The Anthropological Perspective: What Makes it Unique

Roy C Dudgeon

The concept of culture is anthropology’s key concept. Besides the culture concept, however,
anthropology also has various other distinctive ways of thinking about the world or about human
cultures and societies. Of course this is true of any academic discipline, each of which is guided
by certain models or premises concerning the world and how it approaches the phenomena it
studies.

I would like to discuss four main perspectives, each of which are not only central to the
discipline of anthropology, but also make it unique among the social sciences. These include its:
cross-cultural or comparative emphasis, its evolutionary/historical emphasis, its ecological
emphasis and its holistic emphasis.

1. A cross-cultural or comparative approach is central to anthropological understanding. This

emphasis also makes anthropology unique among the social sciences. Unlike sociologists,
psychologists, economists and political scientists, anthropologists look beyond the confines of
our own society and compare it to the beliefs and practices of other societies, past and present.
Where a sociologist, for example, may attempt to explain social organization with reference only
to their own society, an anthropologist would almost invariably go on to compare and contrast
our own patterns of social organization with other societies.

This comparative emphasis is important. It helps anthropologists to avoid equating “human

nature,” for example, with the peculiarities of our own contemporary society. Quite simply, just
because we all take some belief or style of behavior for granted in the present, does not mean
human beings everywhere, or throughout human history, would have agreed. As John Bodley
(1999) puts it, an examination of the wide diversity of other societies encourages anthropologists
“to view their own culture through an outsider’s eyes.” In other words, studying other cultures
with very different understandings of the world, very different customs and styles of life, leads to
what anthropologists refer to as “defamiliarization.”

Defamiliarization refers to the process through which you develop an ability to look at our own
culture as though it were a foreign culture through the study of other societies. That is, extensive
cross-cultural study allows one to think more critically about one’s own culture, and to
understand that many aspects of one’s own beliefs or ways of doing things, which we all take for
granted on a daily basis, are actually not only completely arbitrary, but also far from universal
throughout human history, or even in the present day in many cases.

Many others of our practices or beliefs are actually very recent phenomena. This is something
which is reemphasized by anthropology’s second emphasis.

2. The second major emphasis which is distinctive of anthropology as a social science is its
evolutionary/historical approach. This approach, coming from archeology and physical
anthropology, focuses upon both the biological and cultural evolution of human beings and of
human societies. It is also one of the reasons why a four subfields approach is so important to the
discipline as a whole.

An evolutionary/historical approach is “diachronic.” In other words, it is focused upon the

understanding of and description of patterns of change over time. This approach provides time
depth to an anthropological perspective which, along with its cross-cultural emphasis, helps to
put contemporary society and contemporary patterns of social development into an historical
context.

The third and fourth major emphases which are distinctive of anthropology as a social science-
which are very closely related to one another-are its focus upon:

3. an ecological approach, which views human societies or cultures within the context of larger
natural systems and,

4. an holistic approach, which is very closely related to an ecological approach philosophically.

In fact, anthropology was the first social science to begin to incorporate ecological insights into
its studies of human behavior and society. Ecology has been part of the discipline at least since
the 1960s. Anthropology also remains the only social science which continues to incorporate
ecology in a significant and integral way (even though all anthropologists wouldn’t agree that we
should be ecological). So if you are interested in learning about how socio-cultural systems
interact with natural or ecological systems, anthropology has the longest history of studying this
problem.

The reason so many anthropologists are also ecologists is not difficult to understand. The simple
reason is that, as sciences, both ecology and anthropology are “holistic.”

As a philosophical principle, “holism” simply refers to the assumption that no complex entity
can be considered to be no more than the sum of its parts. Holism in anthropology, then, is the
assumption that any given aspect of human life is to be studied with an eye to the way it is
related to other aspects of human life. In other words, holism is a synonym for a relational
emphasis; an emphasis upon studying the /relationships/ among all aspects of culture-rather than
“whole” cultures.

Anthropology’s holistic emphasis is also the main reason that it was the social science that most
readily adopted an ecological approach. After all, ecology defines itself as the study of the
/relationships/ among living organisms, and between living organisms and the inorganic
environment. A holistic and anthropological approach simply takes the same premise, and
applies it to the study of humanity and human societies.

Of course, anthropology doesn’t focus only upon the relationships between human societies and
their organic and inorganic environments, but also upon the social relations among the members
of societies, the relationships between societies, and the relationships between various aspects of
culture. For example, the relationships between particular patterns of subsistence, particular
technologies, particular economic and political systems, and particular ideologies, or patterns of
belief.
From an anthropological perspective, these various systems are not only related to one another,
they are also seen as integrated with one another. In other words, all of the various cultural
institutions or systems more-or-less fit with one another, or mutually support one another (with a
reasonable degree of conflict admittedly inherent in many social systems).

Thus, following a relational understanding of holism and ecology, what we are studying is the
relationships between things, rather than dividing them up into bits for separate study. And this is
a premise which both ecology and anthropology share, which may explain why anthropology is
the social science which has made the most use of an ecological approach. Because of the
discipline’s holistic or relational emphasis, anthropologists were, in a sense, “pre-adapted” to an
ecological approach at a theoretical level, even before ecological issues began to become
important.

There has, however, been a general trend towards /specialization/ within other disciplines, ever
since the advent of modern science. The trend has been towards narrowly focused disciplines in
which experts end up knowing “more and more about less and less,” as the saying goes.
Anthropology bucks this trend. As does ecology. This is because both anthropologists and
ecologists are /generalists/ rather than specialists. Indeed, even when anthropologists study any
particular aspect of culture-such as political systems for example-we are always looking at the
way they are /related/ to other aspects of culture.

In fact, the holistic and ecological emphasis of much contemporary anthropology can only make
the discipline’s insights more and more relevant as ecological issues continue to become more
important in contemporary society.

References, additional readings:

John H. Bodley (1999) “Victims of Progress,” Mayfield Publishing Company.

Richard H. Robbins (2005) “Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism,” Pearson.

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