Gonzalez C1

Cultural anthropology is a
kind of lens, bringing focus

and clarity to human diversity.
#lensofculturalanthropology
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL
ANTHROPOLOGY
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
In this chapter, students will learn:
• about the field of cultural anthropology
• about the concept of culture
• how cultural anthropology is situated within the larger discipline of
anthropology
• that food and sustainability are essential topics within cultural
anthropology
• about using frameworks to study culture
• a brief history of anthropological thought
Copyright © 2019. University of Toronto Press. All rights reserved.
• how cultural anthropology is relevant today
INTRODUCTION: THE LENS OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Anthropologist and medical doctor Seth Holmes traveled with a group of undoc-
umented Triqui migrant laborers across the Mexico-US border in 2004 as part of
a long-term study on the lives of farm workers. He recounts the harrowing expe-
rience of crossing the desert illegally from Sonora into Arizona, led by a “coyote”
who is paid to move people.
de, G. L. T. (2019). Through the lens of cultural anthropology. University of Toronto Press.
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The coyote tells us to duck down and wait. He walks ahead, then motions down low
with one arm, and we all run fast as we can to and through—mostly under—a seven-
foot barbed-wire fence. We run across a sand road and through another barbed-wire
fence and keep running until we cannot breathe anymore.... Though I am a runner
and backpacking guide in the summers, we move faster than I have ever moved
without taking breaks.... After we have hiked through blisters for many miles and I
have shared all my ibuprofen with the others, we stop to rest in a large, dry creek bed
under the cover of several trees.... Two of the men try to convince me to drive them
into Phoenix, past the internal Border Patrol checkpoints. I tell them that would be a
felony and would mean I would go to prison and lose the ability to work. They seemed
satisfied by my response, respecting the need to be able to work.... Suddenly our coyote
runs back speaking quickly in Triqui. Two Border Patrol agents—one black and one
white—appear running through the trees, jump down into our creek bed, and point
guns at us. (2013:19–21)
Holmes and the Triqui group he was traveling with were arrested by the Border
Patrol. In Holmes’s book Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, the story of their border crossing
begins an examination of the everyday lives of Indigenous Mexican field workers,
the reasons they choose to risk crossing (it is riskier to stay at home and starve or
die), and the responses of others in the community to their roles as fruit pickers.
As a medical anthropologist, Holmes is especially interested in how social struc-
tures create and support their position at the very bottom of the social ladder. By
participating in their border crossing, living with them in crowded apartments, and
working in the fields bent over picking strawberries weekly, he comes to understand
not only in an academic sense, but also in a physical sense, how the Triqui come to
embody their lives as farm workers.
Every cultural anthropologist has stories about how their interest in anthropol-
ogy developed, which field sites attracted and hosted them, and what issues called
to them over the course of their career. Holmes is a cultural and medical anthro-
pologist who focuses on the way hierarchies and injustice are reproduced in health
care and food systems. He is interested in structural violence, or the way that larger
systems reproduce and justify poor treatment of some and not others. Of course,
not all cultural anthropologists seek out dangerous and difficult experiences, but
all hope to understand the lives of other people, and, in many cases, support their
self-determination.
I begin with this story because it brings together several important elements of
the field of cultural anthropology. First, it illustrates the relationship of the anthro-
pologist and their study participants: more friends than lab subjects, they are people
with whom the anthropologist often forges deeply trusting relationships. Second,
2 THROUGH THE LENS OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
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it highlights the importance in cultural anthropology for many of its practitioners Figure 1.1
not only to understand but also to collaborate with the people they study in order YOUNG GIRLS AT
HOLI CELEBRATION
to seek solutions. Finally, it brings together several important aspects of this book Festivals, such as the
that are all tied together: the production of food, sustainable environments and life- Holi celebration in India,
styles, social inequity, and the practice of cultural anthropology. bring people together as
a community. They are an
This book focuses on cultural anthropology, emphasizing the thoughts, feel- important part of cultural
ings, beliefs, behaviors, and products of human societies—that is, culture. Cultural tradition. These young
girls are waiting to be
anthropology tends to focus on living cultures, since the main way that cultural
sprayed with water after

anthropologists learn about people is by living and working among them. As an playing in brightly colored
area of social science, cultural anthropology also seeks patterns of behavior, placing pigment during Holi.
Credit: Aravindan Ganesan/
people’s thoughts and actions within a larger context. This analysis of what people CC BY 2.0.
have, think, and do is the main product of this kind of work.
Cultural anthropologists undertake a period of research called fieldwork in order
to insert themselves in the midst of the people they wish to work among, with, and
for. The process of doing and analyzing fieldwork is referred to as ethnography,
as is the product of that fieldwork in the form of a book, essay, dissertation, or
film. Fieldwork may take place in a village in the desert, a settlement high in the
CHAPTER 1: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology 3
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mountains, an inhabited region of the forest, or in an actual field, as did Seth
Holmes’s study of Triqui farmworkers. It may also take place in a large urban city
or in an online community. Culture is everywhere. Therefore, anthropologists are
everywhere.
Cultural anthropology focuses on qualitative over quantitative information. In
terms of doing research, this means that ethnographers can better find the infor-
mation they are seeking by talking with people and seeing firsthand how they live.
Surveys may be helpful for particular kinds of information, but anthropologists
tend to use them as supplemental, not primary, data. For instance, an ethnographer
wishing to learn about the social and economic impact of locals who braid hair on
Jamaican beaches as part of an informal economy will likely spend much of their
time accompanying hair braiders as they go about their day. This kind of immer-
sion provides a much fuller picture of their activities and the way they feel about
what they do than would responses to a survey.
Cultural anthropologists are interested in small things (such as how hair braid-
ers greet each other at the start of their work day) and large things (such as how
changes in international tourism affect the local Jamaican economy). They are inter-
ested in revealing the thoughts, words, and actions of the people they work with,
sometimes called study participants or informants, rather than imposing their own
opinions. Ethnographers work to describe, capture, and understand. They also work
to analyze and interpret, and often to support, collaborate, advocate, and empower.
Culture is not something static, like a black-and-white photograph. Often repre-
sentations of culture lead us to believe that traditional peoples never change—that
there are “lost” tribes (who lost them?) of exotic peoples who still live the way
we imagine them to have lived in the Stone Age. This is especially propagated in
the media with television shows like “Ancient Aliens” that attribute some of the
great advancements in human history to cover-ups of alien conspiracies. This is a
misguided and dangerous line of thought, since it undermines the advancements of
people whom industrial society deems “uncivilized.” Societies everywhere, through-
out time, have been smart, ingenuitive, and ambitious. People don’t need aliens to
build pyramids.
No society is locked into a particular way of living, and all societies today have
some connection with the industrial world, whether it is economic, social, or polit-
ical. People have agency, meaning that they make their own decisions and interact
with established social institutions in ways that demonstrate power over their desti-
nies. Culture is dynamic, taking advantage of the possibilities that exist. In other
words, those “Others” are just like you and me.
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TABLE 1.1
Definitions of Culture
Tylor (1871:1) that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art,
morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits
acquired by man (sic)* as a member of society
Kluckhohn and Kelly all those historically created designs for living, explicit and
(1945:78) implicit, rational, irrational, and non-rational, which exist
at any given time as potential guides for the behavior of
men (sic)
Parson (1949:8) those patterns relative to behavior and the products of

human action which may be inherited, that is, passed
on from generation to generation independently of the
biological genes
Damen (1987:367) learned and shared human patterns or models for living,
day-to-day living patterns
*Note: The term (sic) is generally used to signal that a mistake appeared in the original
quotation. I use it here to signal that anthropologists today use the term human or people to refer
to people of all sexes and genders, and not man.
THE CULTURE CONCEPT
So, what is culture? Much more than a concept of being “civilized,” culture is all of
the understandings that people share as members of a community, whether phys-
ical, virtual, or diasporic (spread across the world). Actually, there are nearly as
many definitions of culture as there are people who write about it, but Table 1.1
highlights a few definitions, starting with Edward Burnett Tylor’s from 1871, which
holds up fairly well.
In the table, you’ll notice that even though there are minor differences in the
way these writers think about how culture works, they all have a common theme:
culture is learned and shared. Importantly, we’re not programmed in any sort of
innate way—culture is not part of our DNA or biology. It is also fluid and chang-
ing, and not linked to national borders or ethnicities. But as we adopt our own
culture, we are provided with a way to understand ourselves, our communities, and
the world, such as the areas of life listed in Table 1.2.
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TABLE 1.2
Some of the Major Components of Culture Addressed in This Book
Component of Culture
Ethnicity Gender and sexuality
Language Political systems
Food procurement and diet Belief systems
Social organization Illness and healing
Economic systems People’s relationship with the environment
Kinship, marriage, and family
THE FIELD OF ANTHROPOLOGY
Anthropology is a very large discipline of study. It has to be, considering anthro-

pologists are interested in all aspects of being human, from culture to biology, and
from every part of the world, throughout all of human history. I get tired just think-
ing about it.
Because the discipline is so large, it is separated into four main fields: cultural
Figure 1.2 anthropology, which you’ll learn about in this book; physical or biological anthro-
THE BRANCHES OF pology, which looks at humans as biocultural organisms and includes the study
ANTHROPOLOGY
This illustration represents of inheritance, primates, hominins (early humans and human-like species), and
the four main branches of human biological diversity; archaeology, the study of past cultures as represented
anthropology. Each branch by what is left behind; and linguistic anthropology, the study of the relationship
also includes an applied
component. between language and culture, and how people use language to interact with others.
Sometimes the field of applied anthropology is considered a fifth field, since it
uses the methods and skills of anthropology to work with communities to
applied
help solve problems. Because applied methods and projects exist in each
Biological
Archaeology
of the four fields of anthropology, it is helpful to think of an applied
Anthropology
component within each subfield. (See Figure 1.2.)
anthropology Types of Cultural Anthropology

In North America, our field of study is referred to as cultural anthro-
Linguistic Cultural pology or, sometimes, socio-cultural anthropology. In the United
Anthropology Anthropology
Kingdom, it is called social anthropology. These are all synonyms for
the same set of methods and goals. There are many subfields, which
applied
include those listed in Table 1.3. Because there are about as many subfields
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TABLE 1.3
Some of the Subfields of Cultural Anthropology
Subfield of Cultural Anthropology
Anthropology of education Economic anthropology
Anthropology of family and kinship Medical anthropology
Anthropology of food and nutrition Political anthropology
Anthropology of gender and sexuality Public anthropology
Anthropology of religion Psychological anthropology
Digital anthropology Queer anthropology
Feminist anthropology Urban anthropology
Ecological or environmental anthropology Visual anthropology
in which people specialize as there are aspects of culture, any list like this one is
going to be incomplete.
The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is the world’s largest orga-
nization of anthropologists. Its website (http://www.americananthro.org/) shows 40
official sections and ten additional interest groups. A wide range of groups both here
and in other similar anthropology associations are interested in different aspects of
culture and culture areas (such as Sub-Saharan Africa or the American Southwest),
with hundreds, or even thousands, of members each. The AAA website is a great
resource to explore what anthropologists are interested in at the present time.
Many of the basic ideas and issues of these subfields will be covered in this book.
You can visit the corresponding section on the AAA website to learn more about
any particular subfield.
The Importance of Food to Anthropology

Food is of particular interest to cultural anthropologists for many important reasons.
Primarily, humans have to eat every day. Therefore, much of the social and cultural
life that engages humans in their daily activities results from finding, distributing,
preparing, consuming, and disposing of food. For this reason, anthropologists have
addressed questions about the human relationship to food since the beginning of
the discipline.
There are many ways in which food issues are similar across cultures. All humans
may consume a wide variety of foods to support health. As omnivores, people choose
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Figure 1.3
‘AVA CEREMONY,
SAMOA
These Samoan men
in Va`a-o-Fonoti are
ready to participate in
an ‘ava ceremony of
ritual drinking before an
important occasion.
Credit: pbkwee / CC BY 2.0.
from available foods that may be very different in different ecosystems, but still
provide the nutrients the human body requires. Humans across the globe prepare
food by cooking it. This is grounded in an ancient legacy in which our bodies and
communal life were greatly affected by the cooking process.
More importantly for cultural anthropology, activities around food procurement
are deeply embedded in a complex system of social, economic, political, and reli-
gious norms and expectations. People’s daily lives are limited, shared, and enriched
by eating as a cultural and symbolic act. Indeed, food seems to be at the center of
our experience as cultural actors, so much so that people who eat foods we don’t eat
seem to be somehow essentially different from us. Anthropologist Sidney Mintz
(1985) argues “food preferences are close to the center of ... self-definition” (3). To
simplify a classic phrase, what we eat is who we are (see Brillat-Savarin 1825).
Studying peoples’ foodways has become more important than ever due to the
impacts of climate change and globalization. Due to unpredictable weather patterns,
farmers may lose entire harvests during a severe storm or heat wave. Companies
claim ownership of resources that are outside of their national boundaries, due to
a globalized economy that buys and sells land and water as commodities. Water,
privatized by a bottling company, vanishes from underground aquifers, leaving
less for farmers seeking to irrigate crops. The World Bank funds massive food aid
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BOX 1.1 Food Matters: The Anthropology of Food
Food as a serious topic of academic inquiry is foundations of anthropological inquiry, because
only a few decades old. Nevertheless, within how people procure their food structures much
that time, it has exploded as a means to under- of their social life. It is also linked to nutri-
stand culture. Counihan and Van Esterik (2013) tion, health, land use, sustainability, and human
suggest three reasons for the proliferation of cooperation and interaction. The study of food
food research: a more recent focus on femi- connects all aspects of anthropology—cultural,
nist research that privileges women’s work biological, linguistic, and archaeological—in a
(such as food preparation); an interest in how truly multidisciplinary way.
food is related to power, especially in terms of
Anthropologists may choose a specialized
production and consumption; and the many
subfield in which to anchor their research. There
ways that food connects to issues of identity,
are many subfields, such as nutritional anthro-
gender, the body, and the symbolism of cultural
pology, which takes a biocultural approach;
life. This surge in academic interest reflects, as
food studies, which focuses on issues of culture,
well, a larger popular interest in where our food
history, and identity; ethnoecology, which exam-
comes from—especially for those of us living in
ines traditional foodways; and gastronomy,
urban environments—and the largely invisible
which combines cooking, food science, and
processes that take our food from farm to fork.
the cultural meanings of foods. Scholarly jour-
Cultural anthropologists interested in food nals in which food research is published are also
may research the ties between food and nearly growing in number, such as Food and Foodways,
any other subject. Indeed, the study of subsis- Gastronomica, Culture and Agriculture, Nutritional
tence, or food-getting strategies, is one of the Anthropology, and The Anthropology of Food.
programs, while African farmers’ harvests rot in granaries due to lack of demand.
Food systems are tied to environmental pressures and have consequences in econom-
ics, politics, society, and human health.
The Connections between Anthropology and Sustainability

Scientists have known for decades that life on our planet is becoming unsustain-
able. Louder and more urgent calls to action emerge every few years. In 2014,
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a report stat-
ing bluntly that we must act now to cut carbon pollution. Otherwise, there will
be severely damaging and “irreversible impacts” that will hamper our ability as a
species to survive.
Clearly, the sustainability of people and life on earth is an issue we cannot ignore.
Why include sustainability in a book about cultural anthropology? Anthropology,
across its fields, can provide the kinds of broad and deep understandings about
people in their environments that lead to solutions. Since the beginning of the
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discipline, anthropologists have learned about the long-term interactions of people
in their environments. We have looked at reasons for successes and failures in all of
the ecosystems on earth. Why did the Rapa Nui society on Easter Island collapse,
for example? What led to the vast differences between the nations of Haiti and
the Dominican Republic, even though they share two sides of the same island?
What accounts for the ecological success of cities like Amsterdam, Netherlands,
which runs on solar and wind power, and Curitiba, Brazil, which recycles 70 per
cent of its waste?
Today, cultural anthropologists work alongside some of the most marginalized
people that live on the planet, including Indigenous people living in small-scale
traditional societies. These groups hold vast amounts of traditional knowledge about
the ecosystems in which they live. This knowledge is more important than ever to
save the biodiversity of the planet. As these small-scale cultures disappear, so do
their knowledge, language, understanding and use of flora and fauna, and diverse
ways of making a living. One of the goals of anthropology is to help preserve that
knowledge while supporting the lifeways of the people who practice it.
FRAMEWORKS
Anthropologists and other social scientists use frameworks to guide their research.
By a framework, I mean a set of ideas about how the world works. A framework
is also referred to as a theory.
Researchers use many frameworks to guide their lines of inquiry. A scientific
framework is one in which scientific understandings of the world are primary, and
objectivity in pursuing one’s research questions is important. A religious framework
is one in which people’s belief systems guide their thoughts and actions, beyond
what is observable in nature. A humanist framework emphasizes the agency of
individuals to make ethical decisions that benefit themselves and others. A critical
framework begins with the experiences of marginalized peoples and seeks to change
the mainstream narrative from which they have been omitted or misrepresented.
In the development of the field of anthropology, many different frameworks
have been used to examine human life and culture. For instance, an ethnogra-
pher using a framework that understands power relations to be the main driver
of culture will focus on social hierarchies, and how power is used and by whom.
Another ethnographer who is interested in how symbols guide people’s thought
and behavior will identify the powerful ways that words and ideas shape the way
people act. Neither of these are necessarily better than the other, just different
approaches to the same problems.
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Frameworks Included in This Book
As you read this textbook, it will become clear that certain frameworks are used
more than others. In fact, every textbook has a framework, whether it is directly
stated or not, just like every news program, documentary, and museum exhibit.
Someone decides what will be presented, how it will be presented, and what
will be left out. There is no neutral source of knowledge. It’s deliberate, but not
necessarily malicious. It’s just important to remember that every source has a
perspective.
In this book, I don’t rely on a single theoretical framework. However, I do
lean on a few kinds of ideas. My thoughts and writing tend toward a biocultural
perspective. That is, I see connections between culture and human biological needs.
Perhaps this is because, as a community college teacher, I have taught both cultural
anthropology and biological anthropology courses for many years. It would feel
strange for me to leave out the connections that, for me, link these two fields.
This is especially true in the two subfields that this book emphasizes: food and
sustainability.
Let’s take food as an example. Food is a biological necessity. Humans need to
eat to survive, and to eat foods with a variety of nutrients in order to support health.
This is a biological approach to food. However, what we eat (meat/plants/insects/
clay), how we eat (forks/chopsticks/hands), and with whom we eat (family/friends/
coworkers/alone in the car) are all cultural questions. How we get our food (forest/
garden/farm/supermarket) and what foods we can afford to buy are cultural and
economic questions. One question is not separate from the other, but they are inter-
twined in human life and experience. I encourage you to explore these and other
connections you make between fields of study as you think about anthropology.
Anthropology is comfortable with a holistic perspective in which the connections
are emphasized.
In a similar way, I see how the limits of the environment can support cultural
behaviors. This is especially true for the origins of certain cultural practices. For
instance, I find this perspective helpful in thinking about why certain religions
have food taboos—mainly because the taboo animals weren’t suited for the envi-
ronment at the time when the religion developed (See Box 10.1 for a discussion of
this subject). Not knowing, or denying, the limits of one’s environment, as is evident
in current sustainability discussions about climate change, also has cultural, social,
and economic repercussions. Because human biology, culture, and environmental
resources work together in essential ways, this book may draw upon a biocultural
and environmental perspective perhaps more than other cultural anthropology
textbooks.
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL THOUGHT
Anthropology is a fairly recent discipline, only about 150 years old. The hard truth is
that this field, which prides itself today on advocating for social justice and auton-
omy for all peoples, has deep roots in colonial practices in which knowledge about
traditional peoples has been used to stereotype, control, and oppress them. In partic-
ular, early ideas about racial divisions and “savage” peoples in exotic lands led to
racist thought and ignorance.
The next few sections of this chapter may feel discouraging, as they emphasize
some of the outdated ideas and strong critiques of the theories and methods of
anthropological inquiry. I include them not to make you wary of the field as a whole,
but to begin our discussion by grounding it in its historical context. Although the
discipline still struggles with its colonial roots, current discussions among anthro-
pologists in the public sphere make clear that the voices of underrepresented peoples
must be privileged as the field moves forward.
We can trace back some of the first anthropological writings to the early
European voyages of exploration in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The
“discovery” of peoples inhabiting other areas of the world was shocking. It sparked
debates over whether the “savage” and “primitive” Native peoples were in fact fully
human. Some travelers were more “anthropological” than others—Fray (Father)
Bernardino de Sahagún, for instance, traveled to Mexico in 1529. He spent 50
years recording the daily lives of Aztec people and translating documents into the
Aztec language, Nahuatl. He is widely considered to be one of the world’s first
ethnographers. Nonetheless, the legacy of these voyages was to create an impres-
sion that non-Western peoples were primitive, monstrous, or less than human, as
elaborated in Chapter 3. Western religious belief systems made a place for primi-
tive peoples firmly below White superiority.
One of the earliest and most important ideas that led to the concept of culture
as we know it today was developed by British philosopher John Locke at the end of
the seventeenth century. He called this idea tabula rasa, or “blank slate”—the notion
that each person is born fresh, as if they are a tablet on which there is no writing
yet. This idea affirms that personality, thoughts, and behavior are gained through a
person’s life experience, and are not innate or somehow biologically programmed.
This is our current understanding of culture as well, as developed here in Chapter 2.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The
Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Capital (1867) to draw attention to the plight
of the poor industrial laborer. While these texts may be situated in the field of
economics, in fact, Marxist thought has done much to shape the field of cultural
anthropology. In particular, Marx and Engels believed the way people engage in
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production shapes their consciousness.
In other words, how people think and
what they do is directly related to how
they make their living. In particular,
Marxist thought called attention to the
importance of class distinctions in shap-
ing one’s lived experience, and to the
ruling class’s exploitation of the lower
classes by profiting from their labor.
The discipline of anthropology has used
these ideas to shine a light on oppressed
peoples and class consciousness.
Around the same time as Marx
and Engels published their works, a
group of theorists began to explain the
development of cultural beliefs and
institutions. Referred to now as classical
cultural evolutionists, they specialized
in some of the important institu-
tions of cultural life, such as marriage,
kinship, and religion. American Lewis
Henry Morgan (1818–81) developed
a typology for the stages of cultural
evolution that he believed all human
societies pass through. He called these
stages “savagery,” “barbarism,” and “civi-
lization,” basing them loosely on kinship
systems and food getting (foraging, farming, and modern food production). These Figure 1.4
are not neutral terms, and they expressed what Morgan and other academic theo- CHINESE FACTORY
WORKERS
rists thought about “exotic” peoples at the time.
Marx and Engels

While, in the United States, Morgan expounded upon “savages,” Edward Burnett believed that working-
Tylor (1832–1917) ruminated on religion and magic from Britain. Tylor, using a class people, such as
these computer hard
little ethnography and a lot of imagination, considered the evolution of religious drive factory workers
beliefs. His contribution was to come up with rational explanations for how “prim- in China, share a class
consciousness due to
itive” peoples might have understood the mysterious world around them. Tylor is
their occupation as
also known for writing the first anthropology textbook, creating the first published laborers.
definition of culture, and serving as the first professor of anthropology at Oxford Credit: Robert Scoble /
CC BY 2.0.
University in 1884. You can assess how you think his definition of culture holds up
in Chapter 2.
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Remember that none of these early anthropological theorists were “doing
ethnography” as we know it today. The idea of living among people in the field wasn’t
introduced yet, as it wouldn’t have been too popular among the Victorian gentlemen
sitting in their velvet armchairs. In-person observation became the anthropologist’s
modus operandi with the era of American anthropologist Franz Boas.
Franz Boas (1858–1942) is considered to be the “father” of American anthro-
pology. Boas was born in Germany, and took a position as a curator at the Field
Museum of Natural History in Chicago and later as a professor at Columbia
University in New York. He argued that in order to understand people, we must
live among them and understand the details of their everyday life. He focused on
the importance of ethnographic fieldwork (description rather than theory) and
pioneered the four-field method of anthropological study. His approach came to
be known as cultural or historical particularism.
Boas was committed to social activism, having experienced prejudice as a Jew,
and published widely in order to counter the prevailing scientific thought about the
supposed superiority of Whites. His work led to a re-examination of racist thought
in scientific pursuits, including anthropology. Largely because of Boas’s work, scien-
tists began to understand differences among people as primarily cultural divisions,
rather than racial (or biological). Many of the early twentieth century’s great anthro-
pological minds studied under Boas, including Margaret Mead, one of the field’s
most widely read ethnographers.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, several important figures in French structural anthro-
pology emerged at this time, including Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009). More of
a theorist than an ethnographer, he developed the idea that social life works due to
underlying innate structures in thought. These structures in the mind connect to the
structures in social life. For example, he argued that people have an innate mental struc-
ture that leads to gift-giving; that is, it is “natural” for people to give gifts. The practice
of gift-giving leads to alliances and therefore social stability. In Chapter 6, on Economic
Resources, you’ll read more about gift-giving as it was elaborated by another French
structural anthropologist, Marcel Mauss (1872–1950).
In the early decades of the twentieth century, British anthropologist Bronislaw

Malinowski (1884–1942) spent several years living among people of the Trobriand
Islands of Melanesia. In the Trobriands, he completed detailed ethnographies and
published a number of books, focusing on family, marriage, and exchange patterns.
He is credited with the idea of functionalism: that cultures function to fulfill human
biological needs. Although not many functionalists still exist, Malinowski’s ethno-
graphic work is considered to be some of the best. His examination of the system
of exchange called the Kula Ring is one of the most-used examples in economic
anthropology to explain balanced reciprocity, as you’ll see in Chapter 6.
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Later in the twentieth century, several important anthropologists moved away
from the structural idea that society is a stable organism and argued instead
that the stability of society must be worked for. Victor Turner (1920–83) was a
British anthropologist known primarily for his development of the theory of
symbolic anthropology. This theory argues that symbols are used throughout soci-
ety in order to maintain order, and one way they do this is through ritual. Ritual
allows for the social order to break down, but it is through the use of symbols that
social order is reconstructed and reaffirmed. Turner was one of the anthropologists
who examined rites of passage as rituals, such as the Maasai circumcision ritual
discussed in Chapter 9.
A second US cultural anthropologist, Clifford Geertz (1926–2006), also focused
on symbols in his work. A proponent of interpretive anthropology, Geertz (1973)
promoted “thick description” of a field site in ethnography as a pathway to reading
the symbols like a text. The ethnographer must be able to decipher the meanings of
everyday behaviors as the participants themselves understand them. As you’ll learn
in Chapter 2, doing ethnography requires understanding the codes and symbols
that people use. What might that wink mean?
The rise of the field of feminist anthropology in the 1960s is less about the study
of women than about correcting decades of anthropological thought and research
that effectively left women out of the picture, both as researchers and as subjects of
study. We’ll look at some of these issues in Chapter 8 in our discussion of gender.
At first feminist anthropology attempted to correct the omissions by primarily
researching women’s spheres, such as the family and domestic life. Then it came to
encompass other marginalized groups of people that had been omitted from the
main narrative historically dominated by men, especially men in power.
As part of this important shift, the field of anthropology turned its gaze toward
others left out of the narrative. Researchers re-examined groups across the globe, but
now as postcolonial subjects whose societies had been altered by the colonial rela-
tionship. Postcolonial studies looks at how former colonies have adapted in terms
of their ethnic, economic, political, and cultural identities. Public, applied, and even
medical anthropology may owe their roots to this shift in perspective and a new
urgent focus on collaborating with study participants in order to help them find
solutions for their most pressing issues. Read more about how medical anthropol-
ogy does this in Chapter 11.
When I attended grad school in the 1990s, anthropology had theorized itself
into a very confusing state. Well, it seemed confusing to me at the time. The post-
modern era, beginning in the 1980s, questioned the very notion of truth itself. It
encouraged reflexivity, in other words the importance of looking at the self in the
process of doing ethnography. How does the ethnographer shape the construction
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of “truth”? Postmodernists argue that every era of science is basically a cultural arti-
fact, and therefore objectivity is a myth. You can see how this would have been a
challenging entry point into the discipline.
The era of postmodern theory also, fortunately, brought important issues of
power and resistance to the forefront. French theorist Michel Foucault (1926–84;
pronounced foo-coh) argued that truth is written by those in power. Elaboration
on this work by French thinker Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) showed how indi-
viduals with low status could use their skills or connections to create new ideas of
what is considered valuable, thereby altering the structures of power. Box 6.1 shows
how Bourdieu’s ideas can be illustrated using food as social capital among prison
inmates.
Throughout this text, you will be introduced to different ideas and subfields of
anthropology that call upon many of these thinkers, especially the later ones. You
won’t find any savagery or barbarism argued here. Which frameworks appeal to
you most? Which ones make the most sense in terms of how you understand what
people think and do?
Contributions of African American Anthropologists

One of the communities that has been largely left out of the mainstream narra-
tive of anthropology’s great thinkers is that of African American social scientists.
There have been many Black anthropologists, historians, and sociologists who have
contributed greatly to the development of anthropological theory and the body of
ethnographic literature.
Some of their early influential ideas arose in the nineteenth century, as a response
to prevailing racist notions that Africans and people of African descent were unin-
telligent, inferior, and lacked culture. Their response, called the “vindicationist”
perspective, sought to regain control of the narrative. The Black intellectual Frederick
Douglass is considered to be one of the founders of this perspective. This movement
criticized early uses of ethnology in its ranking of “racial” classifications based on
measurements and the inevitability of innate characteristics.
One of the best-known vindicationist thinkers is W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963;

pronounced doo-BOYS). Although he placed himself within the field of sociol-
ogy, his body of work is highly ethnographic and was developed in conjunction
with some of the early American anthropologists who also sought to destabilize
the racist idea of African inferiority. Du Bois was the first African American to
receive a PhD from Harvard and one of the founders of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
In 1906, while teaching at Atlanta University, W.E.B. Du Bois heard a talk
by a visiting commencement speaker, anthropologist Franz Boas (profiled above),
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whose address echoed his own ideas about the
value of African peoples throughout history and
the lack of scientific evidence for distinct racial
lines of humans.
However, as an activist for social equality,
Du Bois would come to resent the anthropolog-
ical focus on exotic peoples when, at the same
time, discrimination, hate, and violence were
undermining the success and very survival of
American Blacks. In 1904, he points out this
irony:
If the Negroes were still lost in the forests of

central Africa we could have a government
commission to go and measure their heads,
but with 10 millions of them here under
your noses I have in the past besought the
Universities almost in vain to spend a single
cent in a rational study of their characteristics
and conditions. (Du Bois 1904:86 in Liss 1998)
To counter the lack of knowledge about the American Black experience, he under- Figure 1.5
took several years of fieldwork in a predominantly Black community, resulting in W.E.B. DU BOIS
W.E.B. Du Bois was
the book The Philadelphia Negro (1899), the first ethnography of an American Black the first African-
community. His best-known work, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), also expressed an American to receive
anthropological perspective in that it explored the double consciousness that he a PhD from Harvard
University. Although
himself felt as being both American and Black, and the distress of trying to recon- trained as a sociologist,
cile both identities. he contributed greatly
Du Bois and other Black thinkers of the time are credited with fighting for many to the development
of ethnographic work,
of the ideas included in the United States Civil Rights Act of 1964, applying the law
especially of American
equally to all people. Many other Black social scientists have contributed, often in Blacks in the United
States. He is pictured
a veiled or invisible way, to social advancement for all people in the United States.
here in 1907, while
For instance, Harrison and Harrison (1999) make connections that have been lost serving as professor of
to the greater narrative, such as the fact that anthropologist Allison Davis’s (1902– economics and history at
Atlanta University.
83) work in education paved the way for Head Start, a federal program initiated Credit: Photo by Cornelius
in 1965 that supports low-income children in school with educational preparation, Marion (C.M.) Battey.
nutritional support, and parental involvement. Anthropologist Louis King’s (1898–

1981) research among West Virginian rural Blacks helped support the landmark 1954
Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka decision, ending the legal “racial” segregation
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of schools. Perhaps best known for her fiction, Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
trained under Boas as an ethnographer in Florida, Jamaica, and Haiti, which influ-
enced her character development in her acclaimed novels, especially of the strong
Black women that she saw in the field. For the most part, due to the challenges
these scholars faced in their own lives, their work had the goal of social change.
This is a short summary of some of the major thinkers in anthropology’s devel-
opment. There are many individuals, and even schools of thought, that have been left
out for the sake of brevity and clarity. Moreover, it does not touch on non-Western
ideas about cultural development. As a field of study, “anthropology has multiple
lineages” (Harrison and Harrison 1999:21).
ANTHROPOLOGY AND COLONIALISM
It’s clear from the beginnings of anthropological thought that the discipline evinced
some serious ignorance. Many of the first ethnographers have shown themselves
to be suffering from a colonial mindset, in which the powerful actors in the field
consider themselves to be superior to the subjects of their studies. Some of this
is transparent, for instance, in the posthumously published diaries of Bronislaw
Malinowski when he refers to his Trobriander study participants as “neolithic
savages” (1989) while alone and unhappy in Papua New Guinea in 1915.
However, connections between the work of anthropologists and the colonial
enterprise go deeper than simply racist comments. A small subset of anthropol-
ogists has chosen to work with governments that are looking to gain control of
a people and their land. One of the most shocking examples is the revelation
that North American anthropologists were contracted to provide information
about Vietnamese culture during the US war in Vietnam between 1964 and 1975.
After this information was revealed, similar collaborations between anthropolo-
gists and military regimes were discovered in Latin America, Thailand, and the
Himalayas (Sluka 2010). Largely due to these and other controversial projects, the
American Anthropological Association first developed a Code of Ethics in 1971. It

has gone through a number of revisions since then, and importantly makes clear
that anthropology that is used as a weapon is unethical and, for most researchers,
unconscionable (AAA 2014).
Moreover, within North America, the relationship between Indigenous peoples
and the anthropological community has often been exploitative, with anthropol-
ogists taking sacred and cultural knowledge and speaking for Native peoples.
Museums were being filled with stolen objects, including sacred items, and the
remains of ancestors taken without permission.
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One of the most outspoken and effective critiques of anthropology’s relationship
with Indigenous peoples came from the professor, lawyer, theologian, and writer
Vine Deloria, Jr., a Dakota Sioux. In 1969, amidst the Red Power Movement in
the United States, he published Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, in
which he slams what he sees as the oppressive relationship between tribal peoples
and anthropologists.
INTO EACH LIFE, it is said, some rain must fall. Some people have bad
horoscopes; others take tips on the stock market ... but Indians have been
cursed above all other people in history. Indians have anthropologists.... The
implications of the anthropologist ... should be clear for the Indian. Compilation
of useless knowledge “for knowledge’s sake” should be utterly rejected by the
Indian people.... In the meantime it would be wise for anthropologists to get
down from their thrones of authority and PURE research and begin helping
Indian tribes instead of preying on them. (Deloria, Jr. 1969; uppercase emphasis
in the original)
Deloria demanded that anthropology re-examine its practices and assumptions.

His activism led to more collaborative work that advocated for Native causes, and
a more equal relationship between Native peoples and the anthropologists who
work with them.
Today, anthropologists advocate alongside tribal peoples, supporting their efforts
for self-determination, such as speaking out against stereotypes and commodi-
fication of their heritage (such as with sports mascots; see Box 1.2). Linguistic
anthropologists work with tribal nations in language preservation and revitaliza-
tion. Museum curators trained in anthropology, who work with items of cultural
importance, are reaching out more to Indigenous groups in an effort to decolonize
their museum collections. There are also many Indigenous anthropologists at the
forefront of these activities. The tensions between Indigenous peoples of North
America and anthropologists have decreased as the field fosters more supportive
and collaborative relationships.
THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY
When we hear the phrase “the world is getting smaller,” we nod our heads in agree-
ment. But what does it mean? It could mean a number of things, and they may all
strike us as true. We might think of the world getting smaller in terms of transpor-
tation, in that a person can get from continent to continent in less than one day on
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BOX 1.2 Talking About: Sports Team Mascots
The American Anthropological Association regu- • The AAA denounces and is proactive in
larly publicizes statements on current topics combating all forms of racism and racist
of cultural interest, such as this one on the use ideologies, as expressed through the use of
of stereotypical or offensive names for sports language, symbols, images, names, nicknames,
teams and their mascots. Many team names logos, personalities, and mascots that
are problematic when looking through a lens of perpetuate stereotypes....
respect for diversity. • The continuing harm done to American Indians
Consider the US-based Atlanta Braves with their who are offended by demeaning and racist
trademark “tomahawk chop.” Or the Cleveland mascots must be acknowledged and viewed
Indians, whose mascot “Chief Wahoo”—finally as the basis of determining what is a racist
officially retired in 2018—has been named the representation or depiction; it is inappropriate
most demeaning caricature of Native peoples in and unjust to base this evaluation on whether
US sports (Tracy 2013). The Edmonton Eskimos or not those who use these images view their
of the Canadian Football League are currently behavior as racist or claim non-racist intentions.
assessing the results of a public 2018 survey on • The use of American Indian mascots
whether their name, which many Inuit people undermines the ability of American Indian
find demeaning, should be changed. nations to represent their own experiences,
These names reduce to stereotypes the ethnic cultural practices, and traditions in authentic and
identities of people with diverse histories of colo- meaningful ways....
nization and resistance, who are often living • Research has established that the continued
today in marginalized communities. It’s import- use of American Indian sports mascots harms
ant to note that the AAA argues that these American Indian people in psychological,
names are demeaning whether or not that is the educational, and social ways;
intention of the users.
• The continued use of American Indian mascots
in sport has been denounced by American Indian
Excerpt from “AAA Statement on Sports Team advocacy organizations, as well as academic,
Mascot Names” educational, and civil rights organizations....
Adopted by the AAA Executive Board March THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT The
20, 2015 American Anthropological Association calls

Whereas: for professional and college sport organiza-
tions to immediately denounce and abandon
• Anthropologists are committed to promoting
the use of American Indian nicknames, logos,
and protecting the right of all peoples to
and mascots, while respecting the right of indi-
the full realization of their humanity, that is,
vidual tribes to decide how to protect and
their capacity for culture, and rights to self-
celebrate their respective cultural heritage.
determination, and sovereignty....
(American Anthropological Association 2015,
www.americananthro.org)
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an airplane. We might think of it in terms of technology, because we can now text
or video chat in real time with almost anyone in the world, making the distance
between us seem less, even though it is not. We can also get to know people online—
and know them as well as anyone in our physical community—no matter where
they are, making the cultural distance seem less as well.
But decreasing cultural distance also brings its challenges. Actor Kumail
Nanjiani, whose comedy routine addresses being Muslim in the United States
today, says, “The world is getting smaller. And people are bumping up against people
from different parts of the world with very different points of view. The challenge
of our time is going to be how do you allow other points of view to exist within
what you traditionally see as your world?” (n.d.). This is where cultural anthropol-
ogy comes in. The approach and guiding principles of cultural anthropology allow
us to understand others without judging them, and use knowledge of their histo-
ries and cultural contexts to understand why they do the things they do, even—and
especially—when those things are different from what we do.
This book will introduce tools and concepts that will be useful as you navigate
the smallness of the world, in whatever field you will eventually enter. There are
cultural anthropologists working as consultants for organizations and corporations;
as diplomats; as medical consultants, doctors, and nurses; in sustainability, eco-tour-
ism, and travel careers; in human resources and social work, and many others.
Anthropology degrees pop up where you might least expect them: actors Hugh
Laurie, Ashley Judd, Thandie Newton, and Cole Sprouse studied anthropology, as
did chefs Giada de Laurentiis and Rick Bayless. Fiction writers with degrees in
anthropology include science fiction master Ursula K. Le Guin and Slaughterhouse
Five author Kurt Vonnegut. Dr. Jim Yong Kim, the president of the World Bank
since 2012, has an anthropology degree, as does Dr. Ashraf Ghani, who taught
anthropology in the United States and was elected president of Afghanistan. This
is not to argue that getting a BA in anthropology will make you rich, famous, or
able to cook a five-star meal. However, it does say something about the expansive
and creative perspective that anthropology training supports. Cultural anthropol-
ogists have generally marketable skills for the twenty-first century: an interest in
people, understanding of diversity, and ability to work with others no matter how
different they may be from you.
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SUMMARY
This chapter has introduced the field of cultural anthropology. Mirroring the learn-
ing objectives stated in the chapter opening, the key points are:
•• Cultural anthropology is one of four academic fields in the larger discipline of

anthropology.
•• Cultural anthropology focuses on the study of culture, or the things that
people think (beliefs), do (behaviors), and have (material culture).
•• There are many subfields of cultural anthropology in which people specialize,
such as digital anthropology or the anthropology of education.
•• Questions of the relationships of people to food and their environments are
essential to understanding culture. This book will emphasize these topics.
•• There are many frameworks that may be used to guide one’s research in order
to approach an issue from different perspectives.
•• The history of anthropological thought has many different ideas about how
to study culture. Not all of them have been free of racist or Eurocentric ideas
and practices.
•• Cultural anthropology is important today in order to live in a global
community that fosters understanding and objectivity.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. What are the four academic fields of anthropology?

2. What is the focus of cultural anthropology?
3. Why are issues of food and sustainability important in cultural anthropology?
4. What is a framework?
5. How does the history of anthropological thought provided show larger changes
in how people think about culture?

6. What are some of the criticisms of anthropology by African American and
Indigenous scholars?
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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Provide an example of how an item that you own illustrates the three compo-
nents of culture: how do people think about it (what does it mean), what do
people do with it, and why do people have it?
2. If you were to choose a subfield of cultural anthropology to study, which would
you choose and why?
3. What frameworks do you use to make sense of the world?
4. What kinds of careers might welcome a degree in cultural anthropology in
addition to the ones listed here?
Visit lensofculturalanthropology.com for the following additional resources:
self-study weblinks further reading

questions
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Cultural anthropology is a

kind of lens, bringing focus

• how cultural anthropology is relevant today

INTRODUCTION: THE LENS OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

2 THROUGH THE LENS OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

sprayed with water after

CHAPTER 1: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology 3

4 THROUGH THE LENS OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Parson (1949:8) those patterns relative to behavior and the products of

THE CULTURE CONCEPT

CHAPTER 1: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology 5

Ethnicity Gender and sexuality

Language Political systems

Food procurement and diet Belief systems

Social organization Illness and healing

Economic systems People’s relationship with the environment

Kinship, marriage, and family

THE FIELD OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Anthropology is a very large discipline of study. It has to be, considering anthro-

anthropology Types of Cultural Anthropology

6 THROUGH THE LENS OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Subfield of Cultural Anthropology

Anthropology of education Economic anthropology

Anthropology of family and kinship Medical anthropology

Anthropology of food and nutrition Political anthropology

Anthropology of gender and sexuality Public anthropology

Anthropology of religion Psychological anthropology

Digital anthropology Queer anthropology

Feminist anthropology Urban anthropology

Ecological or environmental anthropology Visual anthropology

The Importance of Food to Anthropology

CHAPTER 1: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology 7

8 THROUGH THE LENS OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

The Connections between Anthropology and Sustainability

CHAPTER 1: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology 9

10 THROUGH THE LENS OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

CHAPTER 1: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology 11

12 THROUGH THE LENS OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Marx and Engels

CHAPTER 1: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology 13

In the early decades of the twentieth century, British anthropologist Bronislaw

14 THROUGH THE LENS OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

CHAPTER 1: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology 15

Contributions of African American Anthropologists

One of the best-known vindicationist thinkers is W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963;

16 THROUGH THE LENS OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

If the Negroes were still lost in the forests of

nutritional support, and parental involvement. Anthropologist Louis King’s (1898–

CHAPTER 1: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology 17

ANTHROPOLOGY AND COLONIALISM

American Anthropological Association first developed a Code of Ethics in 1971. It

18 THROUGH THE LENS OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Deloria demanded that anthropology re-examine its practices and assumptions.

and collaborative relationships.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY

CHAPTER 1: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology 19

20, 2015 American Anthropological Association calls

20 THROUGH THE LENS OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

CHAPTER 1: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology 21