huxley

islamic philosophy

journalism

judaism

lacan

life in the universe

literary theory

machiavelli

mafia & organized crime

magic

marx

medieval philosophy

middle east

NATO

nietzsche

the northern ireland conflict

oil

opera

the palestineisraeli conflict

paul

philosophy

philosophy of mind

philosophy of religion

philosophy of science

planet earth

postmodernism

psychology

quantum physics

the quran

racism

renaissance art

shakespeare

the islamic veil

the small arms trade

the torah

sufism

volcanoes

A Oneworld Paperback Original

Published by Oneworld Publications 2012

Copyright Joy Hendry and Simon Underdown 2012

The moral right of Joy Hendry and Simon Underdown to be identified as the Authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved
Copyright under Berne Convention
A CIP record for this title is available
from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-85168-930-9
ebook ISBN 978-1-78074-117-8

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Acknowledgements

Anthropology, the study of humankind in all its diversity, is an exciting subject that should be open and available to anyone, and we are grateful to Marsha Filion and Juliet Mabey at Oneworld for offering us the opportunity to bring our field to the wide public audience we think it deserves. We would also like to thank Fiona Slater and Ruth Deary for negotiating the practical details of its production.

This opening up of the discipline is a venture close to our hearts. As it happens, when we were invited to write this book we were already involved in a related venture, as part of the Education Committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) in London, which was tasked with devising ways to bring anthropology to pre-university students, as well as the public at large. Our work on the book thus developed alongside the syllabus for the Advanced-level Certificate of Education in England, which reflected the hard work of chair, Brian Street, and the director of the RAI at the time, Hilary Callan. We would therefore like to thank them and our fellow committee members for their various contributions to this book, notably Marzia Balzani, Paul Basu, David Bennett, Laura Bishop, Stephanie Bunn, Barry Dufour, Luke Freeman, Judith Okely, Peggy Froerer, Bonnie Vandesteeg and Rob Webb, as well as Gemma Jones and Nafisa Fera, who were the education officers during the period, and David Shankland who succeeded Hilary Callan as Director of the RAI in 2010.

For other comments on aspects of the text at various stages of its production, we would like to thank Andrew and Leslie Carter, Chris Dunabin, Rob Foley, Martin and Sofia Gellner, Sandy Hendry, Emily Hendry, Kate Hill, William Kay, Zoe Lake Thomas, Jenny McKenna, Nancy Priston, Mary Patterson, Charles Tyson Taylor and Jemma Underdown.

Introduction

Anthropology is a twenty-first century subject with roots as old as human history. As long as people have wondered where they come from, and speculated about the behaviour of neighbours brought up differently to themselves, they have been thinking anthropologically. For several decades, we have been able to watch people from all sorts of backgrounds on television, but we also often find ourselves beside them, for instance, in school or at work. Some may have travelled from afar, but many have grown up in the same towns and cities we share. We may practise different rites and ceremonies, eat different food at home, and possibly even speak different languages. We may or may not look like one another, though we probably share a local way of speaking with those who live nearby. Yet our families and our backgrounds are intriguingly different.

It is only in the decades spanning the opening of the new millennium that it has become possible through the internet to find out instantly about people who live at opposite ends of the earth, to chase up our common features and to marvel at our continuing diversity. Independent of books and teachers, we can track ideas about our evolutionary origins through time, investigate our relationships with the environment, and, if we have the language, we can communicate freely with people whose elders parents, grandparents and so forth think quite differently from our own. In all these ways we are already beginning to be anthropologists, for this is essentially where anthropology begins.

Those of us living in this new world thus have an advantage over our elders and ancestors in the access we have to anthropological knowledge, the familiarity we may have with long-distance travel, and the products of multinational companies. However, this book will introduce some of the values that those same elders and ancestors may have for us in a kind of learning that goes beyond the internet. It will suggest ways in which you can draw on your valuable inside knowledge to do anthropology yourself, perhaps by talking to some of those elders, by sharing your own particular worlds with friends, or by hunting for curious objects you can hold in your hands, and examine for clues of former lives. It will offer hints to pushing back further through time, from investigating your family ancestry to suggestions about the biological heritage you and your friends share as human beings.