The Importance of General Anthropology
Research and publications are accumulating in each of the four fields of anthropology at an exponential rate. Few anthropologists nowadays master more than one field. And anthropologists increasingly find themselves working not with fellow anthropologists of another field but with members of entirely different scientific or humanistic specialties. For example, cultural anthropologists interested in the relationship between cultural practices and the natural environment may be obliged to pay closer attention to agronomy or ecology than to linguistics. Physical anthropologists interested in the relationship between human and protohuman fossils may, because of the Importance of teeth in the fossil record, become more familiar with dentistry journals than with journals devoted to ethnography or linguistics. Cultural anthropologists interested in the relationship between culture and individual personality are sometimes more at home professionally with psychiatrists and social psychologists than with the archaeologists in theIr own university departments. Hence, many more than four fields are represented in the ongoing research of modern anthropology.
The specialized nature of most anthropological research makes it Imperative that the general significance of anthropological facts and theories be preserved. This is the task of general anthropology.
General anthropology does not pretend to survey the entire subject matter of physical, cultural, archaeological, and linguistic anthropology. Much less does It pretend to survey the work of the legions of scholars in other disciplines who also study the biological, linguistic, and cultural aspects of human existence. Rather, it strives to achieve a particular orientation toward all the human sciences, disciplines, and fields. Perhaps the best word for this orientation is ecumenical. General anthropology does not teach all that one must know in order to master the four fields or all that one must know in order to become an anthropologist. Instead, general anthropology teaches how to evaluate facts and theories about human nature and human culture by placing them in a total, universalist perspective. In the words of Frederica De Laguna,
Anthropology is the only discipline that offers a conceptual schema for the whole context of human experience…. It is like the carrying frame onto which may be fitted all the several subjects of a liberal education, and by organizing the load, making it more wieldy and capable of being carried. (1968, p. 475)
I believe that the importance of general anthropology is that It is panhuman, evolutionary, and comparative. The previously mentioned disciplines are concerned with only a particular segment of human experience or a particular time or phase of our cultural or biological development. But general anthropology is systematically and uncompromisingly comparative. Its findings are never based upon the study of a single population, race, “tribe,” class, or nation. General anthropology insists first and foremost that conclusions based upon the study of one particular human group or civilization be checked against the evidence of other groups or civilizations under both similar and different conditions. In this way the relevance of general anthropology transcends the interests of any particular “tribe,” race, nation, or culture. In anthropological perspective, all peoples and civilizations are fundamentally local and evanescent. Thus general anthropology is implacably opposed to the insularity and mental constriction of those who would have themselves and none other represent humanity, stand at the pinnacle of progress, or be chosen by God or history to fashion the world in their own Image.
Therefore general anthropology is “relevant” even when It deals with fragments of fossils, extinct civilizations, remote villages, or exotic customs. The proper study of humankind requires a knowledge of distant as well as near lands and of remote as well as present times.
Only in this way can we humans hope to tear off the blinders of our local life-styles to look upon the human condition without prejudice.
Because of Its multidisciplinary, comparative, and diachronic perspective, anthropology holds the key to many fundamental questions of recurrent and contemporary relevance. It lies peculiarly within the competence of general anthropology to explicate our species’ animal heritage, to define what is distinctively human about human nature, and to differentiate the natural and the cultural conditions responsible for competition, conflict, and war. General anthropology is also strategically equipped to probe the significance of racial factors in the evolution of culture and in the conduct of contemporary human affairs. General anthropology holds
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