Anthropology

In 1934 Redfield became dean of the comparatively new Division of the Social Sciences established under Robert Hutchins. He was thus concerned that the students in the various disciplines should come to understand one another better. “Anthropology: Unity and Diversity” is a more succinct and formal version of a lecture entitled “The Nature of Anthropology” delivered before the Division of the Social Sciences at Chicago in October, 1936. It is included in the Selected Readings for Human Origins, Anthropology 220, and an introductory general course in anthropology.

Anthropology pursues a diversity of approaches toward the understanding of a diversity of phenomena having to do, in one way or another, with man. There are anthropologists whose principal concern is the pottery made hundreds of years ago by certain Indians of the American Southwest; others who are engaged in determining the precise anatomical changes which have attended the evolution of our species from more apelike ancestors; others who record and analyze the languages of small tribal groups; and still others who study the institutions of modern American towns. The men and women carrying on these special activities share, however, a common traditional and professional body of problems and knowledge and a common point of view. This common body of problems and common viewpoint give unity to the diversity.

The diversity is apparent not only in the great variety of the subject matters studied by anthropological specialists, but in more or less generally recognized subfields. A primary division of anthropology is usually made between physical anthropology and cultural anthropology in obedience to the circumstance that anthropology is concerned both with man as an animal and also with man as a dweller in society and a carrier of culture. Physical anthropology, often regarded as a single subfield comparable with others to be mentioned immediately, is sometimes further divided into somatology and human paleontology. The former is concerned with the study of the biological nature of contemporary groups; the latter with extinct forms.

If physical anthropology be a first subfield, others commonly recognized are archeology, ethnology, and the comparative study of exotic languages (linguistics). Each of these, as is true also of physical anthropology, had a beginning in the work of men of the early nineteenth century, or even of the late eighteenth, before anthropology came to be recognized in the middle of the nineteenth century as a single and inclusive discipline. Each of these subfields developed out of a concern with a special sort of subject matter that requires special techniques in order that it is studied. Physical anthropology arose out of the application of methods of anatomy and related biological sciences to human skulls and other parts and characteristics of the body. Archeology, the study of past peoples by recovery, largely through digging, of their artifacts, began as the collection of antiquities. Ethnology, now understood to mean the study of the cultures of contemporary peoples, had its beginnings in the collection of folklore and in the application of the interests and methods of natural history to primitive human groups. And linguistics is derived from the word lists and grammars made by missionaries and others of the languages of primitive and unfamiliar groups, and in the comparative studies of Indo-European languages made a hundred years ago and more.

These four subdivisions rest, then, on differences in subject matter and on corresponding differences in the procedures a specialist must learn to obtain the materials of that subfield and to analyze them. The physical anthropologist handles bones (to speak approximately) and must know how to describe and measure them. The archeologist must understand the techniques for getting out of the ground the things that ancient men have made and for preserving and interpreting the record they contain. The ethnologist confronts living men in their social groups and must understand how to get from them, and to analyze, information as to their cultures and societies; and the student of languages has to master very special procedures for the recording and study of the subject matter.

There is, moreover, a second kind of diversity within anthropology, diversity in the logical character of the problems set and in the kind of synthesis toward which separate researches tend: anthropological method and objectives are in part those of history and in part those of science.

These terms, history and science, will be recognized to stand for opposing methods: the scholarly pursuit of special knowledge of particular fact, on the one hand, and such pursuit of special knowledge of general fact, on the other hand. The historian, in this sense, is concerned with the uniqueness of his data; each proposition in which he expresses his facts has reference to particular space and time. When it comes to synthesis or integration, he assembles such particular facts into picture-like wholes; these integrations are “histories,” in a wide sense, and include not merely those which are chronologically organized, but also descriptions of the life of a period, accounts of particular institutions, descriptions of persons and places, and ethnographies. The scientist, in this familiar distinction, finds singular propositions referring to definite place and time of service only as they illustrate or contribute to general propositions as to the nature of classes of phenomena. These last are the center of the scientist’s interest. He deals with types, abstracted from particular experience. So he does not relate one particular fact to that next to it in space or time, but rather analyzes the observed or recorded facts, breaking them down so as to abstract so much as may bear upon a class of phenomena also recognizable elsewhere. The organizations of knowledge toward which his work tends are quite different from histories; they are sciences: hierarchies of related general propositions.

With reference to this well-known distinction of approach and objective, anthropology is uncommitted. Or, it is better to say, some anthropologists are clearly historians; a few are plainly interested in science; and the work of many may be regarded as possibly contributing to both history and science. It might be possible to arrange contemporary anthropologists in a linear series with reference to two extremes of scholarly objective: the writing of histories and the making of a social science. Some names may be mentioned to illustrate. Radin is plainly a historian, indeed almost a biographer, he is so interested in particular events and particular human individuals; his disinterest or distrust in social science is marked. Kroeber, always understanding of and sympathetic to scholarly method, however different from his own, is in his own work very largely historical: the products of his work take chiefly the form of reconstructed histories, some local, others continental or world-wide. Moving toward the other end of the series, one encounters, among others, Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune, and Malinowski. None of these is concerned in writing the histories of cultures. They are “historians” only in so far as they depict particular societies. But beyond this they are interested in general scientific problems-the cultural factors in adolescent behavior or the universality of Freudian complexes-and they attack these problems directly in the subject matter immediately before them, without finding any preliminary historical reconstruction necessary. Radcliffe-Brown is near this non-historical end of the series; he is concerned with the general nature of society; particular facts serve for him to illustrate or to yield, by comparison, general propositions as to society and culture; he makes use of considered concepts, somewhat systematically arranged. Other workers are farther from both extremes and nearer to the ambiguous middle ground. Lowie, for instance, has declared that cultural anthropology is a historical science; he makes little use of a priori general propositions to guide his research, which is highly empirical and particular. Yet his own work has contributed to our understanding of, among other things, the general character of kinship and the family, and the general classes of circumstances under which certain forms of these tend to develop.

If emphasis is given to this second diversity which characterizes anthropology-the difference between the tendency to integrate special research into histories of mankind and the tendency to relate them to more or less competent general propositions as to the nature of man and society then the subdivision of anthropology will proceed in accordance therewith and not in accordance with the history of its subject matter and the corresponding techniques of investigation. From this point of view anthropology is a group of investigations and problems concerned with biological fact, on the one hand, and with cultural fact, on the other, and tending either to write the history of man both biological and cultural or to test the validity of general propositions as to his animal or his cultural nature. The subdivisions of the discipline which will then be recognized will be those which come necessarily into being if the difference between historical and scientific objective is made plain. Instead of dividing physical anthropology according to whether extinct men or living man should be the object of study, one will distinguish the study of man’s racial history from the generalizing scientific study of man’s animal nature (human biology). One will distinguish historical linguistics from general linguistics. And one will certainly wish to make plain the distinction between that kind of study of contemporary peoples which moves toward the writing of histories and is closely related to the “history” of departments and professors of that name, on the one hand, and that kind of study of contemporary peoples which is guided by generalizing hypotheses as to society and social and cultural behavior and is related to the other generalizing social sciences, on the other. Recognition of this difference appears in the name “social anthropology” for the generalizing kind of science of culture and society as carried on by anthropologists, and in the restriction of the term “ethnology” for historically directed study of such subject matter. In this limited sense, ethnology is concerned with cultures in their unique situations of time and space: in cultures as systems of events.

The double diversity of anthropology is probably greater, all in all, than the diversity of any other recognized scholarly discipline. No other science presents so many points of contact with other disciplines. Nevertheless there is a unity in the various approaches and interests of anthropology, and this unity lies in a characteristic way of looking at mankind. Archeologist and anthropological linguist, physical anthropologist, social anthropologist and ethnologist, have in common a characteristic viewpoint. The essence of this viewpoint can perhaps be simply put by saying that anthropologists are interested in people in general, rather than in their own people in particular. They are concerned with man’s animal nature and his moral nature, his “body and his sour’ (as Marett says) as such, that is to say, as natural phenomena seen against the entire background of nature and history. Moreover, to realize this concern, he studies all peoples, everywhere and at all times. Characteristically he studies primitive or exotic people. In such groups the anthropologist finds a variety of compact situations in which people, society, institutions, and human behavior may be objectively observed and reported. But whether he study such a group or, as is not rare nowadays, a modern town, he is not much distracted by the importance to Americans or to modern men generally, for practical reasons, of the group studied. For the anthropologist there are many groups and societies, of which his own is only one: the importance of that one as compared with the others depends on its relevance to the scientific or historical problem on which he is engaged.

On the whole the social studies have developed out of concern for the society of those who have developed them, and to them-modern Western society and its antecedents-the social studies and the social sciences, on the whole, tend ever to return. But anthropology has a viewpoint more like that of the well-known man from Mars, who may be supposed to alight anywhere on the planet to begin his illumination studies, and to find the doings of Chinese, Choctaw, or Chicagoan of potentially equal value for his work. Anthropology finds people all over the earth, at different times in its history, exhibiting structure and behavior of great variety. In the impartial investigation of these by direct observation and in the broadest comparative study of these, it makes its claim to science. In the integration of local histories into a history of man’s body and society as broad as the earth and as deep as the beginnings of the human species, it makes its contribution to