What anthropology is: the study of humankind, whole and compared

What this chapter is for

This chapter answers the first question of the subject, which is what anthropology is. It gives you the definitions, the four fields the discipline is divided into, and the four habits of work that make anthropology different from every other social science. Those habits are seeing a custom as part of a whole way of life, comparing all the world’s peoples, living among the people you study, and setting your own judgement aside while you learn. When you finish, you should be able to define anthropology the way anthropologists do, explain each habit with a real people and a named anthropologist, and show what the discipline offers Pakistan.

The chapter has three parts. The first says what anthropology is and what it studies, and lays out its four fields. The second teaches the four habits of work, one at a time, then shows how they set anthropology apart from its neighbours, and asks whether anthropology is a science or one of the humanities. The third shows the discipline at work in the Trobriand Islands, in Swat and in Pakistan’s polio campaign, says where it stands today, and gives its critics their say.

It answers the first item of FPSC’s syllabus, the definition of anthropology.¹ Every later chapter stands on this one. The examiners asked for the definition of anthropology outright in CE-2018 and CE-2023, and almost every question in the paper expects you to write as an anthropologist, which this chapter teaches you to do.²

Before you start

The words

• Anthropology. The study of human beings, everywhere and in every age. It covers their bodies, their past, their languages and their ways of life.
• Culture. The whole way of life a people learns and shares, with its customs, beliefs, tools, food, language and rules. The chapter on what culture is teaches the word in full. Here you need only the plain sense.
• Society. A group of people who live together under shared rules and depend on one another.
• The four fields. The four branches of anthropology, which are biological anthropology, archaeology, linguistic anthropology and socio-cultural anthropology.
• Holism. Studying a custom as one part of a whole way of life, and asking how it is tied to everything else.
• Cross-cultural comparison. Setting the customs of many peoples side by side to find what is shared by all humans and what varies.
• Fieldwork. Going to live among a people for a long time, often a year or more, to learn their way of life at first hand.
• Participant observation. The main method of fieldwork. The anthropologist takes part in daily life and watches it at the same time.
• Ethnography. The written account of one people, made from fieldwork.
• Ethnology. The comparison of many peoples, using the ethnographies written about each.
• The insider’s view. What a custom means to the people who follow it, as against what it looks like to an outsider.
• Ethnocentrism. Judging other peoples by the standards of your own, as if yours were the only right way.
• Cultural relativism. In anthropology, a working attitude. You set your own judgement aside for a while, so that you can understand a custom in its own setting first.
• Descent. The rule a society uses to say which relatives a person belongs to. A patrilineal rule traces the family through the father, a matrilineal one through the mother.

The places

• The Trobriand Islands. A small group of coral islands off the eastern tip of New Guinea, in the western Pacific Ocean. They are now part of Papua New Guinea. Bronislaw Malinowski lived there during the First World War, and his book about them made fieldwork the method of the discipline.
• Swat. A valley in the north of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, on the Swat River. The Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth studied its Pukhtun (Pathan) villages in 1954.
• Mohla. A village near Gujrat in Punjab. The anthropologist Zekiye Eglar lived there in the early 1950s and wrote A Punjabi Village in Pakistan about it.
• Hunza and Indus Kohistan. Mountain valleys in Gilgit-Baltistan and northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Their peoples, the Burusho of Hunza and the Kohistanis, are among the societies anthropologists have compared across the world.

The story in plain words

1. Anthropology studies human beings as a whole, with their bodies, their past, their languages and their ways of life.
2. It has four branches, and each asks a different question about the same subject.
3. An anthropologist studies a custom by asking how it fits into the rest of a people’s life.
4. Anthropologists compare all the world’s peoples, not only modern or Western ones, to learn what is human and what is local.
5. They learn about a people by living among them for a long time, taking part and watching.
6. While they learn, they hold back their own judgement, so that they can see the custom as its own people see it.
7. These four habits make anthropology different from sociology, history, psychology and economics.
8. Governments and aid bodies use anthropology to understand why a plan works in one place and fails in another, as Pakistan’s polio campaign showed.
9. The discipline grew up in the age of European empires, and its critics ask how far that shaped what it saw.

1. Anthropology is the study of humankind

Think of a wedding in a village of central Punjab. A woman sits in a corner with a notebook, writing down every gift. She notes who gave a suit, who gave cash and how much, and which family sent sweets. An outsider might think she is only being careful with money. A relative knows better. The notebook is a record of debts between families, and each gift will be returned, a little larger, at a wedding in the giver’s house. That gift exchange ties the families of the village together over many years. It also shows each family’s standing, and it decides who will help whom when a crop fails or someone dies.

To understand that one notebook you need to know about money, kinship, status, marriage, religion and the farming year, all at once. You need to know what the gifts mean to the people giving them, which may differ from what they seem to mean to you. You also gain a great deal by knowing whether other peoples of the world exchange gifts in the same way, and why. That combination, a whole way of life, seen from inside and compared with all others, is anthropology.

The definition

Anthropology is the study of human beings in all places and all times. It studies their bodies and how they evolved, the remains of their past, their languages, and the ways of life of living peoples. The word comes from two Greek words, anthropos, a human being, and logos, study or knowledge. So the name itself says “the study of humankind”.

The American Anthropological Association, the professional body of anthropologists in the United States, puts it in one line. Anthropology, it says, “is the study of what makes us human”.³ The association adds that the discipline draws on the social sciences, the biological sciences and the humanities together, which is unusual. An economist does not usually need to know about bones, and a biologist does not usually need to know about poetry. An anthropologist may need both.

The founders of the discipline defined it in the same broad way. Edward Burnett Tylor, an Englishman often called the father of anthropology, wrote a textbook of the subject in 1881. He called anthropology “the science of Man and Civilization”. He said its parts range “from body to mind, from language to music, from fire-making to morals”.⁴ Look at how wide that list is. It runs from the human body to the human mind, and from the most practical skill to the highest ideas of right and wrong. No other science claims all of that.

The American anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn gave a shorter definition in 1949. By the beginning of the twentieth century, he wrote, the early anthropologists were asking why some peoples pass on property in the male line and others in the female, and why some are ruled by a king and others by old men. In answering such questions, “anthropology had become the science of human similarities and differences”.⁵ That phrase holds the whole method in a few words. Anthropology asks what all human beings share and how and why they differ, and it answers by looking at all of them.

Why the discipline holds up a mirror

Kluckhohn’s book was called Mirror for Man, and in it he explained why anthropologists spend years among small, distant peoples who seem to have nothing to do with modern life. “It would hardly be fish who discovered the existence of water,” he wrote.⁵ A fish lives in water all its life and never notices it. People are the same with their own customs. You do not notice that your way of greeting, eating or marrying is a custom at all until you see a people who do it differently.

So anthropology studies other peoples in order to see all peoples more clearly, ourselves included. Kluckhohn put it in one sentence. “Anthropology holds up a great mirror to man and lets him look at himself in his infinite variety.”⁵ When a Pakistani student reads about how the Trobriand Islanders exchange shell necklaces, the point is not the necklaces. The point is that the student starts to see the gift notebook at a Punjabi wedding as a custom with a purpose, which it is.

You can now build a definition that earns marks. It has three parts. Anthropology is the study of human beings; it studies them whole, body, past, language and way of life together; and it studies all of them, in every place and every age, by comparing them. A fourth feature is often added, which is the method. Anthropology learns about a people mainly by living among them. The sections that follow teach each of these features in turn, because each is a habit of work you will be expected to show in your answers.

2. What anthropology studies

The first thing that sets anthropology apart is the range of people it studies. Most social sciences grew up studying the modern societies of Europe and North America. Economics studied markets and industry. Political science studied states and elections. Sociology, in its early years, studied the industrial cities of Europe. The peoples who had no factories, no written laws and no parliaments were left out, or were treated as a stage that “advanced” societies had passed through.

Anthropology began by studying exactly those peoples. Hunters in the Kalahari Desert, herders in East Africa, island farmers in the Pacific and tribes in the mountains of the North-West Frontier were among its classic subjects. That is not because anthropologists thought these peoples were simple. It is because a science of humankind that leaves out most of humankind is not a science of humankind at all. Today anthropologists study every kind of society, from a village in Thar to a bank in Karachi, a hospital ward, a software company or a mosque. What has stayed is the rule that no people is too small, too poor or too far away to teach us about being human.

The second thing that sets the subject apart is its reach in time. Anthropology also studies the human past, much further back than history can. History works from written records, and writing is only about five thousand years old. Human beings are far older than that. Archaeologists, who form one of anthropology’s four fields, study the past from what people left behind, such as tools, bones, pots, houses and graves. In Pakistan, the remains at Mehrgarh in Balochistan and at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa tell us how people lived thousands of years ago, in times that no writing we can read describes. Biological anthropologists go further still, to the first human ancestors millions of years ago.

The third is its reach across body and mind. Anthropology studies human bodies as well as human ideas. It asks how human beings evolved, how we differ from apes, why people in different parts of the world differ in height, skin colour or blood group, and how diet and disease shape the body. This is what Tylor meant by a science that runs “from body to mind”.⁴ The body and the mind are studied together because they shape each other. What people eat depends on their culture, and their health depends on what they eat.

If an examiner asks for the subject matter of anthropology, as CE-2023 did, these are its parts. Anthropology studies human evolution and the variety of human bodies; the human past, through what people left behind; human language and how it shapes thought and social life; and the ways of life of living peoples. That last part includes their families and marriages, their ways of making a living, their politics and law, their religions and beliefs, their arts and their changes. In every one of these, it studies all peoples and compares them.¹⁹³ The four fields in the next section are those same parts, divided among specialists.

3. The four fields, one subject and four questions

Anthropology is usually divided into four fields. Each one asks a different question about human beings. Figure 1 sets them around the one subject they share.

Biological anthropology, also called physical anthropology, studies the human body. It asks how humans evolved from earlier forms, what we share with apes and monkeys, and why human bodies vary across the world. Its students study fossils, living primates, genes and health.

Archaeology studies the human past from the things people left behind. It asks how people lived before writing, and how they lived in periods that writing does not describe. An archaeologist digging at Mehrgarh learns from seeds, bones and tools how people first began to farm and keep animals in the region.

Linguistic anthropology studies language. It asks how languages work, how they change, how they divide or unite people, and how the way a people speaks shapes the way they think and act. Pakistan, where dozens of languages are spoken, is a rich field for it.

Socio-cultural anthropology, called social anthropology in Britain and cultural anthropology in the United States, studies the ways of life of living peoples. It asks how people organise their families, their work, their politics and their beliefs. Most of this syllabus belongs to this field, and most of the anthropologists you will meet in it, Malinowski, Barth and Eglar among them, worked in it.

Why keep four such different studies in one discipline? The American Anthropological Association calls the four fields “the pillars on which the whole discipline rests”. It adds that an anthropologist usually specialises in one or two of them but knows something of all four.³ The fields are kept together because each needs the others. To understand why a people eats what it eats, you may need biology (what the body needs), archaeology (when the food was first grown there), language (what the food is called and what the name means) and culture (who may eat it, with whom, and at which festivals). The association gives the same example. Everyone needs to eat, but peoples eat different foods and get them in different ways, so anthropology studies food with every field at once.³

This four-field idea came mainly from the United States, where the German-born Franz Boas built the discipline in the early twentieth century. In Britain, anthropology grew mostly as social anthropology alone, and archaeology and biological anthropology became separate departments. The chapter on how anthropology became a science tells that story, and the chapter on the four fields teaches each of them in full. For now, remember the four, and remember that they are four questions about one subject.

4. Seeing a custom whole

What Malinowski found in the Trobriand Islands

The first habit of the anthropologist is to see a custom as part of a whole. The clearest case comes from the Trobriand Islands, where Bronislaw Malinowski lived for about two years over three expeditions during the First World War.⁶ He studied a custom the islanders called the Kula.

The Kula is a ring of exchange between islands. Men sail in canoes across open sea to trade two kinds of shell valuables. Long necklaces of red shell travel round the ring in one direction, and armbands of white shell travel in the other. No man keeps a valuable for long. He receives it from one partner and, after a time, passes it on to another. The islanders had a saying for it, “once in the Kula, always in the Kula”, because a partnership between two men lasts for life.⁶

An outsider would see a strange custom of passing useless ornaments around. Malinowski saw much more, because he looked at what travelled with the Kula. Beside the exchange of shells, the islanders traded ordinary goods that one island lacked and another had. Before an expedition, they built large sea-going canoes. They kept special taboos before setting out, performed spells and public ceremonies, and held great feasts for the dead that were tied to the exchange. Malinowski wrote that the Kula “welds together a considerable number of tribes”, and that its many activities play into one another “so as to form one organic whole”.⁶ Figure 2 draws what he saw.

Look at what this means. You could not understand the islanders’ economy without the Kula, because their trade travelled under its cover. You could not understand their technology, because they built canoes for it. You could not understand their religion, because magic and ritual surrounded it. You could not understand their ties between tribes, because the Kula joined them. One custom led into every part of the islanders’ lives. That is holism, the habit of studying a custom as one part of a whole way of life and asking how it connects to everything else.

The same habit in a Punjabi village

Holism is not only for distant islands. The anthropologist Zekiye Eglar lived in the village of Mohla near Gujrat in the early 1950s. She found that village life rested on a system of gift exchange the villagers called vartan bhanji, reciprocal exchange between families at weddings, funerals and other occasions. Beena Sarwar, who wrote the conclusion to the 2010 edition of Eglar’s work and described Mohla as it is today, calls this system “the backbone of the socio-economic structure of the community”.⁷

Eglar showed how the gifts tied into everything else. A farmer judged whether he was doing better or worse than before by four things together. They were his crop, his cattle, his debts, and whether he had gained or lost social ties by giving and attending at ceremonies.⁷ In other words, wealth in Mohla was measured partly in relationships. The families who served a farmer were paid under a yearly agreement, the seyp, with fodder for their buffaloes, a share of the harvest, and food and clothes for their services at weddings and funerals.⁷ Each craft, the potter’s, the carpenter’s and the blacksmith’s among them, had its fixed place in this order.⁷ The farming year, the family, the craftsmen’s trades and the ceremonies were one system.

Holism also explains change. When a part of a way of life changes, the change spreads to the other parts. Sarwar found that by 2008 Mohla had become a suburb of Gujrat city. Its people worked in factories, schools and banks, and land was no longer the main way of earning a living. As farming lost its place, the ties that had bound the farmer, the craftsman and the potter together came apart, and only the well-off could still keep buffaloes.⁷ An economist would see a change in jobs. A holistic view sees that the change in jobs also changed the family, the ceremonies, the diet and the standing of each household.

This habit matters for anyone who plans change. A new road, a new crop or a new law does not touch only one part of people’s lives. A planner who sees only one part will be surprised by what happens in the others. That is why holism is the first habit to show in an answer.²¹

5. Comparing all the world’s peoples

The second habit is comparison. Anthropology studies one people in depth, but it does not stop there. It sets that people beside others to find what all human beings share and what varies from place to place. This is called cross-cultural comparison, and the branch of the discipline that does it is ethnology.

Comparison protects us from a common mistake. Without it, we take our own customs to be “human nature”. A Pakistani student might assume that every society traces the family through the father, because Pakistan’s peoples mostly do. A student in the Trobriand Islands might assume the opposite, because the Trobrianders trace descent through the mother.⁶ Only by comparing many peoples can you say which is common, which is rare, and what each arrangement tends to go with.

Work through one comparison with me to see what it teaches. In a Punjabi village, a child belongs to the father’s family and the land passes from father to son. Among the Trobriand Islanders, Malinowski found that “a child belongs to the clan and village community of its mother”, and that wealth and social position pass “not from father to son, but from maternal uncle to nephew”.⁶ Set the two side by side and three things follow. First, the father’s line is not the only way to organise a family, so it is a custom and not a law of nature. Second, a matrilineal rule does not mean that women rule. In the Trobriand Islands a man’s wealth passed to his sister’s son, so the heir was still a man, and descent and power are separate questions. Third, the rule of descent decides which group a child belongs to and who inherits, so each society’s rule has to be learned before its quarrels over land make sense. A Punjabi student who has seen this comparison reads a land dispute in their own district with new eyes.

Comparison on that scale, two peoples at a time, has limits. You cannot say from two cases which rule is common in the world. For that, anthropologists needed to compare hundreds of peoples on the same features.

A great effort at comparison was made by the American anthropologist George Peter Murdock and his colleagues. They read the ethnographies of hundreds of peoples and coded the same features for each one. These included how they make a living, how they marry, where a couple lives after marriage, how they trace descent, and much more. The corrected version of their Ethnographic Atlas, published in 1999, describes 1,291 societies from all over the world, from great farming civilisations to small bands of hunters.⁸

Figure 3 counts one of those features across all 1,291, the main rule each society uses to trace descent.

The result teaches several things at once. Tracing descent through the father is the commonest rule in the world, found in 590 societies, about 46 per cent. Yet more than half of the world’s societies do something else. Bilateral descent, where a person belongs equally to the father’s and the mother’s family, is found in 362 societies, about 28 per cent. Matrilineal descent is found in 160, about 12 per cent.⁸ So the Punjabi way is common but not universal.

Now look at the peoples of Pakistan in the Atlas. The Sindhis, the Marri Baloch, the West Punjabis studied by Eglar and others, the Kohistanis, the Burusho of Hunza and the Shina speakers of the northern mountains are all coded patrilineal. One people is coded differently. The Yusufzai Pathans of Swat, coded mainly from Barth’s work, are placed among the 50 “mixed” societies.⁸ In the Atlas’s codebook, “mixed” means that a society has descent groups traced through one line and, beside them, a second kind of kin group traced through both parents. The Yusufzai have large patrilineal descent groups. They also have kindreds, the circle of relatives a person counts on both the father’s and the mother’s side.⁸ So the people Barth described as reckoning descent “strictly in the male line” turn out, when coded with care, to use two principles at once.¹² That is the kind of finding comparison makes possible. Keep it apart from Barth’s own argument about Swat, which comes in the section on anthropology at work. The Atlas code is about kinds of kin group, and Barth’s argument is about how men choose whom to follow. Both show that descent is not the whole story in Swat.

Comparison of this kind lets anthropology test ideas that would otherwise be guesses. If someone claims that a certain way of making a living always goes with a certain kind of family, the claim can be checked against hundreds of peoples. Comparison also shows the range of human possibility. Human beings have organised marriage, property, politics and religion in many more ways than any one society would guess. A civil servant who knows that range is slower to assume that the way things are done in one district is the only way they can be done.²²

6. Living among the people: fieldwork and the insider’s view

The third habit is the method. An economist may work from figures, a historian from documents, and a psychologist from experiments. An anthropologist learns about a people mainly by going to live among them for a long time, often a year or more. This is fieldwork, and its main method is participant observation, which means taking part in daily life and watching it at the same time. Figure 4 shows the path from a question to knowledge.

Malinowski set the standard. He lived in the Trobriand Islands for about two years, learned the language well, and worked alone, “living for the greater part of the time right in the villages”, so that he had the people’s daily life constantly before his eyes.⁶ Before him, many famous anthropologists had never met the peoples they wrote about. They worked from the reports of travellers, traders and missionaries. Evans-Pritchard tells how the American philosopher William James once asked Sir James Frazer, the author of a famous study of magic and religion, about the natives he had known. Frazer exclaimed, “But Heaven forbid!”¹⁰ Malinowski’s way of working became the training of every anthropologist after him, and long fieldwork is still the heart of that training today.²³

Why stay so long? There are good reasons. First, people behave differently in front of a stranger. Over months, the anthropologist stops being a stranger, and people go back to their normal lives. Second, what people say they do and what they actually do are often different. A villager may tell a visitor that land always passes to all the sons equally, while the anthropologist who stays sees which son in fact farms it. Third, many events happen only once a year or once in a lifetime, such as the harvest, the wedding season, a feud, a death. A short visit misses them.

The long stay also teaches the language, and language carries meaning. A word such as izzat or biradari cannot be translated into English in one word. The anthropologist learns what it means by hearing it used in quarrels, at weddings and in jokes. That is why the anthropologist’s first task in the field is to learn to speak as the people speak.

All this work has one goal, and Malinowski named it. It was “to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world”.⁶ The word “native” here simply means the people who belong to the place. Today we call this goal the insider’s view, meaning what a custom means to the people who follow it.

The insider’s view is not the anthropologist’s only view. A good anthropologist holds two views at once. One is the insider’s, how the people themselves understand their custom. The other is the outsider’s, what the custom does that the people may not notice. The Trobrianders saw the Kula as an honourable exchange of famous valuables. Malinowski also saw that it joined many tribes across the sea in lasting ties and carried their trade. The chapter on fieldwork gives the technical names for these two views and teaches the method in full.

Fieldwork produces an ethnography, the written account of one people. Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) is an ethnography of the Trobrianders. Barth’s Political Leadership among Swat Pathans (1959) is an ethnography of Swat. Eglar’s A Punjabi Village in Pakistan is an ethnography of Mohla.¹²⁷ When anthropologists compare many ethnographies, as Murdock did, they are doing ethnology. Keep the two words apart. Ethnography describes one people. Ethnology compares many.

7. Setting judgement aside for a while

The fourth habit concerns judgement. Every one of us grows up inside one culture, and we learn its ways as the natural and right ones. It is easy, then, to judge every other people by our own standards and find them strange, backward or wrong. This is ethnocentrism, and all peoples do it. A visitor from abroad may think it odd that Pakistanis eat with the right hand. A Pakistani may think it odd that some peoples eat raw fish. Each judges the other by home standards.²⁰

Where does this come from? Every child learns the ways of its own people from parents, teachers, elders and religious leaders. Anthropologists call this process enculturation. By the time we are adults we carry a great deal of knowledge about how our society works, and we could not live without it. It is natural, then, to value our own ways. The trouble begins when one people treats its ways as so superior that it cannot see any worth in others.²⁰

History shows how harmful that can be. When European powers ruled Africa, Asia and the Middle East, they described the peoples they ruled in ways that justified their rule. Africans were pictured as simple and savage. The peoples of Asia and the Middle East, Muslims prominent among them, were pictured as irrational, fanatical and ruled by tyrants. The literary critic Edward Said named this second picture orientalism, and showed how it lived on in Western books and films long after the empires ended.²⁰ A Pakistani student has met orientalism in films and news reports, and so knows from the receiving end what ethnocentrism does. Anthropology at its best is the discipline that corrects such pictures with evidence from the people themselves.

Ethnocentrism stops understanding. If you have already decided a custom is foolish, you will not ask what it does for the people who keep it. So anthropologists train themselves in a different habit. They set their own judgement aside while they learn, so that they can first understand a custom in its own setting. In anthropology this working attitude is called cultural relativism.

Cultural relativism in anthropology is a method, not a moral rule. It does not say that every custom is good, or that nothing may ever be judged. It says that you must understand before you judge, and that a custom can only be understood within the whole way of life it belongs to.²² A doctor examining a patient also holds back judgement until the examination is done. That does not mean the doctor thinks every illness is fine.

The difference matters, because philosophers use “cultural relativism” for a stronger view, that right and wrong are fixed by each society and nothing stands above them. An anthropologist need not hold that view. The American anthropologist Bettina Shell-Duncan studied female genital cutting among the Rendille people of northern Kenya in this way, setting her own opinion aside and spending long periods in the communities. She went on to work with the Population Council, a research body, on a project to reduce the practice. Her understanding showed her who in the community actually made the decision, what the practice meant to them, and which kind of persuasion would work.²²

For a Pakistani officer the lesson is direct. A campaign that begins by telling a community its customs are backward usually fails. A campaign that first learns why the community does what it does can work with the community’s own values. The chapter on judging other cultures teaches ethnocentrism, cultural relativism and the human universals in full.

8. How anthropology differs from its neighbours

Anthropology shares its subject, human life in society, with several other disciplines. What sets it apart is its approach and its method, which is exactly what the examiners asked in CE-2018. The two words mean different things, so keep them apart. The approach is the way a discipline looks at its subject, the questions it asks and the angle it takes. The method is the way it collects its evidence. Two disciplines can study the same village with different approaches and different methods, and come back with different knowledge.

Take that village and send four scholars to it. An economist collects figures on crops, prices and incomes, and asks whether the farmers are using their land efficiently. A sociologist hands out a survey to a few hundred households and asks how many children go to school, and why. A historian goes to the district record room and reads the land settlement reports of the British period. An anthropologist moves into a house in the village for a year, learns the local speech, attends the weddings and funerals, sits in the evening gatherings, and asks how the crops, the schooling, the land records and the weddings fit together in the villagers’ own eyes. Each comes back with something true. Only the anthropologist comes back with the whole, seen from inside. The table sets the differences out discipline by discipline.

The four habits in the last four sections are the difference in short. Anthropology looks at a custom whole, where the others usually look at one part of life. It compares all peoples, where the others usually study modern societies. It learns by fieldwork, where the others usually use surveys, documents or experiments. It holds back judgement while it learns, so that it can report the people’s own view before it weighs that view.

The lines between these disciplines are not walls. Kluckhohn called anthropology “an overlapping study with bridges into the physical, biological, and social sciences and into the humanities”.⁵ He also warned that it “cannot pretend to be the whole study of man, though perhaps it comes closer than any other branch of science”.⁵ Sociologists now use fieldwork, and anthropologists use surveys. Historians read ethnographies to understand the peoples in their documents, and anthropologists read archives to understand how a people came to be as it is. Economists who study development have learned from anthropologists that a market is also a set of relationships. The chapter on anthropology and the other social sciences teaches each relationship in full. What you need here is the core of the difference, which is the four habits.

9. Is anthropology a science?

Every definition so far has called anthropology a science. Tylor called it “the science of Man and Civilization”, and Kluckhohn “the science of human similarities and differences”. Yet the discipline studies meanings, beliefs and values, which cannot be weighed or measured like rocks or cells. So anthropologists have long argued about what kind of knowledge they make. The answer you give shapes how you write about the subject, and a candidate who knows the two sides can handle any question that asks what anthropology is.

The first side holds that anthropology is a science like the natural sciences. Many of the men who turned it into a profession at the end of the nineteenth century had been trained as natural scientists. Evans-Pritchard lists them. Franz Boas was a physicist and geographer, Alfred Haddon a marine zoologist, W. H. R. Rivers a physiologist, and Malinowski himself a physicist. They had been taught that a scientist tests ideas against his own observations, which is one reason they went to the field themselves.¹⁰ Malinowski called anthropology “the science of man at large”, the last of the studies of humankind to arrive, and argued that “the real meeting-ground of all branches of anthropology is the scientific study of culture”.⁹ The British anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown compared a society to a living body, in which each custom does a job for the whole, as each organ does for the body.¹⁰ On this view the anthropologist collects facts, compares societies and looks for general laws of social life, much as a biologist looks for laws of living things.

The second side holds that anthropology is closer to the humanities, the study of history, literature and ideas. Its leading voice was E. E. Evans-Pritchard, professor of social anthropology at Oxford, in a series of lectures broadcast by the BBC in 1950. He said there was “a broad division of opinion between those who regard social anthropology as a natural science and those, like myself, who regard it as one of the humanities”.¹⁰ For him the anthropologist first learns to speak a people’s language, think in their concepts and feel in their values, and then “translates from one culture into another”. Anthropology, he argued, studies societies “as moral, or symbolic, systems and not as natural systems”, so that it “seeks patterns and not laws” and “interprets rather than explains”.¹⁰ On this view the anthropologist is nearer to a historian of ideas than to a physicist.

Most anthropologists today take something from both sides. The discipline uses scientific tools where they fit. Biological anthropologists date fossils and read genes, archaeologists use laboratory methods, and ethnologists test ideas against hundreds of societies, as Murdock did. It also interprets, because a gift, a greeting or a ritual means something to the people who perform it, and that meaning has to be understood before it can be counted. This is why the American Anthropological Association describes the discipline as drawing on the social sciences, the biological sciences and the humanities at once.³ In an answer, you can put it in one sentence. Anthropology is a social science in its comparison and its testing of ideas, and close to the humanities in its search for meaning, and its strength is that it does both.

10. Anthropology at work in three places

The Trobriand Islands: a theory of exchange

Malinowski’s study of the Kula did more than describe one custom. It showed that exchange is not only about getting things. The shell valuables had no use. Men gave them away to gain fame and to keep lifelong partners, and ordinary trade travelled with them.⁶ Economists of the time assumed that people trade to get what they need at the best price. The Kula showed that people also exchange to build relationships, and that the relationship can matter more than the goods. That idea runs through the later study of gifts, of reciprocity and of the economy as part of culture. The gift notebook at a Punjabi wedding is the same idea at home.

Swat: how politics works where there is no modern state

Fredrik Barth went to Swat in 1954 and published Political Leadership among Swat Pathans in 1959. Political scientists of his day studied states and their institutions. Barth studied how power worked in villages where each ward was led by a chief, who had to be a Yusufzai landowner. He found that the Pukhtuns traced descent strictly in the male line, and that a chief’s nearest rivals were his own lineage equals. He also found that the chiefs and their followers were divided into two large, scattered political blocs, which the people called dala.¹² Most importantly, Barth argued that the society was not run by descent alone. Descent fixed a man’s place at birth, but most positions and rights were set by agreements that people entered into by choice.¹² A chief had to keep his followers, and he feared that they were dealing with his rivals behind his back, just as he dealt with theirs.¹²

Barth’s work is a classic of anthropology for two reasons. It showed how order is kept in a society without a modern state, which is a question political science had barely asked. It also showed that people in a so-called traditional society make choices and calculate their interests, which overturned the idea that tradition simply rules their lives. The Pakistani anthropologist Akbar S. Ahmed, who served as a Political Agent in the tribal areas, later studied the Mohmand Pukhtuns.¹³ The chapter on anthropology in Pakistan takes up both men’s work.

Pakistan’s polio campaign: why a plan fails on the ground

The third case is closer to the work of a civil servant. Pakistan and Afghanistan are the two countries where wild poliovirus is still endemic. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative’s update of 14 October 2026 counted six cases in Pakistan in 2026, against 31 in 2025.¹¹ Svea Closser, then an anthropologist at Middlebury College in the United States and fluent in Urdu, did fieldwork on the polio eradication campaign in Pakistan in 2006 and 2007 and published Chasing Polio in Pakistan in 2010.¹⁴ She did not ask the technical question of the vaccine. She asked the anthropologist’s question, which is how the campaign actually worked among the people who ran it and the families it reached.

Her findings, as Samuel Katz summarises them in his review, surprised many health experts. She found that mothers generally “accepted polio vaccination without giving the matter much thought”.¹⁴ So the problem in those years lay less in families refusing and more in how the campaign was organised. Instructions passed from international offices to Islamabad and down to the districts, and the plan was made far from the people who had to carry it out. Closser found that many officials saw eradication as a goal set by the rich nations and passed down through WHO and the United Nations, at a time when diarrhoea, chest infections and meningitis weighed more heavily on the country. So orders from the top were carried out slowly and unevenly further down.¹⁴ The vaccinators who walked from house to house were paid $2.00 a day.¹⁴ Closser’s remedy was partnership in place of orders from above, with organisations working beside local agencies district by district.¹⁴ Katz, who had long experience of the World Health Organization, wrote that her “anthropological approach may provide solutions” to the campaign’s problems.¹⁴

Look at how the four habits produced this result. Closser saw the campaign whole, as a set of relationships rather than a technical programme. She lived in the field and spoke the language, so she saw what the reports did not record. She held back judgement, so she found that the families were not the main obstacle. Her answer was a policy remedy, which is the form a CSS answer should take too.

11. Where anthropology stands now, and why an officer needs it

Anthropology began by studying small and distant peoples. Today it studies every kind of human group. Anthropologists study hospitals, banks, refugee camps, migrant workers, online communities and government offices. The American Anthropological Association points to anthropologists working in technology design, urban planning, the preservation of historic sites, communications and the identification of human remains in crime and disaster.³ Its message is that wherever people are doing something together, anthropology can study it.

The discipline has also turned to the great problems of the age. Anthropologists study how communities live with climate change and disaster, how disease spreads through social life as well as through the body, how development projects change the lives they touch, and how migration reshapes families. The chapter on recent trends and the chapter on applied anthropology teach these in full. The CE-2017 paper asked how anthropology can help study global warming and the loss of biodiversity, and how applied anthropology can help solve humanity’s problems, so these are live questions for the examiner.²

In Pakistan, Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad has a department of anthropology.¹⁸ The CE-2016 examiner singled the university out, calling it “the pioneer forum in the country which provides reading material at the level of M.Phil/Ph.D in the subject”, and advised candidates to consult its library.¹⁶ The chapter on anthropology in Pakistan tells how the discipline grew here, from the district gazetteers of British rule to the university departments of today.

All of this matters most in a country like Pakistan, which is a country of many peoples. Its provinces hold Punjabis, Sindhis, Pukhtuns, Baloch, Brahuis, Saraikis, Kashmiris, the peoples of Gilgit-Baltistan and many more, speaking dozens of languages. A deputy commissioner posted from Lahore to Kohistan, or from Karachi to Kech, enters a way of life with its own rules of family, honour, land and leadership. A plan for schools, vaccination, land records or dispute resolution that ignores those rules is likely to fail, however good it looks on paper.

Anthropology gives the officer three things. It gives the habit of asking how a new measure will touch the whole of people’s lives, not only the part it was designed for. It gives respect for local knowledge, which often holds the reason a custom exists. It gives a method, which is to go and see, listen, and learn before deciding. The examiner of CE-2018 asked candidates for exactly this, writing that the best answers related anthropological findings “with practical issues of Pakistan”.¹⁷ Akbar S. Ahmed, who was both an anthropologist and an officer of the state, is a reminder that the two roles fit together.¹³

12. The critics of anthropology

The strongest criticism concerns where the discipline came from. Anthropology became a profession in the age of European empires. In 1973 the anthropologist Talal Asad edited a book called Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. In its introduction he set out facts he held to be beyond dispute. Anthropology emerged as a distinct discipline at the start of the colonial era. Its work consisted mostly of accounts written by Europeans, for European readers, about non-European societies ruled by European powers.¹⁵ Colonial rule, Asad argued, made those societies open and safe for the anthropologist to study, and anthropologists at times helped colonial power, if only indirectly.¹⁵

Asad was careful not to say that anthropology was simply a servant of empire. He called that view reductive. His point was that the discipline must study the power relations in which its own knowledge was made.¹⁵ For a Pakistani student this criticism has a special meaning, because the British in India gathered a great deal of knowledge about castes, tribes and customs in order to govern, and some of that knowledge fixed the very divisions it described. The chapter on how anthropology became a science, and the chapter on Talal Asad, take this further.

A second criticism follows from the first and is about words. The early anthropologists wrote of “savages”, “barbarians” and “rude” peoples, and placed their own society at the top of a ladder of progress. Tylor’s textbook of 1881 speaks of “the rude man” and of “the lower races”.⁴ Modern anthropology has rejected that ladder and that language. The idea that some peoples are “primitive” and others “advanced” is exactly the ethnocentrism the discipline now teaches students to avoid. When you quote an early anthropologist, quote the idea, and show that you know the language belongs to its time.

A third criticism is that most anthropologists, until recently, came from Europe and North America, and their questions reflected their own concerns. Even with long fieldwork, an outsider may misread what people mean, and people may tell a foreigner what they think the foreigner wants to hear. The field’s answer has been to train anthropologists from the societies being studied, and to take the insider’s view more seriously.²³ Pakistan’s own anthropologists, Akbar S. Ahmed among them, are part of that answer.

A fourth criticism is about method. An ethnography rests on one person’s long stay in one place. Another anthropologist in the same village might see different things, and one village may not stand for a whole region. Critics from the sciences that use large surveys ask how such findings can be checked. Anthropologists reply that long fieldwork reaches what surveys cannot, the meaning behind behaviour, and that comparison across many ethnographies, as in the Ethnographic Atlas, is the check. A good answer states the criticism fairly and gives this reply.

13. What students confuse about anthropology

Anthropology and sociology. Students often write that anthropology studies “primitive” societies and sociology studies “modern” ones. That was roughly true a century ago and is not true now. Today the difference lies in the approach and method, the four habits, not in which societies are studied. The word “primitive” itself loses marks.

Ethnography and ethnology. Ethnography is the account of one people from fieldwork. Ethnology is the comparison of many peoples. Students swap them. Remember that ethnology compares.

Archaeology and history. Both study the past. History works from written records, and archaeology from material remains, which lets it reach the long human past before writing. Archaeology is a field of anthropology. History is a separate discipline.

Cultural relativism as a method and as a moral claim. In anthropology, relativism means understanding before judging. It does not mean that every custom is right. A student who writes that “anthropologists believe all customs are equally good” has confused the method with the moral claim.

Holism and “studying everything”. Holism does not mean an anthropologist studies every fact about a people. It means asking how the custom in question is tied to the rest of their life, as Malinowski did with the Kula.

Anthropology and anthropometry. Anthropometry is the measurement of the human body, an old tool of biological anthropology. It is not the name of the discipline.

14. What the examiners have asked

Two questions in eleven papers asked for this chapter’s subject outright, both for twenty marks.²

• CE-2018, Q2. “Define anthropology. How is it different form other fields of Social Sciences in terms of approach and methodology?” (The spelling “form” is the paper’s.)
• CE-2023, Q2. “Anthropology involves the comparison of different societies to understand the scope of human cultural diversity. Discuss the subject matter of anthropology and how anthropology is related to other disciplines in social sciences.”

Both pair the definition with the relationship to other social sciences, so learn the two together. The first asks how anthropology differs, the second how it is related. The same material serves both, but the conclusion changes. A “differs” answer ends on the four habits that set anthropology apart. A “related” answer ends on how the disciplines borrow from each other. The chapter on anthropology and the other social sciences covers the relationships in more depth.

Other questions rest on this chapter without naming it. CE-2017 asked how anthropology can help study global warming and the loss of biodiversity, and how applied anthropology can help solve humanity’s problems. CE-2020 asked how the knowledge from anthropology’s four branches can help Pakistan develop.² Each of these expects the definition and the four habits in its opening paragraph. Two more lean on particular sections.²

• CE-2018, Q3. “Discuss the issue of objectivity and subjectivity in the field of social research. Explain whether or not objective research is attainable in social anthropology.” The argument over whether anthropology is a science is its core, with the single-observer criticism among the critics. The chapter on fieldwork adds the method.
• CE-2023, Q3. “Economic system refers to the means by which a society produces, distributes and consumes resources. Discuss how anthropologists are different from other discipline in the study of economic organization.” The table of neighbours, the economist’s row in particular, and the Kula among the cases carry it. The chapter on economic anthropology gives the rest.

15. Facts to take into the examination hall

16. What loses marks on this topic

A definition with no anthropologist in it. “Anthropology is the study of man” is true and earns little. Name a source such as Tylor, the AAA or Kluckhohn. Then add the features that make the definition anthropology’s own, which are whole, all peoples, compared and by fieldwork.

Listing the four fields as the whole answer. A question on what anthropology is, or how it differs, is not a question on the four fields. Give them a short paragraph and spend the answer on the approach and the method.

General knowledge in place of a case. The CE-2016 examiner wrote that a tenth of the candidates answered “based on their general knowledge and not from the anthropological readings”.¹⁶ Every habit you name should come with a people and an anthropologist, such as the Kula and Malinowski, Swat and Barth, or Mohla and Eglar.

“Primitive” and “backward”. These words show the ethnocentrism the discipline rejects. Write “small-scale societies” or name the people.

Forgetting Pakistan. The CE-2018 examiner praised the few candidates who related anthropology “with practical issues of Pakistan”.¹⁷ One paragraph on Pakistan, with a real study such as Closser’s, lifts an answer out of the crowd.

17. A worked answer plan

The question

CE-2018, Q2: “Define anthropology. How is it different form other fields of Social Sciences in terms of approach and methodology?” (20 marks)

The tasks

The question sets two tasks. The first is to define anthropology, which needs a definition with a source and its features. The second is to show how it differs from other social sciences in approach (how it looks at its subject) and methodology (how it collects its evidence). The word “different” means the conclusion must say what anthropology does that the others do not.

The headings

1. Introduction, with the definition from Tylor and the AAA and the four features
2. The subject matter in brief, through the four fields
3. Holism, the first difference in approach (the Kula)
4. Comparison of all peoples, the second difference in approach (the Ethnographic Atlas)
5. Setting judgement aside, the third difference in approach (cultural relativism as method)
6. Fieldwork and participant observation, the difference in methodology (Malinowski)
7. A table comparing anthropology with sociology, history, psychology and economics
8. Anthropology at work in Pakistan (Barth in Swat, Closser on polio)
9. The limits, the colonial setting and the single observer
10. Conclusion

A sketch

Draw the four fields around “Humankind”, as in Figure 1, beside heading 2. Draw the path of fieldwork in four boxes (live among, take part and watch, write the ethnography, compare) beside heading 6. Both take a minute and both show the examiner you know the shape of the discipline.

A model introduction

Anthropology, from the Greek anthropos (a human being) and logos (study), is the study of humankind in all places and all periods. Tylor called it “the science of Man and Civilization”, ranging “from body to mind, from language to music, from fire-making to morals”, and the American Anthropological Association calls it “the study of what makes us human”. What distinguishes it is not its subject, which it shares with every social science, but its approach and its method. It studies human life holistically, compares all societies rather than the modern West alone, and suspends judgement in order to understand; and it gathers its evidence by long fieldwork through participant observation.

The support, under each heading

Under the holism heading, give the Kula. It was the exchange of necklaces and armshells that carried trade, canoe building, magic, mortuary feasts and lifelong partnerships, so that Malinowski called it “one organic whole”. Add Eglar’s Mohla in two sentences for Pakistan. Under comparison, give the Ethnographic Atlas, 1,291 societies, patrilineal descent in 590, so the commonest rule is still a minority one. Under method, give Malinowski’s two years among the Trobrianders and his goal of grasping “the native’s point of view”, and Kluckhohn’s fish. Under the table, make one row each for sociology, history, psychology and economics. Under Pakistan, give Barth’s finding that in Swat most positions were set by agreement rather than by birth, and Closser’s finding that the polio campaign needed partnership in place of orders from above. Under limits, give Asad in two sentences and the single-observer problem with its answer.

A model conclusion

Anthropology, then, differs from its neighbours less in what it studies than in how it studies it. Where sociology surveys, history reads documents and economics models markets, anthropology lives among a people, sees each custom as part of a whole way of life, and tests every conclusion against the full range of human societies. For a country as diverse as Pakistan, that approach is not academic: it is the difference between a policy designed in an office and one that works on the ground.

What to remember from this chapter

• Anthropology is the study of humankind in every place and every age. The AAA calls it “the study of what makes us human”, and Tylor in 1881 called it “the science of Man and Civilization”.
• Its four fields are biological anthropology, archaeology, linguistic anthropology and socio-cultural anthropology, four questions about one subject.
• Four habits set it apart. They are holism, comparison of all peoples, fieldwork by participant observation, and cultural relativism as a working method.
• Malinowski’s Kula is the classic case of holism, and his two years in the Trobriand Islands set the standard for fieldwork.
• Ethnography describes one people, and ethnology compares many. Murdock’s Atlas compares 1,291.
• Malinowski treated anthropology as a science of culture, and Evans-Pritchard as one of the humanities that “seeks patterns and not laws”. Most anthropologists now take something from both.
• Barth in Swat, Eglar in Mohla and Closser on polio show the discipline at work in Pakistan.
• Its critics, Asad first among them, point to its colonial setting and its old language, and the discipline has answered by changing both.

Check yourself

1. Define anthropology in two sentences, naming one source, and give the three features that make the definition anthropology’s own.

2. Explain, using the Kula, what holism means.

3. What is the difference between ethnography and ethnology? Give one example of each.

4. Why does an anthropologist stay a year or more in the field? Give three reasons.

5. A classmate writes, “Anthropologists believe every custom is right in its own culture.” What is wrong with this?

6. What did Svea Closser find about Pakistan’s polio campaign, and what did she recommend?

7. Set out the two sides of the argument over whether anthropology is a science, with one anthropologist for each.

8. From the chapter on how to sit the paper. What three things is this subject marked on?