# What is Anthropology? History I · Anthropology · https://tryals.app/learn/history-i/what-is-anthropology ## The Science of Humankind **Anthropology** is the study of all humans across every society that exists or has ever existed. It is anchored by **holism**: the principle that no part of human life can be understood in isolation from the rest. Diet connects to ritual, ritual to politics, and politics to kinship. **The discipline's wager** is that nothing human is self-evident; what feels natural is just one option among many that societies have actually tried. Anthropology earns its generalizations through the **comparative method**. A claim like "all societies regulate marriage" must be tested against the full catalog of human variation. One documented exception beats a thousand armchair certainties. ## The Four Fields Anthropology organizes itself into four cooperating fields, joined by the same subject matter: | Field | What it studies | Typical evidence | | --- | --- | --- | | **Cultural** | Living societies and beliefs | Fieldwork, interviews | | **Biological** | Human evolution and variation | Fossils, bones, genes | | **Archaeology** | Past societies | Artifacts, strata | | **Linguistic** | Language in social life | Speech, grammars | Anthropology overlaps with history and sociology, but keeps two distinct habits: it studies the **full range** of societies and insists on **fieldwork** — learning by being there. ## Practice questions 7 of this lesson's 12 practice questions, with answers. The full set is in the app. ### 1. Sort each question: is it framed the **anthropological** way, or the way a neighboring discipline would ask it? **Answer:** - Anthropological framing: Do all known societies have marriage rules?, How does grief work across cultures, from Bali to Brooklyn? - Neighboring discipline: What did Napoleon write to Josephine in 1796?, How does unemployment correlate with voting in modern Spain? **Why:** The anthropological signature is the comparative, whole-species frame. Single-archive questions belong to history; single-modern-society statistics to sociology. Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/what-is-anthropology/sort-each-question-is-it-framed-the-anthropological-way-or-the-way ### 2. Match each field to the evidence it treats as its home ground. **Answer:** - Cultural anthropology → What living people say and do - Biological anthropology → Bones, fossils, and genomes - Archaeology → Objects and layers left behind - Linguistic anthropology → Speech and grammar in use **Why:** Each field reads a different archive of the same species: behavior, bodies, debris, and talk. Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/what-is-anthropology/match-each-field-to-the-evidence-it-treats-as-its-home-ground ### 3. A trading floor and a Melanesian gift exchange are both legitimate anthropological subjects. What claim about the discipline does that reflect? A. That anthropology studies humans everywhere without a hierarchy B. That modern institutions can be understood only by comparison with traditional ones C. That anthropology has expanded beyond its original small-scale subject matter D. That trading floors are culturally simpler and therefore easier to study **Answer:** A. That anthropology studies humans everywhere without a hierarchy **Why:** Restricting the field to distant peoples would make it the study of otherness rather than of humans, and would leave the analyst's own assumptions unexamined. Making the familiar strange is the same operation as making the strange familiar, which is why studies of laboratories and bond traders are core work, not an extension. Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/what-is-anthropology/a-trading-floor-and-a-melanesian-gift-exchange-are-both-legitimate ### 4. Anthropologists study stock exchanges, hospitals and corporate offices with the same methods they bring to a village. **Answer:** True **Why:** True. The defining commitment is method — sustained fieldwork, participant observation, taking the insider's categories seriously — not the exoticism of the subject. Studies of trading floors, laboratories and hospital wards are mainstream anthropology, and the 'anthropology of the West' turns the discipline's own distancing move back on the societies that invented it. Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/what-is-anthropology/anthropologists-study-stock-exchanges-hospitals-and-corporate ### 5. Order the stages in the making of the discipline. **Answer:** 1. Armchair scholars compile travelers’ and missionaries’ reports 2. Museum expeditions collect artifacts en masse 3. Malinowski makes long-term fieldwork the professional standard 4. Post-colonial critique asks who gets to describe whom 5. Multi-sited ethnography follows people and things across the globe **Why:** From reading about "natives" to living with hosts to questioning the whole colonial gaze: each stage rebuilt the discipline’s evidence and its ethics. Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/what-is-anthropology/order-the-stages-in-the-making-of-the-discipline ### 6. One researcher records a dying language’s last speakers; another sifts a trash layer for pottery. Why is this one discipline rather than two? A. Because both reconstruct a way of life from the traces it left B. Because neither can be studied by any other discipline C. Because linguistics and archaeology were historically funded by the same ministries D. Because both rely on radiocarbon dating to establish their chronologies **Answer:** A. Because both reconstruct a way of life from the traces it left **Why:** The unity is the question, not the method. A pottery shard and a last speaker are different evidence for the same problem: how a way of living is organised and passed on. Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/what-is-anthropology/one-researcher-records-a-dying-languages-last-speakers-another ### 7. Which of these are classically **anthropological** research questions? A. How do burial practices vary among the world’s societies? B. What was the exact troop count at Waterloo? C. How does gift-giving create obligation across cultures? D. Why do virtually all societies have food taboos? **Answer:** A. How do burial practices vary among the world’s societies?; C. How does gift-giving create obligation across cultures?; D. Why do virtually all societies have food taboos? **Why:** Cross-cultural pattern-hunting is the anthropological signature. A single battle’s logistics is a question for the historian’s archive. Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/what-is-anthropology/which-of-these-are-classically-anthropological-research-questions