Kehoe, Alice Beck - Humans - An Introduction To Four-Field Anthropology-Routledge (2013)

This page intentionally left blank
An Introduction
to Four-Field
Anthropology
Alice Beck Kehoe
|J Routledge
Taylor &. Francis Group
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 1 9 9 8 by
R outledge
Published 2 0 1 3 by R outledge
2 P ark Square, M ilto n P ark , A bin gdon , O x o n 0 X 1 4 4 R N
7 1 1 T h ird Avenue, N ew Y o rk , N Y , 1 0 0 1 7 , USA
Routledge is an imprint o f the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
C opyright © 1 9 9 8 by Alice B eck K ehoe
T h e text was set in Galliard
All rights reserved. N o part o f this bo o k may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form
o r by any electro n ic, m echanical or o th er m eans, now know n or hereafter invented, including
p h otocop yin g and record in g, or in any inform ation storage retrieval system , w ithou t perm ission
in w riting from the publisher.
Library o f C ongress C atalo g ing-in-P u b licatio n D ata

K ehoe, Alice B eck , 1 9 3 4 -
H um ans : an intro d u ctio n to four-field an th ropology / Alice B eck
K ehoe.
p. cm .
Includ es bibliographical references and index.
1. A nthropology. I. T itle.
G N 2 5 .K 4 5 1998
3 0 1 — dc21 9 7 -4 0 0 1 7
C IP
IS B N 1 3 : 9 7 8 - 0 - 4 1 5 - 9 1 9 8 4 - 5 (hbk)
IS B N 1 3 : 9 7 8 - 0 - 4 1 5 - 9 1 9 8 5 - 2 (pbk)
C over P h o to : E keko is a sprite w ho com es to Bolivia on January 2 4 , b ringing people w hat they are
hoping to get— h ouse, car, bountiful p otato harvest, co okin g p o t always full o f foo d , m oney, air
plane ticket. Ekeko is pictured as a m estizo, part Indian b u t living in Bolivia’s urban “m od ern ”
style. E keko typifies tod ay’s global society.
The assistance, and friendship, of the following colleagues have directly
benefited the following sections:
Chapter 3, James B. Courtright, Professor o f Biology, Marquette
University, critical reading.
Chapters 4 -6 , Andrew J. Petto, primatologist, University of Wisconsin-
Madison, and editor, National Center for Science Education Reports, critical
reading and selection of photographs.
Chapter 10, discussions with Barry L. Isaac, editor, Research in Economic
Anthropology; and Rhoda H. Halperin, Professor of Anthropology, University
of Cincinnati.
I am grateful also to the staff at Routledge, New York, for their spirited
common sense and efficiency. It’s been a real pleasure to work with editor
William Germano, his assistants Alexandria Giardino and Nick Syrett, and pro
duction editor Brian Phillips.
v
Preface ix
Chapter 1 Anthropology—A General Introduction 1

The four sub-fields of anthropology. Definitions of the basic
concepts “humans” and “culture.”
Chapter 2 Knowing What We Know 13

Systematic scientific knowledge contrasted with “popular
knowledge” that may be false or inconsistent; the principle of
cultural relativism that seeks to understand the environmental and
historical factors influencing a particular society’s culture.
Chapter 3 Humans as a Biological Species 23

Principles of evolutionary biology, basic genetics.
Chapter 4 The Trimates 37

Survey of the evolution and diversity of primates.
Chapter 5 Development of the Genus Homo 49

Evolution of hominids to our present species.
Chapter 6 Variation in Homo Sapiens 65

Human geographical populations, the role of genetic drift,
adaptation, and the difference between biological use of the term
“race” and popular American usage.
vii
Viii I Contents
C hapter 7 Prehistory 75
Part I: The Paleolithic
Part II: The Neolithic and Urbanization
Survey of human prehistory and methods of discovering it.
C hapter 8 Analyzing Societies: Communicating 115

Basic linguistics; the Sapir-Whorf principle; metaphor in thinking;
socio-linguistics; Linton’s distinction of form/function/use/
meaning.
C hapter 9 Analyzing Societies: (I.) Cultural Ecology 129

The holistic perspective, including the concept of habitus as praxis
of society and environment.
C hapter 1 0 Analyzing Societies: (II.) Economics 145

The informal economy; principle of reciprocity; social creation of
value.
C hapter 11 Analyzing Societies: (III.) Regulating Societies 169

Part I: Social Organization and Power
Part II: Kinship Structures
The dynamics of law, politics, religion and kinship as multiple
interlocking means of regulating behavior within societies.
C hapter 12 Analyzing Societies: (IV.) Religion 199

Religion as social charter; civil religion; revitalization as process of
culture change; rites of passage.
C hapter 1 3 Conclusion: Looking Us Over 217

Development of anthropology from nineteenth century to present.
Finis 224
Glossary 225
To Follow up Your Interest: Further Readings 231
Index 235
h d ACC
Students introduced to a subject need a broad general outline of topics and

approach to integrate what is presented into an intelligible picture. If an intro
ductory textbook overwhelms students with details, most will respond by cram
ming for tests, while the few seriously interested will struggle for compre
hension of the field. In my experience with thousands of students, in the long
run, less becomes more of real learning.
Instructors for introductory anthropology courses face more than the chal
lenge of presenting an overview of a complex field at a level comprehensible to
students who may be ill-prepared or uninterested in intellectual questions.
Instructors also wish to use their own preparation and experience to strengthen
their teaching. Instructors who are excited by their own graduate coursework
and their research, who are eager to share their fascination with anthropology,
are likely to be most effective in transmitting the worldview that is the essence
of anthropology. Hobbling an instructor with a six-hundred-page textbook hin
ders real teaching.
This is a concise, introductory textbook minimizing the number of techni
cal terms and names. I wanted a textbook that freed me, in lecturing, from
plowing through each of the major points every student ought to encounter in
an introduction to anthropology; I wanted to be able to simply refer to some
material available in the text. Accustomed as we are to the method of apt illus
tration characteristic of anthropological discourse, I needed a textbook short
enough to permit assigning students, in addition, good illustrative reading. Six-
hundred-page books with boxed illustrative ethnographies force us to repeat
other fieldworkers’ conclusions instead of building upon our own experience.
When it appeared that no one else was going to sit down and write the concise
textbook I needed, I did. This is the outline I have found effective in conveying the
ix
X I Preface
essence of contemporary American anthropology to a wide range of under

graduates.
There is a great deal that is not in this book. That is by design. The pre
ponderance of students taking an introductory course are already in programs
that do not give them much option to continue into anthropology, even if this
course attracts them. What students are likely to absorb are concepts they can
quickly link to their own lives. Rather than construct a text presenting each sub
field equally, I have weighted this one with aspects of anthropology useful in
reflecting upon one’s life in our society. I have been concerned to winnow out
those facets of traditional anthropology that are now appraised to stem from the
nineteenth-century, imperial, colonial foundation of the discipline, e.g., the
emphasis on the “domain” of kinship and the false contrast between “kin-
based” and “contract” societies.
This textbook is for creative instructors who are concerned with tailoring
the introductory course to their students, in their colleges. I anticipate instruc
tors individualizing their courses through ethnographic and archaeological case
studies, projects, or readers reflecting the instructors’ enthusiasms. I have
avoided expositions of formal approaches such as kinship studies or functional
ism so that instructors are not burdened with material they may find unpalat
able, misguided or inappropriate. I mention by name only a few historically
highly influential anthropologists, giving instructors opportunity to introduce
their own admired leaders.
References in the text have been kept to a minimum, in line with reducing
citations of anthropologists in order to free instructors to introduce or empha
size those they themselves most respect. Apt illustrations not in the end-of-
chapter publications have been drawn out o f my own and close colleagues’
experiences. For example, the description of Bolivian peasant life in Chapter 10
comes from my 1988 fieldwork in the village of Lakaya, on the Lake Titicaca
pampa, and overall, the material in the chapter reflects many discussions with
Barry L. Isaac, editor of Research in Economic Anthropology. This text is not
designed to be a bland compendium of traditional academic anthropology, a
liturgy, as it were, for the ritual practitioner. Drawing upon my own students’
reactions—not discounting apathy!—to efforts to awaken them to the worth
while insights from anthropology, I am convinced that instructors who make a
real impact on student thinking are propelled by the excitement of their own
work in the discipline.
Using this textbook, students who may not take any more anthropology
should conclude the course with an understanding of the unity of the human
species, the adaptation o f societies to their environments (physical and politi
cal), and an appreciation of the power of socialization into a culture. Those stu
dents who may major in anthropology should obtain the framework for pursuit
of the discipline’s subfields. Instructors should welcome the opportunity to
challenge stereotypes and biases through a combination of a truly basic text and
their own assignments, maximizing the value of both students’ and instructors’
background.
Preface xi
In winnowing out the material in traditional anthropology that stems from the
discipline’s nineteenth-century, European/Euroamerican origins, I have used,
among others, the books and edited volumes by George A. Stocking, Jr., and
Adam Kuper, Hobsbawm and Ranger’s Invention o f Tradition, Schneider’s
Critique o f the Study o f Kinship, and Adrian Desmond’s and James Moore’s
works on Darwin and nineteenth-century evolutionism. See also these publica
tions by Kehoe:
1981 “Revisionist Anthropology: Aboriginal North America.” Current Anthropology
2 2 :5 0 3 -5 0 9 , 5 1 5 -5 1 6 .
1985 “The Ideological Paradigm in Traditional American Ethnology.” In Social Contexts
of American Ethnology, 1840-1984, ed. J. Helm. Washington: American Ethno
logical Society, pp. 4 1 -4 9 .
1989 “ Tn Fourteen Hundred and Ninety-two, Columbus Sailed . . .’: The Primacy of
the National Myth in American Schools.” In The Excluded Past, ed. P. Stone and R.
MacKenzie. London: Unwin Hyman, pp. 2 0 1 -2 1 6 .
1990 “Primal Gaia: Primitivism and Plastic Medicine M en.” In The Invented Indian, ed.
J. A. Clifton. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, pp. 1 9 3 -2 0 9 .
1991 “The Invention of Prehistory.” Current Anthropology 3 2 (4 ):4 6 7 -4 7 6 .
1991 “The Centro de Madres in the Village of Lakaya, Bolivia.” In Marxist Approaches
in Economic Anthropology, ed. Alice Littlefield and Hill Gates. Society for Economic
Anthropology, Monographs in Economic Anthropology, No. 9. Washington:
University Press of America, pp. 1 1 9 -1 3 3 .
1992 “The Paradigmatic Vision of Archaeology: Archaeology as a Bourgeois Science.”
In Rediscovering Our Past: Essays in the History of American Archaeology, ed.
Jonathan E. Reyman. Aldershot: Avebury, pp. 2 3 -2 7 .
1998 The Land of Prehistory: A Critical History of American Archaeology. New York:
Routledge.
C * H * A * P * T « E * R 1
\ l* % /U 0 4 L iA 4 % \ 4 >4 *
Anthropology studies humans. Anthropology is unique in seeing humans

whole, as biological organisms and as thinking, social beings: anthropology’s
holistic perspective brings together in an integrated study the physical, environ
mental, social, historical, and intellectual facets of human life. Humans survive
and prosper through group living, and the characteristic behavior of people in
socieities, their cultures, is the focus of anthropology.
Our society is accustomed to separate aspects of human life according to a
supposed contrast between nature and human civilization. Our physical bodies
and the natural world in which we live are studied in the natural sciences—
physics, chemistry, and biology; our thinking and our behavior are studied in holistic per
the humanities and social and behavioral sciences—philosophy, literature, his spective
tory, sociology, political science, economics, law, psychology, and business. All
of these come into anthropology. These customary divisions are constructed
within our particular cultural tradition. Anthropologists work to reach an
understanding of humans that goes beyond the limited vision of restricted stud
ies, of conventional focus on politically powerful nations, and of documented
history.
Within their holistic perspective, individual anthropologists usually concen
trate on one or another area of human experience. Biological anthropologists four fields of
(sometimes called physical anthropologists) become especially knowledgeable anthropology
about human genetics, health, and nutrition, or fossils of ancestor species.
Archaeologists study evidence preserved in ruins and in the ground to learn
about human life in the past. Anthropological linguists study languages and their
use. Cultural or social anthropologists—the most numerous kind—observe
contemporary societies, our own and others around the world. Some anthro
pologists who work in corporations or agencies suggest applied anthropology
1
2 I Chapter 1 Anthropology
should be considered a fifth field, and they refer to themselves as practicing

anthropologists.
Anthropologists may teach in universities, but an increasing number make
their living as staff members or consultants to businesses, institutions, and agen
cies. One anthropologist is a troubleshooter for the U. S. Navy; another advises
the U. S. Department of State on how to interpret events in the Middle East;
one helps a Florida public health agency to bring medical aid to impoverished
mothers and children; a fourth is in Latin America assisting villagers to revive
ancient agricultural methods that will return ruined fields to crop production.
Anthropologists prize a flexible approach that highlights human values.
Two statements will guide us through this book:
Humans are gregarious mammals adapted to a wide range of habitats

through a large and complex brain.
Cultures are sets ofpatterned behavior learned by humans as members of
particular societies.
These statements are like suitcases with several compartments. Let’s unpack
them.
• Elumans are mammals. We are living organisms with backbones, brains,

four limbs, warm blood, hair. We reproduce by copulation between
males and females, the female carrying the young inside her body dur
ing its early growth and then nourishing it with milk from her mam
mary glands.
• Humans are gregarious mammals. We live in groups with other peo

ple. No human has ever grown up alone—human babies die if left
without human caretakers. (Plants can grow up alone, so can many
insects, fishes, and reptiles, but not mammals.) “Gregarious” means
social.
• Humans are adapted to a wide range o f habitats. People are found living
in a greater variety of places than any other creature. People live in
deserts and jungles, islands and high mountain valleys, on the water
and now in spaceships.
• Humans are adapted to a wide range of habitats through a large and

complex brain. The human brain is one of the largest of animal brains,
especially when you consider its size relative to the body. (Whale brains
Chapter 1 Anthropology I 3
Hum ans are gregarious mammals who learn patterned behavior as they grow up in their
societies. N urturing adults are vital to humans’ survival.
Photo credit: Aldis Strazdins
are larger, but whale bodies are vastly larger, too.) The human brain is
not only large, it is also unusually complex, with millions of neurons in
intricate networks. This large and also complex brain is the basic instru
ment by which we humans have been able to invent means to survive in
our wide range o f habitats, spreading throughout the world and into
space.
• Cultures are sets o f patterned behavior. Cultures are not single “things,”
but rather many habits, customs, and expectations carried by people in
communities. People grow up imitating the behavior of older members
of their communities, learning to accomplish tasks and to express emo
tions and talents in accustomed ways. Through this process human
behavior is patterned in customary ways, and the sets of patterned
behavior may be said to be the culturally patterned behavior character
istic of members of a particular community.
• Cultures are sets o f patterned behavior. What the anthropologist actu
ally sees is behavior. We can’t see thoughts, laws, or beliefs, we can only
infer them from people’s behavior (including speaking and writing).
Gregarious humans, hundreds together fo r Milwaukee Public Museum’s annual “fu n ra c e ”

Photo credit: Milwaukee Public Museum o f Milwaukee County
When we observe certain patterns of behavior again and again in many

members of a community, we conclude the patterned behavior has been
learned by humans as members o f particular societies.
Very litde that adult humans do is instinctive. Babies will suck and
will move quickly if starded, then very soon begin to look intendy at peo
ple around them to learn to behave as persons in their social group. Most
of our behavior we learn while very young, from our family and neigh
bors. How people talk, how they usually move, how they sit, eat, sleep,
play, make love—everything is learned in society. Patterns of behavior
passed along in this way differ from place to place and even within larger
social groups, some patterns being learned as proper to men, others as
proper to women, or some as proper to upper-class people, others as
proper to lower class. In this way, societies will demonstrate sets of pat
terned behavior.
T& McX&OjL________________________________
Every field of study has its methods of study and also its mode o f discourse,
that is to say, its accepted form o f presentation. For its mode o f discourse,
Mombasa, Kenya, 1928, annual public dance.

Photo credit: Milwaukee Public Museum.
anthropology favors apt illustration: a general idea is stated, then an example anthropolo
is described. These examples are always real cases actually observed by anthro gists present
pologists. Hypothetical examples, such as philosophers give, are not acceptable ideas through
apt
in anthropological discourse. Neither are experimental situations such as those illustrations
psychologists often set up. The anthropologist’s apt illustrations may seem like
anecdotes, but they are vital demonstrations o f the general principle or idea
presented.
Anthropologists’ basic method is to be a participant participant observer method
observer in an existing social group, trying to be with the
people without interfering with their activities. After months or years o f living
with the observed people, the anthropologist has enough experience
to see and describe the patterns of their behavior: this is ethnography. ethno (“nation, people”)
Then comparisons are made with other peoples, observed by the + graphy (“writing”)
same or by other anthropologists, to work out basic human needs
and societies’ answers to these needs. Our physical nature requires food, drink,
shelter, social groupings committed to child care. Differing environments, pop
ulation sizes and historical heritages result in diverse societal responses to these
Cameroons, Africa, 1959. Anthropologist observing Bafut diviner.

basic needs—diverse cultures. Out of anthropologists’ cross-cultural compar cross-cultural

isons come the general statements about humans that guide us to understand comparisons
particular societies and their members.
Now, how can an archaeologist or a biological anthropologist be a partic
ipant observer? Archaeologists work in the actual sites where ancient commu
nities lived. By closely observing the present conditions and analyzing the clues
to past climate, land form, vegetation, animal life, structures, unusual events,
and daily living, an archaeologist mentally reconstructs the society in the past
and compares what is discovered about it to knowledge of other societies, pre
sent and historic. Archaeologists dig to recover stains in soil from house walls,
discarded tools, broken pottery—garbage from long-ago activities. The decay
o f so much o f a past community’s material, not to mention the gone-in-a-
breath speaking and actions of its people, forces the archaeologist to outline
general cultural patterns of behavior persisting over a century or so. Although

this isn’t quite the same as ethnography of a living community, it broadens
cross-cultural comparisons through at least partial knowledge of humans of the
past.
Biological anthropologists may spend much of their research time in labo
ratories, but what they seek is a picture of how the physical features being scru
tinized affected human behavior. They may measure and record other physical
traits of living people or of skeletons, aiming toward better understanding of
how individuals and population groups are affected by living conditions includ
ing climate, nutrition, disease, and work stresses. Biological anthropologists
may collaborate with medical researchers in large-scale studies, or go alone to a
community to observe how its conditions relate to health.
Some patiently watch nonhuman primates in their wild primates: humans, apes, mon
homes or work with them in laboratories to discover their keys, prosimians (see Chapter 4)
manual and cognitive capabilities. Biological anthropologists
may work as forensic anthropologists identifying human remains for police or
military investigations. Archaeologists and biological anthropologists who work
in laboratories are not strictly speaking participant observers, yet their training
in general anthropology and holistic perspective permits them to use cross-
cultural comparisons to understand the material they study. Those “primatolo-
gists” who do observe natural groups of apes, monkeys, or prosimians enable
us to see humans against a background of our closest genetic relations, another
angle on the age-old question, “What is it, to be human?”
Cross-cultural comparisons are a kind of experiment. Anthropology is a sci
ence, which is to say that anthropologists restrict themselves to actually occur
ring, real-world data and try to recognize what is similar, what different, and
what may be the reason for these observations. Because anthropologists will not
construct artificial situations, they plan research where many conditions are sim
ilar for two societies (or sites of ancient societies) but what are hypothesized to
be key factors seem to differ. In other words, anthropologists seek natural
experiments, already existing societies or sites or biological specimens that have
features that test postulated hypotheses. Some anthropologists plan their nat
ural experiment from the beginning, many others find themselves engaged to
analyze a community or site or specimen and then look for good comparisons.
The basic method remains cross-cultural comparison, as other scientists make
comparisons between their data, whether observed in natural settings or in lab
oratories.
Responding to greatly increased opportunities to travel abroad and to the
realization that constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and expression
extend beyond conventional Anglo-American churches and dress, Americans
have begun celebrating “multiculturalism.” Anthropologists have been amused
by incidents of members of multicultural studies committees being surprised to
discover that we’ve been “doing multiculturalism” for more than a century,
and doing it in more depth than just school exhibits of dancing, costumes, and
special foods. Sometimes anthropologists have come into conflict with well-
intentioned teachers who assign for “multicultural understanding,” literature
by highly educated American professional writers expressing their personal
reflections on their ethnic heritage. These works in western literary forms are
generally quite different from collaborative efforts between anthropological lin
guists and word artists from nonwestern societies to present their literatures in
publishable form. True multiculturalism jerks a person into what at first seems
an alien world. The reward comes not from feeling good about oneself and oth
ers, but from feeling more keenly one’s own experiences and heritage as well as
others.
We expect you will read case studies by anthropologists in conjunction with
this textbook. The book is designed to help you make cross-cultural compar
isons between the societies you read about and your own. Try some participant-
observation anthropology in your everyday life. Watch for patterned behavior
and check it against the general statements in the chapters of this book. Use the
holistic perspective to catch the physical, environmental, and social influences
on the pattern of behavior. We’ll bet you discover everyday life is surprisingly
rich and complex. We humans are fascinating.
U + 0 w \ . Lm /£4___________________________________________
Anything having to do with humans can be studied by anthropology, and

anthropological studies have contributed to a great many aspects of our lives.
Are you wearing clothes bought at stores or from catalogs? The sizes that
standardize clothing proportions, making it possible to mass produce and mer
chandise properly fitting clothes, were developed primarily by a few anthropol
ogists hired by the U .S . Air Force early in World War II to enable both clothing
and equipment required by the armed forces to adequately fit the fighting men
and women. Hundreds of measurements were made on each of thousands of
people, the results compiled and analyzed statistically (anthropologists creating
some of the necessary statistical methods), and recommendations prepared.
Not only clothing—including the pressurized suits later developed for space
travel—and ejection seats, but also the dimensions of gun turrets were drawn
from anthropologists’ studies of real human variation.
Advertising, management, international business, urban planning, and
criminology are other fields utilizing anthropologists. Their training in viewing
subjects from the holistic perspective gives anthropologists the capability to
bridge more limited contributions to produce “the big picture.” At the same
time, anthropologists’ sensitivity to cultural traditions and human variation
often alerts agencies to problems. It was an anthropologist who years ago
pointed out that Americans are accustomed to standing farther apart when talk
ing than are people in many other societies: Middle Eastern businessmen, for
example, will stand so close that American businessmen feel uncomfortable,
while the distance that keeps Americans comfortable indicates coldness and dis
courtesy to a Middle Easterner. Once this was realized, American business trav
elers could remember to allow Middle Eastern colleagues to stand closer,
keeping the atmosphere friendly and productive.
Most people think anthropologists only deal with exotic peoples. This is
not entirely mistaken, for anthropologists are more likely to be hired to work
with people from nonwestern cultures. This experience has made anthropolo
gists particularly valuable in today’s global economy, where multinational cor
porations, international markets, and foreign investors are critical to our society.
Within our nation, the settlement of refugees from Asia, Latin America, the
Caribbean, and Eastern Europe calls up anthropologists’ knowledge of the cul
tures of these areas to ease the immigrants’ adjustment. Anthropologists’ train
ing for understanding different cultures and their technique of participant
observation are often critical in developing and testing programs assisting many
segments of our society. Anthropologists were among the first to work with the
elderly, sharing the days in nursing homes and retirement communities to iden
tify ways to make those days more pleasant, less frustrating. Anthropologists
hung out in low-income housing projects and the schools and clinics serving
them, working out strategies to effectively deliver the allocated services. Med
ical anthropologists are part of teams improving hospitals as well as members of
disease research programs.
Archaeologists have increasingly become involved with the public. With
biological anthropologists, archaeologists have lent their skills to crime investi
gation: finding clues to past events is the archaeologists’ job, and sometimes the
past event is a recent murder. More archaeologists work in “culture resource
management” (CRM), checking localities for evidence of past settlements
before construction may destroy them. If evidence is found and the construc
tion can’t be rerouted, the archaeological crews work ahead of the bulldozers,
recording the evidence so it won’t be forever lost. Settlements thus preserved
may be historic or ancient; both are part of our heritage.
Anthropological linguists are active in bilingual programs. Their work has
made it possible for hundreds of thousands of children to learn in both their
families’ native language and the national language such as English, French, or
Spanish. Much research has shown that children usually do better in school if
they are not forced to give up the language of their home. Hundreds of lan
guages that had not developed written form have been analyzed by anthropo
logical linguists who have advised native speakers creating modern
communication systems operating in the peoples’ own tongues. Anthropolog
ical linguists observe people talking in many situations—in law courts and
medical clinics, for example— and pinpoint misunderstandings, suggesting
how effective communication may be facilitated. Probably the most familiar
contribution of anthropological linguists is description of culturally patterned
differences between men’s manner of talking and women’s. Marriage coun
selors have used this research to assist couples to better understand and accept
each other.
Africa, 1928, early anthropologists in the field with their native servants. This Hollywood
B-movie image won’t fit contemporary anthropologists.
A popular image of an anthropologist is the dashing archaeologist slashing

his way into the Temple of Doom. That’s not quite (not quite!) altogether
wrong—we know an archaeologist (a woman) who was nearly blown up by a
land mine in Guatemala on her way to record ancient religious paintings deep
in a cave, and a biological anthropologist threatened by gangsters who didn’t
want a certain body found, and I ’ve dealt with bears and suspicious pistol-
toting ranchers—but by and large, anthropologists do their best to get on with
their work with the least fuss. Spending months in remote villages without elec
tricity and flush toilets is not an adventure, just participant observation. In this
book we want to bring you along with us, to show you that anthropology is not
about stealing exotic treasures, it’s about extending our knowledge o f our own
kind, humans.
RECOMMENDED READINGS
Coming to Light: Contemporary Translations of the Native Literatures of North America,
edited by Brian Swann (Vintage paperback, New York: Random House, 1 9 9 4 ), is a
good introduction to literature from American Indian societies translated in collab
oration with anthropologists— multicultural literature as close to indigenous forms
as can be managed in English.
Deborah Tannen’s You Just D on’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (New
York: William Morris, 1 9 90 ) popularized recognition o f cultural patterns differen
tiating men’s and women’s speaking.
Edward T. Hall, The Silent Language (Garden City: Doubleday, 19 5 9 ) is the classic pre
sentation of cultural differences in nuances of position and gesture.
Eliot D. Chappie pioneered holistic anthropological analyses of contemporary American
behavior, particularly in organizations and therapy procedures; see his Culture and
Biological Man (Fort Worth: Holt Rinehart Winston, 19 7 0 ). Although neither Hall
nor Chappie has been a central figure in academic anthropology, their researches
have deeply influenced business management principles.
C * H #A * P * T * E * R 2
\^l C»
Anthropologists aim to understand human nature and human societies. None

of us can begin anthropological study without first confronting what we think
we already know about this most vital and fascinating subject. It’s useful to clear
the decks of outmoded baggage to avoid confusing popular stereotypes and
erroneous information with what anthropologists have actually discovered.
Science is a method of seeking to understand the natural world. Science has two
important characteristics: (1) it is based on observing what happens, and (2) it
puts together observations and possible explanations in a systematic way. The
most important characteristic is the first, the limitation of the scientist to what
may be actually observed, and this means observed by anyone. A person may
need training or instruments to observe some phenomena, such as microscopic
organisms or structures, or even a means of observation not yet practical (such
as a telescope more powerful than any yet built), but it is essential that the phe
nomena are judged to be at least potentially observable. Something such as
God, which is believed to transcend human capacity to observe, cannot be stud
ied by scientists as scientists, whatever their personal faith. Something that is
supposed to be knowable only by means of a magical or spiritual power cannot
be considered within science.
The second characteristic of science—the systematic way in which the
observations made by scientists are collected together—is the difference
between ordinary everyday knowledge and science. What we ordinarily know,
we have learned over the course of our lives, beginning even before we were
born when we could sense vibrations as we lay curled up in our mothers’
13
14 I Chapter 2 Knowing What We Know
wombs. In our families, neighborhoods, playgrounds, schools, through televi

sion, films, radio, printed materials, we pick up knowledge. Some of what we
are told we know is not true, for example the claim that “PUTZ BEER is the
BEST in the W ORLD!” Some we may not be sure of, such as the claim that
Wonder Bread builds strong bodies twelve ways. (What are the twelve ways?)
Some we know is just wishful thinking, but it feels good to think it: my family
is the greatest. Some “knowledge” is harmful propaganda, like the Nazi claim
that only blond, blue-eyed “Aryans” are fit to rule the world. Whatever the
value, or danger, of all these bits of knowledge we pick up during the course of
our lives, such ordinary knowledge differs from science in that ordinary knowl
edge is not carefully systematized. In science, we must clearly set out what are
the basic assumptions we are taking for granted as true, what are the observa
tions we have made, what question are we asking of our observations, what are
we considering relevant to the question and what are we excluding, what expla
nation are we testing to see whether it seems consistent with new observations.
Consciously fitting together observations, questions, and further observations
enables the person thinking as a scientist to evaluate how
sound our knowledge may be. In contrast, ordinary knowl Ordinary knowledge can be full
edge piles up as bits from here and there, and people seldom of contradictions we don’t
notice.
take the time to reflect whether the kid in our grade school
Scientific knowledge is
class that we saw eat Wonder Bread every day really did system atized to show up
develop a strong body. Whether one bit of knowledge con inconsistencies.
tradicts another is not necessarily noticed.
It is the goal of anthropology, as a science, to systematize observations
about human behavior in order to discover what knowledge is supported by
actual observations of behavior, and what is only supposed to be so.
O b itfid & l' t(>' P iiJ jh c p c L c p y __________________________________

Because we have survived by learning to live in a human society, we have each
accumulated a great deal of knowledge. We have learned what to pay attention
to and what we can safely ignore. Unhappily, in our unsystematic, accumulated
knowledge there is propaganda (“our athletes are real champs”) and misinfor
mation (“people who live in poor housing are all lazy and promiscuous”).
We in America have been socialized to pay attention to the color of a per
son’s skin and to ignore the shape of their ears. Using artifacts made of metal
and plastic and driven by electricity is a sign of intelligence, we are led to
believe. Walking is a sign of backwardness. Eating cooked insects or worms is
horrible. Lacking a permanent address in a long-lasting building is animal-like.
All these and many more bits are learned by Americans as they are socialized to
value American social structure and styles.
When students come into an anthropology class, they must be prepared to
reject stereotypes that are not supported by actual observations. One major
purpose of an anthropology course is to distinguish between false notions and
Chapter 2 Knowing What We Know I 15
well-supported knowledge. It is a false notion that the color of a person’s skin

is a clue to superior, or inferior, brain power or moral standards. It is well-
supported knowledge that all living humans are part of a single species in
which there are no true races, as biologists would use the term. Distinguishing
between false notions and valid knowledge often has significant bearing on
questions of human rights, as in the 1954 Supreme Court ruling against seg
regated educational facilities. Rejecting false notions may cost taxpayers
money, or take away wealthy people’s enjoyment of privileged treatment.
Americans often find it hard to reject stereotypes, such as America’s “manifest
destiny” to be the leading nation in the world. You must be prepared to lose
some treasured notions of superiority if you reflect upon anthropologists’ dis
coveries.
Peoples around the world are convinced that their own particular way of life is
morally good and worthwhile. They usually hear their language as melodious
and see the countryside around their homes as beautiful. Their style of dress is
properly modest, their usual foods and cooking good tasting, their homes ade
quate shelter. Foreign peoples look ugly, their costumes are bizarre, their food
is weird and cooking unpalatable, their language sounds like monkey gibberish,
and even their landscape may appear forbidding. Ethnocentrism is the practice Ethnocen
of believing one’s own ethnic group is superior, of centering one’s good opin trism creates
ion on one’s own group. All over the world, and from the beginning of historic prejudice
against other
times, foreign peoples are described as “primitive” in technology, morals, or ethnic
both. The word “primitive” has so often been a label applied from ethnocen groups.
tric prejudice that anthropologists today shudder when they hear it. The term
really means “early” in the sense of “ancient” and so cannot be applied to any
living or historic people.
The next chapter explains how evolution once was thought to show that
educated European men are superior to anyone else on earth. This was done by
arranging organisms in a line from smallest one-celled creatures, through multi
celled organisms depending on their body parts to gain what they need, to small
nomadic human groups, and finally large populations in cities with elaborate
material goods. The conclusion was that the more metal machinery manufac
tured by a society, the higher it is on the Scale of Nature. What it came down to
was really a Scale of Weapon Effectiveness, with nations commanding large long-
range gunnery rated superior, on this Scale, to countries lacking the resources to
manufacture powerful weapons. Educated European (and Euro-American) men
were the generals and admirals in charge of the long-range gunnery. Men of
other countries, and all women, must be inferior because they could be gunned
down by the “superior” men, the only people permitted advanced education
and citizens’ rights. The “inferiors” were denied the rights of citizens. The idea
of “civilized” was perverted, just as the term “primitive” was misapplied.
Originally, “civilized” meant “being a citizen of a city.” Its modern sense

refers to the qualities admired by good citizens: consideration for others
(“being civil”) and intelligent obedience to lawful government. These qualities
are evident in people in all sorts of societies, whatever their technology. Being
“civilized” should mean recognizing and obeying moral standards; acting
thoughtfully rather than upon impulse; valuing art, music, and beauty; restrain
ing oneself from violence and injustice. It should not mean possessing a great
quantity of manufactured objects—a dog left a fortune by a doting owner is not
civilized.
Technology enables humans to adapt to their environments. Where there is
iron and coal for making steel, a dense population supported by fertile soils and
a climate suitable for crops, and access to markets, a “modern,” industrial west
ern society can develop. Where climate does not permit reliable abundant crop
production, population remains low, industries can’t be built, and technology
must utilize what is available. Americans seeing a few Dene Indians in north
western Canada living in a tent and eating fish, rabbits, and an occasional moose
are likely to think the Dene are “primitive,” lacking in technology, until the
Americans try to live in such a cold, inhospitable land. Dene have an elaborate
technology of hunting and fishing devices, clothing and shelter, and food pro
cessing, but it is carried out with materials available in their land. Dene are not
primitive: Their technology and manner ofliving are different from Americans’
because their land and its resources are different.
Another example of the falseness of supposing some peoples today are
primitive can be seen in the case of the Mbuti and Efe “pygmies” of the Congo
in central Africa. These people are short, a biological adaptation to moving in
dense tropical forest. They are skilled in harvesting wild foods and animals in
the forest, and live by trading what they produce from the forest for agricul
tural products and manufactured goods in Congo markets. In the forest, the
Mbuti and Efe wear little clothing and occupy camps of lightly built leaf-
covered homes, since the climate is hot and humid. No electric power lines
have been built deep into the dense forest, so the people working there don’t
have television and other appliances, though they do enjoy battery-powered
radios. Having no year-round settlements, they don’t build big churches or
schools. Are the Mbuti and Efe “primitive?” No, they are specialized r u r a l
producers exploiting the unusual resources of a difficult environment, the
dense tropical rain forest, that even today ca n n o t be successfully fa r m e d on a
long-term basis. Their minimal clothing and airy homes are more healthful than
American styles woikld be in that climate. Were it not for the highly developed
skills o f the “pygmies” harvesting forest products, no humans could live in that
environment.
In a nutshell, all humans living at any one time are Differences in human societies
equally evolved. Th^t is, all societies have equally long histo today represent adaptations to
ries of working out means ofliving in their environments. All different environments, as well
as differing histories.
humans have some traits that biologists call primitive because
South India, 1930. Shaduf-

type pump drawing water to
irrigate fields. Labor is
abundant, and there is no
machinery requiring expen
sive fu el or technicians to
maintain— this simple
machine doesn’t break down.
Photo credit: Milwaukee
Public Museum.
these genetic traits have been retained from our ancestors of millions o f years
ago, and all humans in the world today have more recently generated traits
marking our species Homo sapiens sapiens.
You may have heard, “I can’t accept anthropologists’ ideas because they believe
in cultural relativism.” What is the problem here?
Rice paddies, Bali, 1930.

Highly sophisticated irri
gated terrace agriculture
sustains a dense population.
Public Museum.
* * * * 1 : * i ■. *
'r l i ~ ~ r ' ‘t t
& <S *&■-•*. ^ •<-
I ' v^ f ‘"
Franz Boas, the most influential leader of American anthropology in the

early years o f this century, campaigned tirelessly for human rights. At a time
when American Indian children were being kidnapped from their homes, kept
in boarding schools for years, and beaten if they spoke their own languages,
Boas argued that American Indians had the human right to retain their ances
tral languages and beliefs. In a country that segregated African Americans,
mocked their way of speaking and said they had childlike brains, Boas supported
African-American scholars including W. E. B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston,
Angola, A frica, 1930.

m/f affordable metal tools in
a village. The blacksmith is
hammering out a knife
while his assistant pumps a
bellows keeping the coals hot
fo r the forge.
Public Museum.
and tried to raise money for Black colleges. Boas insisted that cultural differ
ences are related to differences in environment as well as historical opportuni
ties and events. The technology and customs of a society are related to both its
environment and its contacts, throughout its history, with
Cultural relativism recognizes
other societies. “Cultural relativism” is the opposite of eth-
the effects of environmental
nocentrism: It acknowledges that other societies are, like our challenges and historical events
own, reasonable responses to the circumstances they must on societal values. It does NOT
deal with. mean we must accept practices
Neither Boas nor other anthropologists would reject that violate human rights.
moral standards based on human rights and dignity. Indeed,
Boas was impressed by the universality of moral standards valuing the life of
one’s fellows, respect for others in one’s group, and the obligation to care for
spouse, children, and parents. Unfortunately, morality may not be extended past
the boundaries of one’s own group—killing in batde may be encouraged even as
murder within the group is oudawed.
Anthropology does not attack the values held most deeply in American
society. Cross-cultural comparison shows that valuing material possessions and
privilege bought with money is rejected by some societies, and so it is by many
Americans. Most Americans agree we can and should tolerate diverse opinions
and behavior, as long as no one else’s life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness is
harmed. Cultural relativism says comparing cultures is like comparing apples
and oranges: They share the basic characteristics of all fruit, and their differ
ences are due to their evolved adaptation to different climates. Both apples and
oranges are good fruit; if you prefer one to the other, it may be because you
became accustomed to one as a child.
Every chapter in this textbook, and whatever other readings your instructor has
assigned, will contain information that contradicts popular “knowledge.” Be
alert for these contradictions to what is popularly assumed. Keep a notebook
log as you read, listing anthropological knowledge that challenges stereotypes.
You don’t have to accept what we say; you do have to consider it. Write down
what surprises you and why it strikes you as new or strange. What statements in
SpecialAtbndion LA
1 O F INTEREST TO ALL
I AMLW AUKEAN $
CARVETH W ELL
MANY INTERESTING
v n o th e capture Anthropologists debunk false
.WAiWKS fAMOtK NCW YORK SAYS
•HELL B O O * 2CTO knowledge, though we seldom
I WASHINGTONAAJ'K rutmrficru*eyv/mvmm TO MAINS!
*CV W W >N 20 KT TVfSm fS
!€ A I T U t
g et billboard fame.
Public Museum.
your readings or lectures support the new information? What kind of additional
information do you require to better understand the statement? Why does the
author, or your instructor, accept the information? Scientific argument is prin
cipled, that is to say, scientists state the premises they accept as valid, the data
(observations) they consider to be relevant to the question, and how strongly
these data appear to support their conclusion—the likelihood (the probability)
that they have sufficient observations to answer a “how” or “why” question.
Scientists generally want more data, but time and money are never unlimited
and scientists figure that, at a certain point, they have enough instances of a
phenomenon occurring that they can see a pattern or critical features. Scientists
continually test accepted explanations against new observations. You have a sci
entist’s ability to set out the assumptions (premises) underlying an opinion,
check the sources of information, evaluate how much data has been brought to
the question, and how well the data support the conclusion. Use the scientific
method to test popular notions and to test what you are given in this course.
Discuss your opinions with your instructor, read more from the library. You
are a citizen responsible for your own life and those with whom you live. We
believe anthropology is a liberating study, showing us the diversity and the com
mon bonds of humans and thereby giving each of us more options and better
judgment to choose wisely.
C * H * A * P * T * E * R
To be human is to be a living creature—an organism, sharing Humans are unique animals

the characteristics of earthly life with a multitude of other because of our remarkable
brains. We still share many bod
organisms. Our physical nature demands means to sustain life
ily characteristics with other ani
and limits our capabilities, although our large and complex mals. Science discusses our
brains enable us to stretch those limits. Because we are a physical nature, making no judg
species of organism on this earth, we must: ment on spiritual matters.
• breathe oxygen from the air. Clothing and buildings must permit a flow
o f air. W e m ust guard against drow ning in water.
• ingest nutrients. Our teeth and digestive system are adapted to process
a particular range of plants and animals—we are omnivores (omni-vore^
“everything-devour”). M^/nutrition (“bad” nutrition) can result from
too few calories or from failure to ingest a necessary variety o f vitamins,
minerals, protein, fat and carbohydrate.
• drink liquid. Human setdements must be located reasonably close to a
water source.
• sleep. Humans are diurnal (active in daylight), although people can
adapt to being active at night provided they have the opportunity to
sleep for about eight hours in every twenty-four hour day. Erratic sleep
ing opportunities or extended lack of sleep sicken humans.
• eliminate body wastes: carbon dioxide, urine, feces. Sanitary disposal of
body wastes becomes a serious problem in densely populated areas.
• reproduce. An individual can be healthy although celibate, but if a
social group is to last through generations, some men and women must
23
24 I Chapter 3 Humans as a Biological Species
copulate and nurture the offspring. Young humans are so helpless that
long-term care of offspring is a necessary part of human reproduction.
• avoid extremes of heat and cold. Being mammals, our metabolism
burns calories, or we sweat, to keep our body temperature close to an
ideal. Our internal metabolism cannot cope with freezing or fiery heat.
Understanding human behavior requires recognizing how much is its response
to these biological demands.
Contemporary biological science embeds the concept that variation in popula

tions allows certain organisms to survive and reproduce successfully in an envi-
Biological evolution says nothing about the origin of the universe and seldom dis
cusses possible means of originating life. Biological evolution describes changes in
populations of organisms through earth history.
Accepting scientific explanations derived from an evolutionary framework has no bear
ing on religious faith. Science is “atheistic” only because it asks religious leaders to
deal with spiritual questions.
ronment for which other organisms may not be adapted. Over the course of
time, as environments change through climate shifts, erosion or soil deposition,
and land rising or sinking, some species of organisms will be stranded without
sufficient necessities for life and will move or become extinct; other organisms
will move in or a formerly unusual variant will become common. The variations
that permit these shifts and changes may come about from gene mutations or
from new combinations of genes. These shifts and changes are the reality of
organic evolution.
The idea of changes in populations of organisms through time goes back
thousands of years and is found in many religious philosophies, including the
Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition in the Book of Genesis. European coloniza
tion of portions of other continents challenged European biologists to explain
an amazing amount of variation in organisms. Supposing a god sitting in a
workshop turning out all these variations seemed to downgrade the god, to
make him into an overworked sweatshop laborer. It makes sense, to many reli
gious people, to believe that a process was instituted that would lead into a mul
tiplicity of variations through time. If one believes that a spiritual creator
instituted this process, one can be called a “theistic evolutionist” (theos, “god”);
all the major religious denominations in America are comfortable with theistic
evolution. Science by definition doesn’t concern spiritual questions, so scientists
are free to follow whatever faith they wish.
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were a period of great efforts, on
the part of European thinkers, to systematize knowledge. In eighteenth-century
France, the philosopher Diderot supervised the preparation of an illustrated
Chapter 3 Humans as a Biological Species I 25
encyclopedia of all the activities of his country, while in Scotland volumes were
prepared under the name Encyclopedia Britannica. The Swedish naturalist Carl
Linne devised a chart or table with categories like nested boxes, each with one
or a few clear attributes by which an organism could be fitted into an appropri
ate relationship with others more or less similar. “Linnean taxonomy” remains
the basis for assessing relationships between organisms (see chart “Classifica
tions of Organisms”).
Linnean Classification System illustrated by the human species:

Kingdom: Animalia (all mobile organisms with more than one cell)
Phylum: Chordata (organisms with central nerve cord and gill slits)
Subphylum: Vertebrata (organisms with backbones [including nerve
cord])
Class: Mammalia (vertebrates of which the females secrete milk for the
young)
Subclass: Eutheria (vertebrates of which the females carry the young in
a uterus, attached to a placenta for delivering nourishment to the fetus)
Order: Primates (a number of basically similar placental mammals with
flexible grasping hands and feet, relatively large brains)
Suborder: Anthropoidea (monkeys, apes, humans)
(The other major suborder is the Prosimii, comprising lemurs, lorises, and
tarsiers)
Superfamily: Hominoidae (“humanlike:” apes and humans)
(The other superfamilies are Ceboidea [American monkeys] and
Cercopithecoidea [Old World monkeys])
Family: Hominidae (“human,” not just “human-like;” notice the second
“o” [“-oid-”] has been dropped)
(The other families are Hylobatidae [gibbons, siamangs] and Pongidae
[chimpanzee, Pan; gorilla, Gorilla; orangutan, Pongo])
Genus: Homo (humans; there is only one genus of humans today)
Species: Homo sapiens (humans; there is only one species of human
today)
Subspecies: Homo sapiens sapiens (humans; only one subspecies today)
Any organism, living or fossil, can be fitted into an appropriate category in the
Linnean system by identifying physical characteristics. The system becomes a
shorthand summarizing distinguishing characteristics of organisms.
Note that the Linnean system is used worldwide but is by no means the
only reasonable or useful system of classifying organisms. Linne highlighted the
physical parts used in reproduction in drawing up many of his classes, in part
because obviously these are essential if the species is to be perpetuated, in part
because he wanted his system to be useful to farmers breeding better crops and
livestock. Societies in other areas have their own “ethno-science” systems, in
which a flightless bird such as the ostrich might be classed with mammals
CLASSIFICATIONS OF ORGANISMS
MATTER
INORGANIC (not liv in g / " ORGANIC (living)
PLANTS \ANIMALS
INVERTEBRATES VERTEBRATES (bony spinal column, spinal nerve ending in brain)
(no spinal column or nerve cord,
e.g., insects, worms, shellfish) FISH AMPHIBIANS REPTILES BIRDS MAMMALS (warm-blooded, fur, young
nourished by mother's milk)
EGG-LAYING MAMMALS MARSUPIALS EUTHERIAN MAMMALS (young carried inside

(platypus) (young in pouch in "mother's body, there nourished through placenta)
mother's skin—
kangaroo, opposum)
CARNIVORES TREE SHREWS INSECTIV ORES

(abt, 70 million years ago: dogs, cats, bears, seals, million years ago) (70 million years ago)
R A B B IT ^ RODENTS
(abt, 62 million years ago) (60 million'years'ago) (abt, 62 million years ago: mice, rats^ etc.)
CETACEA PERIS SODACT YLSX ARTIODACTYLS PROSIMIANS

( 52 million years ago: (58 million years ago: (57 million years ago: pigs,
whales, porpoises) horses, rhinoceros) cattle, deer, camel, antelope) LEMURS, LORISESi TARSIERS
i
ELEPHANTS ANTHROPOIDS
(50 million years ago) PLATYRRHINES -------------
(So. American monkeys, e.g., C ATARRHINES
spider monkey, marmoset) CERCOpITHEcoiD S \

HOMINOIDS
(Monkeys of Africa, Asia,
Europe: baboon, macaque, etc.
HYLOBATES PONGO
(gibbon, siamang) (orangutan)
AUSTRALOPITHECUS
/
HOMO
(2 million years ago: humans)
because it runs on the ground and cares for its young, or wild pigs and farm-
held pigs might be considered different species because they look and behave
recognizably differently.
Why species are similar, orders quite different, or how they got that way did
not enter into Linne’s system. The introduction of “scientific agriculture” in
eighteenth-century Europe, landlords experimenting with breeding as well as
cultivation methods, keeping careful notes and comparing them with other
gentlemen and farmers, heightened interest in the process of developing new
varieties. Production of new breeds under the eyes of literate scientists, coupled
with the great number of new species recorded on exploration voyages and
often brought home as specimens, stimulated discussion of how variations
appear and become populations. An English medical doctor, Erasmus Darwin,
Chapter 3 Hum ans as a Biological Species I 27
at the end of the eighteenth century wrote a very long poem speculating about
processes of change in organisms. Half a century later, in 1859, his grandson
Charles Darwin published a solidly researched book On the Origin o f Species
(note: not about the origin of life, only of new species or breeds). Charles
Darwin realized that wild populations could be subject to selection for survival
just as farmers select livestock they wish to breed: “Natural” selection would
consist of availability of resources necessary for an organism’s survival, and the
organism’s capacity for obtaining and utilizing those resources. Through time,
better-adapted organisms would prevail and become the bulk of the population
of their species until the environment changed, whereupon a variant better able
to cope with the changed environment would in its turn become more com
mon over generations. If no suitable variants existed, the species could go
extinct.
“Darwinian evolution” means the principle of natural selection on organ
isms. It is not all there is to evolutionary biology; genetics is an important field
unknown to Darwin, and ecology has become a complementary scientific field
of study. In the century and a half since Darwin first published, biology has
greatly expanded and refined its knowledge. Within the field, scientists may
argue over the relevance or validity of data (are observations thorough? well
described? or possibly confused or difficult to figure out?). Arguments spring
up over whether interpretations fit the data. Overall, never
theless, biology accepts in its general framework the Medical research accepts evolu
tionary biology. Experimentation
Darwinian principle of natural selection and the broader
on nonhuman animals would
concept that genetic variations in organisms produce, over be useless if our species were
time, different species more or less well adapted to their not ultimately genetically related
environments. A corollary to this concept is that very differ to'others. Experimentation on
ent species may have derived from one ancient ancestral pop bacteria and viruses also uses
ulation, and in theory, all organisms in the Animal or in the principles of evolutionary biology
to create vaccines and
Plant Kingdom may be ultimately related. biotechnology.
<
0^1 S i/z o h s fa o j* __________
Organic evolution is defined (by the eminent biologist Ernst Mayr) as “change
in the genetic properties from generation to generation owing to differential
reproduction.”
Evolution does not happen to individuals, only to populations. An individ
ual organism is conceived with a set of genes that will not change during the
individual’s life; there cannot be any change in the genetic properties of indi
vidual organisms. It is within the aggregate of individuals making up a popula
tion of organisms that evolution can appear as younger generations replace their
parents. The population is a gene pool: Like a car pool, it is a group of individ
uals that share among themselves but exclude strangers. Each individual in the
pool is in a sense a vehicle for his or her genes, ready to contribute that vehicle
at an appropriate time to mates in the pool. Not every individual will actually
ride in every other member’s vehicle, but the potential of doing so exists.
Members of the population pull out sets of genes when they select mates from
the group, and the offspring of the mating pair will combine the genes of two
parents from the gene pool. “Differential reproduction” refers to differences in
the number of surviving offspring produced by pairs of parents; some pairs have
many healthy offspring and others may have only one, or their offspring may
die young. The genes in the fruitful pair are reproduced many times and will be
common in the younger generation’s population gene pool. Any unique genes
of the unsuccessful mates will disappear when the individual dies. Notice that
we’re not looking at an all-or-nothing replacement from generation to genera
tion, but a shift in the proportion of the population having certain genes con
ducive to reproduction and survival in that group’s environment.
An example: Erasmus Darwin had seven children, his son Robert had five,
and Robert’s son Charles had ten children of which three died young.
Generation after generation the contribution of Darwin genes to the popula
tion continued. Herbert Spencer, whose version of evolution was popular in
Charles Darwin’s lifetime but is poor science, never married nor had children.
D ifferential reproduction is illustrated by Spencer’s failure to reproduce, leaving
Darwins to dominate the later generations of the population. We can also see
how natural selection might be at work here, for the Darwins held a strong
commitment to marriage and nurturing children while Spencer showed antiso
cial qualities: He rejected a good woman who loved him because she wasn’t
beautiful enough for his taste, and he publicly advocated abandoning the poor
to die.
Populations, then, are what evolve through differential reproduction of
their members. Technically, the population is the species, defined by Ernst Mayr
as “groups of actually or potentially interbreeding populations which are repro-
ductively isolated from other such groups.” The test for whether individual
organisms belong in the same species is whether they can successfully breed. If
they can’t, they belong in separate species.
It looks simple, testing whether organisms can or cannot breed with
another from a species. The test obviously can’t tell us whether fossils come
from one or more species because dead organisms can’t breed, hence the many
debates over to what species a fossil belonged. Organisms from closely related
species may breed but produce nonfertile offspring, the most common example
being the sterile mule produced by the mating of horse and donkey. Here, horse
and donkey can conceive a viable offspring but that animal cannot reproduce
itself, so it never contributes to an ongoing species population. Other animal pop
ulations such as herring gulls may look like they could produce fertile offspring
across population groupings but will not mate with birds who differ slightly
from themselves in markings. Thus the key words “reproductive isolation”:
populations that either are physically isolated from others or that isolate them
selves by behavior. We should also note that some populations are called sepa
rate species even though they readily mate and produce fertile offspring—dogs,
wolves, and coyotes are an example. In this instance, human concern to keep
Diagram of gene arrangements in X chromosomes from three different mammals and the
probable ancestral prototype. Second from left, the early ancestral prototype, with the
genetic names of several of the known genes listed to the right of the chromosome (by no
means all of the thousands of genes on each of these species’ X chromosomes are listed on this
gra ph!). Vertical arrows show orientations as compared to the ancestral protoype sequence:
genetic sections that have rearranged are shown as filled blocks, and where block patterns
are the same, the same set of genes is present. On the left, the human X chromosome; on the
right, the X chromosomes of rat and mouse, with the rat positioned closer to the ancestral
prototype. The central region of the rat chromosome is a group of genes that have been
inverted and moved from the terminal (top) end of the ancestral chromosome. The mouse
X chromosome is most divergent from the ancestral prototype, with more inversions and
transpositions than appear in the human and rat X chromosomes. Note that all ancestral
genes are conserved and nearly all retain the same neighboring genes on these X
chromosomes of three species of mammals; only the relative positions of certain segments
differ between these species’ X chromosomes. These X chromosome arrangements
demonstrate D arw in’s principle of adescent with m odifica tio n th e foundation of
evolutionary biology.
Credit: James Courtright, Marquette University
domesticated dogs separate from wild canines persuaded Linne to name three
species for the canines.
Overall, understanding the species as “groups o f actually or potentially
interbreeding populations which are reproductively isolated from other such
groups” focuses understanding on the ongoing dynamic o f life, the genera
tions-long view that helps us comprehend changes appearing as some mates

produce many offspring, others none or few.
_________________________________________________________
Genes are sections o f the strings of DNA within the nucleus of a cell. DNA
stands for deoxyribonucleic acid (Deoxyribo Nucleic Acid), a compound of a
sugar, phosphoric acid, and nitrogenous bases. Proteins accompany the DNA.
Different bases may combine with the sugar and phosphate, producing differ
Genes are
ent genes. Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is another compound in the cell nucleus and
chemical
transmits chemical “messages” from DNA to the rest of the cell. The strings of compounds
DNA in cell nuclei are called chromosomes (“colored bodies,” because they take inside cells in
up dye and so will stand out in a photograph). Each species has its normal num organisms.
ber o f chromosomes, 46 in humans, and these are paired. The thousands of These
genes (DNA sequences) carried in cell nuclei on the chromosomes include chemical
compounds
many that are repeated in other species, even throughout a Linnean Family,
affect the
Order, or Phylum (implying evolutionary relationships), and a lesser number growth and
characteristic only o f the particular species. A species thus can be identified by health of
its distinctive genetic codes. organisms.
In sexually reproducing organisms, a very large percentage o f both animals
and plants, each parent contributes only one, not the pair, of each chromo
some in his or her cell nuclei. That way, the offspring gets its pairs of chromo
somes by putting together the single ones from the parents. Most of the genes
on the new chromosome pairs will be duplicates, but there may be slight dif
ferences between particular genes (segments o f DNA) between the parents’
chromosomes. Variant genes are termed alleles (“alio-”, “other”). When each
parent’s gene is a duplicate of the other, the new individual is said to be
homozygous for that gene (“homo-” meaning “the same,” “-zygous” from
zygote, the fertilized egg). When the zygote contains alleles for a gene, i.e., a
difference between the gene from one parent and from the other, the new indi
vidual is said to be heterozygous (“hetero-,” “different”). Sometimes it is
obvious that the offspring is different in some respect from one o f its parents;
often the expression of the allele is modified in the heterozygous organism by
the expression o f the other allele or by factors such as nutrition during the
organism’s growth, so that its heterozygous condition is “masked.”
This can have dramatic consequences for humans, as you see in this letter
to advice columnist Ann Landers:
Dear Ann: Is it possible for two parents who have dark hair and blue eyes to have
a light-haired, brown-eyed child?
Let me start at the beginning. All my life I have been told that “Jake” is my
real father. Jake and my mother divorced when I was about 7 years old. Jake has
black hair and blue eyes. My mother has brown hair and blue-green eyes. I have
naturally reddish-blond hair and hazel-brown eyes.
My mother remarried very soon after the divorce to a man she has known
since high school. “Bob” has red hair and brown eyes.
People who do not realize that Bob is my stepfather comment on how much
I am getting to look like him and how lucky I am to have inherited those beauti
ful red highlights. . . .
Is Jake my real father? . . . Bob and I don’t get along very well. If it turned
out that he was my real father, I would die.
Ann Landers replied, “ I checked with an expert on genetics who said that
hazel-brown eyes are the result of pigment that can come from parents with any
color eyes. Two light-eyed people can indeed have a hazel-brown-eyed child.
It’s more than likely that Jake is indeed your father, so relax” (Ann Landers
2/10/92, permission granted by Ann Landers and Creators’ Syndicate).
In other words, the child inherited, for eye color allele, one for blue (from
her father) and one for blue-green (indicating her mother is herself heterozy
gous for eye color). The child is heterozygous for eye color, neither parent’s
allele fully dominates expression, and the child shows the light-brown color
indicating partial expression of both parents’ alleles. Similarly, her true father’s
black hair masks his own heterozygosity for this gene, and coupled with the
mother’s heterozygosity for hair color, the child exhibits hair color superficially
like that of the mother’s second husband.
Heterozygosity can be advantageous when an organism inherits one allele
that causes a dangerous condition but the other parent contributes a normal
allele. Examples include hemophilia, the condition in which blood does not clot
so that even a scratch can bleed endlessly until the sufferer dies. The allele that
results in failure of blood to clot is on the “X” chromosome that also has the
gene determining sex. Females inherit two X chromosomes, males inherit one
from the mother (who has two, is homozygous for sex) and a differing, “Y”
chromosome from the father (who has an X from his mother but a Y from his
father, thus can contribute an X making a homozygous, female offspring or a Y
making a heterozygous, male offspring). If a male receives from his mother an
X chromosome with the hemophilia allele, there is no normal clotting allele on
the paired, Y chromosome, and the boy manifests hemophilia. Girls are usually
protected by receiving a normal clotting allele from their father, even if the
mother carries and may pass on one hemophilia allele. Natural selection
removed hemophiliac boys from the human population by their dying young
from excessive bleeding. Medical technology today can save these boys, who
may grow up and could pass on the hemophilia gene to daughters. With nat
ural selection hindered, the possibility of an increase in the very rare condition
of hemophilia in females is increased.
Another example of the advantage of heterozygosity is the case of sickle-cell
anemia. The gene for this condition is expressed in a tendency for red blood
cells to wither, becoming thin and curved (like sickles) instead of the healthy
round full shape. If a person is homozygous for this gene, the person is likely
to die from inadequate red blood cells. It happens that young children who are
heterozygous for sickle-cell are better able to resist the virulent disease falci
parum malaria, caused by a microscopic parasite living in blood. The malaria
parasite seems to need nice round red blood cells to flourish. Heterozygous
children are more likely to survive infection from the malaria parasite, and
unlikely to develop serious sickle-cell anemia. Children who are homozygous
for normal red blood cells easily die from falciparum malaria, children who are
homozygous for sickle cell die from the anemia. Result? In tropical countries
where falciparum malaria is common, a large proportion of the people are het
erozygous for sickle cell. With both parents heterozygous, families are at risk for
babies dying young from malaria (the babies who inherit a normal red blood
cell allele from each heterozygous parent) or children dying from sickle-cell
anemia (children inheriting the sickle-cell gene from each heterozygous par
ent), but some o f their children, heterozygous like their parents, have a good
chance to survive. There is a close correlation between regions with the falci
parum parasite—tropical forest Africa, India, marshy areas of Greece and South
Arabian oases—and regions with high proportion of people heterozygous for
sickle cell.
Packed in the tiny head of the sperm and in the woman’s ovum (egg),
genes on their chromosomes are the basic chemical compounds regulating life.
An individual’s set of genes is the genotype. Between the amalgamation o f sperm
and egg that creates a fertilized zygote, and the visible creature that is born and
grows up, many influences affect the expression of the genotype. What you see, Genotype:
in organisms, is their phenotype (“pheno-,” “show”). The phenotype will, first, the set of
show incompletely expressed genes, especially when the genotype is heterozy genes in an
gous (as in the hazel-eyed woman who wrote to Ann Landers) as well as the individual’s
cells.
expression of dominant or homozygous genes; and second, show the effects of Phenotype:
nutrition, infections, healthful or unhealthy living conditions. Many Americans an individ
can see how poor nutrition, inadequate medical aid, and hard work imposed on ual’s ap
children limited the growth of immigrant grandparents or great-grandparents, pearance.
while a better-fed, easier childhood allowed their American-born offspring to
grow taller—to achieve a phenotype that expressed the full genetic potential for
stature.
The variations in populations that can help their survival or generate new
species— as environments may change—arise from several causes:
• mutation
• structural changes on the chromosome
• genetic drift
• sexual mating.
Mutation is the only cause of really new genes. Especially in the process of
meiosis, during which adults produce gametes—sperm or ovum—with only one
of each pair of chromosomes (in order that the anticipated zygote will have the
normal pairs), the chemical bases in the compounds we call genes may be
altered. Nearly always the alteration is fatal, causing the embryo to die.
Occasionally, the mutation is not fatal but does result in deformity in the phe
notype. Rarely, the mutation results in a better-adapted organism, which then
may survive and reproduce, adding the mutation to the species’ gene pool.
Mutations may occur in cells in an adult organism, from smoking tobacco, from
exposure to radiation, or from taking some drugs. Since mutations do occur,
especially during meiosis, in all species and under all conditions, some seem to
be spontaneous—the transcription of DNA involves several steps—and we can
not prevent the possibility, only reduce the probability by avoiding exposure to
known mutagenic agents.
S tru ctu ra l changes on the chromosome, generally called “crossing-over,” is
also most likely during meiosis as the chromosome pairs separate and float
toward opposite sides of the cell. A segment of the DNA chain that is the chro
mosome may break off and fail to be reattached, or may attach to another
section of the chromosome. Even though the genes themselves have not
been altered, the sequence of genes on a chromosome string affects their ex
pression.
Genetic d rift refers to changes in gene pools resulting from removing some
ancestral alleles from a population. The way this usually happens is that some
individuals become separated from a larger parent population. The few form
their own, new gene pool. Lacking the whole range of genotypes found in the
original population, the new pool has less variability and some characteristics
that in the original group would be uncommon may happen to be carried into
the budded-off group. Let us suppose a parent population of a million people
has only a few hundred blue-eyed individuals, a miniscule percentage. Suppose
a boatload of ten adventurers happened to include one blue-eyed and one
(heterozygous) hazel-eyed person: the boatload was shipwrecked on a large,
lonely island, creating a new gene pool of ten individuals of which one-fifth
had the allele for blue eyes. Genetic drift will make this allele more common
in the new gene pool than it had been in the ancestral pool. Note that g e n e tic
d rift does N O T refer to chromosomes flo a tin g through the eell d u r in g meiosis; it
refers to populations. Genetic drift is particularly interesting to humans because
so many of our populations were founded by small groups traveling away from
earlier habitats.
S exu a l m a tin g is the everyday, ongoing source of variations in popula
tions, individuals with unique genotypes being created constantly through the
sexual union of two individuals. Gene pools are populations of variations. The
many thousands o f genes in humans, most with allele variants, give a practi
cally infinite number o f combinations. It is this that enables forensic anthro
pologists to determine the DNA of cells, say in bloodstains on a knife, and
find whether it matches the DNA of a suspected murderer. The possibility of
two individuals having exactly the same genotype is so astronomically low that
courts generally accept DNA matches as proof of identity (defense lawyers, of
course, may argue that the sample was tampered with or the lab tests poorly
done).
34 I Chapter 3 Hum ans as a Biological Species
Evolutionary biology includes the study of humans. Because we are physically ani
mals, we must breathe oxygen from air, eat, drink, sleep, eliminate body wastes,
and avoid extreme temperatures. Survival of our species requires that most adults
mate to reproduce. Societies develop customs and technology to promote indi
vidual and group survival (generally speaking; war and oppression are practices
that promote certain individuals’ survival at the expense of others.)
Western science uses a systematic classification scheme, devised by the eigh
teenth-century Swedish naturalist Carl Linne, to organize knowledge about
organisms. Through this system broad similarities between species are evident.
In recent years, chemical analysis of cells confirms similarities. Biologists explain
these similarities by the principle of evolutionary change through variations in
organisms, some variations being more successful at surviving and reproducing
in a particular environment than are others. Successful variants will be more
numerous in that environment. If the environment changes, other variants may
be more successful and may breed (through differential reproduction) into a
population distinct enough to be termed a new species. This is Darwin’s prin
ciple o f natural selection.
Populations can be thought of as gene pools, the individuals in the popula
tion sharing their genes with one another when they mate and each contributes
to the gene set of an offspring. Genes are chemical compounds, segments of
long strings of DNA we call chromosomes. Humans have 46 chromosomes (23
pairs) in the nucleus of each cell in the body. An individual’s set of genes is their
genotype. The effects of these chemical compounds are modified by (1) paired
genes, one from each parent, differing somewhat—that is, having alleles of a
gene; and (2) poor conditions during the individual’s growth. An individual’s
appearance—phenotype—reflects the interplay of genes and life experiences.
The variability within populations, so essential to adaptation to changing
environments, comes basically from gene mutations: changes in the chemical
compounds of DNA. Changes in the genotypes also occur during processes of
cell division when segments of a DNA string (chromosome) may break apart
and reconnect to other segments. Variations within populations are constantly
produced by sexual mating, simply by each parent contributing its set of chro
mosomes into a new cell (zygote) that will combine genes of mother and father.
Populations may change over generations if a few individuals leave the original
group and start a new breeding group. Not all the genes in the larger, original
group will happen to be taken into the new small group, and the new group
will not produce the same range of individuals to be seen in the original popu
lation. This effect of dividing populations is called genetic drift.
Desmond, Adrian and James Moore, Darwin. (New York: Time Warner Books, 19 9 1 ).
A marvelous biography full o f drama.
Gould, Stephen Jay. This gifted writer, who is also a leading scientist, has published a
series of books ( Ontogeny and Phylogeny, 1 9 7 7 ; Mismeasure of M an; Time’s Arrow;
others) and collected essays (beginning with Ever Since Darwin) on geology, biol
ogy and evolution. Look for Gould’s latest.
Harrison, G. A., J. M. Tanner, D. R. Pilbeam, and P. T. Baker, H um an Biology. Oxford:
Oxford University Press. 1988 (third edition), Technical but authoritative.
I f You a re Interested in the Q uestion o f R eligiou s Issues R e la ted to Science

Godfrey, Laurie R., ed., Scientists Confront Creationists. New York: W. W. Norton Co.
1983. Chapters by careful scientists explaining misconceptions raised by some “sci
entific creationists.”
Frye, Roland M ., ed., Is God a Creationist? Religious Arguments Against Creation-
Science. New York: Scribner’s. 1984. Essays by theologians from each of the major
American denominations.
C # H * A * P * T * E * R 4
Primates. The highest, the Number One animals, the prime— said Linne
when he named the animal kingdom Order containing humans. A bit o f
bias here in favor of ourselves. Within the Order Primates, four groups are
recognized and ranked from oldest types (“lower” ) to most
recently evolved (“higher”): Years ago o f Appearance
Humans— 2 million
Most recent: Hominids (humans)
Hominids— 5 million
• Hominoids (humans and the living species o f apes) Apes, monkeys— 35 million
Prosimians— 65 million
• Anthropoids (monkeys, apes) (Mammals— 180 million)
(Vertebrates— 500 million)
Earliest types: Prosimians (lemurs, lorises, tarsiers)
This list is not a list of replacements through time, but a ranking of living
species according to the age of the earliest fossils of their type. Prosimians
resemble the earliest primates known through fossils, monkeys and apes resem
ble later fossils, and human fossils appear latest in the layers o f rocks analyzed
by geologists. Living prosimians as well as a variety of anthropoids may be seen
in zoos.
The earliest primates evolved from populations o f small mammals from
which eventually evolved—besides primates—bats, colugos (also called “flying
lemurs,” although they are not actually lemurs), and tree shrews, a mouselike
insect-eating animal. The ancestral populations had well-developed visual
capacity and handlike front paws, which in bats and colugos developed skin
between the fingers that acts as wings. Primates and tree shrews never devel
oped this specialization, keeping the hand that in the anthropoid primates
including humans is so essential for feeding.
Many of the characteristics of primates seem to be adaptations for living on
the branches of trees in tropical forests. (That is, there was natural selection for
37
38 I Chapter 4 The Primates
animals that ran up into trees and ate food available on the living in trees: arboreal (“arbor”:
branches. In the trees, there was less danger and less compe tree); living on the ground:
terrestrial (“terra”: earth)
tition than on the ground.) The ancestral population had
claws on the ends of its fingers and toes, as tree shrews still
do, but a mutation in early primates gave us flat nails instead of claws: We pri
mates are better able to grasp and manipulate objects with our fingertips, no
claws curving out hindering our grip. (Watch a cat trying to
hold a ball, to see how claws interfere with grasping.) Early primates’ eyes are side-by-side
primates relied on vision, more than smell, to locate food, on the front of the head, giving
overlapping vision fields (stereo
and because quick-moving insects as well as fruit were a good
scopic vision— like the two
source of food, there was natural selection for eyes able to speakers in a stereo set giving
gauge distance, muscle structure able to grab small things overlapping sound fields).
fast, and brains able to coordinate eye and hand. Primate The overlap allows us to see in
brains have a greater number of specialized stimulus- depth.
response areas than do many other animal brains, and we can
clearly see continuing natural selection for relatively large and also complex
brains throughout the history of primates, culminating in the exceptionally
large and complex brains of the last type of primate to appear, humans. Eye
sockets in primates are completely backed with bone, protecting the brain bet
ter than the tubelike sockets of other animals.
Prosimians (Latin for “before [pro-] apes [-simia\”) give us an idea of what pri-
mates looked like millions of years ago before monkeys and apes had evolved.
All the prosimians live in the tropics, mostly in forests, and the greatest num
ber live on the island of Madagascar where there were no monkeys or apes to
compete with them for food and territory—nor humans, who did not colonize
Madagascar until about four thousand years ago. This large island well off the
east coast of Africa was a refuge for lemurs. Other prosimians—lorises, bush-
babies or galagos, and tarsiers—live in Africa, India, and on islands in Indone
sia, Sri Lanka and the Philippines. Zoos most commonly show lemurs, lorises
and bush-babies. Some lemurs look rather like raccoons, bush-babies look
rather like cuddly monkeys, and taken together, the prosimians on exhibit in a
large zoo give us a picture of the range of species from which monkeys and
apes could evolve.
For the study of human evolution, tarsiers are particularly important
although less numerous now than lemurs, lorises, and bush-babies. Tarsiers
look like small monkeys with big eyes, they sit erect and use their front paws as
hands. These characteristics, plus anatomical details identified by researchers,
make it likely that the earliest monkeys and apes were mutations from tarsier-
type populations. The few surviving tarsier populations, in Indonesia and the
Philippines, move about at night, behavior that protects them from competing
Chapter 4 The Primates I 39
directly with later-evolved, more intelligent primates. (In other words, tarsiers
occupy an ecological niche different from that of simiiform primates: The tar
siers’ niche is nocturnal [night-living] while other primates are diurnal [day-
living].)
The concept of ecological niche helps explain how new species may develop
and other species persist for millions of years. Environments may be thought
of like large furnished rooms. A potted plant may occupy a sunny window
ledge in the room: That is its niche where it has a space, air, and obtains its ecological
nutrients. That niche isn’t enough for a cat, which needs a food dish, water, niche: partic
ular environ
and a litter box, using more of the room for its niche. A mouse in the room
ment in which
has its niche in the woodwork, scurrying out at night (nocturnally) to take a species
food. Cat and mouse occupy overlapping niches, a bad situation for the mouse survives.
which can itself become food in the cat’s niche. Every species of organism is
adapted to survive in a particular environment, its ecological niche. When an
environment changes or organisms migrate to a new environment, they have
an opportunity to move into a new ecological niche. A variant in the species
population, perhaps a mutation, may be better adapted to survive and repro
duce in that new niche than are most of the original population, and through
differential reproduction and continuing natural selection a new species may
develop. An example was seen recently in London when a mouse with genetic
potential to grow heavy fur slipped into a supermarket cooler. Its unusual fur
enabled the animal to survive in the cold. When the mouse mated, it passed on
its gene for heavy fur to its offspring, who, like their parent, could take advan
tage of the abundance of food in the new niche. If city exterminators had not
interfered, London would have had a new species of mouse living in market
coolers.
Both monkey and ape species appear in the fossil record around 35 million
years ago, suggesting several lines of evolution from tarsier populations. There
is a basic division between monkeys native to South America—the platyrrhines
The term Simiiformes has been suggested in place of Anthropoidea, because there
are mostly monkey and ape genera in the suborder. Linne used Simia ("apes”), but
once it became clear humans belonged in the same suborder, the name Anthropoidea
("manlike”) was preferred.
(“flat-nosed”)—and the monkeys, apes, and humans native to Africa and Eura
sia— the catarrhini (“downward-nosed,” referring to the opening of the nos
trils). Platyrrhines include a variety of monkeys and also marmosets, smaller
animals with claws rather than nails, the claws perhaps advantageous to these
small primates in the trees, where larger primates are better served by grasping
Pair of lemurs (Africa)

Credit: Wisconsin Regional Primate
Center and Timothy Keith-Lucas
Tarsiers (Asia)
Credit: Wisconsin Regional Primate
Center and David Haring
hands with flat nails. Platyrrhine monkeys have long prehensile tails, tails they prehensile:
can wrap around branches to hold on as they swing along through the trees or grasping.
hang from a branch as they pick fruit. Hands, too, are prehensile. Catarrhines
have prehensile hands but either no tails (apes, humans) or tails good only to
help balance, unable to grasp (African and Asian monkeys).
Catarrhine monkeys exhibit various specialized tooth forms that adapt species
for particular diets. Apes and humans share a generalized dentition, making for a
more omnivorous (omni-, “all”; vore, “eats”: eats vegetables and meats) diet. The
monkeys are of two basic types, the cercopithecids including such monkeys as the
patas, mona, and diana monkeys, baboons, and rhesus and other macaques, and
the leaf-eating colobus monkeys, including Asian langurs, which have segmented
stomachs with a compartment where cellulose in leaves is broken down to make
it digestible. Baboons and macaques are relatively large monkeys that spend much
time on the ground. Monkeys are found throughout Africa and southern Asia to
the major islands off it, and formerly in southern Europe, in tropical and sub
tropical forests and grasslands, with one species so far north in Japan that it
endures snow in winter. Monkeys illustrate well how spread of organisms into
new habitats leads to the evolution of new species as particular variants prove bet
ter adapted to one or another habitat. Gray langurs in India have found an eco
logical niche in Hindu temples, where they prosper because they remind
worshippers of the Monkey King in the great epic, the Ramayana.
Apes comprise four living major types, the gibbons and siamang (Hylo-
bates), the orangutan {Pongo), the gorilla {Gorilla), and chimpanzee {Pan).
From the point of view of biologists, it is better to mark out three types: gib
bons and siamangs; orangutans; and gorillas, chimpanzees and humans. That is
to say, the similarities between gorillas, chimpanzees, and humans are so con
siderable that a proper biological classification puts the three together in a sub
family {Hominidae). O f the four ape genera, gibbons, siamangs (a large species
of gibbon), and orangutans are found in Asia, and gorillas and chimpanzees in
Africa, where it seems likely that humans also evolved. Gibbons and siamangs
are the smallest apes; they have extremely long arms and prefer to move by
swinging themselves along high tree branches, sometimes launching themselves
from one branch to another like circus aerialists. Orangutans are approximately
human size, and although their very long arms let them hold on and swing from
branches, their weight requires them to take care, and they walk along tree
limbs or climb using feet as well as hands. Chimpanzees and gorillas have long
arms on which they lean as they walk on the ground, putting the backs of their
hands down (curving the fingers up toward them), a practice termed “knuckle-
walking.” These apes do some swinging in trees, especially if they’re climbing
after fruit, but like the orangutan, their large size makes walking safer than fly
ing grabs at branches. “Pygmy chimpanzees,” or bonobos, are more arboreal
than the common, larger chimpanzees. Roughly similar body size and the
related strong tendency to walk more or less upright would logically class
together, in the family H om inidae (or Pongidae), orangutans, the African apes
and humans, in contrast to monkeys and gibbons, all smaller than the Hominidae
and Pongidae.
Pair of pat as monkeys (Africa)—smaller female on left, larger male on right show
sexual dimorphism in this largely terrestrial primate.
Credit: Wisconsin Regional Primate Center and Anne Zeller
Pair of macaques (Tai

wan)—another terrestrial
species with marked sexual
dimorphism (male on left,
female on right).
Credit: Wisconsin Regional
Primate Center and Andrew
Petto
Gibbon with her child (Asia)—gibbons are more

arboreal than the other apes and use their very
long arms to swing along tree branches.
Credit: Wisconsin Regional Primate Center and Nancy
Staley
Bonobo (Africa)—these
“pygmy chimpanzees” are the
apes most similar to humans.
Male pictured here is playing
with a straw. Behind him his
companion Bonobo reaches
for it.
Credit: Milwaukee County
Zoo P h o to /M . A. Nepper
Gorilla (Africa)—Female gorilla with her infant in her

arm. She is knuckle-walking while carrying the infant.
Notice that the infant has not yet developed the heavy bone
structure of adult gorillas.
Credit: Milwaukee County Z oo P h o to /M . A. Nepper
Chimpanzees, orangutans, and gibbons and siamangs are omnivores, feed

ing primarily on plants but eating insects and occasionally meat. Gorillas are
vegetarians, eating quantities of leaves and bamboo shoots; their food is lower
in nutrients than in fiber, necessitating their spending most of every day sitting
and munching. Chimpanzee males have been observed ganging together to
capture young monkeys or baby antelopes to eat, some of the apes yelling at
and driving off the mother animal while others sneak in to seize the young.
Chimpanzees have been observed using tools to obtain food, long flexible sticks
to poke into termite mounds or holes in trees to pull out edible insects, and set
ting hard nuts on one stone and pounding with a second stone to crack the
shell. Observers have seen chimpanzees hitting at objects with sticks and throw
ing stones at tourists. All the apes and monkeys communicate by means of
dozens of distinct calls and noises, differing somewhat from one group to
another even in the same species. Chimpanzees use several gestures identical to
human gestures: hugging each other, kissing, extending the hand in friendship.
Gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans build sleeping nests by weaving branches
together and lining the nest with soft leaves. Young apes need to learn how to
do this by watching their mothers. Nest-building, food-getting techniques, and
vocabularies of calls indicate that apes, like humans, are highly dependent on
the culture they learn from their parents.
Primates as a rule have one or two young per pregnancy, relatively long preg
nancies, and young already well developed at birth (eyes open, fur well grown).
Even though the babies can already see, primate mothers actively care for their
young. Among animals in general, species with litters of helpless young requir
ing close care by the mother (such as dogs and cats) contrast with species in
which the young can stand up and follow the mother soon after birth, requir
ing less maternal attention (such as cattle and deer). Primates don’t fit neatly
into either category, because particularly among the “higher” primates (mon
keys, apes, and humans) mothers carry their babies, devoting more attention to
them than is typical when the newborn is fully formed. Primates’ reproductive
strategy is to have few offspring per female but to maximize their survival
chances through parental care. Humans show this reproductive strategy espe
cially clearly, with the longest juvenile stage (around fourteen to eighteen years)
and extraordinary adult investment in our young— “it takes a village to raise a
child” is as true whether it is neighbors who help with children or the many
dozens of paid adults who help American children in schools, clinics, sports
teams, and agencies.
Humans are born more helpless than other infant primates, and take much
longer to reach maturity. It is not that we just grow slowly; in fact, human
brains grow more than other primates’ do, human legs grow faster and become
longer than other primates’, while human jaws do grow more slowly and never
reach the size (relative to body size) of other primates’ jaws. Humans’ long
childhood of relatively slow growth maximizes our bodies’ capacities to funnel
nutrients into brain growth, and may also help the immune system resist disease
by maximizing nutrients available to combat illness. Natural selection would
have favored hominid children whose overall growth was slow while their brains
grew large. What happens in humans contrasted to other primates is that we
have prolonged, overall slow growth until at last in adolescence growth is accel
erated. In human females, sexual maturity coincides with the end of growth; in
males growth continues for a few more years resulting in larger size for human
males than for females. Other primates show steadier as well as relatively faster
juvenile growth. In human populations today, well-nourished children not only
grow larger but also get into the final adolescent growth spurt, and sexual
maturity, at an earlier age than children do in poor communities unable to feed
them well. Impoverished diets produce smaller people who may not have com
pleted growth until nearly twenty for women, the early twenties for men. This
slower growth gives poor children the ability to maximize brain growth even if
they don’t achieve their genetic potential for height and weight.
Surveying the variety o f primates, we can see adaptation to many niches in trop
ical forests, plus expansion into tropical grasslands resulting in more genera of
primates, and finally, very recently in earth history, expansion of one genus,
humans, into temperate and arctic zones. Social behavior is molded by the envi
ronment a species inhabits. Grassland species spend a good deal of time on the
ground, trees being few and scattered, and therefore are more visible and more
vulnerable to predators (hunting animals) than are primates living in trees.
Grassland species therefore tend to stay in larger groups, where some animals
will act as lookouts, calling loudly when a predator is sighted and giving the rest
of the troop precious time to run for the nearest tree. More strongly arboreal
species tend to show less organization. Size of group is related also to density
of food, with larger groups where food is abundant (as when fig trees fruit), and
smaller or even lone animals where food is scattered. The Asian forests where
orangutans live provide only scattered food resources for these large primates,
and each adult orang usually seeks its food alone.
Sexual dimorphism refers to species in which males and females differ, espe sexual dimor
cially in size, in more than reproductive organs. Among ground-living primates, phism: “di-”
adult males generally are larger and heavier than adult females, and have larger (or “bi-”): two,
“ morph”:
canine teeth (fangs). Adult males frequently threaten predators approaching body, so: two
their troop, while females carry the young to a safer spot. Male gorillas, which types of
can be twice the size of females, are famous for their chest-pounding threats bodies,
that frighten off practically everybody. Male baboons bare their long fangs, sev according
to sex.
eral perhaps standing together as a living, snarling fence in front of their mates
and offspring. In contrast, highly arboreal primates, including gibbons as well
as many monkeys and prosimians, show litde or no dimorphism, and males are
less likely to threaten while females retreat, although males have been observed
trying to distract predators by jumping around on branches as females with
young try to get away.
Sexual dimorphism is correlated with social relations in primates in that
species that mate monogamously (pair for long periods) do not show dimor
phism—males and females, instead, are the same size. Species where one or a
few adult males breed with a group of females, a common pattern among pri
mates, tend to have males larger than females. One big male with a “harem” of
females breeding exclusively with their protector is rare, observed only with
gorillas and one species of baboon. Chimpanzee troops have several adult males
and females who mate and share a territory; a young adult female chimpanzee
is likely to leave her parents’ troop and join another to find mates. “Pygmy
chimpanzees” (bonobos) are less sexually dimorphic than the common, larger,
terrestial chimpanzees. Males and females spend more time in pairs and make
love more frequently than common chimpanzees. The term “make love” seems
appropriate because bonobo pairs remain close, embracing, looking at each
other’s face, leading into copulating face-to-face more often than other apes do.
Many monkey troops are primarily groups of females who tolerate males join
ing them for mating and protection. It is significant that social patterns among
primates seem to be less fixed, more adjusted to local circumstances and indi
viduals’ personalities than is seen among other mammals.
Monkeys and apes, like humans, often show interest in other adults’ babies,
and in many species females cooperate in child care, one adult watching a little
one while its mother gets some food, one grooming another’s infant or playing
with juveniles. Infants hang on to their mothers’ fur, and ape mothers use their
arms to hold their babies. (A mother gorilla in a zoo saw a little human boy fall
into the gorillas’ enclosure, ran over, picked up the boy and carried him in her
arms to the door where zookeepers could retrieve him.) There is, unhappily, an
ugly side to primate interest in others’ babies: Observers have seen males invade
a troop, drive away its principal adult male, seize his offspring from their moth
ers’ arms and kill them, apparently wanting the females to bear only the
invaders’ children. Jealous females have been observed hurting and even killing
another mother’s child. Primates’ capacity for flexibility in behavior, for figur
ing out what to do instead of blindly acting from instinct, is a capacity for evil
as well as good.
Primates evolved from an early mammal population that was ancestral also to
tree shrews, bats, and “flying lemurs” (not a true lemur). The earliest primates
were small, arboreal, omnivorous mammals (lived in trees, ate both plants and
meat—in this case, insects). Each paw had five flexible fingers. Catching insects
made for natural selection for eyes in the front of the head with overlapping
vision fields giving depth perception, for quick movements, and for intelligence
to react quickly to prey’s erratic motions.
Prosimians, the first major types of primates, spread throughout the trop
ics, primarily in forests but extending into grasslands where more new species
and eventually genera evolved adapting to many ecological niches. The princi
pal types of prosimians are lemurs, surviving on the large island of Madagascar
in the Indian Ocean off East Africa; lorises, found over much of Africa and sur
viving by feeding at night when monkey competitors and hunting animals are
mosdy sleeping; and tarsiers, also nocturnal (night-living), living in forests of
Indonesia and the Philippines. Tarsiers are more like simians than are the lemurs
and lorises, and presumably are descended from an ancestral population from
which monkeys and apes (and humans) have also descended.
Monkeys and apes (simians) first appeared about 35 million years ago, or
some 30 million years after prosimians. With prosimians already throughout the
tropics in a great number o f ecological niches, simians competed with the older
types of primates primarily by using greater intelligence to take over food and
safe sleeping places. Thus today’s prosimians exist by feeding at night when
their competitors aren’t active, or in the case of lemurs, because of being on a
large island that became separated from Africa before simians evolved and is too
far from the coast for simians to swim or float over to on branches. Monkeys
and apes include species, such as colobus monkeys, that have evolved special
ized feeding capacities enabling them to live in particular ecological niches such
as leafy trees without fruit. The majority of simian species, and humans, remain
omnivores, eating mosdy fruit and green plants but occasionally insects or
smaller animals. In addition to the many arboreal monkeys and the gibbons,
there are a number of monkey and ape genera that spend most of their waking
hours on the ground, although sleeping in trees for protection. Ground-living
(terrestrial) primates are bigger than related arboreal species and show more
sexual dimorphism (one sex, usually males, larger than the other). Where males
are larger than females, they often aggressively confront predators while the
females carrying young run to trees for safety. The majority of primates live in
groups of females and young, some species with one or a few males as their
YOU HAN/E BEEN CHOSEN AS YOU'RE IN A P00/A WITH I GUESS THE SUCCESSFUL
BILL GATES' TOCOEL BOY. THREE fAONKEYS. ONE TOCOEL BOYS RN0C0 THAT
BUT FIRST YOU hUST HAS A BANANA, ONE HUWANS ARE PRIVATES
ANSWER THIS Q O rZ. HAS A S T IC K , ONE HAS TOO.
NOTH IN G . CORICH STUPID r =
P R IV A TE IS THE TRICK [
SMARTEST? QUESnONTTIT
D ILBER T reprinted by permission o f United Feature Syndicate, Inc.

mates, other species tolerating many males in the group. There are also primate
species where males and females pair off in lasting monogamous relationships.
Apes evolved about the same time as monkeys but are larger than monkeys
and lack tails. O f existing apes, gibbons and the closely related, somewhat larger
siamangs live in Asian forests where they swing through the trees and feed
hanging by an arm from a branch. Orangutans also live in Asian forests, are
larger than gibbons, and walk along wide tree branches, holding on to upper
branches for balance. Adult orangs are solitary except when they wish to mate,
although the females keep their juveniles with them for years until fully grown.
Chimpanzees and gorillas live in Africa, the chimpanzees in groups of adults of
both sexes and young, the gorillas in female groups attended by one adult male.
(Other males keep a distance until they can attract females or replace a group’s
male.) The African apes are physically and genetically closer to humans than are
the Asian apes, and chimpanzees most resemble humans in behavior.
RECOMMENDED READING
Jolly, Alison, The Evolution of Primate Behavior; Second edition. New York: Macmillan,
1985. Jolly surveys prosimians, monkeys, and apes, discussing how human behav
ior seems to have evolved. Her sensitivity to moral questions raises this book above
ordinary reporting.
C * H * A * P * T * E * R 5
‘C ' jj t U
C iO h l* 4 > ___________________
About five million years ago, a genus appeared in Africa that differed from
ancestral ape populations in habitually standing and walking upright. This new
genus is termed Australopithecus. From it evolved, over about three million
years, our own genus Homo. Australopithecus and Homo together are the
hominids.
Australopithecus looked somewhat like a pygmy chimpanzee, except that its
legs were longer, its arms shorter. Because human and chimpanzee genes are
almost identical, and the pygmy chimpanzee (bonobo) especially similar to
humans in its genes and biochemistry, it is reasonable to suppose that the early
Australopithecus resembled bonobos in much of their behavior as well. Australo
pithecus fossils from around four million years ago were still well adapted to
moving in trees (arboreal) in spite o f the pelvis and legs being strongly modi
fied for upright walking and running. Brains o f Australopithecus were the size
of chimpanzee brains, about 400 cubic centimeters (cc.); human brains are
three times this size. The major noticeable differences between African apes and
humans today is in brain size and habitual posture, but when ancestral popula
tions diverged about five million years ago, the difference was principally in pos
ture.
Assessing the difference between apes and Australopithecus around four
million years ago, we should keep in mind that it is characteristic o f tarsiers,
monkeys and apes to hold the body upright. Simians sit upright to eat, using
their hands to bring food to their mouths, mother simians often use an arm to
hold an infant, and all simians have been observed to occa
sionally walk or run upright on hind legs at least for a few bipedal: “two [bi-] legs [ped]”
steps. Natural selection among anthropoid primates for intel- (4-legged: quadrupedal)
49
50 I Chapter 5 Development of the Genus Homo
Australopithecus afarensis. Male

and female reconstructions from
skeletons and estimates of
similarity to other hominids and
apes.
Credit: Courtesy Department o f
Library Services American Museum
o f Natural History
ligent use of the hands favored erect posture and a tendency toward occasional
bipedal movement, especially when carrying something (food, an infant, or—
among African apes—stones or sticks to throw). Austmlopithecines derived from
a mutation that shortened the pelvis, lengthened the legs, and modified the
angle of insertion of femur (thigh bone) into pelvis (hip joint). As you can
observe from people who have been paralyzed from a very young age, without
Famous fossils: News stories dramatizing discoveries help researchers gain funds, but
obscure the real day-to-day drudgery of science. “Lucy,” nicknamed after a Beatles
song, is a set of australopithecine bones making up about two-thirds of a complete
skeleton, perhaps from one individual. Found in Ethiopia (East Africa), “Lucy” is the
best example of an australopithecine. Dozens of less-complete fossils are also vital to
understanding hominid evolution but not so appealing to the public.
Chapter 5 Development of the Genus Homo I 51
Comparison of skeletons of a small adult human (a Pygmy from

Congo), left, and Australopithecus afarensis of nearly fo u r
million years ago, right. Both individuals weighed about 60
pounds; the human was fo u r feet tall and the Australopithecus
about three and one-halffeet tall. Note the human has a larger
cranium (brain ease), smaller jaw, larger pelvis, and longer leg.
Australopithecus has relatively longer arms because it has shorter
legs; note also the thickness of its fem u r (upper leg bone, in thigh),
actually thicker in midshaft than the hum an’s femur.
Credit: From “How Big Were Early Hominids?”, by Henry McHenry,
Evolutionary Anthropology 1 (1): 1 5 -2 0 © 1992 Henry McHenry.
Reprinted by permission of Wiley-Liss, Inc., a subsidiary o f John Wiley
& Sons, Inc.
modern human
(Pygmy, from Congo)
exercise the legs never develop the length and musculature usual in humans.
The mutation oriented australopithecines to easily walk bipedally, and exercise
in this mode developed the longer legs and musculature. Habitually standing
upright, australopithecines’ heads balanced on top of their spines instead of
hanging at an angle from the neck as in four-legged (quadrupedal) animals and
apes. We can tell this because in the hominids, the foramen magnum (“large
hole”) into which the top of the spine is inserted is in the middle of the base of
the skull, whereas in other animals it is in the back or, in apes, at the angle
between back and base.
A remarkable find at the site of Laetoli in Tanzania (East Africa), near
Olduvai Gorge, by archaeologist Mary Leakey revealed footprints of three aus
tralopithecines preserved in powdery volcanic ash. The imprints prove that
these australopithecines, one about four and one-half feet tall, another a bit
shorter than four feet, had feet like ours and walked much as we do, though
apparently not able to stride taking long steps.
3
f EUR0pe4*ft
east as ' * _ A [
......
|\
V\
s0 ^
t#8
\f
\W
. u.
J/ \
Ci
\
<sf •
r s-
&
u L
oU cyj
p a Cro-Magnon Afalou Shandingdong Kow Swamp
tf>CJ
^3 <C*a
p t
E e
R nooJJ
P
L i
d La Chappelle Dar Es Soltan Maba Lake Mungo
E
1 d
S 1
T e
O Locations, in time and space,
C E
a Qafzeh Klasies
fi Dingcun Ngandong of some Homo fossils. Time,
E
N r
E 1 Krapina V from older (lower) to more
y
recent (upper) on left;
M
I L
a
Ehringsdorf Florisbad Dali Sambungmachan columns place fossils in
D
D
t
e
Europe/Near East (left-hand
L
E % column), Africa (middle
M
P i Petralona %Mbwe Zhoukoudian (uncertain)
left), Asia (middle right), or
L d
E d Steinheim Hexian Indonesia and Australia
11 1
S e (right-hand). Footprints are
T
0 E
Olduvai Zhoukoudian Sangiran
to remind you that humans
C a
E r traveled, carrying their genes
1
N
E y
/> (background figure, D N A in
oSf its double-helix structure) to
L L Olduvai Gongwangling Sangiran
0
w
a add to populations in other
t
E e regions. Through occasional
R
P
M inter-regional mating,
L i Lake Turkana
E d evolutionary innovations were
I d
S 1 spread throughout human
T e
0
populations, while regional
E Lake Turkana
c
E
3 variations persisted through
r
N
E
ii time.
y
Credit: Carl Rank from informa
tion by Milford Wolpoff.
By two million years ago, larger hominids had evolved in Africa, alongside
a continuation of the smaller, lightly built, “gracile” (slender) australopith
ecines. Some of the larger species retained many australopithecine features in
cluding brains not much increased from ape size—about 450 cc. in the gracile
australopithecine and 500 cc. in the “robust” species (since brain size roughly
correlates with body size in mammals, the size of gracile and robust australo
pithecine brains is relatively the same). Robust australopithecines probably ate
more plant foods, gracile australopithecines a more omnivorous diet, the size
and diet differences between the genera corresponding to the differences
between gorillas and chimpanzees. It is likely that there was sexual dimorphism
among australopithecines, the general condition in relatively large, terrestrial
primates.
In addition to species of australopithecines, by two million years ago there
lived in East Africa populations of larger hominids that were more fully bipedal
and terrestrial and were evolving larger brains: Homo. Fossils of Homo found in
Olduvai Gorge, dating from just under two million years
ago, were labeled Homo habilis by Mary Leakey’s paleontol On the television show Friends
ogist husband Louis Leakey. Their son Richard Leakey later the romantic character, Ross, is
a museum curator. In a 1996
found hominid fossils of about the same age at the site of
episode, Ross is about to make
Koobi Fora near Lake Turkana, Kenya, in East Africa. Homo out with Rachel when the phone
habilis skulls contained brains averaging 650 cc. Stone chop interrupts. Ross:
ping tools and crude knives have been discovered in East “Australopithecus isn’t
Africa dating to two and a half million years ago. Natural supposed to be in that display.
No, no, Homo habilis was erect.
selection for an ecological-behavioral niche where use of Australopithecus was never fully
tools contributed to a healthy diet may have favored evolu erect.”
tion of Homo with less climbing and more walking on the
ground, plus more attention to the possibilities of tool use and use of the hands
manipulating objects. Meanwhile, both gracile and robust species of australo
pithecines lived throughout Africa for another million years. (And it seems pos
sible, judging from bones at Olduvai, that Homo habilis may have hunted
australopithecines.) We can’t rule out the possibility that australopithecines may
have made stone tools, it just seems sensible to suppose that, given the genus
and the earliest tools evidenced at around the same period, it was the newly
evolved genus, Homo, that began the practice of making stone tools.
Popular science stories and textbooks like to show “the evolution of humans”
as a single line of fossils, one apparently replacing another. In fact, until about
thirty thousand years ago— very recent indeed from the long view of millions of
years of primate evolution—there were more than one species or subspecies of
hominids. The present situation of only one genus, one species, one subspecies
of hominid is peculiar and unique.
Because there are not many fossils o f Homo habilis, and none o f one
complete individual, no one can state exactly how many species or sub
species o f the earliest Homo were living around two million years ago. So far,
all the earliest hominid fossils, from australopithecines to Homo habilis,
come from Africa, especially East and South Africa where dry, open country
exposes fossil beds. Judging from the variety o f australopithecine species and
subspecies, known from a greater number o f fossils, there were probably
several distinct populations o f early Homo in Africa, competing successfully
with australopithecines for food and safe sleeping places. The advantage
gained by having brains one and a half times larger than those o f australo
pithecines allowed variations in early Homo populations, their survival
assisted by figuring out how to make and use tools and very probably by
improved group strategies for obtaining resources and protecting the troop.
Without cities, markets, or wars to attract or force people to travel long dis
tances, early Homo populations would have a greater degree o f reproductive
isolation than historic humans, thus more speciation (evolution o f new sub
species and species).
Around one and a half million years ago, the earliest Homo populations had
evolved into what is generally termed Homo erectus. (Some paleoanthropolo-
gists simplify the history by using the term Homo sapiens for these as well as
Homo erectusgroup, male

and female. Reconstructions
from skeletons and estimates
of probable hair and skin
color; with butchering
activity deduced from stone
tools and animal bones
found in associated sites.
Credit: Courtesy Department
o f Library Services
American Museum
o f Natural History
later Homo, noting that there are no really substantial differences or breaks in
time between the erectus and the sapiens species into which this earlier species
evolved.) The genus Homo had, during the Pleistocene, subspecies reflecting its
gready expanded range of Africa and throughout tropical and temperate Asia
into what are now islands of Indonesia. Homo erectus brains were around
1,000 cc., overlapping the brain size range of humans today. Their bodies and
limbs were heavier than modern humans, with correspondingly heavy muscle
development and thick, ridged bones to support their weight and withstand the
stress o f the pull of the muscles. Homo erectus skulls were low and long front-
to-back, in contrast to modern humans’ high rounded skulls. Above the eye
sockets and across the back of the skulls are projecting thickenings of the bone
where the powerful jaw and neck muscles attached; such a ridge is called a
torus, hence Homo erectus is noted for large prominent supraorbital (“above
eye”) and occipital (“back of head”) toruses.
Note that the African apes evolved a more robust (gorilla) and a lighter
(chimpanzee) pair o f genera; Australopithecus evolved robust and gracile gen
era; it took about half a million years for a gracile species of Homo, our own
species Homo sapiens, to evolve after the Homo erectus type appeared. This pic
ture suggests that the hominid way o f life could be successfully pursued both
by powerfully built and by lighter populations. The heavier built would
require more food and, like gorillas, might have been adapted to environments
with an abundance o f foods, especially edible plants; larger bodies mean larger
digestive system accommodating more slow-digesting fibrous food. The
gracile type gets by with less food although seeking highly nutritious food
(which would make it favor meat). The gracile types could colonize environ
ments with too little year-round food to support robust populations, while
conversely the large hominids could live on less-nutritious plants where highly
nutritious food is scarce. The ranges of gracile and robust populations could
overlap, as seems evidenced by fossils o f both types of australopithecines in
some regions of Africa.
Homo erectus made stone tools, the cruder Oldowan and more specific
Acheulian forms (see Chapter 7, Prehistory). They ate meat as well as plants.
Whether they used fire to cook is debated: some researchers have claimed evi
dence of campfires in a site with a fossil robust australopithecine, which of
course could have been the victim of Homo habilis who walked away with
their own bodies intact. Much stronger, and later, evidence comes from
Zhoukoudian cave near Beijing, China (Beijing was formerly spelled
“Peking”). Half-a-million-year-old layers in the cave contain fire-blackened
hearths, charred animal bones, and fossil hominids classified as late Homo
erectus. The strong evidence for first human use o f fire comes at the time
when Homo sapiens is evolving out o f Homo erectus populations. Zhoukoudian
erectus skulls have smaller teeth, no fangs, and larger brains compared to ear
lier erectus skulls from Java and Africa. Could the use o f fire for tenderizing
food have allowed survival of mutant Homo with smaller jaw and teeth, indi
viduals who might not have survived in an era where food had to be chewed
raw? And did lighter jaws and teeth facilitate development of human language
with its precise pronunciations of thousands of words? These remain ques
tions because the mouth and throat parts critical for human speech are made
o f soft tissue and weren’t preserved; nor do the skulls tell us whether the
speech areas inside the soft-tissue brain were increasing. Anatomists have
linked the vocal tract with characteristics of bones of the upper body, and this
evidence suggests that at least early Homo erectus did not have the speech abil
ities of Homo sapiens.
Fire hearths at Zhoukoudian were important for warmth. Beijing is in the
northern half of China. Cold winters would have been dangerous for hominids
without clothing and fire—or fur. A mutation has occurred that caused
hominids to no longer grow fur, but no one knows when this happened,
whether australopithecines had chimpanzee-like fur or only the fine hair of
humans, whether Homo erectus was furry. Nor do we know whether being vir
tually hairless is advantageous or merely a condition associated on a chromo
some with another mutation that conferred a real advantage. Even if erectus had
fur, fire’s warmth would have been appreciated by the people in the cave, lis
tening to the bitter winds roaring out of the steppes far to the north. Fires
would have protected the people, too, for humans are the only creatures that
can overcome the instinctive fear of fire.
Around 300,000 years ago, Homo sapiens was replacing Homo erectus. Some of
the sapiens fossils from this period are not very different from late erectus,
prompting disagreement among researchers about which label to give to cer
tain specimens. There is also the more important unan
swered question: Was natural selection favoring sapiens-type The Piltdown Hoax: In 1911, a
hominids so that our type was evolving in parallel among a skull like that of modern
number of late erectus populations? Or did sapiens evolve in humans with an apelike jaw was
said to have been found in an
one area of Africa and migrate to Europe and Asia, either English gravel pit. It was claimed
interbreeding with erectus in Asia or driving them to extinc these proved that intelligent
tion? There seems no way of deciding whether the variations humans evolved in England. Not
in archaic (early) sapiens represent interbreeding or parallel until 1953 did a researcher look
evolution. Furthermore, this is not an either/or choice, closely at these “fossils” and
see file marks and modern
because parallel evolution permits adventuresome individuals
brown stain. Wishful thinking
to travel and try mating with people in foreign territories. had blinded some English
Picture to yourself a late-erectus young lady, bored to tears by anatomists to a practical joke.
the nerds in her parents’ band, eyeing a strange-talking, odd-
looking but lively fellow who strode up to the campfire one day, from who
knows where . . .
THE FAR SIDE By GARY LARSON
Another ancient race of hominids: the

nerds?
T H E FA R S ID E © 1988
FARWORKS, INC. Used by permission of
“Mom! The kids at school say we’re a UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE. All
family of Nerdenthals! ... Is that true?” rights reserved.
Basic differences between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens include the full
modern capacity for long strides and other gaits in sapiens; a higher and rounder
skull without the thick torus over the eyes and in the back; larger brain
(1100-1500 cc.); smaller teeth in a reduced jaw that retains a thickening along
the lower edge of the lower jaw for muscle attachment, thereby making a chin
(in other hominids the whole lower jaw is thick and appears rounded); and
lighter build, with less robust upper-body musculature correlating with thinner,
less ridged bones. Humans’ lower body musculature, supporting our bipedal
standing, walking, and running, is relatively more powerfully developed.
Homo sapiens looks rather like an adolescent Homo erectus, relatively slen
der, the head with that rounded shape seen in young children (and cute cartoon
characters). Mutations affecting rate of growth in humans, affecting the timing
during growth of the development of particular bodily features (and of behav
ior capacities), and affecting achievement of sexual maturity may have resulted
in the various differences between earlier and anatomically modern humans.
The markedly larger cranium portion of the modern skull and of the brain
beneath it may be due to a genetic delay in sexual maturity, allowing more time
for growth of the brain and consequently a larger brain when the individual
finally achieves adulthood. The very large brain could better invent tools and
cooperative labor to compensate for lesser physical strength, lessening natural
selection for powerful upper-body and jaw musculature. Add to the small light
childlike jaw a childlike eagerness to try out words, sounds, word games, and
puzzles, and sapienf capacity for developing modern culture is clearly en
hanced.
Another unusual characteristic of humans is that adult females ovulate every
month unless pregnant or nursing a baby. (The baby must suckle every couple
of hours to suppress ovulation.) Most female mammals ovulate only during part
of the year, and many show outward signs of being ready to conceive (that is,
in estrus or “heat”): reddening and swelling of the area around the vulva,
becoming somewhat nervous and excitable. Males of these species are aroused
by females in estrus but remain uninterested in sex when the females are not in
this state. Humans, in contrast, know no season for love or lust. Human females
can conceive during several days every month, and since there are no outward
signs readily perceived, human males are unaware of when these days occur.
Human females’ breasts are more enlarged than those of other primates, and
human males’ penises are larger than those of ape males. With upright posture
and no fur, these human secondary sexual characters are prominent. Compared
to other primates, human adults are more consistently and easily sexually
aroused. The tendency is elaborated in humans’ cultures into songs, drama,
symbols, played with to enhance the emotional charge of many customs that
bond members of the community.
There was more genetic diversity in Homo during the million years of the Pleis
tocene, the geologic era ending about 10,000 years ago, than there has been in
the succeeding Holocene, the modern geologic era beginning 10,000 years
ago. What Americans call “racial” differences between human populations are
superficial, contrasted with differences between Pleistocene populations or
within contemporary ape genera. Biological races are defined as populations
that might evolve into separate species—but this is highly unlikely to happen
with widely traveling modern humans. Pleistocene humans were less numerous
than historic humans, lacked ships, and were affected by sea-level changes alter
nately opening and drowning land passages. (During the epochs of massive
glaciation, so much water was frozen in the immense continental glaciers that
sea level fell as much as 350 feet.) In the late Pleistocene, from about 100,000
to 30,000 years ago, there were at least two human races, Homo sapiens sapiens
and Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. (Whether these are ^fepecies of the single
species Homo sapiens, or two species of the genus Homo is debated. Recent
examination of a limited DNA sample from the original Neanderthal skeleton,

showed sequences different from any known present human or ape genome.
Such difference may indicate the Neanderthal population separated half a million
years ago from the African Homo erectus population ancestral to Homo sapiens
sapiens. On the other side of the debate there are archaeologists’ observations
that no cultural difference appears until about 40,000 years ago. If Neanderthals
were a distinct species, more than a geographically based race, how is it they
made tools so similar to those of the early sapiens sapiens societies?)
Neanderthalensis was first recognized as a distinct race in 1856, when a fos
sil was discovered in a cave in a valley near Diisseldorf, Germany. Local people
liked to stroll in the pretty valley that a town poet called das Neander thal, “the
Neander vale,” after a Greek river because its ordinary German name didn’t fit
his poetry. The fossil was clearly human but its bones were exceptionally thick,
and it had supraorbital and occipital toruses unlike any modern humans.
Charles Darwin’s book on evolution and natural selection, published in 1859
while anatomists were still debating over the German fossil, stimulated the
hypothesis that the specimen represented an extinct species of humans. Its
extraordinary muscular development, reflected by the heavy bones, led biolo
gists to suppose that natural selection came to favor the development of intelli
gence over the brute strength they saw in the ancient Neanderthal fossil. (“Thai”
is spelled “tal” in contemporary German.) The notion that Neanderthal was an
ape-man brute was fostered around 1870 by a French anatomist who claimed
that a squat ugly Neanderthal was the ancestor of the Prussian Germans fighting
his country in the Franco-Prussian War; the French, he insisted, were descended
from graceful, large-brained “Cro-Magnon” (Homo sapiens sapiens) fossils
found in a French valley.
It turned out that both Neanderthals and the modern-type humans found in
the French cave had the same large cranial capacity. So far as we can tell, lack
ing the soft parts of the brain itself, the two populations can have been equally
intelligent. Neanderthals resembled Homo erectus in powerful musculature and
thick, ridged bones to support it. Homo sapiens sapiens have lighter skeletons
and musculature. The skulls of Neanderthals appear lower and longer, with
supraorbital and occipital toruses, in accordance with the heavy neck and jaw
muscles. Homo sapiens sapiens skulls are high and round because jaw and neck
muscles are light, only slightly stressing the skull they pull on. Intelligence is
likely to have been comparable because Homo sapiens sapiens as well as Nean
derthals made the same general types of stone tools for thousands of years.
Neanderthals had broad shoulders, relatively short arms and legs, robust tor
sos, and short but strong fingers. The most pronounced “classic” specimens of
Neanderthal type are found in Europe and Western Asia, living during several
stages of late Pleistocene glaciations. Neanderthals’ heavy, short-limbed bodies
would have been well adapted to a cold climate, conserving body heat by reduc
ing skin surface area relative to body weight. Homo sapiens sapiens’ more slen
der build is better adapted to warm climates, the longer limbs and torso
Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, male and female. Reconstructions from skeletons and estimates of probable
hair and skin color; the male is shown using a stone blade to whittle a wooden spear, the female is using a
stone scraper to cleanse and soften a hide.
Credit: Courtesy Department of Library Services American Museum o f Natural History.
providing more skin surface for the cooling evaporation of perspiration. The
earliest Homo sapiens sapiens appear in Africa. Neanderthals and Homo sapiens
sapiens thus seem to be what biologists term geographic races, populations
adapted to differing environments.
Most researchers date the earliest Homo sapiens sapiens, in Africa, to around
120.000 years ago. This happens to be the time of the last interglacial period,
when ice sheets melted to the polar ice caps, sea level rose with the influx of
meltwater to even higher than today, and subtropical vegetation and animals
extended farther north than at present (hippopotamuses in northern Europe!).
“Anatomically modern humans” spread into the eastern Mediterranean area,
appearing in Israel, along with Neanderthals, in Qafzeh cave at 90,000 years ago.
Glaciations and bordering cold tundra in northern Eurasia recurred begin
ning around 118,000 years ago. The relatively short interglacial era (126,000-
118.000 years ago) followed by the relatively rapid return of colder climate may
have discouraged migrations of Homo sapiens sapiens northward. Anatomically

modern humans don’t show up in Western Europe until about 35,000 years
ago, coexisting with “classic” Neanderthals, although only for a few thousand
years. It is significant that Homo sapiens sapiens comes into Western Europe
with a warmer climate period (an “interstadial” rather than interglacial, because
there was less glacial melting in this “stage” [“-stad-”:stage] than had occurred
at 126,000 years ago). Cold glacial periods recurred up to 18,000 years ago,
but once settled in temperate latitudes, Homo sapiens sapiens seems to have fig
ured out how to cope with cold by means of tailored fur clothing, lined tents,
or iglu-style homes.
Asia seems to show more continuity between earlier Homo and Homo sapi
ens sapiens, or at least not the apparent relatively abrupt replacement of Nean
derthals by sapiens sapiens that is seen in Western Europe. Another perspective
is to note that only in Western Eurasia was there a markedly distinct “classic”
Neanderthal, while in Africa and Asia greater diversity of Homo sapiens shows
shifts rather than abrupt changes in populations. Anthropol
ogist Christy Turner challenges even that perspective in argu Christy Turner reminds us that
ing that Southeast Asia may have been the locale of the Southeast Asia is not in a far
evolutionary emergence of modern Homo sapiens sapiens corner of the globe, as it
appears on Mercator projection
about 50,000 years ago, a time when sea levels were at their
maps, but central between
lowest and the new race could have migrated widely, possibly Europe, Northeast Asia,
using bamboo boats to cross some straits. Turner notes that southern Africa, and Australia
people using boats could have traveled faster than people on (around 6000 air miles from any
foot, and might have spread diseases to regions where the of these).
archaic humans lacked the Southeast Asians’ immunity, in
this way reducing resistance to the travelers’ colonization. (Turner’s model for
this scenario is the devastation suffered by American Indian populations from
diseases brought by European invaders whose forebears had survived those dis
eases’ first impact in Europe.) The fact that Australia was colonized by humans
at least 40,000 years ago fits Turner’s hypothesis that boats facilitated the
worldwide spread of humans. During the maximum cold period, low sea level
let Siberia and Alaska join as one land mass; humans could have migrated from
Asia overland into America, perhaps along coastal plains now underneath
today’s higher sea level.
Did Neanderthals and archaic Homo sapiens in Asia become extinct? As
with early Homo sapiens and late Homo erectus, both observed human behavior
and some physical evidence suggest interbreeding. Gene alleles from the exist
ing populations could be carried in the new interbreeding populations without
showing in the phenotypes of most heterozygous individuals, occasionally then
appearing incompletely expressed in a few members of the mixed population.
In regions of Europe where many sites of “classic” Neanderthals occur, one can
see some people with relatively low and long heads, well muscled, compactly
built—reminiscent of Neanderthals who may have been among their very dis
tant ancestors.
Homo sapiens sapiens* light, slender anatomy is advantageous, compared to

archaic Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, in two ways: (1) it requires fewer calo
ries to keep it active because less energy is burned carrying its weight, and
(2) its greater skin surface, contrasted to thick-bodied, short-limbed Nean
derthals, cools more efficiendy in hot climates. The second advantage would
have been significant in the evolution of anatomically modern humans in Africa
and the adjacent Near East, while discouraging their expansion north into the
cold lands occupied by heat-conserving Neanderthals. The first advantage—
needing fewer calories to keep going because not so many are consumed in car
rying one’s own weight as one moves—would have been selected for if
populations were experiencing food shortages. During the Late Pleistocene, the
great glaciations not only closed off vast regions of northern Eurasia and moun
tain zones but also disrupted rainfall patterns so that portions of Africa and
southwestern Asia became arid, reducing vegetation and animals available for
human food. Under these conditions, the slender modern humans would burn
fewer calories on long treks to find food. If they could invent more efficient
tools, they would also burn fewer calories processing food. Thus adverse climate
in warmer regions selected for populations efficient in energy consumption and
motivated to experiment with technology to substitute for energy-wasting
brute muscular strength. When the glaciation trend waned about 50,000 years
ago, the fluctuating but overall warming curve favored the northward migra
tion of anatomically modern humans, now with technology considerably more
sophisticated than European Neanderthals were using.
Excavations in the Near East (Israel, Lebanon) have uncovered 15,000
years of changes in artifacts (tools and other crafted objects) bridging the Mid
dle Paleolithic (Mousterian) and Upper Paleolithic (Aurignacian) cultures.
Anatomically modern human societies there (and probably in adjacent north
eastern Africa) were refining techniques of chipping stone to readily produce
quantities of thin, sharp blades rather than the thicker Mousterian flakes that
used more flint but cut less well. These anatomically modern people created
techniques to cut, shape and polish bone and antler to make new kinds of tools.
No doubt they also improved woodworking (wood wasn’t preserved in the
sites), and with their new techniques fashioned beads, pendants, and little fig
urines— ornaments in stone, shell, and mammoth-tusk ivory never before seen.
Aurignacian blades and pointed, smoothed bone tools would have been well
suited to sewing clothing and tents. We don’t know whether Neanderthals
might have had enough body hair to help them keep warm; we do know that
anatomically modern humans must have clothing to survive in cold climates.
When, around 35,000 years ago, anatomically modern people with their varied
and attractive Aurignacian technology expanded north and into Europe, the
“classic” Neanderthals of Western Europe learned some of these techniques,
producing for several thousand years a much-modified Mousterian incorporat-
ing Aurignacian inventions. In the end, by 30,000 years ago, both the Nean
derthal race and its Mousterian culture were no longer to be seen.
Meat procurement by hominids shifted from the pattern common in all
hunting animals of picking off the infirm, young, and old prey, to a unique
human concentration on healthy adult animals. Such animals are prime for
meat, and for bone and horn to make artifacts from. They are also most diffi
cult to overcome, alert, fast, and dangerous if cornered. Hunters needed to plan
strategy carefully to stalk, ambush or trap, and dispatch prime game. Interest
ingly, Western European Neanderthals as well as anatomically modern humans
harvested prime adult game (i.e., Neanderthals seem to have had the intelli
gence to hunt as do anatomically modern humans).
Neanderthals’ Mousterian tools could have scraped and softened hides but
do not seem suited to sewing tailored clothing. Upper Paleolithic, anatomically
modern humans required fewer calories for mere survival. They further reduced
calorie needs by conserving body heat with sewn clothing and tents, gained
prime meat from their hunting skills, invented fishing, no doubt improved har
vesting and processing of plant foods, and from the combination of these fac
tors obtained time to manufacture ornaments and organize social events. The
general evolutionary trend in primates toward larger, more complex brains cou
pled with hands capable of fine manipulations culminated in hominid develop
ment of Homo sapiens sapiens: us.
Hominids separated from the same ancestral population as chimpanzees and

gorillas around five million years ago, in Africa. The earliest hominids were Aus
tralopithecus, bipedal creatures about four feet tall, with brains not much larger
than those of apes. About two million years ago, there evolved a new genus,
Homo, and stone tools were first made. After a few hundred thousand years,
Homo erectus was the recognizable hominid, with brains twice the size of apes’
brains and the custom of making several distinct types of stone tools (and no
doubt tools of perishable materials, too) to process food, hides, and wood. Use
of fire, a dramatic innovation dared only by humans, appears 500,000 years ago.
Cooking food over fire rendered many foods more edible, especially to young
children and the elderly, contributing to population survival and lessening nat
ural selection for powerful jaws. Homo erectus spread throughout Asia and into
Europe, as well as through Africa.
Homo sapiens evolved about 300,000 years ago. By 120,000 years ago, two
subspecies of Homo sapiens had developed: in Africa and the adjacent eastern
Mediterranean lands, anatomically modern Homo sapiens sapiens, and in west
ern Eurasia, the more robust, cold-adapted Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. A
period of warmer climate around 35,000 years ago encouraged anatomically
modern humans, who by then had invented a greater variety of efficient tools
and also beads and carved figurines, to expand northward in Eurasia. At first
Neanderthals coexisted with anatomically modern immigrants, copying some of
their tool types, but by 30 ,0 0 0 years ago the Neanderthal race was submerged
in the anatomically modern human populations. For the last 3 0 ,0 0 0 years, only
modern humans have existed, inhabiting every continent and living by means
of a variety of tools, shelters, clothing, and social relationships.
RECOMMENDED READING
Walker, Alan, and Pat Shipman. The Wisdom of the Bones: In Search of Human Origins.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. Walker recounts his study of the nearly complete
skeleton of a teen-age Homo erectus boy, found in Africa. Every question raised
about features of the fossil opened up further questions, making Walker’s work a
detective story involving a variety of experts. The style is lively, as if you were beside
the anthropologist as he is alternately puzzled and excited.
C * H * A « P * T * E * R 6
Americans are socialized to immediately identify people in “racial”

Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, American Indian, Pacific
Islander. “Race” identification is made on one or a few traits Race: reproductively isolated
identifiable even on fully clothed people. “Race” traits are population evolving into a new
binary (either/or)— “white” skin or not; families speak species. Not applicable to con
temporary human populations!
Spanish or not; “slant” eyes or not; light brown skin but no
“African” features. Children o f parents from different
“races” are classified into the lower-status “race.” “Race” powerfully affects
everyone who lives in the United States.
Anthropologists ever since Franz Boas have been explaining to Americans
that American “racial” categories are social constructs poorly connected to bio
logical facts. There have been no true (biological) races within the human
species for the past 30,000 years, and there are none now. Nevertheless, since
1964, U.S. law has banned discrimination based on alleged “race,” U.S. Census
forms still ask for “race” identification, supposedly to help discover patterns of
persisting discrimination. “Race” in America is what “class” is in Europe or
“caste” in India, a means o f maintaining social distinctions of wealth and power
through automatically assigning people to their forebears’ status. Because the
United States was officially founded on the principle of inalienable human
rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, what is actually a system of
social class categories is masked by calling the categories “races.” Slavery was
finally made unconstitutional after 1863, but the notion conveniendy persisted
that certain populations are biologically bred to hard labor, others to manage
ment and power.
It would be fimny, were the anecdotes not so often cruel, to describe some
o f the nonsense imposed on Americans in the name of race. An anthropologist
65
66 I Chapter 6 Variation in Homo Sapiens
“Bi-racial” twin brothers.

The boys’ parents have both
European and African
ancestry: one twin happened
to get the African gene allele
for more melanin in the
skiny the other the European
allele for less melanin. Note
how closely similar the twins’
features are—can you ignore
the difference in skin color?
CRED IT: Rex U SA /T h e Sun
with some African ancestry is married to a psychologist with only European

ancestry; their daughter is called “Black” in America but when she visits Brazil,
she was called “morena” and told she is not “Black” (preta in Brazil)—as she
says, “When I got on the plane I was Black but when I got off the plane I was
no longer Black!” Another American family with one parent of part African
descent, the other entirely European, visited two schools in a city attempting to
create “racial balance” in its schools. At one school—in a Black neighbor
hood— the parents were asked to check off “White” on the “race” question on
the enrollment form; at the other school—in a White neighborhood—the par
ents were asked to check off “Black.” At each school, the secretary making the
request was looking direcdy at the two attractive brown-skinned children stand
ing beside their parents. Tragic stories can be told, too. Sylvester Long, popu
larly known as Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, was a strikingly handsome,
athletic, highly intelligent man born in 1890 to a family in North Carolina that
appeared Black. Unlike his parents, two brothers, and sister, Sylvester mani
fested genes from two American Indian great-grandmothers. His father’s
employer suggested the boy claim he was American Indian and take advantage
o f free schooling available to Indians. The schooling was much inferior to that
available to Whites but better than poor Blacks like the Longs could obtain.
Sylvester became a successful journalist and occasional actor but at the price of
always concealing his Black ancestry; he never dared visit his family, broke off
an engagement rather than risk revealing his secret, and finally, exhausted by a
life o f evading discrimination, shot himself.
Chapter 6 Variation in Homo Sapiens I 67
First and second generation offspring of

African-European matings. The first genera
tion children are genotypically heterozygous
for skin color, hair form, and body shape, phe-
notypically showing blending (neither parent’s
alleles dominant). The children of this het
erozygous couple may inherit only African
alleles, only European alleles, or be heterozy
gous; alleles are passed on independently so
that an individual may inherit one grand
parent’s skin-color allele and another grand
parent’s hair-form allele or body-shape alleles.
The chart illustrates a hypothetical but possi
ble family. Note that before the U.S. Civil
War, if either of the Africans in the parental
generation was held in slavery, all the chil
dren and all the grandchildren would proba
bly have been slaves, their free Euro-
American grandparents disregarded by
American society. Incidentally, this chart
exhibits ccMendelian sorting” of alleles: differ
ences between first and second generation off
spring of mixed matings, first charted by
Darwin’s contemporary, the Austrian scien
tist Johann Gregor Mendel, in his research
with pea plants.
CREDIT: R. Biasutti, Le Razze e I Popoli della
Terra, 1967, tav. IX
M Ilf<*41*64* __________________________________
Human populations, like other organisms, show the effect of large natural bar
riers separating breeding groups. Europeans, Northeast Asians, Southeast
Asians, Africans, American Indians, Australians, and Polynesians are distin
guishable populations. Each of these major populations can be pictured
through “typical” individuals B UT the populations g rade into one another across
continents and on the edges o f natural barriers.
Conventionally, Homo sapiens sapiens has been divided into three or five
“races”: Caucasoid or European, named from supposedly most typical examples
being found in the Caucasus Mountains of Russia; Mongoloid or (East) Asian,
named from the Mongols o f Central Asia; Negroids, named from their skin
color (negro, “black”). To these three are sometimes added American Indians
(otherwise included among Mongoloids) and Australoids (Australia and New
Guinea). Negroids, in Africa, Australoids, and American Indians each have a
continent surrounded by water to keep them relatively reproductively isolated.
Caucasoids and Mongoloids share a wide continent with the world’s highest
mountains, the Himalayas, in the middle separating them. Biologists use the
term “geographic races” for such breeding populations associated with territo
ries that are separated by geographic features.
Caucasoids are distinguished by reduced melanin, giving them the lightest
skin. Plus, a minority of Caucasoids inherit mutations producing blue eyes and
blond or red hair. Mongoloids tend to have slightly more melanin than
Caucasoids, black straight hair, brown eyes. A subtype in northern Asia exhibits
a fold on the inner side (near the nose) of the eyelids, narrowing the amount of
eye exposed. This is an adaptation protecting against cold and bright glaring
snow; northern Europeans are likely to have a similar mutation with the fold
appearing on the outer sides of the eyelid, away from the nose. Negroids have
more melanin than the other populations and tightly curling hair. Both are
adaptations to the tropics: Melanin protects against sunburn, and the tight curls
allow more air circulation and evaporation than long straight hair does. It is not
surprising that Australoids, in the tropics of Australia and New Guinea, also
have dark skin, curly hair, and broad noses, although otherwise differing from
Africans. American Indians, Southeast Asians, and Pacific Islanders north and
east of New Guinea and the adjacent western Pacific, share Mongoloid charac
teristics minus the cold adaptations. “Pygmies” or “Negritos” are dark, small -
stature populations in tropical forests of Africa, Malaysia, and the Philippines.
They are not genetically close and represent parallel evolutions selecting for
small stature, perhaps because the lack of sunlight in these dense forests reduces
the vitamin D needed for calcium metabolism, thereby favoring individuals with
light small bones requiring less calcium. Dark-skinned populations tend to have
broad noses because both high melanin and broad nasal passages help maintain
health in humid tropics, so both have been favored through natural selection.
Conversely, high narrow noses protect health in dry or cold climates and there
fore have been selected for in deserts and in cold regions. In this case, there is
no correlation with skin color.
Causes of differences between major human breeding populations include
mutations, chromosome structure changes, and genetic drift, all of these subject
to natural selection. Populations differ in the proportion of alleles. For example, a
greater proportion of Europeans have the A blood antigen allele than have the B
allele, while the proportions are reversed for East Asians. No sizable populations
are exclusively one or the other, indicating that nowhere has there been strong
natural selection for one or the other allele. Besides A and B blood antigens there polymorphic:
are additional alleles, making all major human populations polymorphic for a “many” (poly-)
“bodies”
blood antigen gene. (Keep in mind that individuals within the populations have
(-morph)
only one pair of alleles, either two of the same [homozygous] or two different
alleles [heterozygous]. Lumping the individuals in a population lets us say the
population is polymorphic.) For practically all the genes so far tested, major pop
ulations are polymorphic, reflecting both a lack of strong natural selection pres
sure on most human alleles, and interbreeding between populations.
Where natural selection has affected the gene make-up of populations,

resistance to disease has in several cases been demonstrated. Best known is the
higher resistance to falciparum malaria shown by persons heterozygous for
Garifuna (“Black Caribs”) on St. Vincent Island are descended from marriages of local
Carib and Arawak Indians with Africans brought in as slaves. On the island, gene tests
indicate equal ancestry from Indian and African. In 1797, rebel Garifuna were exiled to
Honduras where malaria had become endemic. Here, Garifuna with the African allele
protecting against malaria survived while those who happened to inherit the Indian
allele more often died. Mainland Garifuna test more “African” than their Island
cousins due to natural selection by malaria.
the sickle-cell red blood cell (with selection against homozygous normal red-
blood-cell and against homozygous sickle-cell persons). Similarly, persons with
blood antigen O, mainly found in South American Indian populations, seem
less resistant to virus diseases (hence the high mortality when invaded by
Europeans). It may be that the low proportion of O in Europeans is the result
o f natural selection, generations ago, against O-type people in Europe through
early death from virus diseases while the more resistant A-types recovered from
these diseases and reproduced. Note—again!—that all major human popula
tions are very polymorphic, a situation that maximizes the chance that some of
their members will survive the attacks of new diseases.
Humans’ willingness to seek a better life in a new place has spun off little
colonies countless times over thousands of years. Each colony has held a por
tion of the total gene pool of its parent population. Given a limited portion of
the total original gene pool, plus the selective effects of a new environment,
colonies would come to differ from the parent population in lacking some
genes, in having relatively more of some and fewer of other genes compared to
the parent population and, in time, in possessing new genetic material resulting
from mutations and chromosome structural changes. Strictly speaking, “genetic
drift” refers only to the chance differences due to the colony happening to have
some but not all of the parental gene pool. This throw-of-the-dice kind of
chance—even if a colony were deliberately made up of people with a certain
appearance, their phenotypes would mask recessive or partially expressed genes
unseen by the choosers—has been a strong factor in creating the differences
seen in human populations.
A clear example of genetic drift has been observed in a remarkable natural
experiment, the Pitcairn Islanders. In 1787, the British navy ship H.M.S.
Bounty sailed to Tahiti in the Pacific. Its commander, Captain Bligh, was
ordered to take on board at Tahiti a shipment of breadfruit trees, native to
Polynesia, and convey them halfway around the world to the West Indies, where
they would be planted to provide cheap food for the slaves working on British
sugar plantations. Once in Tahiti, it took several months for hundreds of bread
fruit saplings to be potted and secured on the ship. While a few crewmen were
busy at this task, others were free to lounge on the beach and become friends
with local people. When the Bounty was ready to resume its months-long sea
journey, the Englishmen hated to leave their tropical paradise. A few days out,
junior officer Fletcher Christian, a young man who had some brushes with the
law already in England, organized a mutiny.1 Captain Bligh and a few loyal men
were put off in a lifeboat, which they rowed over 3000 miles to land. Christian
sailed the Bounty back to Tahiti, left ashore those Englishmen who wanted to
stay, and picked up twelve Tahitian women, six men, and one woman’s baby
girl. Eight English seamen remained with Christian. To hide from the British
navy that would be out to arrest and execute the mutineers, the Bounty then
sailed to an uninhabited, isolated island called Pitcairn, hundreds of miles from
any other island. The mutineers carried everything useful off the ship to the
high, cliff-encircled island and scuttled the Bounty so it wouldn’t betray their
hide-out.
Within ten years, all but one of the fifteen men were dead. The Tahitian
men were killed when they rebelled against the Englishmen’s insistence they
should be slaves. Most of the Englishmen were killed in quarrels (home-brew-
fueled brawls). Several of the Englishmen had fathered children before they
died; other children were fathered by the one surviving man, seaman John
Adams. All the children, of course, had Tahitian mothers. Over several genera
tions, the population on Pitcairn grew to make a distinct population, manifest
ing both British and Tahitian genes. Nine Englishmen and twelve Tahitian
women obviously were a very small, random sample of the parent populations
of Britain and Tahiti, so many traits seen in the large parent populations are not
present on Pitcairn. On the island, there was limited choice of mates and a like
lihood that cousins would marry, distributing the founders’ genes throughout
the colony. The “founder effect” of a high percentage of the colony possessing
a gene not at all common in the parent populations was observed in the high
incidence of decayed and lost teeth among Pitcairn people. This was due to a
gene carried by John Adams, who, according to the log of the Bounty; had fre
quent toothaches and had lost teeth to decay already in his twenties. Adams’
allele for poor resistance to tooth decay is maladaptive (not adaptive) but not
fatal, allowing people inheriting it to grow up and reproduce. Natural selection
would not have favored that gene causing pain and loss of chewing power in
adults, but because they could still eat and reproduce, neither was there selec
tion against the defect. A great many traits distinctive of one or another popu
lation are probably due to chance rather than natural selection.
1 Mutiny on the Bounty has twice been made into a movie, the first starring Charles Laughton as
Bligh, the second starring Marlon Brando, both based on the popular history by Nordhoff and Hall.
Human populations exhibit adaptations to environments both genetically and

phenotypically (i.e., individual plasticity, the ability to respond to stress or to
maximizing factors such as excellent nutrition). Several genetic adaptations have
been mentioned already: variations in skin melanin content associated with dif
ferences in sunlight ultraviolet radiation; broad or high, narrow noses correlated
with humid versus dry or cold air; eyelid fold where cold and bright snow can
damage eyes; slender people maximizing skin surface where heat must be dissi
pated, and stocky people where body heat must be conserved against cold.
Phenotypical responses are also well known: tanning when skin is exposed to
sunlight, short people maturing late when food for children is generally inade
quate, and marked increases in stature and body weight when offspring of a
stunted population receive abundant and nutritious food. Research by Franz
Boas early in the twentieth century demonstrated that not only height and
weight, but also the relative width of the head are affected by childhood nutri
tion and health conditions: The longer an immigrant family had lived in the
United States, the wider its U.S.-born children’s heads were compared to the
heads of parents reared in poverty abroad. Boas’s research persuaded members
o f Congress that immigrants were not inferior but disadvantaged, and influ
enced continuation of liberal immigration policies.
One adaptation requiring both genetic and phenotypic contributions is
adjustment to living at high altitudes. The higher one goes, the less oxygen pres
sure in the air, so people at high altitudes are better off with large lungs able to
pull in plenty of the low-oxygen air with every breath. Sure enough, there has
been natural selection for large lungs/broad chest in Tibet and the Altiplano of
the Andes of South America (Peru and Bolivia), where for thousands of years
people have lived at 12,000 or more feet above sea level (3500 meters or more).
Full aerobic capacity at high altitudes results when the child of a high-altitude
population grows up at the high altitude. If the child grows up near sea level and
then as an adult moves to the high plateau, he or she will not have the full aer
obic capacity of others who never left the plateau. People from lower altitudes
who visit the high plateaus experience headaches, loss of appetite, weakness, and
rapid heartbeat due to the decreased amount of oxygen in the red blood cells.
They feel okay after a day or few days, but tests show that they can’t match the
workload capacity of those who are native to the high altitude.
Heat and cold tolerance similarly are greatest in individuals who grow up
in the conditions of high heat or considerable cold, while persons who move to
such conditions can acclimate after a few days without achieving the full toler
ance capacity of the natives. There has been some natural selection for tolerance
of cold in the Arctic and in places like the Central Desert of Australia, where
nights are close to freezing although days are warm. Inuit in the Arctic have the
best blood flow to hands and feet o f any population tested, a capacity that keeps
the hands and feet warm, protecting against frostbite. Central Desert Australian
aborigines are accustomed to sleeping near a fire in a light shelter, a custom that
allows their skin on the side away from the fire to cool to a degree that sets for
eigners to shivering; whether these Australians’ ability to sleep without feeling
discomfort is due to natural selection for tolerance, to habit since early child
hood, or to a combination of genotype and habit has not yet been determined.
__________________________________________
Geographic races may be associated with languages and customs, simply

because breeding populations are made up of persons living with others among
whom they will find mates. Sharing a language and customs is common
between mates, and the language and customs are likely to be learned by the
couple’s children. There is, however, no physical connection between genotype,
language, and customs: If not handicapped, a human child learns the language
and customs of the home in which it lives, regardless of its biological ancestry.
Within any human breeding population (geographical race), the range of intel
ligence, strength, beauty, kindness, musical talent, sense of humor, willingness
to work hard, mathematical ability, and so on, is much wider than any averaged
differences between populations.
The U. S. Census categories mix up biological traits (“White,” “Black,”
both referring to allele for skin color), language spoken (“Hispanic” ), and geo
graphical races (American Indian, Pacific Islander, Asian). “Hispanics” may be
European, or European, African or Asian immigrants to Latin America, or
American Indian, or descended from two or more of these geographical races.
None of the census categories is an ethnic group, that is, derived from a nation
with distinct language and customs; instead, each of the census categories is
comprised of many ethnic groups. Television news daily teaches us that some of
the most bitter prejudice is raised against people nearly identical to one another.
In every war, neighbors turn upon one another. Shakespeare’s tragic play
Romeo and Juliet pictures the fatal enmity between two closely similar wealthy
families. Real life gives us many similar stories, for example the prejudice
between German Lutherans and Norwegian Lutherans in a small Wisconsin
town, where high school sweethearts, he of German and she of Norwegian
descent, had to elope to find an unprejudiced minister to marry them, and even
the couple’s grandchildren were ostracized because they were “tainted” by the
other faction’s “blood.”
Millions of Americans, as millions on other continents, have parents or ear
lier ancestors from more than one geographical race. The census forms don’t
give these people a suitable category ( “Other” seems strange, when “Mixed”
would be the honest answer). In effect, millions of Americans are pushed to deny
some of their ancestors when choosing a category to mark. Growing up in
America, people are confused over the significance of the few visible signs so
emphasized in our society. An African American anthropologist expected to be
hailed as a brother when he went to a West African village as participant
observer, and he was deeply hurt when the villagers saw him as “American,” very
different from themselves (he didn’t speak their language; he was rich by their
standards; his clothes were different . . .). An American Indian anthropologist
resents the assumption she will work exclusively with American Indians— “Why
shouldn’t I go to New Guinea? No one thought Margaret Mead should only
study other White Americans!” For both these anthropologists, the extended
formal education through which they earned Ph.D. degrees was far more signif
icant for their lives than the allele for skin color they happened to manifest.
“Race” is a social category in America. No contemporary human populations

are reproductively isolated, so none are evolving into new species. Major geo
graphical barriers lessen interbreeding between regions on opposite sides of the
barrier, allowing each large region to maintain a breeding population differing
in some traits from populations in other regions. (These breeding populations
are called geographic races.) What Americans term “races” include three geo
graphic races, American Indian, Asian, and Pacific Islander, but the “Hispanic”
designation refers to a language, not a geographic population, and “White” and
“Black” refer to alleles for skin color. None of these “race” designations allows
for the phenotypic variations due to ancestry from more than one geographic
race.
Major human geographic races include Western Eurasian or “Caucasoid,”
Eastern Asian or “Mongoloid,” African or “Negroid,” American Indian, and
Australoid. Three of these geographic races occupy continents surrounded by
ocean, and the first two, occupying the very broad Eurasian continent, are sep
arated by the Himalayan mountain chain.
Some of the distinguishing traits of geographic races represent natural
selection for adaptation to their environments: dark skin and broad nose for
humid tropics, light skin for northern regions with less sunlight, high narrow
noses for dry air, epicanthic (eyelid) fold for cold regions with bright snow.
Blood types differ; Type A may represent natural selection for better immunity
to virus diseases. Other distinguishing traits may simply be “neutral” mutations
that happened to occur and be passed on within a breeding population.
There is no fixed relationship between geographic race and the ability to
speak a particular language, perform well in academic subjects, train successfully
for sports, or any other cultural practice. Within each geographic race there is a
wide range of talents and intelligence. The one human species to which we all
belong covers the earth, every region’s population exhibiting some minor dis
tinguishing traits grading into adjacent populations.
RECOMMENDED READING
Harrison, G. A., J. M. Tanner, D. R. Pilbeam, P. T. Baker. H um an Biology, 3d Ed.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
C * H " A * P * T « E ‘ R 7
pm 1 m MiBotnm __________________
Nearly all o f human existence passed before writing was invented. That means
that nearly all we know of humans over two million years comes from informa
tion obtained from the kind of evidence a detective uses: objects and the cir
cumstances in which they are found. The very long period before the relatively
recent creation of written documents of history is termed “prehistory.”
Archaeologists discover and identify evidence of human lives in the past, pre
historic and also historic, and interpret the evidence through cross-cultural
comparisons with other sites from the past and with historic and contemporary
societies.
f /0 4 0 t& t ________________________________
How does the archaeologist know where to dig? Either local

people have reported noticing artifacts on the ground—or in artifacts (Latin artes, “skills,"
some regions, they have seen ruins—or the archaeologist has + factum, “made,"): things
surveyed an area, walking over sections looking for artifacts. that have been made, not
natural objects
Frequently, in recent years, the survey has been conducted to
meet government requirements to protect our cultural her
itage: Before road or building construction can destroy historic or prehistoric
remains, the area to be affected must be surveyed by a competent archaeologist,
and, if significant remains are present, the construction should be rerouted if
possible, and if not, the remains recorded and salvaged.
When a site is to be excavated, the first step is to record thoroughly the
appearance of the site before it is disturbed. This is done with photographs and
75
76 I Chapter 7 Prehistory
a contour map on which visible remains are marked. The contour map is keyed
to a geological benchmark or other permanent marker so that the exact loca
tion of the excavation can be determined again.
Next, a grid is laid out, using a surveyor’s transit or theodolite, with steel
pins or wooden stakes put into the ground at regular intervals, usually a meter
(approximately one yard) apart. Location of each key point—pin or stake—is
marked on the master map prepared for the site. Everything discovered, arti
facts and alterations of the natural environment, is measured by triangulation
from one of the key points or directly by use of the transit, and the exact find
spot recorded on the master map. The information is also recorded in the
archaeologist’s notebook. Frequently now, a personal computer is brought into
the field and data processed through programs created for archaeologists.
Excavation normally is done with small hand tools, often a cut-down and
sharpened mason’s trowel, so that the excavators are close to the work and can
instantly stop when they feel the trowel touching an object or they notice dis
coloration in the soil. The artifact or soil stain is then delicately uncovered and
its exact location and appearance recorded before it is moved. Photographs and
scale drawings as well as notebook and map notations are means of recording
the information on the discovery and its association.
Sometimes archaeologists use sensing instruments to assist their judgment
on the probable location of buried evidence, and they may hire earth-moving
machinery to remove the top layer of soil (if it has been churned up by plow
ing or is the result of recent flood silting). Machinery is only used preliminary
to the hand excavation.
Everything uncovered during excavation is placed in bags labeled with the
grid location and find-spot measurements. Laboratory workers, on the site or
back at the archaeologist’s headquarters, clean the artifacts sufficiently to ana
lyze them and write a catalog number indelibly on the artifact. The catalog
number identifies the artifact with its excavation record.
As the excavation proceeds, the archaeologist is alert to recognize patterns
of association. Discolored soil often is the effect of decayed timber from ancient
structures, or of pits dug into the ground to store food or dispose of trash. Bits
of ash, charcoal, and reddened soil indicate fires, perhaps cooking hearths.
These discolorations frequently can be seen to form patterns outlining houses
and activity areas where the ancient people processed food, manufactured tools,
or carried out religious rituals. The artifacts associated with these patterned dis
colorations are clues to the activities carried out.
Most sites have been occupied again and again, or over a long time span.
(That’s why they may be threatened with destruction, people today finding the
locality as suitable for occupation as the people of the past did.) Repeated occu
pation tends to form layers (strata [plural; the singular is stratum: both are
Latin]). The oldest layer, or stratum, will usually be the lowest down, and the
one above it will be later in time. This is called the Law of Superposition, a fancy
way of pointing out that the first thing laid down has to be on the bottom, and
things laid down next will be on top of the previously placed thing. The most
Chapter 7 Prehistory I 77
recent stratum will usually be on top. By recording the stratigraphy, or stratigraphy:

sequence of strata (layers), the archaeologist can discover which occupation is layers (of
most recent, which are older, and in what order of age. Noting the associa soil or rock)
tion of artifacts and features such as soil stains and hearths within a stratum, and
their separation from strata above or below, the archaeologist can date the arti
facts and features within the sequence of occupations at the site. By sending
charcoal (from wood) or other organic material within a stratum to a radiocar
bon dating laboratory (run by physicists), the archaeologist gets an estimate of
age, in years before the present, of when that organic matter lived. Very likely,
the occupants of the site who left that particular layer of evidence lived at the
same time as the plant burned into charcoal and radiocarbon dated. That asso
ciation with dated organic matter then dates the stratum.
Excavation is only part of an archaeological project. Weeks in the field are
followed by months in the laboratory, closely examining the artifacts for evi
dence of use and manufacturing process, examining the maps and scale draw
ings for patterns perhaps not obvious in the field, comparing artifacts and
patterns to those of other sites to discover economic and possible political rela
tionships of the ancient people, and collaborating with experts in animal, plant,
and climate history to determine the ecology of the site in the past.
How do you become an archaeologist? If you want to earn your living at
it, you need at least an M.A. degree in anthropology, preferably a Ph.D., spe
cializing in archaeology. If you’re interested but not that much, there are avo-
cational archaeologists’ groups in every state and province. They collaborate
with professional archaeologists, notify members of opportunities to volunteer
for digs or for laboratory work, and arrange lectures. Read Archaeology maga
zine (published by the Archaeological Institute of America) for lists of addresses
to contact, or inquire from your instructor or your state or province museum.
Archaeology is one science that anyone can participate in, from kindergarteners
to senior citizens, provided they follow the directions of the professional dig
supervisor.
Archaeologists know a few things about humans in the past simply by
knowing they were humans, members of our genus, Homo. We are certain that
they reproduced by the unions of adult males and females, that the adult
females nursed the babies, because Homo is a mammalian genus. We know that
the young required years of adult care because we have bones of ancient young
Homo that indicate the relatively slow growth rate and prolonged juvenile stage
typical of humans. We can be pretty certain that all Homo lived in social groups,
because nearly all primates are gregarious mammals, and the extended juvenile
stage would be dangerous—nonadaptive, likely to be selected against in evolu
tion—unless the juveniles had several adults around to protect them. Our inter
pretation o f prehistoric human life begins with the expectation that evidence
derives from social groups.
V. Gordon Childe, an Australian-born British archaeologist who was a
leader in archaeological interpretation from the 1920s until his death in 1957,
remarked that what the archaeologist finds can be thought of as fossilized social
How the Archaeologist Works
Excavation of a fur traders’ post, Canada. In 1768, a Scots immigrant businessman in Montreal,
Canada, teamed with a Erench-Canadian voyageur (backwoods trader) to build a set of log cabins
on the Saskatchewan River in central western Canada, at a camping location popular with Indian
travelers. The post was abandoned a few years later, the cabins burned down, and gradually all was
covered with soil. Because the trading post was independent of the competing Hudson’s Bay Company,
it was not well documented. The independent traders lived with Indian wives and children, so the
post contained both European and American Indian artifacts of the frontier period.
A. Aerial view of the site on the high bank of the river.

Trees have grown over the site. In the center, left of the
truck, trees were cleared and rectangular excavation
pits opened along the grid laid out on the site by the
archaeologists.
B. The crew: left to right, two local workmen; the

archaeologist; her child; Reinhard Lehne, lab technician (in
charge of conserving artifacts); David Wilcox, graduate
student in archaeology; Colin Watson, crew foreman
experienced in archaeological excavation; local workman.
C. Mapping the site before excavation. Archaeologist uses

transit to determine fixed points for a contour map. (Site is
under trees.)
D. Preparing the site map on a plane table with alidade:

marking in a benchmark in adjacent field.
E. Early in the excavation. A rectangular grid,

matching one marked on the contour map, has been
laid out on the site with small wooden stakes and
string. Enough trees have been cleared to permit
excavation. Workman in foreground has uncovered
roof logsfrom a burned cabin; note paper bags by his
shoulder, to hold artifacts found in his square that
day. Archaeologist is working in square on right.
Field foreman Watson has measured in a discovered
feature and is recording its exact placement in his
notebook. A second workman is excavating by
scraping with a trowel. Behind Watson and in lower
right corner are metal mesh screens for sifting
excavated soil, to be sure no small artifacts or
fragments of bone or plants are missed.
F. Close-up of workman using trowel.

G. Roof logsfallen from a burned cabin, left in

place (in situ) as remainder of g rid square is
excavated. In middle of side ofpit can be seen a
pair of horizontal lines, light above and dark
below: these are strata (layers) resulting from
charcoal from burned cabin (dark layer) and
(light layer above it) burned clay chinking from
between cabin logs. The charred dark stratum
marks the surface in 1768. Dark oval in right
center at corner of pit is soil filled in a rodent
burrow. Note the archaeologists’ orientation arrow
fo r the photo, pointing north, and numbers and
letter identifying the g rid square fo r the site map.
H. Strata in an excavation trench wall: light layer from

burned clay chinking has charcoal layers above and
below it in this section. This f u r trade post proved to be a
simple site with only the one occupation, marked by the
set of narrow strata from the burning of the cabins.
Note the orientation arrow pointing north and
identifying label with site code (FhNa-19, in official
Canadian site records), date and excavator’s initials
(top right corner), name of site ( CCTinlay,” after the
Montreal merchant who built it), g rid number (78R 16)
and trench face ( awest wall”) . Plastic sheets protect
earlier excavated sections from rain.
I. In another section of the site, recorded as FhNa-3

and called aFrancois” after Finlay’s voyageur partner,
a U-shape (center, in trench wall) filled with
decomposing loose leaves and stones marks a vandals’
pit. Treasure hunters had dug into the site years before.
Archaeologists learn to distinguish such modern
vandals’ pits from older features of a site.
J. Excavated fireplace from trader’s cabin. A puddled

clay hearth extends as an apron beyond the base of the
rock chimney. One charred log remains on the hearth
(above point of orientation arrow), with burned logs
from cabin wall and roof in lower right. A small
rectangular label and nail to left of hearth log marks
where a fragm ent of a china teacup was recovered.
Plastic sheeting on right protects trench wall.
K. Wilcox excavates trash dump showing up as a long

narrow oval stained dark against the undisturbed
natural light soil. The traders’ discarded artifacts
and butchered animal bones remain in the square
under excavation but have been recorded and
removed from the excavated squares above. A n
excavator’s trowel is lying in lower left.
L. A small storage cellar (rounded dark stains in

middle of photo) originally under the floor of a trader’s
cabin. Some light-colored burned chinking from the
walls fell into the little cellar (darker stain around
lighter circle outlined in charcoal) when the cabin
burned. Burned cabin logs are in upper part of
excavation square.
M. Indian artifacts beside traders’ cabin: center left,

beside identification label, pieces (sherds) of a small
Indian-made clay pot, perhaps a child’s pot. Above it,
upper middle left, a tinkler (used today on dance
costumes to create tinkling sound) made by rolling piece
of sheet metal into cone. Tinklers were popular trade
items. Note identification label includes exact position
of artifacts (“1.4 N[orth of grid square line]” and
CC1.T b[elow] d[datum point marking surface before
excavation]”).
N. After the excavation season: analyzing artifacts in

the laboratory. A hand lens is being used to determine
structure of artifact found in a trader’s trash pit.
O. The artifact under examination: a fragment of

European linen interwoven with strips of shiny brass
to look like gold, used for epaulets on eighteenth-
century European military officers’ coats. Fur traders
gave officers’ decorated coats to Indian leaders,
hoping to win them as customers. Artifacts such as this
fragment, the tinkler and the little clay pot help us
picture the human beings who lived their cultures in
the sites archaeologists study.
Credit: Alice Beck Kehoe and Saskatchewan Power
Corporation
behavior. Behavior itself is ephemeral, it disappears as it is performed, but it fre

quently leaves a residue. Objects and changes in the environment result from
human actions, so the actions or behavior can be inferred from their residue of
objects and environmental changes. The archaeologist works as a historical sci
entist from the principle ofactualism : We observe actions and their effects in the
present and match what we find preserved from the past to these present-day
observations, inferring that the effects preserved from the past proceeded from
the same causes as similar effects today. We can’t really prove that any particular
evidence from the past was the result of an action that causes similar effects
today, but if we don’t assume causes and effects today probably operated also in
past time, there would be no historical sciences.
What if we don’t accept the principle o f actualism? Science-

fiction writers have written tales of creatures from other galaxies
who manufactured fossils and stone tools and placed them in the
situations in which archaeologists find them, supposedly in order to
cover up an extraterrestrial cause o f life on earth. Adherents of
some religions want to believe God or saints worked miracles in the
past, so that the past is different from our own experience. You may
believe, or speculate, as you please— but you can’t consider yourself
to be thinking as a scientist unless you limit your explanations of
phenomena to actions similar to those observed today. Anything
outside the physical universe we can observe is outside science;
that’s part o f the definition o f science.
Archaeologists look for artifacts and associated marks in the surroundings.

Artifacts are anything that has been made, anything that is not a natural item.
Usually we think of artifacts as objects, but technically any human alteration of
the environment is an artifact of human action. Most of the artifacts studied by
archaeologists were made of stone, bone, or pottery clay; everything else made
in ancient times is likely to have decayed away. Sometimes unusual circumstances
such as peat bogs or extremely dry deserts preserve normally perishable artifacts
such as cloth because the extreme conditions kill bacteria and other organisms
that consume matter. Artifacts are fossilized human behavior in that they are the
material aspect of actions, for example a stone knife is the “fossilized” part of a
person’s action of cutting something, and a sherd (broken piece) of pottery is
the preserved part of the action of cooking, serving, or storing food.
To obtain the maximum information on the ancient action, archaeologists
collaborate with other scientists. Chemists analyze traces of food on sherds, or
microscopic traces of blood on stone knife blades to identify what animals were
butchered. Soil scientists determine the conditions that probably caused the
characteristics of the soil in which artifacts were lying and, with geologists, they
advise the archaeologist on how natural conditions affected the preservation of
artifacts. Archaeologists themselves use high-powered microscopes to see tiny

scratches on the working edges of artifacts. Then, they experiment by whittling
wood, cutting bone, and so on with similar artifacts the archaeologists them
selves have made. They examine the differing kinds of scratches left by the
experimental actions, then infer that the ancient evidence comes from such
actions. In this way, the functions of artifacts can be inferred from their work
ing edges.
Artifacts simply as objects, unanalyzed, have little scientific value: it is their
association with other artifacts and surroundings that give us most of our infor
mation. When well-meaning collectors ask archaeologists what they can tell
them about the “arrowheads” in a shoebox (or— gasp!— glued into a frame in
the shape of an “Indian chief” ), the answer has to be, “Not much.” An artifact
torn from its association is called an “orphan” by archaeologists, an object with
out the relations that give it meaning. It’s critically important not to disturb a
find until an experienced professional archaeologist has been able to record the
full association (by photographs, mapping, and notes) and examine exactly how
the artifact lies in the ground, the color and characteristics of the soil, what else
lies near it, and how near. By such painstaking recording of associations, the
archaeologist Mary Leakey and her husband Louis Leakey, who was an expert
on fossil hominids, were able to identify the Homo hahilis camp site in Olduvai
Gorge, in Tanzania in East Africa. The pattern of association of the stone arti
facts with broken game animal bones and a crude pile of stones led the Leakeys
to infer a small group of humans sitting together, eating meat and marrow from
bones, perhaps huddling beside the piled stones to sleep out of the wind blow
ing from the nearby lake. The association of these artifacts below a layer of vol
canic ash permitted the Leakeys to date the camp as older than 1,7 0 0 ,0 0 0 years,
since the ash had been dated in a physics laboratory to that age. Part of the
Leakeys’ interpretation came from their knowledge that the early humans were
surely gregarious mammals, therefore the accumulation of game animal bones
and stone artifacts is likely to represent a social group, not a solitary creature
eating alone day after day.
The Beginnings of Culture, or, Will the First Humans Please Stand XJp?
Benjamin Franklin thought that toolmaking set humans apart from other ani
mals. The twentieth-century American anthropologist Leslie White said it was
humans’ use of symbols. When did characteristically human behavior first
appear?
Anthropologists have tested these claims of human uniqueness by observ
ing nonhuman primates, other mammals, and birds. Jane Goodall watched
chimpanzees fish honey-sweet termites out of their hills by peeling a twig
smooth, then poking it into the termites’ holes and pulling it out laden with the
insects. Particularly significant was Goodall’s observation that the chimpanzees
prepared the “fishing rod” before finding a termite hill: They knew it was the
season for the insects to be ripe with a sweet taste; they found a suitable-size
twig, broke it off and made it smooth, then went off looking for a termite hill.
Clearly, the chimpanzees thought about their project and had a mental picture
of a termite-fishing rod. Goodall also observed Egyptian vultures use rocks to
crack open food, and we have known for centuries that sea otters crack shellfish
open by hitting them with rocks. These animals use tools, and, in the case of
the chimpanzees fishing for termites, the animals are making the tools, not just
picking up a handy rock. Chimpanzees and gorillas regularly make nestlike
beds of twigs and leaves in crotches of trees. Little toddler apes have been
observed closely watching their mothers making the bed for the night, then try
ing to imitate them. The little ones’ first attempts are too loose and bumpy for
sleeping in, but in time the skill is mastered and the young ape no longer sleeps
with the mother in her nest bed. A bed is as much an artifact as a termite-
fishing rod or a stone knife.
Many animals show some capacity to think. Simply learning to recognize
predators involves distinguishing certain characteristics of the dangerous species
and generalizing from predators actually sensed to a conceptual category
“DANGEROUS BEINGS.” Animals that learn quickly and reliably to react
defensively when the distinguishing characteristic is sensed are likely to survive
and reproduce, those that don’t pay attention or can’t generalize are likely to
die without offspring, so there has been natural selection for intelligence for
millions of years. Mammals, with their relatively large brains, are particularly
capable of processing variations in information signals.
The most striking of all the observations and experiments to determine the
uniqueness of humans involve teaching apes to communicate with humans or
to use tools. One experimenter demonstrated stone tool making to a captive
orangutan and showed it how the stone knife could cut a string suspending
food. The orang had no difficulty chipping a sharp edge on a piece of flint and
using it to cut the suspended food down. More controversial have been the var
ious experiments teaching versions of human languages to apes. Most of the
experiments have used chimpanzees, although Francine Patterson claims to
have taught a gorilla, Koko, hundreds of sign-language words. An early exper
iment, in the 1930s, was with a baby chimpanzee, Vicki, cared for like a human
baby by a young married couple, both psychologists. Vicki played with neigh
borhood children but couldn’t produce English words, even when her “par
ents” withheld food or drink to force her to ask for them. Another married
psychologist couple, Allen and Beatrice Gardner, tried a generation later to
improve on the Vicki experiment by teaching their young female chimpanzee,
Washoe, to use her hands for sign language. The Gardners realized that chim
panzees’ mouth structure will not permit them to make the sounds required for
human languages, while chimpanzees’ hands are similar enough to humans’ to
imitate sign language. Washoe seemed to learn several hundred signs in
American Sign Language (used by deaf people—what you see when lectures or
videos are interpreted for the deaf). She seemed able to create new sequences
of signs to communicate her own ideas, for example putting together signs for
her trainer, Roger, and for “dirty” to express how she felt about Roger when
he refused to take her out to play. Critics of the Gardners’ work and similar
experiments have charged that eager humans read messages into the chim
panzees’ hand motions, that what the apes do is no more than monkey see,
monkey do, imitating the trainers without real understanding. To get around
that possibility, other experiments have invented symbol languages with plastic
shapes and colors standing for words. Their apes have learned to place the plas
tic symbols in grammatical sentences to obtain food or playtime, and like
Washoe these apes have occasionally set up an original communication that
makes sense. Is that by chance? It’s surprisingly difficult to tell for sure. One
complicating aspect of the experiments is that apes are strong and potentially
dangerous animals. Once they are out of babyhood, they must be chained or
confined in the laboratories, and that is apt to anger them. Ideally, free-living
apes like those Jane Goodall observes could be induced to learn sign language,
resolving the question of whether the captive apes really have demonstrated
capacity for human language, or are forced to go through tricks.
If experiments disagree on apes’ capacity for human cultural behavior, how
much more challenging it is for archaeologists to pinpoint the time when
human culture began! Do we say it was two million years ago when the first of
the genus Homo appears? Do we insist that the use of human language is the
critical factor, and, if so, how can we recognize it in archaeological material? Are
the crude stone tools at Olduvai Gorge the sign of Franklin’s Man the
Toolmaker? What if australopithecines used rocks they picked up, animal bones
such as jawbones and teeth, and horns as tools? Raymond Dart, the anthropol
ogist who first identified the genus Australopithecus, suggested these hominids
had an “osteodontokeratic culture” (osteo: bones, donto: teeth, keratic: horn).
What if australopithecines made tools out of wood, like the chimpanzees’
termite-fishing rods? What if female australopithecines made carrying slings for
their babies? These wooden, hide, or fiber artifacts would all have decayed away.
l&e PfitbelZtfcc: f w ’-fK
to , t& t U fo p t'______________________________________
Background. Using stones for hammers and breaking them to make sharp
edges to use as knives is simple. Stones would be what early hominids would be
likely to use for tools. Humans all over the world use stones; some human soci
eties used stone artifacts and not metal even in the historic period. It seems
obvious to people familiar with complex industrial technology that there would
have been a universal stage of human development in which hominids used
stone but had not invented technology for smelting metal. Both Classical
Roman and Chinese writers wrote of a Stone Age preceding the discovery of
metallurgy. In the eighteenth century, philosophers laid out a logical human

progress from an animal-like Stage of Savagery, when stones and wooden clubs
were the only weapons; through a Stage of Barbarism, when animals were
domesticated and crafts of carpentry and weaving invented; to a Stage of
Agriculture, when farming, markets, and metallurgy were developed. The
philosophers, Europeans all, claimed their Western European nations, and only
they, represented the highest stage of human progress, the Age of Commerce.
Europeans, they said, were “polished” by their cultivation of knowledge, the
arts, and refined manners, a far cry from distant “rude” tribes, distant in the
past or distant in remote lands. Cultural differences were measured from the
European upperclass ideal, with non-western nations equated with ancient peo
ples in the supposed earlier stages of progress. This claimed “universal history”
was put together in philosophers’ studies from popular travel books, missionar
ies’ stories, import-export merchants’ memoirs, and accounts from Classical
Greek, Roman, and Arab authors. The philosophers neither conducted thor
ough examination of historical documents nor fieldwork outside Europe. Their
“universal histories” were models of what could have been, based on the assump
tion—now rejected by evolutionary biologists and by historians—that organic
life progresses from simple to complex unless held back at some stage.
As European overseas colonizations expanded, many citizens were dis
turbed at the ruthless wars of conquest against nations whose only crime
seemed to be occupancy of lands and resources of value to Europe. Political
philosophers were ready to answer these qualms. John Locke, an Englishman
employed by a prominent aristocrat, was appointed Secretary to the Board of
Trade when his patron’s party came to power in 1689. Locke wrote two
Treatises on Government that claimed nonWestern nations were undeveloped
because, he asserted, their inhabitants did not hold private title to land as
European law provided, and did not buy and sell land for money. Failing to
achieve a political economy similar to Europe’s, these overseas nations had
failed, in his estimation, to fulfill the basis for a moral society and therefore, he
argued, it was right and just for Europeans to conquer them and impose
European governance. “Stone Age” people lacked European technology and
that indicated, in his reasoning, they lacked self-discipline, the work ethic,
morality. Locke’s intellectual brilliance obscured the ax he was grinding for his
employers, the Board of Trade and, later, the proprietors of Carolina colony.
Writers less subtle than Locke blatantly equated American Indians,
Africans, and Australians with the Stage of Savagery that they equated with early
hominids. One of Benjamin Franklin’s contemporaries, in a piece of pure racist
propaganda, declared American Indians to be “Men-Brutes of the Forest” who
don’t farm, “except a very inconsiderable quantity that some of their Women
plant. . . . They do not provide for To-Morrow.” Franklin knew, from serving
on treaty negotiations, that Indians had well-organized governments and con
siderable investments in agriculture and trade. (The Pilgrims and the
Jamestown colonists survived only through the generosity of Indian neighbors
providing thousands of bushels of corn from their storehouses.) Franklin

respected the Indian nations bordering his colony, but the stereotype of the
savage living from day to day like an animal was more popular than the truth.
Biased descriptions of nonwestern peoples at the frontier of
European conquests were used to picture the philosophers’ CAUTION! False knowledge: the
Stage of Savagery. Nineteenth-century archaeologists naively notion that non-western peoples
continued the false equation of geographically distant peo are the same as early stages of
human history
ples with humans in remote times, illustrating books on cul
tural evolution with sketches of American Indians, Africans,
Pacific Islanders, and Asians.
C onventional Stages o f H u m an C ultu ral History. In 1865, one of Charles

Darwin’s associates divided human existence into periods he labeled
“Paleolithic” (“Ancient Stone”), evidenced by chipped stone artifacts and little
else; “Neolithic” (“New Stone”), evidenced in sites with polished stone artifacts
assumed to be closer in time to the “polished nations” of modern Europe;
“Bronze Age,” when copper or bronze artifacts appear, and “Iron Age.”
Copper is more often found in pure, easily worked nuggets than is iron, so it
was assumed that copper was the first metal to be worked and then melted and
mixed with tin or arsenic to make the harder alloy, bronze. The Iron Age
depended on more difficult technology than the preceding ages, and it contin
ues into the present, with iron and its alloy, steel, still being common artifact
material. Now, notice that we have four Ages labeled by principal tool raw
material and the philosophers had four Stages of cultural development.
Combine these, and they had a Paleolithic Stage of Savagery, a Neolithic Stage
of Barbarism, a Bronze Age of Agricultural Civilizations, and an Iron Age of
Commerce. The principal artifact material discovered in a site came to be used
as an index to a presumed general stage of cultural development just as, in geol
ogy and paleontology, fossils such as certain dinosaurs identified different time
periods in the history of the earth.
Conventions die hard—they are, after all, part of our popular culture—and
we still have the nineteenth-century labels “Paleolithic” and “Neolithic,” to
which was soon added “Mesolithic” to complete our magic number three. The
cultural tradition shared by speakers of the Indo-European languages (e.g.,
English, French, German, Spanish) teaches that it is desirable, or proper, to
structure utterances into three parts (beginning, middle, end; noun, verb,
object; youth, adulthood, old age; Heaven, earth, and Hell; fairies grant three
wishes . . .). The Paleolithic is conventionally subdivided into three stages,
Lower, Middle, and Upper. Back in 1877, the American anthropologist Lewis
Henry Morgan wrote in his Ancient Society of three stages each divided into
three, a Lower, Middle, and Upper Stage of Savagery, ditto of Barbarism, and
of Civilization. The book was quite popular. Fitting archaeological data into any
of these conventional, magical three parts is like the Greek mythical character
Procrustes fitting every visitor to his bed by lopping off their feet or head, or
stretching them to breaking. Classification is an essential component of scien

tific analysis, but it must be drawn from working with data, not from a precon
ceived logical scheme or thoughtless slipping into a very old popular cultural
pattern.
The Paleolithic. What we label “Paleolithic” was a long, long period of time,
99% of the span of existence of our genus, Homo.
Remember the timelines your sixth-grade teacher drew?
— YEARS AGO —
2,000,000 1,000,000 iryra

P A L £ 0 L 1 T H 1 C Neolithic
There is no way we can tell what sounds our very ancient ancestors made, what
ideas they had of themselves and the world about them, what they may have
made out of wood, leather, plant fibers. Did they make nestlike beds for them
selves like chimpanzees and gorillas? Did they skin game animals and soften
their hides for bedding, like some historic peoples? Was there a “home base” to
which they planned to return after scattering to seek food, or did they move
around together? Did they regularly share food, as is the norm in the human
societies we know directly, or did all but the littlest children find their own
food, eating together if there was a large amount of food at one place but not
planning to provide for others? We don’t even know whether, in the most
ancient sites, the association of stone artifacts and game animal bones with
butchering marks represents human hunting or only scavenging of kills made
by other animals. About all we can say is that for the first mil
lion and a half years of the existence of our genus, Homo, our that Australopithecines traveled
ancestors lived in small groups of women with their young in small groups is evidenced at
children and probably some men, fathers to some of the chil Laetoli in Tanzania, where Mary
Leakey found footprints of
dren. The men no doubt usually assisted the women in pro several hominids together.
tecting the children—natural selection would have favored
such groups—and may have shared food with them. Both
men and women would have learned to recognize a variety of raw materials
suitable for bedding and tools, and would have collected these materials, often
carrying them some distance from their source to use in a new camp. It is highly
likely that each adult made his or her own stone tools, and used bone splinters
and wooden sticks also as tools. If rock overhangs and similar natural shelters
were handy, Paleolithic people would have taken advantage of them, but gen
erally, early humans would have had to camp in the open. Possibly they made
huts of bark strips, leaves, or thatch—such perishable shelters leave too little
trace for archaeological discovery after a million or so years. (They didn’t live
inside caves. Caves are dark and damp.)
The greatest invention in the history of humankind was made in the
Paleolithic: control of fire. This invention had a tremendous effect upon our
development. Controlling fire enabled humans to live in cold regions, opening

up huge areas of the globe to human expansion. Controlling fire gave humans
an advantage over every other animal, for there is one behavior that distin
guishes humans from all other creatures, and that is technology to control fire.
Around a blazing campfire, humans were safe from hunting animals. Fire
enabled people to render a great variety of foods edible, and took the stress of
chewing raw foods off our teeth and jaws, allowing survival of the light, easily
moved jaw needed for human speech. In time, fire made possible the smelting
of metals and the combustion engine. Fire probably had a psychological effect,
too: Flumans knew they had tamed one of the terrifying forces of nature. As so
many myths around the world tell it, for humans to control fire was a godlike
act. By half a million years ago, this great leap in human capacity had spread
throughout most of the human world; evidence for it has been found from
China to England.
Lower Paleolithic. The Lower Paleolithic—in deep deposits of human occu

pation of places such as Olduvai, the lower strata—covers almost all of the exis
tence of our genus, Homo. Beginning somewhat over two million years ago, the
Lower Paleolithic’s earliest component is called the Oldowan, after Olduvai in
Africa. Crude stone choppers, sharp-edged flakes, and what Louis Leakey
frankly termed bashing stones are the common artifacts. Homo hahilis and
Homo erectus bones are associated with these artifacts in some sites.
(Australopithecines have not been definitely linked with the manufacture of
stone artifacts.) Oldowan artifacts are chipped only enough to get the needed
working edge, but as the Leakeys pointed out, the artifacts are not made sim
ply by picking up a rock; the hominids knew and selected the types of rock that
can be chipped to a sharp edge. Stone artifacts chipped on both sides are termed
Acheulian, after sites around the city of St. Acheul in France where the signifi
cance of these artifacts was first recognized by the pioneer nineteenth-century
archaeologist Jacques Boucher de Perthes. Best known of Acheulian-type arti
facts are the hand axes, really butcher knives chipped out of hand-size nodules
of flint. Acheulians made smaller knives on stone flakes and used round stones
for hammers. A few sites with unusual preservation conditions still contain
wooden poles with whittled, fire-hardened points, possibly spears.
A major difference between Oldowan and Acheulian sites is that some
Acheulian artifacts are finished into symmetrical, pleasing shapes, whereas
Oldowan sites have only artifacts roughly chipped just to get a working edge.
It may well be that activities at “Oldowan” sites required only the cruder arti
facts, and those at some of the “Acheulian” sites utilized more carefully finished
tools; both Oldowan and Acheulian artifacts have been discovered associated
with remains o f Homo erectus. The aesthetic sense, the sense of balance and pat
tern displayed in many Acheulian artifacts, leads linguist Mary LeCron Foster to
suggest that human speech, with its strong patterning and reliance on abstrac
tion, may have evolved in the Lower Paleolithic. Foster notes some very basic
similarities shared by a great variety of known languages, tendencies for lip

movements to mimic the sense of the word (you open your lips to say “open,”
close them to say “close” ), and postulates such mimicking by makers of
Acheulian artifacts creating human speech. In the later Lower Paleolithic, by half
a million years ago— when control of fire became generally known— humans
began moving into colder regions from our tropical and subtropical homelands.
Adapting to a greater variety of habitats spurred both physical and cultural
change. After a couple hundred thousand years, early Homo sapiens appeared.
Middle Paleolithic. Around one hundred thousand years ago, the Lower
Paleolithic is said to have been succeeded by the Middle
Paleolithic. “Middle Paleolithic” is identified by types of 10,000 yrs. Neolithic
artifacts termed Mousterian , from the French rock-shel- ago
35,000 Upper Paleolithic
ter Le Moustier where they were recognized over a cen
125,000 Middle Paleolithic
tury ago. Mousterian artifacts continue the trend begun (Mousterian)
in the Acheulian toward more carefully and completely
Lower Acheulian
finished tools, with butt ends shaped and smoothed to
Paleolithic &
fit comfortably in the hand or possibly in wooden han Oldowan
dles. Tools for different purposes were becoming more 2,000,000
standardized. Many were manufactured by a technique
called Levalloisian (again, after a French site) by which flint nodules were
chipped into a turtle-shell shape (“tortoise core,” core referring to the core of
the stone nodule), then blows struck skillfully along the edge of the flattened
upper surface so that rounded flakes are knocked off. Levalloisian flakes were
standardized by the preparation of the nodule, thereby more quickly and effi
ciently finished into knives or scrapers. (You might say that Middle Paleolithic
people invented the basic idea that eventually became mass production and the
assembly line.) Considerable continuity in many regions between later
Acheulian and succeeding Mousterian stone artifact production and types par
allels the basic continuity in evolutionary development between later Homo
ereetus and early Homo sapiens.
Where hominid bones have been associated with Mousterian artifacts, the
bones are those of Neanderthals ( Homo sapiens neanderthalensis). Most
Mousterian sites have no human bones, and it is highly possible that particu
larly in Africa, early Homo sapiens sapiens made Mousterian artifacts. The most
startling innovation in the Middle Paleolithic is the practice of burying deceased
humans. At Shanidar Cave (a large chamberlike rock shelter) in northern Iraq,
the body of a Neanderthal man killed by falling rock, probably from an earth
quake, was covered up with additional rocks. Analysis of soil settled on top of
this burial revealed pollen from a variety of flowering plants clustered on the
grave, like a bouquet of flowers. Several of the plants are used for medicinal pur
poses by the Kurdish people of the region today, although whether the
Neanderthals knew the curative powers of these herbs cannot be determined.
Another intriguing aspect of that burial is that the man had only one arm but
was nevertheless respected by his companions. An earlier rockfall at Shanidar

had killed a young man recovering from a spear jabbed in his ribs; he, too, was
properly buried by the survivors. Other Neanderthals in Western Asia cherished
a child so much that when it died, they placed wild goat horns around its grave,
like a little fence. Artifacts were sometimes placed in graves with Neanderthals,
as if to be used in an afterlife (well, maybe just because they were his or her pos
sessions and “belonged” with the deceased). No other animal buries its dead
companions as humans do. Like the use of fire, the custom of burying the dead
distinguishes Homo sapiens.
Neanderthals lived during one of the most severe phases of Pleistocene
glaciation. “Classic” Neanderthals, the extremely robust, muscular, long
headed men and women like the skeleton originally recognized in the Neander
Valley in Germany in 1856, occupied the cold lands south of the immense ice
sheets. In Africa and the subtropical Near East, anatomically modern Homo
sapiens sapiens were contemporary with the Neanderthals. By about 4 5 ,0 0 0
years ago, Homo sapiens sapiens seems to have been expanding northward, fan
ning out from the eastern Mediterranean region. The last Neanderthals in
Europe are dated at 3 2 ,0 0 0 years ago. Already, Upper Paleolithic artifact types
(1) FLINT CORE A nodule of flint from an

outcrop has been struck to knock off long
narrow blades. Note the white weathered
cortex surrounding the core.
(2) ACHEULIAN STONE FLAKE TOOLS

from Barbas, an Acheulian workshop site. The
base of each artifact has been thinned, possibly
to fit into a handle; the bases of the two upper
artifacts are narrowed to a tang.
Upper left, side-scraper. The working edge is
along the middle right side edge, used to scrape
hides or plant material.
Lower left, another side-scraper, the working
edge again on the middle right side edge.
Upper right, knife, made on a thin flake. The
working edge is the long left side edge.
Lower right, another knife. The working edge
is the diagonal upper right sloping edge.
(3) MOUSTERIAN (LEFT) AND UPPER PALEOLITHIC STONE FLAKE TOOLS

Left, a Mousterian “point.” The upper side of the tip is wide-angled and used for
scraping, the left edge is acute-angled and used as a knife. The base has been chipped at
each end to make a tang to fit into a handle.
Middle, mid-section of a Magdalenian blade, used as a knife. The left side is the working
edge and the lower edge is slightly blunted.
Right, Magdalenian end-scraper. The working edge is along the entire top side, used for
scraping, and the lower end is chipped into a tang to fit into a handle.
were common in Europe and the Near East. Did invading Homo sapiens sapi
ens massacre the Neanderthals and take over their territories? No evidence of
mass slaughters has come to light. Archaeologists have noticed that in some
pleasant little rock shelters, there are a series of occupation strata, alternating
Mousterian and early Upper Paleolithic artifact types. From this, we deduce
that the Homo sapiens sapiens gradually moved into new territories, alternating
at favored campsites with native Neanderthal families and very possibly inter
marrying. In time, only Homo sapiens sapiens remains are found, associated
with Upper Paleolithic artifacts. Mousterian artifacts went out of style, and
Homo sapiens sapiens genes dominated in the populations. At least one experi
enced paleoanthropologist, the late Carleton Coon, was sure he could see
traces of Neanderthal traits in some European populations today. Coon sagely
remarked that in his worldwide travels, he observed little prejudice in Homo
sapiens sapiens when it comes to mating (marriage is another story!) with other
Homo sapiens. Not likely, said Coon, that humans in the early Upper
Paleolithic were that much fussier about whom they slept with than their mod
ern descendants. And nine months later . . .
Upper Paleolithic. Upper Paleolithic artifacts are more regionally distinctive

than those of earlier periods. Pioneer archaeologists named the sequence in
France after sites where the styles were first identified: Aurignacian (Aurignac
Rockshelter), Solutrean (an open site at Solutre), Magdalenian (La Madeleine
Rockshelter). Then excavation at other sites revealed another style, the
Gravettian, approximately contemporary with late Aurignacian and Solutrean
but more common in central Europe; and a Chatelperronian style that parallels
the Aurignacian but shows more continuity with French Mousterian. In parts
of Asia, stone tools don’t show much refinement over time, probably because
people were using tropical woods and bamboo rather than stone for cutting
implements. Elsewhere in Eurasia and in Africa are a proliferation of style dis
tinctions, and by the late Pleistocene, Upper Paleolithic people had explored all
the way into America, producing more new styles on this continent.
Art blossomed in the Upper Paleolithic. In parts of Europe, people went
deep into caves, lighting their way with torches or stone lamps with a wick float
ing in grease, to paint realistic animals on the cave walls. Why they would paint
where few could ever enjoy the art is a puzzle: we assume the painting was part
of religious rituals, held in dark, silent caves to heighten the aura of spirituality.
Did they paint also on easily visible rockshelter walls? A few traces of paint pro
tected by accumulations of soil testify to the likelihood that time and storms
destroyed Paleolithic painting except that deep in caves. Upper Paleolithic
artists sculpted, too. Spear throwers with carved animals or animal heads on the
end, little female figurines, and carved phalluses were common, although books
generally neglect mentioning the phalluses. Figurines and phalluses might have
been love charms, or tokens of feminine and masculine roles. Upper Paleolithic
artists occasionally modeled animals in clay. They carved mammoth-tusk ivory
into figurines and beads, and pierced shells and animal teeth to string on neck
laces or sew as ornaments on clothing. They may have embroidered clothing
with the fine bone needles invented in this period.
Not only were Upper Paleolithic peoples anatomically modern, their ways
of life were also not so far different from those of historic peoples. Size of so
cial groups seems more varied in the Upper Paleolithic than earlier, some sites
apparently holding several families each with its own cooking fire, others ev
idencing occasional larger gatherings. Housing for Upper Paleolithic peo
ples included tents, with linings to cut the draft, and huts. On the Russian
Plain where mammoths were often encountered, the huge bones of these ex
tinct elephants were collected and used as frames for huts. Archaeologists have
excavated some structures built of mammoth bones interlocked to make a
herringbone-patterned wall. In France, rectangular pavements of cobblestones
late in the Upper Paleolithic may indicate foundations for log cabins. Upper
Paleolithic hunters drove herds of game into corrals to slaughter for hide cloth
ing and meat, and some tantalizing lines on reindeer and horses painted on
cave walls raise the possibility that a few of these may have been harnessed as
pack or sled animals. Fishing technology was another development in the
Upper Paleolithic. Plant harvesting must have been carried on, but that leaves
less trace for the archaeologist, except in the form of implements that may have
been made to chop or shell plant foods or shred fiber (for making mats and
baskets?).
The end of the Pleistocene geological epoch, 10,000 years ago (8 0 0 0 B .C .),
is said to mark the end of the Paleolithic. The date isn’t quite
as arbitrary as it may seem. A Swedish geologist surmised, a B.P., “years ago" vs. B.C.: western
century ago, that the thin bands, alternating light and dark culture counts time from the
silt, making up the stratigraphy in old lake beds in his coun birth of Jesus, 2000 years
before now. B.C., “Before Christ,”
try had resulted from the annual deposit of summer melt- are dates plus 2000 years
“Before Present.”
Doonesbury BY GARRY TRUDEAU

SO, AS YOU CAN (VBLL UFG IN THOSE PAYS UIAS IN FACT, THE FIR STH A LF- TO BGG/N RUTH,
IMAGING, THOSE FIR ST JU ST HUNTANP GATHER, PECENTINCARNATIONI EVER ITLVASm FIRST
UVBS OFMINS U/ERG HUNTANPGA7HGR. THG HAP PIPNTCOME UNTILLUGLL WERE ONLY VM G/NA6ESI
\ FILLED LUTTH NOTHING ROUTING COULP REALLY INTO THGPLGtSIDCGNG. BUT I UP TO THG PIPNTPIE PUR-
BUT PRUPGGRV. WEAR YOU POtUN. KNEOHTWOULPBE SPECIAL. PLESTOCENE? IN6 CHIIPBIRTH...
\ THE OMENS THERE - X/
FABULOUS!
D O O N ESBU RY © 1 9 8 7 G.B. Trudeau. Reprinted with permission o f UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE. All rights
reserved.
waters from glaciers, followed each winter by cold-weather soil formation.

Painstakingly counting the layers, called varves, from top to bottom of the
deposits, the geologist counted a total of about 10,000 years from first melting
of the Scandinavian final Pleistocene glaciers to eventual drying up, in the his
toric era, of the lakes so formed. “The end of the Pleistocene” was several thou
sand years of climate fluctuations, each centuries long—overlying, as it were,
the basic warming trend that in fact would not reach its climax until 5,000 years
ago (3000 B .C .). Warming climate away from the equator affected the equato
rial zone, too, changing global wind patterns that in turn changed rainfall pat
terns.
Around 10,000 years ago, these worldwide shifts in climates had caused
vegetation changes that in turn induced animal population changes. Some of
the huge beasts flourishing on the rich Pleistocene grasslands could no longer
find enough forage to remain healthy, and their species became extinct. None
o f us will ever see a live mammoth, a mastodon, or, thank goodness, a saber-
toothed tiger ambling by our picnic. Other species survived by natural selection
favoring smaller individuals. You can still see bison, but they’ve half the size of
their Pleistocene ancestors. Still other species survived on one continent but not
others. Camels disappeared from North America although they’ve survived in
South America (as llamas and guanacos) and in Asia. Horses disappeared from
the Americas, surviving in Eurasia and finally returning to the Americas on
European ships after historic colonization began. Since, by the late Pleistocene,
active hunting of large gam e animals was an im portan t source of food and raw
materials (hides, bones) for most humans, the climate changes necessitated
adjustments in human strategies for the good life. These adjustments are
reflected in the archaeological record of the post-Pleistocene epoch, that period
which we are still in, the Holocene.
Conventional usage puts a Mesolithic period or stage between the
Paleolithic—correlated with the Pliocene and Pleistocene geological epochs—
and the farming Neolithic cultures in the Holocene. “Mesolithic” would be the
several thousand years of fluctuating climate between the last continental glacia
tion and climates more like today. Humans in this Mesolithic period would be
adapting their technology and social patterns to changes in their resources such
as the extinction of the truly big game of the late Pleistocene. In Europe, there
were several thousand years between the disappearance of many customary
Upper Paleolithic game animals and the appearance of agricultural villages.
During this Mesolithic period, Europeans adapted their economies to the
Holocene environmental conditions. After agricultural villages came in, many
of the Mesolithic societies continued to hunt, fish, and gather native foods, in
many areas becoming specialized producers trading with the villagers for grain.
Other regions of the world seem to show a more direct development of farm
ing, early in the Holocene, from late Pleistocene Upper Paleolithic societies.
Even in Europe, the degree to which the Mesolithic was an intervening period
rather than specialized economies is debated. For speakers of Indo-European
languages such as English, the neatness of a three-part set, Old (Paleo-), Middle
(Meso-), and New (Neo-), drew archaeologists to extend the threefold division
beyond its original region of discovery.
T&t \jOAAlAA, PtbbobXJbc

Archaeology is the study o f human societies of the past. Archaeologists do not
do research on dinosaurs, fossil bones, or geology. The practice of archaeology
involes:
1. discovering sites of human activity in the past. Most sites are reported
by local people or discovered through construction work. Archaeolo
gists also carry out surveys, checking historical records and satellite pho
tos and systematically walking across an area, to discover the past human
occupations of an area.
2. mapping the contour of a site; laying out a grid with small stakes; work
ing within the mapped squares with hand tools, particularly cut-down
sharpened masons’ trowels; recording the exact location of every artifact
and soil feature; sifting the excavated dirt to catch the smallest items;
and cataloging everything removed with its exact location to preserve
information on context—its relationships.
3. laboratory examination of all the excavated material, the features, and
the records, often with the assistance of local people and of specialists in
soil science, biology, geology, physics, and chemistry.
4. comparing information from the site with anthropological and histori
cal information, to interpret the fragmentary evidence by means of
similarities to the known effects of human activities. Because archaeo
logical excavation destroys a site, archaeologists today focus on preserv
ing sites, excavating only where construction or natural forces will
destroy the site, or excavating only a limited portion of a site.
The Paleolithic or Old Stone Age covers nearly all the two million years of
the existence of our genus Homo. Exactly when our early hominid ancestors
could be termed “human” is a question of which behavior is distinctively
human—making tools? using language structurally resembling historic lan
guages? controlling fire? burying the dead? Complicating an answer is the prob
lem that most of the evidence of human activities, for example speech or tools
of perishable materials, will not be preserved for the archaeologist to discover.
Apes and even a few other animals and birds are capable o f making simple tools
or structures and of communicating through wordlike sounds or signs, so there
does not seem to be a hard-and-fast line between humans and all other crea
tures, unless it is the control of fire.
The Lower Paleolithic begins somewhat over two million years ago, marked
by the use of chipped stone tools. The crudest stone tools are called Oldowan,
after those found by the Leakeys in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, Africa. About
a million and a half years ago, Homo erectus spent more effort chipping biface
stone tools ( biface, “two faces [sides]” ), conforming to a mental pattern of the
artifact rather than just trying to get a sharp or heavy edge. These more care
fully manufactured stone tools are termed Acheulian. Cruder Oldowan-type
stone tools continued to be made as well, and some regions probably used per
ishable hardwood or sharp bamboo tools rather than Acheulian-type stone
tools.
The Middle Paleolithic or Mousterian, about 1 2 5 ,0 0 0 -3 5 ,0 0 0 years ago, is
the period of Homo sapiens sapiens and Neanderthals. People had realized that
time and effort spent in shaping a piece of flint before knocking off a flake
would increase overall efficiency, saving raw material and time in the long run.
Mousterian-style stone tools are generally made from such prepared stone
cores. The first deliberate burials of humans by their social groups occurred
during the Middle Paleolithic
The Upper Paleolithic, about 3 5 ,0 0 0 -1 0 ,0 0 0 years ago, sees the last of the
Neanderthals and has instead anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens sapi
ens. A great variety of stone tools were made, many exhibiting virtuoso skill in
chipping stone, and different regions of the world show distinctive styles, each
given a name by archaeologists. Humans migrated into the Americas during the
Upper Paleolithic period. Recognizable art appears for the first time in the
Upper Paleolithic, in the form of paintings, carvings, and clay sculpture.
Ikoma woman, Tanzania

(Africa), 1928, grinding
grain on a stone slab
(metate).
Public Museum.
Dwellings constructed in open areas included tents with inner linings, like
Plains Indian tipis, or in Russia, frames of interlocked mammoth bones over
which hides were probably stretched. Herd animals were driven into corrals to
be slaughtered, and fishing technology developed.
It is conventional to end the Paleolithic cultural period with the end of the
Pleistocene geological epoch, 10,000 years ago (8000 B . C . ) . Earth’s climatic
shift from glacier-building, in the Pleistocene, to more or less modern climates
in the Holocene stimulated human adjustments to the loss of mammoths and
other game that became extinct and to changes in seasonal climates affecting
vegetation. In Europe, several thousand years of human societies hunting mod
ern species of game, fishing, and gathering native plants are termed the
Mesolithic period. Some Mesolithic societies became specialized producers of
native foods, trading with agricultural villagers, when agriculture came into
Europe about 7000 B . C . Other areas of the world had more continuity between
late Upper Paleolithic and early farming societies.
pm w Neotmc _______________
Marked terminal-Pleistocene cultural changes in Eurasia are labeled
“Neolithic.” That term, meaning “New Stone [Age],” was applied because pio
neering archaeologists of the nineteenth century believed that new techniques
for working stone had been invented, specifically that metamorphosed rocks
such as granite could now be pecked and polished into ax heads. Later discov
eries showed that pecking and polishing stone was occasionally done in the
Upper Paleolithic (that’s how the stone figurines were made). The technique
does become more common in the Holocene, and so ax heads made by this
technique begin to predominate over those made by chipping. The shift to
more pecking and grinding of metamorphosed stone went with an apparent
major shift in food resources, to seeds and grain that needed to be ground or
pounded into edible form. Some societies processed grain by placing it in a hol
lowed log or a bowl-shaped stone mortar and pounding it with log or stone
pestles. Others ground it on millstone-like slabs of stone (called querns in
Britain and metates in Hispanic America). Log mortars decayed away; milling
stones remain to testify to the new Holocene reliance on grains.
The term “Neolithic,” today, really means societies relying on cultivated Neolithic
food resources but without urban states. Neolithic is the equivalent o f the Early refers to
societies with
Agriculture Stage of nineteenth-century evolutionists. Gordon Childe thought
farming
that reliance on cultivated resources, especially domesticates, was so radical a villages but
change in the social relations of people who had been hunter-gatherers that we no cities.
should see the change as a “Neolithic Revolution,” a political as well as eco
nomic change much greater than that from the American Revolution. The term
“Neolithic” is not as a rule applied to prehistoric American societies in spite of
the basic similarities in resource base and in time between many of them and
Neolithic cultures in Eurasia. Pecked and ground stone ax-heads and milling
stones characterize early American farming cultures, too, but American archae
ologists prefer to emphasize that these early farming cultures were the ancient,
or archaic, forerunners of historic American Indian nations. For American cul
tures of Neolithic type, “Archaic” is the more usual term.
Conventional prehistory says the Neolithic first appeared in the Near East
(Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan), where wheat and barley grow natu
rally. As the Pleistocene climate shifted into the Holocene, human communities
in this zone of rainy, mild winters and dry, hot summers began to harvest quan
tities of wild wheat each year. Bushels of the grain were stored in covered pits
in villages of round houses, some built on stone foundations. Permanent homes
like this are a new invention in the Neolithic, so far as the archaeological record
can tell. Parties of hunters, or perhaps families, went out hunting gazelle and
wild sheep and goats, camping overnight in rockshelters. Probably carrying
dried cooked grain to eat while traveling, hunting parties efficiently corralled
herds and brought home abundant meat.
Populations increased, and people began to labor in the
grain fields to increase the harvests. They would have Agricultural economist Ester
burned off stubble to return nutrients to the soil and sown Boserup argued that population
increase stimulates more
some of the grain they had harvested. Grain that had clung
intensive farming, to provide food
to the stalk until threshed was more likely to be sown than for a greater number of people.
that which had blown off as soon as ripe, before people got
to harvest it. Whether or not people were deliberately breeding wheat with a
greater take-home yield, sowing some of their harvest led to a new, domesti
cated variety of wheat in which the grain waited, as it were, to be reaped instead
of scattering in the wind.
Lentils and peas were also cultivated in the early Neolithic in the Near East,
furnishing vegetable protein and fixing nitrogen in fields if planted after wheat
had depleted it. Sheep, or goats, or both (these related wild species are so sim
ilar that it is extremely difficult to tell which was butchered in early Neolithic
sites) were herded under human control as early as 11,000 years ago in Iraq
near Shanidar Cave, about the same time that wheat and barley were apparently
first cultivated. No one was making pottery yet in the earliest Neolithic villages,
but in Israel, clay plaster was smoothed around the inside of storage pits (and
also modeled over deceased villagers’ skulls to give us remarkable likenesses of
their living faces). In Iraq, shepherds were modeling little animal figurines from
clay, much as had been done in the Gravettian of the Upper Paleolithic, a few
thousand years before.
Skeletons of Early Neolithic people show general good health, with few
indications of stressful periods of food scarcity or illness. Prosperity is reflected
also in the long-distance trade that carried decorative shells far inland from the
Mediterranean Sea and transported volcanic glass called obsidian hundreds of
miles south and east from its outcrops in eastern Turkey. Obsidian, which looks
like thick dark-colored bottle glass, can be easily flaked into thin, extremely
sharp knife blades, even into razor blades, and was in great demand. Higher-
yield seeds, domesticated animals, and agricultural inventions must have passed
from community to community along the trade routes marked for the archae
ologist by thousands and thousands of obsidian blades. Obsidian from an island
in the Mediterranean off Greece proves that at the end of the Pleistocene, boats
had been developed that were good enough to paddle out to the island and to
transport back blocks of obsidian. Long-distance transport of flint particularly
suited for flaking had been carried on in the Upper Paleolithic, possibly by
canoes on rivers (sites with the desirable flint are strung along river valleys in
central Europe), so the Neolithic obsidian trade is not so much new as an inten
sification of a late Paleolithic practice.
Outside the “Fertile Crescent” (a crescent-shaped area on the map, from
the Greek border through the Near and Middle East [Iran and Iraq] and into
Egypt), Neolithic farming seems to appear later. Or are we ignoring the culti
vation of alternative crops and animals, native to other zones? A controversial
hypothesis advanced by the late Eric Higgs, a British archaeologist, argues that
the concentrations of hundreds of bones from herd game in Upper Paleolithic
sites is evidence for the kind o f semidomestication practiced by the historic
Reindeer Saami (popularly called Lapps) in northern Scandinavia. Saami drive
reindeer herds into corrals to slaughter as many as they need for meat and
hides, and keep a few tied up in their camps, milking the does and using gelded
males to pull sleds. For most of the year, the reindeer move freely, though
Saami try to protect them from wolves (nowadays sometimes using helicopters
to patrol). Saami consider the reindeer domesticated because when they corral
herds, they mark the ears of the calves with their family brands, enabling the
families to identify each year animals they claim to own. Under the conditions
of northern Scandinavia, nothing would be gained by Saami shepherding rein
deer year round. Higgs pointed out that late Pleistocene Europe was similar to
Scandinavia in harboring many herds of reindeer, therefore it is reasonable to
hypothesize that Upper Paleolithic Europeans may have managed reindeer as
do the historic Saami. The archaeological sites with piles of hundreds of rein
deer bones resemble corrals used as slaughtering places, and it would follow
that if the Saami are said to have domestic reindeer, then we should say the
same of the Upper Paleolithic reindeer slaughterers. Cave paintings that seem,
to some archaeologists, to depict corralling herds, and the few that seem to
show pack straps around reindeer and halters on horses, support Higgs’s
hypothesis.
Higgs’s basic point is that domesticated animals and plants represent
intense symbiosis (mutual dependence: Greek sym: together, biosis: YiCmg, “liv
ing together”). Those Upper Paleolithic hunters and present-day Reindeer
Saami who depend upon reindeer live intimately with the herds, and the herd
populations are affected by the humans’ patrolling, corralling, and culling.
Agriculture—people depending on a few, selected, high-yield species they cul
tivate, and those species dependent on their cultivators—wasn’t invented
overnight. It must have developed over generations, initially as people discov
ered, and shared with trading contacts, ways to assist desired plants and ani
mals to grow well, or to gain greater amounts in the harvest. Characteristics
of docility in animals and stability in plants at ripening time would have been
selected for, regardless of whether the people consciously favored them. From
the point of view of a domesticated plant or animal, the people who cultivate
or care for it are the domesticated ones, the creatures who have been selected
for their willingness to labor in behalf of the privileged plant or animal! That’s
symbiosis, each of the interacting pair smugly happy because the other lives
“for” it.
Near Eastern Neolithic farming had been blocked in expansion north
ward by cold winters and rainy summers, climate detrimental to the growth
and ripening o f wild wheat. After centuries o f farming at the northern bor
der along the mountainous Balkan zone of southeastern Europe, by around
5500 B .C . knowledge of how to manage crops in the temperate zone had
developed sufficiently to support colonies of farmers out along the central
European river valleys. It took about as long for Neolithic farmers to expand
through Europe as—6,000 years later—it would take for European invaders
to expand throughout the Americas. Did the Neolithic colonizers fight the
Mesolithic inhabitants of Europe? No evidence o f battles has been discov
ered. Did the Mesolithic inhabitants welcome the farmers? There is consid
erable evidence of increased trade, including, along the Atlantic coast,
intensified production of fish that probably was dried and exchanged for
grain in adjacent farming communities. Grain, remember, is the basis for
beer; maybe villagers brewed beer and traded jars of beer for the fish.
(Archaeologist Robert Braidwood quite seriously suggested that thirst for
beer was a motive for early farming. Would you labor in the fields just to get
porridge or griddlecakes?)
Farming villages in Europe were radically different from preceding com
munities, not only because the men and women cleared woodlands to plant
imported crops (wheat, barley, lentils, peas) and to pasture sheep and cattle,
now domesticated, but additionally because the farmers built substantial
thatched timber houses similar to those still traditional in much of Europe. One
end of the rectangular home was finished into a sleeping and living room for
the family, the other end was the stable for cattle. Keeping the cattle under the
same roof used the animals’ heat in the building during the winter. A work area
often separated the family and stable sections of the long house. Pigs and sheep
were penned next to the houses. About a dozen houses made up a village. With
the fields around the village, crops rotated to preserve soil fertility, shepherds
watching the flocks, pedlars retailing news along with ornaments and small
tools, women spinning and weaving and men carpentering, the villages of the
Danubians, as the Neolithic colonizers of Europe are called (they spread
through and out from the Danube River Valley) looked much like historic
European peasant communities.
Eastern Asia, too, had an expansion of Neolithic farming villages from
around 5000 B . C . Central China farmers grew a variety o f millet and raised
pigs; they lived in timber-framed, adobe-plastered thatched homes, often
round, sometimes rectangular, but never the long house-and-stable combina
tion o f Europe. Wheat found in minor amounts in Chinese Neolithic villages
indicates some long-distance trade across the central Asian steppes (plains)
with Neolithic towns in Iran. Southern Chinese and Indochinese grew rice, a
wet tropics crop, and kept domesticated water buffaloes as well as pigs. To the
west, India developed farming from an expansion through Afghanistan of the
Near/Middle Eastern system based on wheat, with native zebu cattle domesti
cated in India.
Farming seems to have been invented independently in the Americas about
7000 B . C . American Indians domesticated maize (corn) and squash in Mexico,
gradually breeding maize with larger cobs and larger kernels that by 2000 B . C .
was supporting numerous permanent villages and the beginning of urban
towns. In Peru, beans were domesticated at 7000 B . C . , and by around 5000 B . C .
chili peppers, potatoes, quinoa (a native grain), and guinea pigs were raised for
food as they are today by Andes mountain villagers. In the tropical lowlands of
eastern South America, manioc, a tuber (dried and ground, it is called tapioca),
has been farmed for several thousand years. Tropical root and tuber crops such
as manioc grow without extensive field clearance. They can be kept in the
ground until needed rather than requiring harvesting at a certain season and
then storage. Because these crops leave little preserved evidence, the history of
tropical forest agriculture is a challenge to archaeologists. North America chal
lenges archaeologists in a different way, because local plants were cultivated in
the Midwest (small-seed grains now seen as weeds, and wild rice) and California
(cacti, acorn oaks, seed-bearing grasses). In Eastern North America, deer pop
ulations and, on the Plains, bison populations were bolstered by Indians burn
ing off forest to increase pasture for their favored game. European invaders
couldn’t see that these practices, and the cultivation of native plants, can be
alternative forms of agriculture. Archaeologists debate whether to apply the
term “agriculture” when there seems to have been no radical “Neolithic
Revolution” change from Archaic hunting and plant harvesting. One clue
implying agriculture is the cultivation, by 5,000 years ago, of maize and squash
in North America, far north of the natural homeland of these plants in Mexico.
Both these plants appear to have been minor crops for over 3,000 years, then
around A . D . 900, Eastern, Midwestern, and Southwestern Indian societies start
intensively raising maize as their principal food, clearing and hoeing fields. New,
hardy, high-yield varieties of maize may have been the stimulus to such agricul
ture. Maize as a minor crop during the preceding 3,000 years indicates famil
iarity with agricultural practices. Turkeys and muscovy ducks were kept for food
in late prehistoric Mexico, turkeys in North American agricultural communities,
and, on the Plains, two types of dog were bred, a large strong animal as a beast
of burden (carrying packs and pulling loads tied to a pair of poles yoked to its
shoulders) and a smaller dog fattened for feasts.
Agriculture in humid tropical Africa and Pacific Islands, like that in low
land eastern South America, is generally difficult to discover archaeologically.
In New Guinea after 7000 B .C ., villagers were draining swampy ground by
digging ditches and planting the root crops taro and yams in the ridged fields
they created. Buried ridges and ditches can be identified archaeologically,
demonstrating how early agriculture was on this large island. When Africans
began raising yams is, so far at least, poorly known. Some archaeologists spec
ulate tropical root crops may have been cultivated, though leaving no pre
served evidence, for many thousands of years; others demand hard proof.
Cattle herding was the basis of the East African economy as early as five thou
sand years ago. Farming is clearly evidenced in sub-Saharan Africa about 2,000
years ago, when Bantu-speaking nations expanded through much o f the con
tinent, carrying with them iron metallurgy, their cattle, and crops including
sorghum and millet, all needing cleared fields and thus altering the natural
environment.
The one continent on which Neolithic agriculture has not been recog
nized is Australia. Whether Australians really didn’t raise crops, or whether we
haven’t learned to read traces of native Australian food crops from the archae
ological record, can’t easily be determined. We do know that some Australians
constructed fish farms in the late prehistoric period. Australian Aborigines
believe that their activities are necessary to sustain the plants and animals they
harvest. European observers rejected the claim because the activities included
prayers and cerem onies, but the pragm atic p art o f their w ork, requiring
detailed, sophisticated knowledge of the biology and ecologyof their food
sources, does affect the food populations. Technically, it isn’t agriculture,
because fields are not cleared and planted, but Higgs’s point about intensive
symbiosis between human communities and their food resources applies to
Australian practices, too.
Agriculture changes the relation of people to natural resources. It was very

common for people to assist favored plants to flourish, to increase the harvest,
and to promote populations of grazing game herds by burn
ing off the countryside in order to favor grasses and discour cultivation: assisting plants to
age woody plants. These forms of cultivation very likely were grow (weeding, watering,
transplanting to better location).
practiced in the Upper Paleolithic in most tropical and tem
domestication: selecting for
perate zones, as Higgs hypothesized, and became the basis genetically changed plant or
for domestication, selecting for genetic characteristics that animal population, to make it
made plants and animals easier for people to handle or caused more useful for human needs.
them to yield more food, wool, or other product. Being agriculture: economy based on
large-scale cultivation. (Ager:
genetically determined, domestication characteristics would Latin for “field.”)
be passed on generation after generation in the selected pop
ulation, creating a new variety or species. Agriculture refers to a society’s eco
nomic base, when preferred resources are cultivated on the larger scale of fields,
not just a few plants. Agricultural societies allocate substantial time and labor to
the cultivation of fields, and failure of cultivated crops means famine.
There is a major difference between an economy based on adaptation to
natural resources, however assisted by cultivation, and an economy based on
large-scale cultivation of a few selected crops. Plants and animals native to a
region are adapted to its normal range of temperature, humidity, winds, storms,
predators, and diseases. They may suffer in extremes of the range, be vulnera
ble to predators or diseases, but enough of their ancestors perpetuated the
species through occasional bad years to build a population able to roll with the
punches. Crops and animals imported from distant regions are much more
likely to die under foreign conditions. They may do well for a few years, then
be killed by an unseasonable temperature or a disease epidemic. Communities
expecting to gain most of their food from the imported crop may starve: They
spent their days laboring to raise the crop in fields they cleared, and when it
freezes or dies from drought or hail or blight, there are too few wild areas left
uncleared to provide native foods, or it’s too late in the season to harvest wild
foods. Agriculture is risky.
Why should people gamble on an agricultural crop when their ancestors
lived comfortably harvesting local natural resources? Hunter-gatherers know
the variety of their resources intimately, they schedule an annual round from
harvest to harvest, storing some to tide them over the leanest months.
Anthropologists who have lived with hunter-gatherers report that they are usu-
Jaipur; India, 1928, a

walled city where caravans
o f draft animals carried
tv <
& goods between markets. This
scene resembles early
Mesopotamian cities.
Public Museum.
ally well nourished, though not fat, and show strong confidence that they will
obtain food as expected. In some regions of low natural resources, such as
deserts or northern forests, people may anticipate some weeks of belt tighten
ing toward the end of the coldest or driest season, but no worse than farmers
often face when waiting for the earliest crops to ripen. Agriculture doesn’t pro
vide a more secure source of food, it provides a greater amount of food per acre.
It provides this in return for hard labor, more hours, and more exhausting work
than gathering wild foods entails. Agriculture is the means to feed large num
bers of people living permanendy in one place.
Permanent setdements appeared in the early Holocene in many regions,
perhaps as an adaptation to increasing human populations. Inventions in food
procurement and processing, clothing, and shelter allowed ever more people to
survive and reproduce. By around 1 0,000 years ago, it made sense for commu
nities to establish a settlement with cultivated fields and pastures around it,
dividing regions between the communities to maximize the utilization of
resource potential. There would still be plenty of less desirable land to support
firewood and game for hunting. Families could be large, partly because more
hands meant more capacity to clear and cultivate fields, partly because women
no longer had to carry babies and household gear from camp to camp, neces
sitating spacing births far enough apart that the older child could walk the
required miles before the mother had a new baby to carry. Even if custom still
urged four years or so between babies, to protect the mothers’ health, the occa
sional slip-up could be accommodated, and over centuries, a slight increase in
number of births per woman can result in substantial population growth.
As Holocene communities grew, those in locations where trade routes
crossed or travelers were likely to seek accommodation grew larger than less
conveniently situated ones. Artisans in the larger villages produced enough
items to regularly exchange for others’ surplus food production, a practice that
seems to have begun in the Upper Paleolithic but was much increased in the
Neolithic. It is likely that the more there was occupational specialization, the
more people looked to leaders to oversee the various jobs and manage the dis
tribution of both tasks and production. Fairs and markets had to be organized,
disputes adjudicated. Managers built larger homes and storehouses so they
could entertain foreign traders and the managers of other villages, and distrib
ute necessities to the handicapped. Managers’ skills were taught to their chil
dren, differentiating their children from those of ordinary villagers. An upper
class developed, distinguished from the working class by its education for lead
ership. Upper-class people married persons of their class from other towns, con
solidating regional leadership networks and maintaining class distinction. This
narrative of how societies may have changed over the centuries after the
“Neolithic Revolution,” culminating in what Childe called the “Urban
Revolution,” sounds like a simple story. Much of the description is generalized
from ethnographic observation of historic and contemporary societies of vari
ous sizes and economies. Archaeologists can’t provide detailed histories of
social behavior, so we must hypothesize from comparisons to known societies.

Actual histories were diverse, region from region, but overall, the trend de
scribed is supported by data from excavated settlements in regional sequences
covering several thousand years.
The paragraph above is a broad generalization, and it ignores a very criti
cal point: C u ltu ra l evolution d id not result in all h u m a n societies becom ing alike.
Once H om o sapiens sapiens had reached practically all the habitable regions of
the world, in the late Pleistocene, adaptation to great environmental diversity
coupled with diverse historical experiences of trade, epidemics, wars, and so on,
created the great variety of present-day societies. Nineteenth-century theorists
who believed our species had followed a single line of cultural evolutionary
development from simple to complex societies, from hunting-gathering to
urban agricultural-commercial economics, failed to realize that the great evolu
tionary principle of adaptation m ust produce diversity. Ecological conditions
differ from place to place, therefore adaptations must be different. People who
live in camps harvesting wild foods, or on small farms producing nearly all their
own necessities, are not undeveloped, unevolved, or retarded; they represent
successful, perhaps the best possible, adaptation to their environments, given
their historical opportunities. We tell the story of how some hunter-gatherers
switched to agriculture, how some agricultural villages grew into cities with
markets, courts of law, temples. It’s a favorite story for all of us who are citizens
of primarily urban, industrial nations. It would be an alien story for Inuit in the
Arctic, who relish the story of how their forebears invented clever technology
to survive, in small communities, in some of the harshest country on earth. It
would be a story about fools for a Mbuti or Efe in the forest in the Congo,
laughing at how the big people in the towns outside the forest work like slaves
day after day amid dirt and noise, while their own small, slender people enjoy
the beauty of the tree-shaded land so generously giving them food and shelter.
Focusing on narrating cultural development from Upper Paleolithic through
Neolithic agriculture to urban states is really ethnocentric. Still, urban states are
as much a part of the total human story as the descriptions of Arctic and trop
ical forest cultures.
V. Gordon Childe listed ten criteria that the archaeologist could look for to
recognize a city, contrasted with a village. These were not meant to be a list of
essential features of urban society, only a list of what could appear in the archae
ological record.
1. setdements of city size. (They should be markedly larger than other set-
dements in the region, but Childe avoided putting any figures down.)
2. indications that the society was organized on the basis of territory
rather than only by kin groups. Archaeologists might look for admin
istrative buildings, symbols of territory and their rulers (for example,
banners and crowns), fortresses or markers at defensible approaches to
the territory.
3. capital wealth (i.e., wealth that can be invested), from taxes or tribute.
4. monumental public works (government buildings, temples, rulers’
palaces, roads, irrigation systems). These would have required capital
wealth, so become evidence for it.
5. class-stratified society. Differences in home size and furnishings, in
graves, and in costumes seen in art all can indicate class stratification.
6. full-time craft specialists. Workshop areas with quantities of mass-
produced or luxury manufactures indicate craft specialists. These in
turn indicate markets.
7. long-distance trade in luxuries—another sign of class stratification.
8. representational art including human portraiture. We can’t explain why
smaller, more democratic societies generally seem not to have been
interested in portraits. The archaeological record shows that the cus
tom of painting or sculpting likenesses of actual individuals appears
when class-stratified societies glorify their rulers. They also begin to
personify their deities, not a coincidence because the rulers and deities
are apt to be shown together.
9. writing. If the society did not carve inscriptions on stone, writing may
not appear in the archaeological record. Some form of record-keeping
is essential to manage urban states.
10. true science. By this, Childe meant a system of measurement, engi
neering, astronomy sufficient to construct a calendar, and mathemat
ics necessary to manipulate the engineering system.
Archaeological sites with these evidences of urban societies are dated to the fifth
millennium B . C . (5000-4000 B . C . ) in Mesopotamia (Iran and Iraq). They are
later everywhere else: third millennium B . C . (3000-2000 B . C . ) in India and
Egypt—both in direct trade contact with Mesopotamia; second millennium B . C .
in the eastern Mediterranean and Greece, China, Mexico, and Peru; first mil
lennium B . C . in Europe and North Africa; first millennium a . d . in sub-Saharan
Africa and North America. To Gordon Childe, organizing cities was a radical
innovation in societal form, deserving to be termed an Urban Revolution.
Childe thus recognized two revolutionary societal reorganizations in human
history, the Neolithic and the Urban “revolutions.”
American archaeologists tend to explain the development of cities and
urban states as the more or less inevitable outcome of population growth. Land
suitable for farming is finite, and once the countryside is full of villages and
fields, population increase has to be handled either by out-migration and colo
nization or by increased density in settlements. Both happen. Some people push
past the frontiers, draining swamps, cutting forests, terracing mountainsides,
building irrigation canals in deserts, becoming nomadic herders on steppes, sail
ing to islands, conquering other nations. Other people become goods manu
facturers instead of seeking farmland, depending on surplus from agriculture to
be exchanged for their products. Centrally located settlements grow into towns;
optimally located towns grow into cities. Class stratification, bureaucracy, mar
kets, and taxation are all social adaptations to large, dense populations.
Archaeologists in other parts of the world are more likely to explain the
development of cities as simply the result of increase in trade. They note that
Mesopotamia (Iran and Iraq) lies between the two great rivers Tigris and
Euphrates, rising on the mountainous border of the Near East and flowing
southeastward into the Persian Gulf leading into the Indian Ocean.
Mesopotamian plains could produce an abundance of wheat and other crops
but lacked stone suitable for cutting implements and timber for building. The
rivers’ headwaters are near major obsidian outcrops and in superb timberland
(the Bible’s famous “cedars of Lebanon”). Towns grew easily on the plains
along these rivers, fed from the fields that could be irrigated from the rivers if
necessary, and were busy importing, redistributing, and manufacturing. Leaders
could accumulate capital wealth and invest it in palaces, impressive temples to
the deities that favored them, grand plazas, fortresses. They could subsidize
priests, artists, engineers, merchants, ship captains, soldiers. On the Mesopo
tamian plain, agriculture was less risky than in many other regions, and there
were fewer alternative natural resources to support communities.
Once a number of cities had developed in Mesopotamia, they spurred
development of cities in the more remote regions into which they traded. Egypt
and India, both highly accessible by sea from the Persian Gulf, were the princi
pal targets for Mesopotamian merchants. The overland route through the
steppes to China, or the even more time-consuming sea route around Southeast
Asia, discouraged much trade between Mesopotamia and China, though there
was some. Urban states developed later in China, without much evidence of dis
tant trade. Mexico and Peru are generally held to have developed urban states
independently, but there is a tantalizing correlation between the rise of the
Chinese states, the subsequent turmoil created, and the appearance of the ear
liest cities in Mexico and western South America. Agriculture and large popu
lations were already in place in Latin America, and Polynesians were colonizing
the Pacific Ocean islands, so there is a possibility that there were occasional con
tacts across the oceans. Foreign explorers and merchants at times might have
catalyzed state developments in the regions they brought into trade with their
homelands. (A catalyzing agent is a trigger, the last element that shifts a ready -
to-change solution into its potential other condition.) The prospect of sub
stantial profits from trade may have been the spur emboldening leaders or
groups to commit themselves to construction and societal organization on a
scale not yet attempted in their region.
A perspective emphasizing trade gives more weight to human decisions and
less to an environmental determinism that makes people seem mechanically
driven. It returns us to the question of strategies for prosperity. If prospects for
wealth and power alliances appear, someone may seize the initiative. The actual
very distant trade may prove impractical to sustain, but the moves toward con
solidating the organization to achieve it have been made, and the ruling group
can reach toward more practical objectives. Meanwhile, out on the far borders
of territories, people may see little prospect of gain from involvement in an
expanding state and may prefer to remain independent, minimizing risk (and
the possibility of becoming dependent on the state) by harvesting a variety of
foods, both cultivated and wild, and manufacturing nearly all their artifacts
from local resources. These communities are not “backward” or “primitive,”
they judge it wiser to be free than to end up exploited laborers in a state that
reserves ease and luxury for the aristocracy. Time and again, states overrun bor
der communities, but that is history.
Once written documents are created recording events in a state, prehistory
ends. Completely developed writing appears 5,000 years ago, that is, 3000 B . C . ,
in Mesopotamia. Shortly afterward, a quite different style of writing appeared
in Egypt. A few centuries later, writing—so far not deciphered—was used in
India. It was another thousand or so years, late in the second millennium B . C .
(1400-1200 B . C . ) , that writing was developed in China, the Near East, and
Greece. In the middle of the first millennium B . C . , ideographic writing was cre
ated in Mexico, and alphabetic writing systems in the eastern Mediterranean.
Northern Europe did not create its writing systems until the middle of the first
millennium A . D . , as part of the spread of Christianity after the breakup of the
Roman empire. Polynesians had a script by this time, also. The Peruvian king
doms and the second millennium A . D . empire of Tawantinsuyu, ruled by the
Inca, seem to have been m anaged entirely by means of accountants recording
censuses, taxes, and other governmental data on abacus systems using sets of
knots on colored strings. African states similarly had means of record-keeping,
while valuing oral transmission of histories committed to the trained memories
of officials and bards.
Invention of writing systems capable of putting down any fact or thought
was a tremendous achievement of human minds, yet the dates we can give for
these inventions, the dates for the beginnings of histories, obscure the variety
of memory aids people have used. Notches on Upper Paleolithic bone artifacts
sometimes were placed in regular sets. Perhaps they recorded days per phase
of the moon for a calendar, or they may be tally marks. Historic American
Indian women are known to have kept tallies of the number of hides tanned
on the bone handle of a hide scraper, or to have made a notch for the birth of
each child on a favorite awl. Priests of the Midewiwin religious society of
the Ojibwe Indians around the Great Lakes made birch-bark scrolls on which
they drew series of pictograph symbols to help them remember the details
of rituals. Mesopotamians made little clay tokens for possessions such as sheep
that might be consigned to a trader to sell, then modified tokens into picto
graph form on clay tables, eventually simplifying the pictographs into cuneiform
(.cunei: “wedges”) symbols that finally became phonetic. This evolution of writ
ing from owners’ tallies shipped in sealed clay envelopes along with goods con
signments, to true writing transcribing religious myths and political histories as
well as complex financial transactions— not to mention ordinary citizens’ per

sonal news and inquiries— took well over a thousand years in Mesopotamia.
Egyptians may have been stimulated to perfect their writing system by their
trading contacts with Mesopotamia, but Egyptian hieroglyphics don’t resemble
Mesopotamian cuneiform at all. The long, indigenous use of picture symbols in
every part of the world, including Australia, coupled with the close association
of true writing systems with urban states, indicate that it was the governmental
functions of states that forced the creation of writing systems.
Most of the people in most states never learned to write or read because
they were not expected to be active in government; only participatory democ
racies value universal literacy. Small societies manage political and economic
affairs through face-to-face relationships, so they don’t need writing.
Nonliterate societies may train certain people to remember accurately histories
and rituals, making these specialists living books. There is a tendency for liter
acy to promote formal ordered knowledge such as classification systems, formal
logic, law codes, and also holy books believed to be the exact revealed Word of
God; but ordered knowledge can be constructed and transmitted orally, so non
literate societies aren’t radically different from those with books.
We can conclude this chapter with the note that written documents can be
as difficult to interpret for a factual history as the archaeological record. The
subfield of historical archaeology— studying the sites and artifacts of historically
documented societies— has revealed how much information is absent in docu
ments and must be gained through other archaeological methods. Archaeology
may demonstrate that claims in documents are deliberately false, or a version of
events little better than myth. Prehistory is no longer all that archaeologists
work on; archaeology is a set of methods to illuminate the human past, from
the remote beginning of our species two million years ago, right into the twen
tieth century.
Pm X it: Aib o ltfjfc c M>J-
Neolithic refers to settled agricultural communities. These are evident in a num

ber of regions of Eurasia, Africa, the Americas, and New Guinea early in the
Holocene epoch, by 7 0 0 0 B .C ., and the foundations of agricultural practices
must have been observed and experimented with in the late Pleistocene epoch
Upper Paleolithic. Grains (wheat, barley, millet, maize) were sown and culti
vated, along with lentils, peas, beans, and similar protein-rich seed plants, in the
temperate climates of Eurasia, North Africa, and Latin America, and yams in
tropical New Guinea and possibly Africa. Producing food by clearing and hoe
ing fields and planting desired food staples, rather than harvesting only natu
rally occurring foods, supported larger populations than hunting and gathering
usually would. In many regions, populations gradually became denser, living in
permanent houses in towns with regular markets, temples, and officials to col
lect taxes and administer public affairs. Class stratification appears, with both
wars of conquest and peaceful trade extending relations among political groups.
Eventually, formal systems of record-keeping, including various types of writ
ing, were instituted in the early cities.
This story of “the rise of civilization” is only one version of human history.
Many societies resisted enslaving most of their people to hard labor in fields or
manufacturing workshops. These societies continued harvesting naturally
occurring foods, often becoming specialized producers regularly trading with
agricultural communities on their borders. Seasonally shifting bands of hunter-
gatherers could plant small fields or manage livestock. There are also parts of
the inhabited world where climate conditions make agriculture impossible; peo
ples such as the Inuit of the Arctic and the Mbuti and Efe of the Central African
tropical forest were inventing technology to improve their harvests of the ani
mals and plants in these more challenging regions.
Archaeologist Gordon Childe was correct in pointing out the revolution
ary impact of, first, agriculture and then the development of densely populated
cities upon human social relationships. These Neolithic and urban “revolu
tions” occurred in each of the continents and major islands except, it seems,
Australia, and no one region was markedly ahead of the others, although the
geographic position of Mesopotamia in Western Asia may have facilitated its
development into several city-states somewhat earlier than happened elsewhere.
History, in the narrow sense of written documents recording political and eco
nomic events, “begins” in the many regions of Eurasia, the Americas, Africa,
and the Pacific when relatively large, occupationally specialized, class-stratified
societies developed formal systems of record-keeping to manage their affairs.
The “rise of civilizations” is only one of the narratives of human history.
Contemporary societies that depend upon their sophisticated knowledge and
skills to harvest naturally occurring food resources are as “advanced” in their
histories as any college student in a high-rise apartment microwaving frozen
pizza. Agriculture and cities are impossible or too costly even today in large
areas of the world. Thus the Neolithic and urban “revolutions” were as histor
ically located as the American Revolution, not universal happenings or resulting
from genetically superior people, but rather adaptations to complex changes in
particular regions where increasing the food supply through agricultural prac
tices have been practical.
RECOMMENDED READING
Renfrew, Colin and Paul Bahn. Archaeology: Theories, Methods, and Practice. New York:
Thames and Hudson. 1996. Note that the material discussed in this chapter is ref
erenced in this text.
Fagan, Brian M. People of the Earth: A n Introduction to World Prehistory. (Latest edi
tion.) Glenview IL: Scott, Foresman.
Bruhns, Karen Olsen Ancient South America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1994.
Fagan, Brian M. Ancient North America. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995.
Each of these books is profusely illustrated and clearly written for the general college stu
dent. The authors are experienced archaeologists with a gift for writing.
Case Studies in Archaeology (Harcourt Brace), edited by Jeffrey Quilter. Books in this
series can be used to supplement this textbook, or as sources for term papers or pro
jects.
Khok Phanom Di (Thailand), Charles Higham and Rachanie Thosarat, 1994.
The Ceren Site (Central America Maya), Payson D. Sheets, 1992.
Special Topics
Eugene Linden, Apes, Men, and Language (Penguin Books, 1974), is a lively and
thoughtful account of the controversies over the projects to teach apes to commu
nicate in human languages. Linden discusses the question of how to define
“human.”
W. C. McGrew, Chimpanzee Material Culture: Implications for Human Evolution
(Cambridge University Press, 1993), discusses ape tool use from the perspective of
“What is ‘human’?” See also “Stone-Tool Bone-Surface Modification by Monkeys,”
G. C. Westergaard and S. J. Suomi, Current Anthropology 35(4):468-470 (1994),
for a recent discussion with bibliography.
C * H * A - P * T * E * R 8
Multimedia communication is basic to human cultures. All human societies use

spoken language, gestures and body language, visual and aural symbols, and
space to convey meaning. All known societies have complex languages capable
of communicating abstract philosophical concepts as well as pragmatic knowl
edge. One marked difference between humans and apes occurs when infants are
about six months old: Human infants intently watch people speaking and begin
attempting to imitate speech, while ape infants’ babble diminishes. Capacity for
elaborated, fine-tuned language is in our genes and is a distinctive human char
acteristic.
Before we examine language, let us look at American anthropologist Ralph
Linton’s clarification of the place of objects in cultures.
Linton suggested every object has, obviously, a form . Objects form: directly observed
also have uses, utility. Then Linton pointed out that objects meaning: associations society
ascribes to the object or behavior
have social functions that may be quite other than the obvious
use: object or behavior in rela
use: For example, an old-fashioned balance scale may function tion to external [natural or
today as a symbol for justice, though it can still be used for social] environment
weighing. Finally, Linton directed our attention to the social function: object or behavior in
meaning an object may carry: The balance scale functioning relation to role it plays in its
society (its “purpose” as seen by
as a symbol for justice means equality before the law—wealth
members of its society)
or political power are not supposed to overbalance justice. To
give a more exotic example, aluminum cans have the familiar form in Papua New
Guinea, and the familiar use of preserving food, functioning in meal preparation
and meaning , in New Guinea, a luxury food for high-status people. Once emp
tied, they have a second use in rituals and dances, flattened and cut to shine in
headdresses and as part of fancy pendants. Here they function to mark partici-
115
116 I Chapter 8 Analyzing Societies: Communicating
Bali, 1930. Form: a mon

strous, lion-faced, hum an
bodied figure.
Meaning: Holds a fierce
spirit gu a rd ing the commu
nity’s temple.
Use: Decorates temple
entrance.
Function: (1) communicates
the sacred nature of the tem
ple it guards; (2) its produc
tion is the means through
which the community sup
ports talented artists
enabling the congregation to
visualize religious beliefs.
Credit: Milwaukee Public
Museum.
pants in a ritual or festival dance, and mean that the wearers remain loyal to tra
ditional culture. We could look, too, at tin cans in highland Bolivia, where dis
carded cans are salvaged by peasants who put a strip of rag and some kerosene
in the can to make a lamp. The cans retain their form, their use now is to give
light, their function is to permit people to continue some of their activities and
socializing after dark, and their meaning is a sign of poverty, for only the very
Chapter 8 Analyzing Societies: Communicating I 117
Form, Meaning, Use, Function in an American city university campus:

Form: Large church and two large classroom buildings in late-medieval European style,
fronting a main avenue of the city.
Meaning: The powerful authority of a long cultural tradition dominates the campus and
city.
Use: Church is used to hold religious services, classroom buildings to house classes and
offices.
Function: University selects and trains generations of Catholic Americans for
managerial and professional employment, consolidating political and economic power for
middle-class Catholic Americans and perpetuating the Roman Catholic American
cultural tradition.
Note how the architecture, deliberately imitating the style of the era when Roman Catholic
leadership dominated European politics, symbolically portrays the persistence and power of
this cultural tradition. The university further communicates itsgraduates’ influential
position in the political economy of the region by positioning its principal buildings
fronting a main avenue of the city, where they will loom above thousands of
passing vehicles daily. The message is emphasized by positioning the Law School, the
building on the left, on the most visible corner of the campus.
C R ED IT: Marquette University
poor, who have no electricity and can’t afford even candles, use these lamps.
Linton’s distinction between form, use, function, and meaning should be kept
in mind when cross-cultural comparisons bring up what may appear to be bizarre
uses of objects.
Anthropologists who study languages may specialize in one or another aspect

of human languages: the structure of languages, semantics, historical linguistics,
and sociolinguistics. These several facets of anthropological linguistics some
what parallel Linton’s four aspects of a cultural object. Structural or descriptive
linguistics describes and analyzes the form of a language, or languages.
Semantics is the study of meaning, how it is created and perceived. Historical
linguistics charts shifts in languages and identifies general processes in language
change. Sociolinguistics observes the social functions of language, the messages
unconsciously accruing to behavior in its social settings.
This chapter briefly surveys the several facets of anthropological linguistics,
particularly as they may help students better understand daily experience in
communicating. Historical linguistics is least touched upon here because shifts
in language seem to be somewhat like biological evolution, generally occurring
outside most people’s conscious observation or control. These shifts are inter
esting, because they offer clues to the historic contacts of a land (in place-
names) or society, and they raise the controversial question of how much any
individual can control social behavior— the eternal question of how much free
will a human can claim.
7
Human languages work by means of two basic principles:
1. Words name objects and actions.
2. Arrangement of words into sentences carries part of the meaning.
Linguists including Franz Boas and, a generation later in the first half of the
twentieth century, Roman Jakobson drew a general model of how human lan
guages are constructed: First, there are the sounds used in speech. These can be
described according to how they are produced by the vocal chords, breath, teeth,
roof of mouth, tongue, lips. The technical word for a sound in speech is phone (of
course you know that word— it is Greek for “voice”). Over 200 sounds, or
phones, have been recorded in use in one or another human language. Linguists
record phones in the International Phonetic Alphabet, where each phone is
defined by how it is physically produced. Jakobson said this basic foundation of
speech is the phonetic level. Second, there are the sounds regularly used in mean
ingful speech in a particular language. Each of these is a
phoneme. Out of the more than 200 possible sounds for a phoneme: minimal sets of
human to use in speech, each language has selected a few sounds used in a language to
dozen. American English uses around 45 phonemes distinguish meanings______
(“around,” because different regional or class dialects may use
a few more or a few less). Some languages use as few as 30, some as many as 60.
The phonemes of any one language are only about one-third out of the possible
more than 200 phones. Apparently, around 40 or so sounds (phonemes) are suf
ficient to convey a rich variety of meanings, and many more in one language
would be inefficient. A phoneme is actually a cluster of closely similar sounds,
because in fluent speech a person shifts sounds slightly in relation to what is spo
ken just before or after. Slight shifts that do not affect meaning in one language
may do so in another. That is to say, similar sounds heard as “the same” in one
language may be distinguished as “two different sounds” by speakers of another
language. Third, phonemes are clustered or combined into morphemes, the tech
nical term for what we usually call “words.” Morphemes carry meaning. A mor
pheme may be a single phoneme (English “I ”), or more commonly a string of
phonemes (English “me” [2 phonemes], “cat” [3 phonemes]). Morphemes may
be combined in a word, for example “cats” has the root morpheme “cat” plus the
suffix morpheme “s” meaning “plural.” Another example: “schoolhouse” has
two root morphemes, “school” and “house,” and for plural,
“schoolhouses” adds on the suffix “s.” Fourth, morphemes phone: sound (any spoken
are strung together into sentences according to rules of syntax. sound).
phoneme: sound used in a
The grammatical rules you learned years ago are English syn
particular language
tax. Syntax gives human languages their amazing versatility. To morpheme: word (meaningful
take an obvious example, the sentence “Dog bites man” combination of phonemes).
describes a commonplace happening. Reverse the order of the syntax: rules of order (grammar)
morphemes to “Man bites dog” and we have quite a different for morphemes.
action, one likely to be featured in the newspapers. The same
three morphemes are used, but the change in their order radically changes the
story they tell.
Jakobson used the method o f comparison and contrast to analyze languages.
He would compare examples of speech or written text to find similar sounds,
combinations of sounds, and order of combinations. He would then ask a
native speaker of the language to tell him whether two similar sounds he had
heard spoken are “the same” or “different,” thus recognizing the phonemes of
the language. (To a foreigner, a phoneme may sound slightly different spoken
by different native speakers, or by the same speaker at different times. People
who know the language accept certain closely similar phones as “the same”
phoneme.) By comparison and then contrast, Jakobson would discover that in
English, “bat” and “pat” carry different meanings, indicating phonemic status
for “b” and for “p.” The only physical difference between the two utterances
lies in activating the vocal chords in forming “b” and not activating them for
“p” (put your fingers on your throat and say “bat,” then “pat”; you can feel the
vocal chords activated for the “b” and not for the “p”). In many other lan
guages, it doesn’t make any difference whether the vocal chords are activated
or not when the lips are pressed together for the b/p phoneme. Note that a lan
guage may have several dialects, with one or more phonetic differences between
them; New York English, for example, includes the phone technically called
“glottal stop,” written as an apostrophe (’), spoken by New Yorkers between
the “t” and “1” in the morpheme “bottle” (that is, New Yorkers say “bot’l”
catching their breath for a moment in the glottal stop). Standard American
English does not include this phone, the glottal stop, after the “t” in “bottie.”
(Standard American English, the officially preferred phonemes, morphemes,
and syntax—the dialect—of newscasters on the national networks, among oth
ers in the educated professional class, avoids identifying the region or social
class the speaker came from.)
Languages differ in the way they usually construct morphemes. Chinese is
called an “isolating” language because its morphemes are generally short, just a
consonant or two and a vowel, while German is “agglutinating” (“glues
together”), combining several morphemes into one long word (example:
Weltanschauung, “world” + “on” + “viewing” = “worldview”). Chinese dif
ferentiates morphemes in part by using different tones and pitches for two
otherwise identical, consonant-vowel-consonant morphemes. German, and
English, do not differentiate morphemes by tone and pitch, but we do employ
tone and pitch in syntax: The difference between a declarative statement and a
question comes from the rising pitch at the end of the question. (Try saying
“The dog bit a man” flatly, and it is declarative. Let your voice rise on the last
morpheme and it’s a question, “The dog bit a man?” [Meaning something like,
we thought that dog was only dangerous to cats.] And if you raise the pitch for
the three last morphemes, it’s an exclamation of surprise, “The dog bit a man?!”
[We thought that dog would never bite anyone!])
Linguists argue over whether all human languages have the same basic syn
tax, or “deep structure,” claimed by the contemporary American linguist Noam
Chomsky to be “actor/subject” followed by “verb/action.” Chomsky is
accused of mistaking basic English syntax for basic human syntax. It does seem
that the concepts of “actor,” “action,” “object of action,” and “state of being”
(no action, just being) are universal. What is basic, clearly shown by empirical
(direct observation) research, is that human children learn to speak human lan
guage, whichever it may be, by a series of steps: first the toddler constructs sim
ple one- or two-word sentences, verb (“Go!”) or noun-verb (“Dada! drink!”).
Then, a year or so later, the child figures out some more complicated syntax,
for example in English that “-ed” signifies “past action,” giving the child sen
tences such as “Daddy bopped the ball,” but also “I drinked the milk.” Another
year, and the child is mastering the “irregular verbs” (actually regular, there are
different rules for certain verbs) and can say “I drank,” “Mommy drove,”
“Grandma went home.”
Children learn a great deal more than phonemes, morphemes, and syntax
as they acquire language. Body language—the way one holds oneself or
moves—and gestures, tone and pitch o f voice and appropriate noises, these
are all culturally determined. Skilled actors are very much aware of how much
they must control in order to effectively portray a person o f a particular class
and background. Supposedly WASPs (“White Anglo-Saxon Protestants”) are
often “uptight,” hold themselves fairly straight. They use relatively few ges
tures and keep their arms close to the body, while African Americans are
stereotyped as “hanging loose” with more relaxed posture and frequent, more
sweeping gestures. Men, being on the average taller than women, tend to
look straight out and women, averaging shorter, tend to look slightly upward
in conversation, holding the head a little cocked, producing gender stereo
types that bother some short men—if they look up with head slightly cocked,
it’s “effeminate,” and they may compensate by staring aggressively at other
men. (Watch actor Dustin Hoffman in the film Tootsie. He first establishes his
role as a man with scenes where his body language is strictly conventional
manly behavior, then with brilliant subtlety uses almost perfect feminine body
language and tone when he takes on a woman’s role. Take this film seriously:
it exhibits the social roles “man” and “woman.” ) American boys learn to pre
fer declarative sentences sounding authoritative, while girls observing
women’s behavior use the questioning pitch more often, conveying a non
challenging feminine attitude. American women learn to break into others’
speaking, completing the sentence and constructing the next as if helping the
other to build a story. (Is it extended from helping a child to learn to build
an utterance?) American men learn to wait until the other guy has finished his
say. Such learned cultural role behavior is seldom conscious but significantly
affects communication.
Early in the twentieth century, Edward Sapir, one of Franz Boas’s students and
a poet, drew attention to how language affects perception. A blatant example
occurs when you are asked to write down what someone is saying, let us say tak
ing notes from a teacher who speaks with a strong foreign or regional accent.
Do you write down what you actually heard—the phonemes that differ from
Standard American English? Do you write down the “uh . . . ” between words?
the sniff or cough? You heard sounds different from Standard American English
but your perception focused on recognizing morphemes, so that your written
notes show only words in conventional spelling, not the dialect phonemes or
the meaningless noises you actually heard. As little children, we learn to distin
guish between morphemes and noises that do not carry meaning, and to figure
out the standard phoneme overlying actual individual variations.
Sapir’s student Benjamin Whorf spent most of his life employed in the
insurance business. Analyzing how language conventions affect perception
proved critical in that business. Whorf’s most famous case was an airport
employee who tossed a cigarette butt into an “empty” gasoline barrel. It
exploded and caused a disastrous fire in the hangar. Was the employee negligent
because he should have remembered that invisible gas fumes remain in a barrel
after gasoline has been poured out? He argued that he had tried to be careful,
that he had looked about for an empty metal container instead of dropping his
cigarette on the oily floor. The word “empty” that came to his mind when he
saw the barrel overrode his intellectual knowledge that fumes remain in gaso
line containers. Thousands of dollars in insurance payment depended on
whether the employee could be held to have been “negligent.”
W horf spent vacations in the American Southwest studying the Hopi and
Navajo Indian languages. (These are quite different. Hopi is related to lan
guages of Mexico, including that of the Aztecs, and Navajo to native languages
of Western Canada.) He found that neither of these languages uses the actor-
action-object sentence as frequently as does English. A sentence with only a
verb is permissible in Navajo. This means that Navajos more accurately describe
what they see when they say (in Navajo) “Raining,” contrasted to English
speakers whose rules of syntax force them to say, “It is raining.” (What actually
is “it?” ) W horf’s point was that English speakers are likely to think in terms of
agents (actors) causing actions, to look for cause, even when it is not appropri
ate. Navajo speakers, he thought, should be less likely to assume that everything
they see is caused by an agent.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language structure affects perception and
thinking is very difficult to prove, although it sounds reasonable. A considerable
advance has been made by the contemporary American linguist George Lakoff,
approaching the question by way of studying metaphors. In
W horf’s time, in the 1930s, philosophers were busy trying to metaphor: speaking as if some
make language more precise in hopes of better clarifying the thing shares a characteristic of a
issues they discussed. Using metaphors, it was generally different thing.
Example: “Speech is golden.”
believed, messed up thinking by mixing dissimilar things. Speech has no color but it is
Philosophers’ ideal, at the time, was symbolic logic whereby valuable like gold.
algebra-like symbols are substituted for words. Engineers’
successes with precisely defined and designed machinery and building projects
suggested the possibility that social behavior could be better ordered if defini
tions of words and phrases were sharper, like engineering formulae. This was the
time when Nazi engineers carefully designed efficient gas chambers for killing
millions of people. Gas chambers are monsters! The metaphor effectively
expresses the significant meaning of the Nazi operation, whereas a precise defi
nition of the constructions misses the horror. Lakoff, beginning his work in the
1960s, decided to reconsider the role of metaphor in thinking.
Metaphors We Live By, published in 1980, is a small paperback with big print
and exploding ideas. In it, Lakoff and his collaborator Mark Johnson examine
our most basic notions about communicating and thinking. Their conclusion is
that all thinking is ultimately grounded in real experience. We form concepts
out of our actual experience, then extend the concept metaphorically by iden
tifying similar aspects of other experiences: for example, little children get up,
feel bouncy, when they are healthy and well rested; they lie down, drag, when
they feel ill. So, we learn early that “happy” is “up,” “misery” is “down.” It
seems natural to say, then, that “things are looking up” when you mean to com
municate the likelihood of happiness (what things? real things? can those things,
if any, look? have they eyes?). Likewise, you say, “I ’m really down today” when
you mean to communicate sadness, never mind that in actual fact you’ve been
on your feet maybe on the top floor of a high-rise building all day. And com
puters are “up” when they’re working, making their users happy, and “down”
when they won’t work and everyone is frustrated and unhappy. Physically, “up”
or “down” has nothing to do with computer operation. Projecting from early
experiences is the way we build understanding.
Expansion of concepts from our early experiences structures language.
“Up” from feeling well develops into “up” equating with “good” and “desir
able,” so that we speak of “high” status, “high” quality, “high” standards. We
put “high ranking” people on platforms higher than the common throng, we
portray God “on high” on the upper portion of a painting with humans below
him. Subordinates bow down, lower themselves, before their “superiors” (Latin
super: above, sub: below). Early experience induces us to read
ily accept reifications such as thinking of “an idea” as “a reification: speaking of an
thing,” leading to the metaphor that communication is abstract idea or intangible as if
it were a physical thing
“sending ideas” from one person to another, as if in boxes via
a mail carrier.
It isn’t necessary for each one of us to have all the same early experiences
to understand basic metaphors. Because one simple metaphor such as “idea/is
like/a thing” is extended in many ways, we can figure out related meanings
from more-or-less similar experiences. You can say, “I ’ll send this idea by elec
tronic mail” and someone who had never seen a computer working could eas
ily understand because “send” and “mail” are metaphors referring to very
common experiences.
Lakoff’s claim that metaphors are basic to human thinking is supported by
studies of how scientists work. It used to be said that scientists must think log
ically (“given A, then B is likely”), but anthropological studies of actual scien
tists in laboratories revealed that many breakthrough ideas come through a new
metaphor occurring to someone. In the early nineteenth century, researchers
conceptualized many invisible phenomena—light, heat, electricity, magnetism,
and the movement of atomic particles—as if they were waves, metaphorically
extending their knowledge from seeing the behavior of water. Once electricity
was thought of as a current (that is, electricity “flows” through a conductor like
a current flows through water), scientists devised a number of fruitful experi
ments. A physicist interested in weather invented an apparatus for creating
miniature clouds in a glass container, and then the basic metaphor “wave” con
ceptually connecting electricity and atoms with water gave scientists studying
atoms the idea to use the cloud chamber apparatus for experiments in molecu
lar physics.
More support for Lakoff’s claim comes from American linguist Mary
LeCron Foster’s analyses of common features in languages worldwide. Certain
general ideas seem to be regularly conveyed by speech movements that mimic the
idea: for example, the sound “1” involving a relatively relaxed movement of the
tongue seems to correlate with words meaning loose, limp, fall, let, and so on; the
wider stretching of the lips to produce “y” sounds correlates with meanings hav
ing to do with the concept of “extending,” such as yet, yield, yard, yawn, yell,
yearn. Foster hypothesizes that primitive human language development in the
Lower Paleolithic used these mouth movements metaphorically to convey some
what abstract ideas. The repetition and symmetry of many Acheulian artifacts of
the Lower Paleolithic evidences intellectual recognition of pattern and may have
been associated with development of syntax (that is, order and pattern) in lan
guages. In the Upper Paleolithic, Foster hypothesizes, after thousands of years of
slow extension of the capacity to conceptualize and communicate abstract ideas,
people realized that patterns can be inverted, reversed, repeated after intervals,
disassembled and reassembled. That sophisticated grasp of pattern accelerated
the development of more complex syntax, the creation of new words, and the
invention of other media of communication such as painting, Foster suggests.
Sapir and W horf were onto something when they postulated that basic fea
tures of languages influence the thinking of speakers of the language. Lakoff
and other more recent linguists have expanded our understanding of how lan
guage and thinking are inter-related. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests, for
example, that speakers of Indo-European languages such as English will be
highly conscious of people’s gender because Indo-European languages’ syntax
requires speakers to select pronouns according to the gender of the noun
referred to (“he” versus “she” ). Algonkian Indian languages such as Blackfoot
do not require attention to sex gender: their pronouns differ according to
whether the reference is alive or inanimate (“live being” versus “it”). Lakoff’s
work adds that Indo-European language speakers are likely to stereotype a great
many phenomena as “masculine” or “feminine” according to whether we
would stereotypically use a masculine or feminine pronoun; for example, “dogs
are rough, cats are sweet” or “police work is heavy, typists’ work is light.”
Blackfoot speakers are likely to stereotype a phenomenon such as thunder,
which takes an animate pronoun, as having qualities of a live being, something
unlikely to be conceptualized by an Indo-European speaker. All this being so,
nevertheless we must remember that humans can consciously compensate for
the basic structuring of their particular language. Being aware that linguistic
structure does have some influence on thinking, is itself helpful in developing
our ability for critical thinking.
Early in the twentieth century, the French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure noted
the important difference between a language, in the sense of one taught in
school from textbooks, and speaking. Saussure called formal language langue,
and speaking parole, these being the French terms. We think of language as if
what we’ve seen in schoolbooks is the real language, with rules of syntax and
spelling and series of paradigms of irregular verbs. What we effordessly speak,
picked up from babyhood, doesn’t exactly match the formal English we learned
in school. Speaking, parole, should not be thought of as messy imperfect langue
but parallel to it. Saying “I gotta go” instead of “I must leave now” is not the
mark of a stupid uneducated person, it’s normal parole. Linguists must study
both formal langue and actual parole, respecting both.
Pursuing research related to parole, many anthropologists and linguists
challenged stereotypes of “good” and “poor” speech. They realized that pidgin
languages, created out of two quite different languages where speakers of each
must interact frequently in business but neither has incentive to really learn the
others’ language, are efficient means of fulfilling business communication
needs. They realized that languages and dialects have a political function in sig
naling class and ethnic group affiliation; from the point of view of the dominant
social group, speaking with a lower-class accent or dialect appears disadvanta
geous, marking the speaker as subordinate, but to the lower-class speakers it
may demonstrate pride in their family and heritage. Some years ago, the English
sociolinguist Basil Bernstein contrasted what he termed the “elaborated”
speech of upper-class English people, who teach their children to use complex
sentences and to develop a paragraph logically, with what seemed to him the
“restricted” speech of working-class people. “Elaborated” speech fit a profes
sional class performing in law courts and executive offices and living in multi-
roomed homes where children were taught to separate themselves from the
servants surrounding them. Listening to working-class English people, it
seemed to Bernstein that they more frequently used incomplete sentences and
a smaller vocabulary with their children. Bernstein believed this handicapped
working-class children in school. Subsequent studies of working-class teenagers
in England brought out how the “lads” deliberately rejected using the “proper”
English their teachers attempted to instill. The “lads” realized that the likeli
hood of their getting high-class jobs was poor, even if they graduated with good
grades from their working-class secondary school, and rather than alienate the
friends they could count on, they affirmed their loyalty by sharing working-class
dress, recreation, and speech. Not long after Bernstein’s initial studies, this
aggressive working-class punk cultural pattern was noticed by disaffected young
people of other classes and achieved wide popularity as punk rock. The direct,
simple, four-letter-word style, teamed with a powerful hard-hitting rock beat,
expressed the emotions o f young men and women of all classes crowded in
cities.
While millions of young people grooved to Sting, the Sex Pistols, Eric
Clapton, and Mick Jagger, several scholars including the English anthropologist
Jack Goody were thinking about the role of writing and literacy in societies.
This attention, too, stemmed from Saussure’s fruitful distinction between for
mal language and speaking. Writing tends to “fossilize” language (in the sense
of langue): A standard form is presented and preserved. The standard is acces
sible to all literate people but not to the illiterate, and formal education sepa
rates the literate, making them a social class, from the illiterate. From the
earliest historic periods, in all societies developing writing, literacy has been a
marker of higher social class. Sometimes laws forbade teaching slaves or peas
ants to read. Writing makes it easier to classify long lists of things, including
behavior classified under legal codes, and makes it easier to declare that written
rules define the norm, labeling variant behavior “deviant.” It is no coincidence
that writing developed with the inception of complex state societies ruling hun
dreds of thousands, or millions, of people. The American movement, beginning
in the mid-nineteenth century, to provide schooling at taxpayers’ expense for all
children—and backing up the opportunity with laws enforcing school atten
dance—was indeed revolutionary. It is true that much of the enthusiasm for
mandatory public schooling came from industries’ need for literate workers, but
the expansion of literacy did facilitate democratic procedures.
Universal public education raised the issue of class differences in language,
as Bernstein realized. In the United States and Canada, controversies flare over
whether children must use Standard American English. Standard English facil
itates social mobility, since it is heard and taught all over the continent and
someone speaking it can fit in with educated people in any business or profes
sion. But Standard English seems to some people to be like packaged sliced
white bread, uniform and bland, in contrast to regional or class dialects that
trigger memories of generations of one’s own people, of the land one grew up
in, its sounds and way of being. Regional and class dialects carry a group’s her
itage, incorporating words and some syntax from foreign languages and phrases
drawn from the group’s surroundings and activities. African American dialects,
for example, differ from Standard American English in part because they are
likely to use an African language syntax form as a variant on Standard English
(e.g., “be. . .” instead of “is . . .’’ or “was . . . ” when long duration of the action
is meant). Should people be urged to drop a variant reflecting their ancestry, in
order to sound like an ad for sliced white bread? Should children from Spanish
speaking American or American Indian families be forced to speak only a lan
guage brought here by invaders who fought their ancestors? On the other hand,
employers, landlords, and police may associate dialects other than Standard
American with ignorance and immorality. Should children be permitted to put
themselves at risk of suffering prejudice? It doesn’t have to be either/or; most
people can “code-switch,” if they wish, once they’ve heard the differences. The
controversy continues because it is the tip of the volcano of societal conflicts
over privilege versus rights.
Studies of class and gender differences in dialect, and of the uses and effects
of literacy, have become part of a broad sociolinguistic interest in the languages
o f “muted groups.” A number o f linguists are assisting subordinated ethnic
groups to maintain their languages. Nationalists in Wales demanded a television
channel broadcasting in Welsh. At first, the British Broadcasting Corporation
dismissed the requests, claiming few people speak Welsh and even they under
stand English. When one leader in desperation went on a hunger strike, the
BBC gave in. Along with their own language on television and radio, the
Chapter 8 Analyzing Societies: Communicating i 127
nationalists have persuaded schools in Wales to use the language, and one can
hear parents speaking Welsh with their children to encourage it, then lapsing
into the English they grew up with when the kids are out of earshot. Speaking
Welsh powerfully reminds people that England had conquered their country,
had exploited their people (labor conditions in Welsh coal mines were notori
ous), and that greater Welsh sovereignty might be to their benefit. American
Indians similarly are tying parental insistence on maintenance of the native lan
guage through its use in local schools, newspapers, and radio to increased
demands for sovereignty as recognized in the treaties made between the United
States and Canadian governments and the Indian nations they encountered in
their expansion. Having the Indian actors speak Lakota in the movie Dances
with Wolves was hailed as a breakthrough in forcing the American public to
respect the reality of Indian nations. Contrast those scenes with older films’
Indians grunting “Ugh” or speaking broken English. Languages are instru
ments for communicating not only overt messages through morphemes and
syntax but also political statuses through popular association of particular lan
guage forms with class and ethnic groups.
In the Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology Series (Fort Worth: Harcourt
Brace)
Esman, Marjorie R. Henderson, Louisiana: Cultural Adaptation in a Cajun Community.
1985.
Hostetler, fohn A. and Gertrude Enders Huntington. The Hutterites in North America.
1996. (Hutterites are a Protestant religious sect that uses their forebears’ German
language to maintain their culture and separation from nonbelievers.)
Parman, Susan. Scottish Crofters: A Historical Ethnography of a Celtic Village. 1990.
Wong, Bernard. Chinatown: Economic Adaptation and Ethnic Identity of the Chinese.
1982.
REFEREN CES
Foster, Mary LeCron. Symbolic Origins and Transitions in the Palaeolithic. In The
Emergence of Modern Humans: A n Archaeological Perspective, ed. Paul Mellars.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1 990, pp. 5 1 7 -5 3 9 .
Goody, Jack. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1977.
Lakoff, George. Women, Eire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980.
Linton, Ralph. The Study of Man. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1936.
C * H * A * P * T * E * R 9
C i * S c C ' t o ' O ^ _____________
V A L U E S ^
e x p r e s s i o n a n d r e c r e a t i o n
S O C I A L I Z I N G
A R T S (visual, musical, dramatic, literary) G A M E S
N O
O F
I
T S
A O
L C
G U I
E E T
R
l aw politics religion kinship

M A N U F A C T U R E and D I S T R I B U T I O N
P R O D U C T I O N OF T R A W M A T E R I A L S
E N V I R O N M E N T
129
130 I Chapter 9 Analyzing Societies: Cultural Ecology
How do anthropologists understand living societies? In contrast to the tanta-

lizingly fragmentary archaeological record, living societies are overwhelmingly participant
rich in data. Participant observation is like parachuting into Disneyland, all observation:
living in a
kinds of people busding here and there. Some of them, you’re sure, are mask
community in
ing their real selves, and you suspect that some of the structures around you order to learn
may not really be very true to the past they supposedly represent. Anthropolo and under
gists try to follow the basic scientific method of recording careful observations, stand their
organizing them according to what seems likely to be significant principles of culture
classification, and checking the validity of these hypothesized principles by see
ing how well they accommodate new data. This mode, of scientific analysis, is
one of our modern Western worldviews. It won’t closely match perspectives of
people in the society, although there will be overlap. Both descriptions, the sci
entific and the native, are worth presenting: The scientific uses terms and looks
for principles of organization that may be universally valid, the native highlights
concepts that the particular society tends to believe are important.
The chart beginning this chapter is a visual map for ordering observational
data on living societies. The base for the society is mapped as the base of the
chart: the environment. We make it big and bold to indicate how important it
is. Out of the environment, people produce raw materials—food, fuel, materi
als for housing, clothing, cooking, tools. The arrow connecting the environ
ment with production of raw materials goes both ways because production
always affects the environment. Out of produced raw materials, people manu
facture all their artifacts. “Manufacture” means processing food as well as mak
ing objects. “Distribution” is on the same line as “manufacture” because these
are two aspects of getting items to people who want them. The eighteenth-
century Scottish economist Adam Smith called production of raw materials the
“primary sector” of the economy, manufacture the “secondary sector,” and dis
tribution and service occupations the “tertiary sector,” a reasonable mapping
but one that pulls apart the actually tightly linked manufacturing and distribu
tion activities (“supply and demand”).
Manufacture and distribution, as well as primary production from raw
resources, are connected with what Karl Marx called the “social relations of
production,” relationships between workers and managers, suppliers and con
sumers, all historical actualities affected by location, wars, climate, health fac
tors. Above the physical components of human societies we have placed laws,
political structures, organized religious groups, and prescribed family relation
ships. These all regulate how people in the society are to act toward others,
naming social roles and procedures to assign persons to them. These several sys
tems o f regulating society are held to be necessary. On a higher plane, socializ
ing, expressing emotions and poetic images, the pleasures of experiencing
beauty and playing games, are what make living worthwhile to humans. In these
Chapter 9 Analyzing Societies: Cultural Ecology I 131
activities we can glimpse the values that guide people, and their worldview
framing all behavior.
This and the following chapters will discuss these several levels, or focuses,
for analyzing societies.
U vel Q u H w u d . S cetop ^ _________________________
E N V I R O
t N M E N T
The environment is the foundation of all organic life. Out of it come the
biochemical molecules with which we build and move our bodies. We couldn’t
live for even a few minutes in the emptiness of outer space—unless, of course,
we were to use our technology to construct an environment in a capsule and
stay inside that simulation of an earth environment. We and our environments
are interactive.
Ecology is the term for the concept that living organisms
and their environment interact. Any organism, even a tiny Ecology is the study of the inter
bacterium, affects its environment simply by breathing, con action of living organisms and
suming nutrients, eliminating body wastes, and becoming a their habitat. The word was first
spelled “cecology,” from Greek
decaying corpse. Big organisms such as humans affect their oikos, “house,” + -logia, “speak
environments even if they live entirely by collecting wild ing with a certain knowledge.”
foods and sleeping in natural shelters: humans’ food needs We think of the environment as
affect the numbers and probably the growth and reproduc an organism’s “house.” Ecology
describes the “house”
tive success of the plants and animals collected, and human
—the environment— and how
body wastes change the chemistry of the soil on which they organisms live in it.
fall.
With Neolithic farming, human groups began consciously to change their
environments. As the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss put it, soci
eties that lived by collecting natural resources were like the neighborhood
handyman who picks up stuff laying around that might be useful, and can knock
together a shed or shelf out of what’s piled up in his backyard. In French, the
fellow’s called a bricoleury and what he cobbles together is bricolage. In contrast,
said Levi-Strauss, people who consider themselves modern decide what they
would like and design it, inventing materials such as plastics if no natural mate
rials will enable them to complete the design. Levi-Strauss calls this approach to
life “engineers’ thinking.” Bricoleurs can create some very beautiful and effi
cient artifacts—think of the delicately flaked, sharp, leaf-shaped javelin points
made by Upper Paleolithic people and their contemporaries, Paleo-Indians in
the Americas—but there are limits set by the characteristics of the raw materi
als. “Engineers’ ” minds overturn natural limits. The Flolocene has been the
This man in India using an

elephant, something he’s seen
around, to do what an
engineer constructed a
bulldozer to do, is an
example of bricoleur
thinking.
Public Museum.
heyday o f the engineers, beginning with radically changing organism popula

tions in selected localities through agriculture, then building those gigantic
human anthills we call cities, and finally erecting those enclosed mall complexes
where people ice skate in summer around tropical foliage as the long-dead
Elvis’s voice booms through the filtered air.
It’s all ecology, whether you study owls in remote forests or sparrows
thriving on the crumbs from McDonald’s in mall parking lots. When you
focus on the interaction between humans and their environments, with par
ticular attention to people’s beliefs about their world and the way their
customs affect their environment, you are studying cultural ecology. Anthro
pologists have been fascinated by the variety o f interpretations o f the nature
o f the world. I f the world is things out there and we go out into it to get a
living, why should there be any differences in conceptions o f the world? Nine
teenth-century anthropologists assumed nonwestern peoples were either of
lesser brain development or ignorant because they were cut off from the dis
coveries o f modern science. Hundreds o f anthropological studies show that a
scientific way o f thinking—careful observations from which generalizations
are drawn and tested—is characteristic o f some people in every society, and
that much scientific knowledge is incorporated in every cultural tradition.
Simply to survive, every society has to do some study o f its ecology. Differ
ences in interpretation come partly from differences in the environments in
which people live, and pardy from profound philosophical ideas that suggest
how the world should appear.
Historians formerly believed that science was invented in Classical Greece and devel
oped in the western cultural tradition. A prominent biochemist, Joseph Needham,
became curious why science “had not developed” in China, and began researching
Chinese history. Needham found that in fact, China has a long and impressive tradi
tion of scientific research. It had been unknown in the West because the few western
historians able to read Chinese hadn’t been interested in documents on science. At
the same time, in the 1960s, that Joseph Needham was discovering the history of Chi
nese science, astronomers were recognizing the scientific knowledge behind Neolithic
and American Indian sky observatories; linguists were recording the science embed
ded in “folk” classifications of plants, animals, and geology; and medical anthropolo
gists were demonstrating the scientific basis of much “folk” medicine. Scientific
observation and experimentation are practiced in all cultures.
French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu gives us the term habitus to refer to

a “way of being,” covering both the ecology o f a society (its environment and
interaction with that environment) and its habitual interpretation of the nature worldview:
o f the world and its people (worldview). Bourdieu emphasizes the dynamic people’s
interactive relationship between a society and its environment, how the envi belief about
the universe
ronment limits what people might do and at the same time stimulates us and humanity
humans to get around the limitations, to invent technology and social practices (not people’s
that open options. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus goes beyond active interac notions about
tion to cover also how people in a society perceive their accustomed environ foreigners!)
ment, the features they pay attention to, features they use in metaphors (e.g.,
“His heart is as hard as a rock”), and how they teach their members to regard
their environment—for example, is the deep forest threatening, as in European
fairy tales, or an embracing parent, as the Mbuti in the Congo believe.
Children are socialized, in their communities, to accept certain conditions
as “natural.” In traditional middle-class American homes, children have been
Eight photos illustrating “habitus”
Nias, Indonesia, 1930. Tropical

coastal habitat. Dress and houses
adapted to local conditions; the
government-recognized village head
man wears a foreign hat to mark his
office, but keeps clothing suited to the
climate.
Photo credit: Milwaukee Public
Museum.
Port Moresby, New Guinea, 1928.

Another tropical coastal habitat. Fish
ermen’s houses here are raised above
high-water level. (Note dugout canoe
at left between homes.) Women and
girls wear cool, shredded-fiber skirts
like those of women in the nearby Tro-
briand islands.
Cameroons, Africa, 1959. Bafut

house. Another tropical habitat,
this one an agricultural state
where leading families even in
villages build more imposing
houses to mark their social power.
Public Museum.
The Acropolis, Athens, Greece. Classical

Greeks took basic building forms and
expressed them on large scale in local stone,
to symbolize the power and permanence of
the Athenian state. Even the common
sight of women bearing loads on their
heads is translated into huge female fi g
ures bearing the gods’ temple.
Near Pisa, Italy, 1928.

The barefoot women bear
ing loads on their heads,
the oxcart and horse-cart,
the plastered houses with
tile roofs and stone-faced
temple (church), exhibit a
cultural tradition several
thousand years old adapted
to the Mediterranean habi
tat.
Public Museum.
Indigenous Ojibwe Indian home

stead near Lake Superior, with wig
wam made of mats roofed with
birchbark sheets.
Museum.
Ojibwe homestead, 1925. The family

now lives in a European-style log
cabin on its homestead.
Museum.
1936, Ojibwe family constructing a

traditional wigwam in a city park
fo r an ethnic-heritage festival.
Museum.
socialized to believe that men are born to be strong and aggressive and women
born to easily cry, be silly and vain. Not only drama (including television shows
like I Love Lucy and Leave It to Beaver) but also social practices reinforce the
stereotypes in the worldview. Traditional middle-class American families pushed
their boys to be active exploring the neighborhood and in competitive sports,
while they kept girls close to the house and out of sports. Girls were smiled
upon if they giggled a lot, boys were not. In restaurants, men ordered for
women at the table as well as for themselves, and paid the bill, as if women
couldn’t handle speaking out or simple arithmetic. Since most people, wanting
to be liked, more or less conform to what is prescribed for their role in society,
the usual way of interpreting the natural world and human fate seems to be sup
ported by people’s experience. It’s circular: Children are taught that boys “nat
urally” don’t cry and girls do, so boys repress tears and girls readily weep. So
see! you hardly ever see a boy cry and you do see girls cry. To challenge your
society’s worldview and habitus would seem the act of a crazy person who can’t
recognize the way the world is, the normal “way of being.” The value of cross-
cultural comparisons is the revelation of what behavior is the result of social
ization in particular societies, and what behavior seems species-specific to Homo
sapiens sapiens. Among Lakota Sioux, both men and women have been social
ized that adults “naturally” break into tears during a speech expressing strong
emotion. European visitors were surprised, and disturbed, when dignified men
wept openly as they orated—and Lakota thought European men were “natu
rally” stony, “naturally” unlike fully human people such as the Lakota.
Worldview and habitus may not be challenged often, but they can be chal
lenged, and they can change bit by bit. No society is static, unchanging. Any
society that tried to prevent all change, never allow any modification, would be
unable to survive more than a few generations at best, for the natural environ
ment changes, and so do the society’s demographics (population characteris
tics such as birth and death rates, number of people of various ages, of men
and of women), and so do neighboring societies. The nineteenth-century
opinion that only western societies are dynamic and changing, and nonwestern
societies are rigidly “traditional,” was simply propaganda for legitimatizing
conquest—the “benighted heathen” supposedly blindly followed their tradi
tional practices and needed to be freed by the colonial powers, sort of like a
slew of Sleeping Beauties waiting for their Princes. The historian of science
Arthur Lovejoy found that at the beginning of western history, by 700 B . C . in
Classical Greece, already there was the stereotype that remote tribes had prim
itive cultures, which were either innocently good or horridly cruel, and “civi
lized” Greeks could journey to these places to observe pure Natural Man. Over
on the other side of Eurasia, Chinese had similar stereotypes. The stereotype
of one’s own society being dynamic, creative, full of intelligent people, while
foreigners are dull slaves to custom, functions very well to keep people work
ing within their society—maybe not contented, but sure that they’d be worse
off among the barbarians.
Cultural ecology tries to break out of the value judgments conventionally

made about cultural practices. It begins with the premise that any society that
survives over generations has adapted reasonably well to the conditions and
resources of its environment (see the lower part of the chart, Fig. 9.1) and that
its worldview, values, and customs (see the upper part of the chart, Fig. 9.1)
reflect its environmental situation and support the ecological interaction. The
nonhuman ecology of the region must be observed and analyzed: the landforms
and soils, climate, water supply, animals and plants. The human population
must be observed: numbers of people, their density per unit of land, their mode
of subsistence, housing, transportation. The interaction between humans and
the land—the human ecology—must be plotted out. Is the population low in
relation to resources? high? well adjusted? Is it stable in numbers, or rapidly
changing? Are its techniques of resource extraction sustainable over a long
period or wasteful, damaging to the land’s capacity to regenerate? What is
known from archaeology or historical documents about the region’s earlier
human ecology? When the ecology is described, the anthropologist can get to
the fun part, teasing out the way the culture is molded by its natural situation
and in turn molds that situation (the interplay Bourdieu terms habitus).
Anthropologists noted a century ago that we can map out culture areas, geo
graphic regions each with its distinctive cultural pattern reflecting adaptation to
the region’s natural attributes plus the influence of neighboring societies.
Sometimes cultural ecology shows a straightforward relationship between a
society’s culture and its ecology. On the Northwestern Plains of the United
States and adjacent Canada (Wyoming, Montana, Alberta, Saskatchewan),
grasses are the principal plant cover and bovines (bison and cattle) the principal
food animal. Before the Eurasian grass, wheat, was imported, grain agriculture
was impossible; the region is too dry for the native American grain, maize
(corn). The best way for people to gain a living from this land was by hunting
bison, the native bovine. To balance the diet, camas (a native tuber) was culti
vated in its natural habitat, other native roots such as the prairie turnip were col
lected, and surplus meat and hides could be traded at the farming towns along
the Missouri River and its tributaries in North Dakota for maize, as well as for
pipe stone, for a glassy rock that makes excellent, sharp arrowheads and knife
blades, and for ornaments. The cultural ecology of the Northwestern Plains
nations—Blackfoot, Gros Ventres, Sarsi, Cree—focused on the bison herds
until European invasions drastically altered it. Communities were small and
nomadic, moving camp in a pattern resembling the movements of the bison,
wintering in sheltered valleys or parkland and traveling farther in the warm
months. Each year, bison congregated by the thousands in summer, socializing
and finding mates, and the people congregated at the same time, socializing,
trading, holding religious ceremonies, mediating conflicts, gambling, courting.
As the snows approached, the lively rendezvous camps, like the bison herds,
divided again into small village groups that returned to the wooded spots where
they could be protected from the worst storms and find firewood. Bison and
humans were in symbiosis, the humans surviving on bison meat and the bison
population thriving because the humans burned over the land each year to fos
ter growth of the nutritious grasses the bison grazed. This symbiosis, and the
similarity between bison herds and human communities in size, habitat, and
annual cycle, were recognized by the humans, whose worldview held that the
bison (and other animals of the Plains) are other nations, each with its particu
lar customs and language. Bison were believed to feel kinship with human
communities, occasionally in the past to have visited them transformed in
appearance to humans, and to willingly enter the humans’ corrals to enable
their human friends to survive.
European invasions broke this habitus, this way of being. Competition for
land in eastern North America between what would total millions of immi
grants from Europe and the native American nations drove Indian nations west
ward. More and more Indians tried to make a living hunting bison, west of the
colonies of Euro-Americans. In the nineteenth century, that colonization
reached the Plains, plowing up bison habitat and bringing in a competing
bovine from Europe, cattle. The bison herds were exterminated and the Indian
nations forced to surrender their lands in exchange for famine relief.
Now there is another habitus on the Plains. The majority of the people now
living on the Plains have been socialized in a cultural tradition that declares ani
mals to be very different from humans, to lack souls and be of low intelligence.
Animals and plants are to be controlled wholly by humans. Radically altering
the landscape, replacing natural forms with clearly artificial rectangular shapes
(fenced fields, houses and yards, street grids, shopping malls), is highly valued.
Cultural ecology points out that a key factor in the difference between the two
habituses, the two ways of being, is wheat: With no native American cultigen
(crop) able to sustain full-scale agriculture on the Northwestern Plains, its orig
inal human inhabitants had to adapt to the principal available resource, bison
herds, developing symbiosis with them for maximum utilization of the region.
Bison apparently can’t be tamed, so they couldn’t be domesticated and their
independence had to be respected by their human neighbors. Then came a new
ingredient in the ecology. Wheat, once it was imported, grew well on the
Northern Plains. To grow it, the native grasses were destroyed so wheat could
be substituted. Domesticated cattle were substituted for the independent bison.
Such wholesale substitution of Europeans’ preferred resources, carried out
through destruction of the native resources, fit and reinforced a worldview that
claimed humans are meant to command the world. Cultural ecology explains
the differences between Blackfoot and Euro-American worldviews as stemming
from their different resource bases, from which people develop a habitual mode
of subsistence, social relations, and values.
Cultural ecology as a research strategy is not supposed to make value judg
ments. A nomadic life of bison hunting and root and berry gathering, with its
worldview of respect toward the other animal nations sharing the habitat, is not
in itself better, or worse, than the European-derived radical substitution of rec
tangular fields and yards and houses and street grids for a less obviously modi
fied native grassland with scattered clusters of conical tipis. Recent studies urge
us to add another dimension to cultural ecological studies: Is the habitus sus
tainable? We learned the hard way, during the 1930s’ Dust Bowl drought, that
plowing let precious topsoil blow away, or run into streams after rains. Thou
sands of families were beaten by the inadequacy of their technology to maintain
the resources they depended upon. The ecological disasters we have watched in
the twentieth century—the Dust Bowl, the creep of Sahara sand dunes over
destabilized African farmlands, the rapid rise in river-borne diseases in Egypt
once the Nile floods were contained in back of the Aswan Dam, the destruction
of temperate-zone forests and lake life by acid rain, the massive erosion of trop
ical lands after clear-cutting their forests—all these and so many more examples
of overwhelming impact teach the basic lesson of cultural ecology, that human
societies adapt to their environment and adapt their environments to them. For
long-term security, we must weigh the effects of our customs on the world we
live in, and seek to construct a “way of being” based on real symbiosis. From
that perspective, restoring native Plains grasses and bison herds in place of the
wheat farms makes sense; geographers from Rutgers University proposed doing
that, turning the western Plains back into a “Buffalo Commons.” Ranchers
would cull the herds and sell the lean, healthful bison meat to cover the mini-
“The reason there are no more elk in the mountains is that prairie
chickens don’t dance on the prairie anymore.”
Anthropologist Alan Marshall had mentioned to his Nez Perce Indian teacher, Cyrus
Red Elk, that Idaho game wardens were concerned about how few elk remained in the
mountains. Marshall remarked that the increase in logging no doubt was responsible
for the reduction in elk in the mountain forests. Mr. Red Elk replied, “No. The reason
that there is no more game in the mountains is that prairie chickens don’t dance on
the prairie anymore.”
This must refer to a Nez Perce myth, Marshall thought. Nez Perce had pointed
out to him that prairie chickens (sharp-tailed grouse) and humans are the only species
that prepare special places and gather there to drum, sing, and dance. Nez Perce
believe that when they drum and dance ceremonially at these time-honored dancing
grounds, spirit beings dance with them, renewing the bonds that bring blessings and
prosperity to the people. Presumably, when prairie chickens dance, their spirit friends
are with them, too. Did Mr. Red Elk believe that the elk population depends on the
prairie chickens’ spirit friends?
Marshall discovered that prairie chickens no longer danced on the prairie in
Idaho because large-scale Euro-American farming destroyed the native grasslands in
the broad valleys. These grasslands had been the principal wintering grounds of the
elk. The critical factor in elk survival was not the mountain forests where they sum
mered and were hunted by sportsmen, but the prairie valleys and the deep, warm
sheltering canyons cutting through them. Mr. Red Elk knew why there is no more game
in the mountains; he explained it succinctly. There was nothing mystical in the expla
nation: Red Elk thought Marshall would realize that the disappearance of prairie chick
ens was the clue to radical changes in the ecology affecting other species, such as
elk, that utilized prairie chicken habitat.
mal costs of sustaining the Buffalo Commons. Long-term sustainable subsis

tence practices aren’t pie-in-the-sky, they will be inevitable.
The best way to understand human ecology is to read several ethnographic
studies. Ecology has been given a prominent place in most ethnographic work
since the mid-twentieth century. One landmark book in cultural ecology was
The Nuer, by British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, published in 1940.
Nuer live in the Sudan region of East Africa. Much of that country is range land
suitable for cattle but, except for limited areas, not for agriculture. Conse
quently, Nuer economy has been based primarily on raising cattle, and the peo
ple much admire fine cattle, give cattle as wedding gifts and to seal contracts,
sing songs about how lovely a herd is as the lowing cows enter their pen in the
evening, etc. The leader of a Nuer village is called its “bull” (even when the
leader is a woman). Nuer habitus is organized around the needs of cattle, for if
their cattle sicken, the people may starve. Neighboring the Nuer are the Dinka,
whose land is better for farming. Evans-Pritchard described the Dinka as per
petual victims of Nuer raids to capture cattle. Later anthropologists, including
Francis Mading Deng (who is himself Dinka), picture the Dinka more favor
ably, recording many instances of Nuer settling peaceably among Dinka. A cul
tural ecological analysis, of which Evans-Pritchard’s work was the pioneer,
clarifies the situation. Environmental conditions in the southern Sudan can be
harsh and fluctuating, with extensive prolonged flooding from the upper Nile
in some years and drought in others. These fluctuations threaten farmers, who
are fixed in one place. Cattle, because they are mobile, are a kind of insurance
against crop failure. The labels “Nuer” and “Dinka” refer to complementary
economic adaptations, primarily cattle herding or primarily farming, that allow
the human population to fully utilize the region over the long term.
The power of ecological analysis to illuminate the foundation of a society
has made this approach popular among anthropologists since The Nuer was
published. Colin Turnbull described how well adapted the Mbuti of the Congo,
in Africa, are to their environment, their unusually small size (they are the
African “pygmies”) letting them run nimbly through the tropical forest that
continually caught the big Britisher Turnbull in its tangle of branches. The
Mbuti think of the forest as their parent, providing food, shelter, and safety.
They respect it as children do their parent, even sing to it. Mbuti trade meat
from their hunting and other forest products to neighboring Bantu-speaking
agricultural villagers for metal knives and palm wine, and are happy to visit if a
villager is hosting a feast, but they consider farming hard, hot work and they
enjoy greater freedom in their shady forest. A comparable study has been pro
vided by Richard Lee, an American anthropologist, of the Dobe Ju/’hoansi
(formerly called !Kung), a Basarwa group (popularly called Bushmen). The
Ju/’hoansi live in the Kalahari Desert of South Africa and adjacent Namibia and
Botswana. Like the Mbuti, they hunt and gather wild foods. Like most Mbuti,
most Ju/’hoansi desire little in the way of material possessions, prizing their
independence from outside government. Intensively recording Ju/’hoansi daily
activities, Lee found that they enjoyed more leisure than most working people
in larger societies. Turnbull’s and Lee’s ecological analyses demonstrated that
the standard western notion that hunting-gathering people live lives that are
“nasty, brutish, and short,” as the seventeenth-century English philosopher
Hobbes put it, is quite wrong. Turnbull and Lee showed, also, that the values
of freedom and respect may be more important to some people than material
possessions: Many Mbuti and Ju/’hoansi who did want clothes, radios, beer,
and cigarettes left their nomadic bands to work on farms or in towns; the bands
Turnbull and Lee observed were the people for whom liberty was worth more.
A depressing postscript to Lee’s work is that the South African government
insisted on “civilizing” Basarwa, forcing many bands to remain permanently in
reservation villages where they were supposed to raise goats and farm. Since the
Kalahari is a desert, farming requires irrigation and the government skimped on
developing this, leaving the Basarwa to depend on welfare payments. The
Mbuti are threatened by the widescale destruction of the African forests.
Demands of large national populations for resources may leave no space for
small societies to sustain different ways of being.
Cultural ecology takes into account social factors in a group’s environment.
Imposition of South African rule on the Basarwa changed their habitus, willy-
nilly. The woman whose practiced eye can find nutritious roots in the dry land
scape and the sure-shot bowman no longer garner admiration. In their place,
the smart guys who can speak English and read and promise votes to politicians
influence the community. The Kalahari itself hasn’t changed much, especially
the sections now incorporated into a nature preserve; it’s the political condition
that has changed. In his 1940s’ pioneer work, Evans-Pritchard had initially
ignored the political aspect of Nuer ecology, writing as if there were no British
colonial power recently extended over Nuer country (though it was only
because of that conquest that he was given funds to study the Nuer). Subse
quently, Evans-Pritchard insisted on acknowledging historical circumstances. A
look at historical circumstances for Basarwa by anthropologist Carmel Schrire
revealed that in the seventeenth century, when European and African Bantu
colonization hit South Africa, Basarwa generally lived in villages raising cattle.
Squeezed between two invaders, one from overseas, one from the north, each
with much greater population and better weaponry, the Basarwa moved out of
the desirable cattle-pasture lands into the Kalahari. Their hunting-gathering
way of life was not the continuation of a Paleolithic culture, but a historic adap
tation. This revelation underscores the dynamic nature of the ecological rela
tionship. No historic society is simply a remnant of Paleolithic culture; all the
living societies we have observed are adapted to modern conditions.
In the Case Studies in C u ltu ral Anthropology Series
Lee, Richard B. The Dohe J u / ’hoansi (earlier editions use the title The Dobe Kung), 1994.
Turnbull, Colin. The Mbuti Pygmies: Adaptation and Change, 1983.
Other case studies highlighting cultural ecology include:

Goldschmidt, Walter. The Sebei: A Study in Cultural Adaptation. The Sebei o f East
Africa are comparable to the Nuer and Dinka in carrying on both farming and cat
tle pastoralism. 1987.
Hallowell, A. Irving. The Ojibwa of Berens River, Manitoba. The ecology of Northern
Canada makes fishing, hunting, and commercial trapping a viable twentieth-century
economy for the Ojibwa; Hallowell in the 1930s and the editor o f his notes, con
temporary ethnohistorian Jennifer Brown, clarify the interrelationship between his
tory, ecology, and Ojibwa worldview. 1992.
Kintz, Ellen M. Life Under the Tropical Canopy: Tradition and Change Among the
Tucatec Maya. Kintz skillfully shows the interaction between the Yucatec tropical
environment and the Maya who have populated it for many centuries. Since the
Maya habitus was first their independent kingdoms, then the imposition of Spanish
colonization, and now greater integration into the international economy, Kintz can
bring out the interplay of values and environmental potential. 1990.
Parman, Susan Scottish Crofters: A Historical Ethnography of a Celtic Village. Gaelic
speaking Highlanders in Scotland were supposed to be another unchanged primi
tive way of life, but historical research indicates that much of the crofting culture is
the effect of nineteenth-century agribusiness development by wealthy landowners.
With the sea on one side and the laird’s sheep range on the other, the residents work
to keep their niche. 1990.
Tonkinson, Robert. The M ardu Aborigines: Living the Dream in Australia’s Desert. It is
instructive to compare the Australian Aborigines with Basarwa ( J u / ’hoansi). Both
have been pushed out of their most productive land over the past couple of cen
turies. The Aborigines are famous for their devotion to their own religious tradi
tions, teaching that their rituals and actions are necessary to the perpetuation of the
world as they know it— part of the “business” of men and women, they say. This
understanding gives an interesting ecological sophistication to their culture. 1991.
REFEREN CES
Bourdieu, P. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1977.
Levi-Strauss, C. The Savage M ind, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.
Lovejoy, Arthur O. and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, 1963.
(First edition 1 9 3 5 .) Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 199 7 reprint.
Marshall, Alan G. “ ‘Prairie Chickens Dancing’. . Ecology’s Myth. In Idaho Eolklife:
Homesteads to Headstones, ed. Louie W. Attebery, University of Utah Press. Pp.
1 0 1 -1 0 7 . 1985.
Needham, Joseph et al. Science and Civilization in China, Multi-volume series. Cam
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954 et seq.
C * H * A * P « T * E * R 10
■ ■ ■ ■ ■ I
( I t ) '
CC04*0M«*C/l
In this chapter, we focus on the next level up in our chart:
M A N U F A C T U R E and D I S T R I B U T I O N
P R O D U C T I O N O F R A W M A T E R I A L S
Getting a living is economics. “Production of raw materials,” “manufacture and

distribution” are economic activities. A community’s economy involves the
resources available to its members, their technology, and social organizations
for utilizing the resources.
Economics is embedded in ecology, which is why the sentences above sound
much like the preceding chapter. Focusing on economics, the production of
raw materials including food and manufacture and distribution of the material
culture o f a society, this chapter lifts the human activities out of the ecological
matrix for a finer-tuned examination of the social relations of getting a living.
College courses in economics tend to limit their field to form al economics, mod
els of modern western economic systems recognized in government planning.
145
146 I Chapter 10 Analyzing Societies: Economies
The discipline of formal economics was created in the late eighteenth and the
nineteenth centuries by European philosophers and politicians setting out a
rational explanation for the social changes we call the Industrial Revolution.
Early modern (seventeenth-century) European states replaced the medieval
feudal structure of personal loyalties and little choice of occupation with the
impersonal structure of centralized political power enforced through codes of
law. Citizens were no longer expected to seek aristocratic patrons and serve, if
requested, in their private armies battling for the throne (vividly dramatized in
Shakespeare’s historical plays). Earning a living moved into a national frame
work, with people free (as medieval serfs had not been) to change jobs
and move to where there was a market demand for their goods or skills.
Personal mobility prompted people to think of the national state as their arena,
and their protector against tyrannical local lords. In the first phase of modern
state-building, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that humans “nat
urally” fight like dogs for a bit of meat, and that such a “war of all against all”
is controlled by enlightened people realizing that to escape “nasty, brutish and
short” lives they must contract (formally agree) to establish offices of authority
entitled to enforce laws for the common good. A century after Hobbes, Adam
Smith thought he discerned “the invisible hand” of the market manipulating
social relations. The form of the modern European state with its central author
ity enforcing written laws over all persons in its territories was no longer con
troversial. It now seemed “natural” that people should choose their occupation
and residence and base their choices on opportunities to obtain maximum price
or profit from whatever deal they could get from their money, property, or
labor. Given the habitus o f eighteenth-and nineteenth-century
Western Europe, this was rational and appeared “natural.” Anthropological economics
Formal economics analyzed the relations between state examines social relationships,
authority and free markets and the behavior of individuals in rather than supposing
individuals coldly make
a society that assumed every person had as “property” either “rational” choices.
land, goods, and money or energy and skills, with any one of
these freely exchangeable for any other.
Substantive economics takes a different position. It studies actual resources,
skills, and relations of production. These vary greatly around the world and
through history. In the middle twentieth century, economist Karl Polanyi, with
anthropologists Conrad Arensberg and George Dalton, argued that the rela
tively unregulated, competitive market so dominant in modern European and
U.S. political economies is a particular historical formation. Many of the
assumptions of formal economics don’t hold for most other societies: People
don’t universally or “naturally” want to maximize their material possessions, or
believe that desired objects are in scarce supply and must be aggressively com
peted for. Blackfoot Indians on the Northwestern Plains, for example, despise
people who selfishly accumulate possessions. Leaders among the Blackfoot are
expected to live modestly and use their time and energy to assist the less fortu
nate. Men and women work to obtain large amounts of food, horses, and goods
Chapter 10 Analyzing Societies: Economics I 147
T H E IN FO R M AL EC O N O M Y Weekend market in a Midwestern town. Note the ven

dor’s home-made cider press.
Photo Credit: Aldis Strazdins
in order to frequently invite others to feast and receive gifts. Traditionally, when
a much-admired leader died, people constructed paths of stones leading from
several directions to the grave, symbolizing followers coming from all directions
to benefit from the leader’s generosity. Indians today contrast their value sys
tem with that of whites—when Indians wish to honor someone, they give gifts
away in their name, while whites, they say, give gifts to the honored person. The
contrast is a bit unfair, o f course, since many whites honor others by giving to
charity in their name, but the basic point is that Blackfoot life can’t be under
stood through formal economic analysis based on European values and politi
cal institutions.
Formal economics tends to overlook some important aspects even of mod
ern Western societies. The extensive, important “informal economy” of families
and friends exchanging services and lending money; of garage sales, flea markets,
home-based small businesses; plus the businesses of burglary, fencing stolen
goods, illegal gambling, and other crimes including shoplifting and embezzling
from employers, cannot be quantified like legal, taxed enterprises and may be
neglected in formal economics courses. These, like the economics of nonwest
ern or earlier western societies, can be studied through the substantive approach
of anthropology. Anthropologist Rhoda Halperin, for example, observed ven
148 I Chapter 10 Analyzing Societies: Economics
dors at weekend markets and documented their reliance on the “extra” cash
they earn to support themselves. Gracia Clark studied garage sales in the United
States, Sybil Wolfram the similar “jumble sales” in Britain. Wolfram learned that
cooperating to put on, and attending, a jumble sale maintained a sense of com Using the
munity among residents in a village or neighborhood, and that although the fee method of
to enter the sale was nominal and everything priced ridiculously low, consider participant
observation,
able sums could be made because there was no investment or overhead. Garage anthropolo
and jumble sales, like weekend markets, don’t get reported to the IRS and often gists research
are thought even by participants to be minor activities, but the sums of money informal
earned can make a real difference in whether a family manages to get along. economic
behavior that
Lillian Trager and a sociologist colleague, Jim Stills, wondered how people in a
isn’t officially
small industrial city coped after the largest employer, an automobile plant, closed. reported.
They found a shift toward greater involvement in the informal economy compen
sated to a surprising degree for the loss of unionized jobs in the big factory.
Karl Marx, and those who follow his approach, have emphasized the soci
etal relationships channeling production and distribution. Marx studied history
closely and saw that political statuses, for example aristocrat or slave, and laws
restricting production or consumption to certain social classes strongly affected
the workings of “the market”: Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” might be quite
visibly attached to a titled lord or judge. Marx’s collaborator, Friedrich Engels,
operated a factory where he dealt with the demands of his employees as well as
those due to his competitors. Living in nineteenth-century England, Marx and
Engels witnessed mobs again and again storming the gates of Parliament,
yelling for reforms in the laws that gave the vote only to men who owned prop
erty, that taxed the poor, that tolerated dangerous and degrading conditions for
workers. Class conflict became a key point in Marx’s analyses. Anthropologists
share with Marxist economists, political scientists, and historians a focus on
societal structure and social relations, but class conflicts may seem less signifi
cant to anthropologists. There are some anthropologists who label themselves
“Marxist” and do highlight class conflicts; there are many anthropologists who,
plunged into a peasant rebellion or observing an agency where middle-class
professionals experience difficulty dealing with lower-class clients, find class
conflict is part of their analysis. “Marxist” interpretations may appear in the
work of anthropologists who dislike “schools of thought” labels, preferring an
open approach to their data. Our holistic perspective tends to encompass a vari
ety of explanatory factors.
Studying economics as a participant observer in a community, the anthropologist

soon realizes that we can’t separate out “economic” from other behavior of
humans in their societies. Cooperation is essential for long-term survival (who
will provide food and shelter when you’re ill?). Economics is not a simple ques
tion of individual choices in a market, it’s a web of obligations and opportunities.
Chapter 10 Analyzing Societies: Economics 149
The thread that forms the web is, as the early twentieth-century French
anthropologist Marcel Mauss pointed out, the principle of reciprocity. People reciprocity;
mark their relationships by exchanging items. Husband and wife give each other from the
food, help, gifts, and those most precious creations, children. Parents give their Latin re-, “go
back” (as in
children the necessities of life and when the parents are elderly, the children “return”) and
should reciprocate by providing support to the parents. Friends exchange gifts, pro-, “go
taking care that the cost and type of gift suits the relationship—you can give forward”
your roommate a sweater, but if you gave an expensive leather jacket, people (as in
“progress”):
would suspect there was more than just friendship between you. We know all
“go back and
too well how we consider our lists of holiday gifts and cards, matching the forth” as
depth of the relationship by an appropriate outlay of money or effort. If some exchange of
one to whom we gave a gift fails to reciprocate, at least with a thank-you note, gifts or
we figure that’s a signal the relationship is at an end. Gifts, Mauss emphasized, services.
are not simply outpourings of the heart, but symbols of the cooperation essen
tial to human survival.
Two anthropological studies excited interest in the meaning of gifts and
reciprocity. In the 1880s, Franz Boas began learning about the culture of the
Kwakiutl and other indigenous Indian nations on the Pacific coast of Canada.
Collaborating with a trader’s son who had married into the Kwakiutl commu
nity, Boas transcribed thousands of pages of descriptions of Kwakiutl behavior,
particularly the memories of aristocratic men. Much of the descriptions con
cerned the feasts these men had hosted or attended. “Potlatch” is a native term potlach:
for the public feasts. What intrigued Boas was the aggressive gift-giving Northwest
reported for the potlatches: Guests were given a superabundance of food, thou Coast Indian
term for feast
sands of dollars’ worth of presents were pressed upon them, people boasted of with gift-
their excessive generosity. What was the point of this display of conspicuous giving
consumption?
Let’s answer that by reminding you that some Americans today indulge in
potlatch-like conspicuous consumption feasts. Not long ago, a rich Chicago
father gave a party for his son’s thirteenth birthday. The boy liked Ferrari rac
ing cars. At thirteen, he couldn’t drive one, but his doting papa rented a Ferrari
dealer’s showroom for an evening, had caterers bring in the birthday dinner,
and let his boy’s friends eat their hot dogs and pizza surrounded by the luxury
cars. This outlay of cash signaled to the children’s families the great wealth and
social standing of the host family. So it was with the Kwakiutl. The impressive
outlay of expense, ostensibly to please the guests at a potlatch feast, actually sig
nals the high status and accompanying power of the host. Ambitious guests will
try to top the outlay at the next feast they give, signaling their status to be
higher than that of the previous host. Potlatches, big hotel weddings to which
a couple thousand “friends” are invited, debutante balls, and the like, are means
to publicly display the financial power of the giver.
The other landmark anthropological study of gift-giving was published in
1922 by the Polish-born British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, report
ing on his two years’ study of the Trobriand Islands off the southeastern coast
of Papua New Guinea, in the South Pacific. Malinowski was deeply impressed
by the long, dangerous sea voyages Trobriand men undertook in their outrig
ger canoes to exchange shell ornaments with friends on distant islands.
Necklaces with a large, polished red central shell are always passed on from
island to island in a clockwise direction, and armbands made from a broad white
shell are always passed on counterclockwise; exchange of these ornaments is
called kula. The best of these necklaces and armbands are heirlooms known to
have been treasured by particular famous chiefs in the past. Ambitious men
want to be ranked among the owners of the acclaimed treasures, to be talked
about when people discuss who is important. Demonstrating the courage and
skill to sail so far, the knowledge of the treasures’ history and the confidence
and persuasive manner to induce an owner to part with the desired valuable,
brings fame to a man. The exchange of kula treasures marks men to be reck kula: in the
oned with. Like golden crowns, kula necklaces and armbands have no utilitar Massim
islands off
ian value but immense symbolic use. Malinowski recorded that Trobrianders say
Papua New
they “give,” not “sell,” kula valuables. Marcel Mauss noted Trobrianders’ Guinea,
emphasis on kula as an exchange of gifts, not market barter (ordinary items voyages to
such as pots, axes, pigs are carried on commercial trading trips, separate from exchange
kula voyages). Such an exchange of beautiful treasures between two highly prized shell
ornaments
respected men seemed to Mauss to perfectly illustrate the principle of reciproc
ity and its role in structuring societies: each man, and his followers from his own
island, can be actually seen by onlookers to be linked to the other. Through the
visible alliances of leading men, kula links hundreds of island villages into a
nation.
Half a century after Malinowski’s research, American anthropologist
Annette Weiner went to the Trobriands and found Malinowski hadn’t noticed
another kind of reciprocity important to structuring Trobriand societies. Local
women insisted that Dr. Weiner accompany them to funerals where they spent
hours collecting together and then giving out hundreds of bundles of dried
banana leaves and the traditional skirts made out of the shredded leaves.
Women don’t usually go on kula voyages, but they too seek fame through pub
lic gift-giving, in their case the distribution of skirts, or the material to make
them, to women relatives and friends attending the funeral of a family member.
The more bundles and skirts given out, the more friends and relatives a family
counts. Male leaders are known by the kula treasures entrusted to them by
important men on other islands, women leaders are known by the numbers of
people who come to pay respect to their family at a death. Public gift-giving is
the physical measure of social status and the power it brings.
That thread of reciprocity, so often symbolized by gifts, is valued in all
human societies. Presidents and prime ministers paying official state visits to
each other exchange beautiful objects made by their countries’ artists. Little
girls in grade school exchange plastic bracelets. Whatever the scale, there is the
promise that a productive relationship has been instituted. Reciprocity may
involve actions rather than objects: “You scratch my back, I ’ll scratch yours.” In
Chapter 10 Analyzing Societies: Economies I 151
politics, “You vote for my constituents’ pet project, I ’ll vote for yours” and
“Vote for me, and I ’ll get the potholes on your street fixed.” Give the bank your
money in a savings account, and it will reciprocate by paying you interest. Give
a company money, and it will reciprocate by paying you dividends. Reciprocity
is an essential component in most economic transactions.
Anthropological economics looks at the social use of material objects. Beyond

the bare necessities to stay alive, material goods primarily serve social functions.
Formal economics assumed that people “naturally” (invariably) want more and
more and more, that their appetite for goods and services can never be satiated.
Like the dictator’s wife who had thousands of pairs of shoes in her closets,
enough could never be enough. Furthermore, because population tends to
increase, in time a greater number of people will be attempting to fill their
needs from a limited planet. Therefore, formal economics postulates a principle
o f scarcity from which cost, or value, derives from the difficulty people meet in
attempting to obtain desired goods and services. Difficulty can arise from the
time and energy required to obtain the good, or from competition for it. The
problem with the principle of scarcity is that no one “naturally” wants thousands
m ousanus
of pairs of shoes. The dictator’s wife, an ex-beauty queen,
filled her closets with shoes and other fashionable clothes to Historian Arthur Lovejoy noted
draw admiration: what she wanted was approbation. that the desire for approbation-
to be thought well of by those
The natural needs of humans are modest: plain food,
one associates with—seems a
water, fire, a simple shelter from rain. Humans evolved in universal human need.
warm climates and “naturally” might stay there, having no
need for clothing. Societies like the Dobe Ju/’hoansi and the Mbuti show us
that living off the land in a tropical climate takes only about half what the
rest of us call a work week. Most days, both men and women enjoy leisure
to nap, chat with neighbors, play with the children. When, at the end of the
Pleistocene, larger human populations required the organization of more com
plex societies, workers needed to produce more than their own families’ needs
in order to give the surplus to full-time managers. Possessing power over peo
ple’s productive time came to be signaled, or symbolized, by the display of
objects requiring much time to be produced, for example by clothing fabri
cated through hundreds of hours of weaving and embroidery, by fancy cakes,
by large houses involving numerous construction workers, by ornamented fur
niture, by entertainment from musicians and dancers who practiced for years
to perfect their art. Conspicuous consumption of time- and labor-consuming
articles signals the owner’s social right to command that labor. Lack of such
objects signals the poor person’s subordinate status. Societies with managerial
and laboring classes look quite different from societies such as the Mbuti and
Ju/’hoansi, who reject class stratification and demand that everyone share the
TOUNG AMERICANS’ “NECESSITIES”

The small apartment of a young American couple displays the many manufactured goods
they have been socialized to believe necessary.
resources brought into their communities. Small societies such as theirs can
operate through informal, flexible organization, giving people the feeling they
are freely conforming to social expectations.
The question becomes, what motivates both manager and laborer, in class-
stratified societies, to do their jobs? It’s seldom a simple matter of work or
starve—people who can’t work are usually fed, and in many societies, people
who can and want to work may be prevented by a political structure that limits
their opportunities. Managers and laborers work at their socially appointed jobs
in order to gain the good opinion, the approbation, of the people they associ
ate with. For some, it will mean prestige or power, but for most it’s just seeing
respect from other people. If we remember that we humans are gregarious
mammals, we realize that millions of years of natural selection for living in a
social group have bred us to be sensitive to our fellows’ attitudes toward us and
to feel impelled to gain their approbation. Without the approbation of the oth
ers in our social group, we would be ignored or outcast and without a mate.
The genes of antisocial hominids weren’t likely to be passed on. Our ancestors
were the ones who did care about others, did seek their approbation.
In the final analysis, value is set by one’s social group. No material or object
has value in itself. Only when a society recognizes a material or object as signi
fying high social status, prestige, or power does it become precious. This is well
shown in the Trobriand Islands, where the actually rare well-cut and beautiful
shell ornaments exchanged in the kula are not the only valu
ables; bundles of banana leaves are also valuable, though very a U.S. woman sued the BMW
plain to look at. Both kula shell ornaments and banana-fiber automobile makers for $10
million because they did not
skirts are time-consuming to make, and are likely to have
limit import of their M5 model to
been gifts. A man wearing a rare shell ornament and a 500 cars per year. By selling
woman wearing a painstakingly constructed full-length more than this arbitrary limit,
banana-fiber skirt exhibit a sign of the respect, the approba she claimed, BMW cheapened
tion they have earned from their peers. Only respected men, the value of the M5, causing her
and other buyers to lose money
judged responsible and intelligent, are accepted as kula trade
in resale value— and M5 as a
partners; only respected women, judged responsible and sign of high status.
intelligent, will own skirts made from quantities of labori
ously shredded and woven banana fiber. These valuables are badges of good
character, calling forth respect. In each case, the man and woman wearing the
valuable item signals not only their personal worth, but also the fact that fam
ily and friends stand behind them.
Anthropologist Mary Douglas observed the BaLele, a group of communi
ties in the Congo in central Africa, make and use a valuable much like the
Trobriands’ banana-fiber skirts. BaLele raise raffia palm trees for the leaves,
which they shred and weave on looms for skirts. Like the Trobriand skirts, raf
fia cloth is laborious to make, and an appliqued dance costume of ten lengths
of raffia cloth represents much time and skill. Lengths of raffia cloth are valu
able, and they are given as gifts on occasions marking a person’s social value: by
a husband to his wife upon the birth of their child, by a youth to his father when
Papua New Guinea, 1928. A handsome young man seeks the approbation of society
through cosmetics, coiffure, ornaments, and offering a business deal for local products.
the boy attains adulthood, to a bride’s family upon her marriage, at the funer
als of a man’s parents-in-law, as tribute to chiefs, and as fines (communicating
the offender’s respect for the community). Young men beg older men to lend
them raffia cloth to get enough for a proper bridal gift, and the older men can
keep rambunctious or disrespectful young men in line by threatening to refuse
the cloth, dooming the young man to bachelorhood or a no-account girl for a
wife. Douglas saw raffia cloth sold for francs, the national currency, but francs
alone were not considered suitable gifts on important social occasions. Nor
could factory-made cloth substitute. The BaLele had selected the local skilled
craft product to represent value, to be the standard unit in counting wealth.
American society has selected currency to be our unit of wealth. Market
economies like ours use arbitrary standardized items to represent units o f labor
time (the basic real valuable): people are paid so much per hour, the rate sup
posedly reflecting the amount of their training and skill. We also have selected
tinie-consuming skilled craft: products to signal high status: Rolls Royce limou
sines, gold jewelry, fine china, designer-made clothing. The difference between
luxury goods and standard items lies in the amount o f labor time invested in the
object. Limousines have hand-polished leather interiors that represent a great

deal of labor time—in raising the animals from which the hides came, in slaugh
tering, skinning, tanning, shipping, inspecting, cutting the hides, in installing
the leather. A stranger from Mars might very well think that a heavy vinyl cov
ering, rapidly machine produced and assembly-line installed, looks prettier than
leather; it may be as durable and it will require less upkeep. We have to learn,
from others in our society, that vinyl is a sign of mediocrity. We learn to recog
nize symbols of low status as well as those signaling high status.
Understanding that approbation, and not simply a goal of amassing signs
of high status or power, induces people to conform to their social group’s cul
tural pattern explains the behavior of those who refuse to accumulate goods.
Monks, Hindu holy men, 1960s’ hippies, ostentatiously reject owning goods,
seeking the approbation of others (perhaps including God) whom they believe
agree that seeking material objects interferes with the pursuit of a greater good.
For such ascetics, distinctive unfashionable clothing signals their peculiar group,
and begging for daily food becomes their occupation, their socially patterned
way of earning a living. Their costume has a value, as much as any corporation the social
executive’s business suit or jet-setter’s high-fashion outfit. Value is not inherent group’s
in any object, and the signs that elicit approbation from members of one social assignment
of value
group may signal others to reject the person. Some Americans respect people
teaches
wearing expensive fur coats, other Americans spit upon anybody who they see members to
has encouraged the slaughter of so many helpless animals. Members of a social perceive
group learn a rationale supposedly explaining why one item is desirable and beauty in the
another to be avoided. (Fur coats are warm, say some; fur coats are dead ani valued items
and ugliness
mals and death is tragic, say others.) Our society claims that scarcity is the rea
in items that
son goods such as gold or Rolls Royce limousines are valuable, but the are labeled
production of gold, Rolls Royces, and other high-status symbols is controlled low value.
to maintain scarcity. It is important to cut through the rationales and under
stand that value is arbitrary, at bottom the value is measured by the approba
tion of one’s peers.
Logically, there could be a distinction between producing only necessities for

one’s own family consumption, and producing additional items to trade with
others. The importance of reciprocity tieing together people blurs the logical
distinction. Small societies that prize independence over material goods, such as
the Mbuti and the Ju/’hoansi, value sharing highly, for without day-to-day
cooperation and sharing of food, families would suffer every time a hunter had
poor luck or a plant gatherer had to tend to a new baby. Agricultural villagers
must also cooperate—to manage peak labor needs; to assist households strug
gling with illness, death of an active adult, or disability; and to deal with the
demands of governing agents from the larger political unit. Exchange of food
and material goods functions as the sign of good will and willingness to coop
erate. Thus even those whose households produce all their own necessities keep
in mind the social obligation to have ready food or items to share or give as
gifts.
There is a useful distinction between social groups whose working house
holds primarily produce nearly all their necessities, and those whose primary
plan is to produce only particular items, depending on regular exchange to
obtain other (or all) necessities. Households that expect to
be basically self-sufficient are said to have a subsistence econ subsistence economy:
omy; those that depend upon regular exchange are said to be households produce all their
in a market economy. The distinction is not whether some basic necessities
market economy: workers
body makes an item or gathers extra food to exchange; the produce quantities to exchange
distinction is whether the person expects their household to for necessities they don’t
produce its own needs, or expects someone in the household produce
will be going to the market to obtain some of the necessities.
Dependence upon the market requires a society to structure social relations to
ensure that the necessities they don’t themselves produce will be reliably avail
able to workers.
One point to keep in mind: Subsistence economies may be imposed upon
communities by governing agents. Rural farmers or conquered groups may be
denied access to a variety of occupations in order that the power and wealth of
upper classes will be protected. Peasants may be forced by law to wear home
made cloth, eat home-baked bread from their own fields’ grain. Within one
nation, upper classes can live within a market economy, exchanging wealth or
professional services for food, clothing, and skilled labor, while in the country
side, serfs or slaves are required to grow their own food and fiber and make
their own household goods from local resources. O f course, the serfs or slaves
must also produce more in order to provision their masters’ households, or
must labor in the masters’ enterprises in addition to their own subsistence work.
Hunter-gatherer groups may appear to have chosen subsistence economies,
when historical expansion by military powers drove them into marginal regions
and gave them the hard choice of serving masters or subsisting in a minimal
economy where resources for market production are lacking.
Markets are a common means for people to exchange items they may not pro
duce themselves. Markets thus depend upon production beyond the producers’
consumption needs. A true market economy exists when every worker produces
a surplus of some product instead of investing time and labor in direcdy filling
subsistence needs (food, shelter). Workers then must exchange their surplus for
others’ surplus in order to survive: wheat for house-building materials, meat for
knives, labor for clothing. Market economies can exist without money, but
some medium of exchange is likely in a market economy; cacao (chocolate)
beans functioned as money in the Aztec empire in Mexico, cowrie shells did in
Africa, and dentalium shells in the Pacific Northwest of America, all these
Sri Lanka, 1930. Professional potters with bowls mass-produced by hand for the local mar
ket. There is no simple distinctin between “handcraft” and “mass production. ”
Roadside restaurant, Bali, 1930. The operation looks simple but the enterprise is a business
operated in a densely populated state.
objects being standard sized, numerous, countable, and durable like coins.
Societies with market economies must be able to assure people reasonable sta
bility and security when they engage in market transactions; feudal societies
protect “market peace” on scheduled market days. Without the expectation
that surplus production can be exchanged for other necessities, workers would
be forced to get their food and other requirements directly rather than plan to
produce surpluses.
In North America today, almost no one lives by what they raise and build,
or weave and sew, themselves. When a hydroelectric dam project ruined the
hunting territory of Cree and Inuit in the James Bay region o f northern
Quebec, Canada, negotiators agreed to a program designed to protect the
native families’ way of life in the remaining undeveloped area. To continue to
live by hunting and fishing, families said they needed a guaranteed minimum
cash income. James Bay Cree take nearly all their food and shelter directly from
their environment, but they have been part of the international economic sys
tem, selling furs they trap, for over 300 years. To live traditionally in the bush,
they require money to buy trapping equipment, rifles and ammunition, tools,
industrially manufactured clothing, and motor transportation to bush localities.
Most of the millions of other North Americans couldn’t produce even food and
shelter for themselves. Anthropologist Robin Ridington, who has lived for
many months with northern Canadian Dene Indians, remarks that while most
Americans carry technology inefficiendy in bulky tool boxes,
his Dene friends carry their technology in their heads: that is, “Know-how" is an economic
they know how to make snares, fishing lines, containers, and asset that’s hard to quantify.
other implements for obtaining necessities from local
resources. One effect of a commitment to a market economy is the inefficiency
of having to purchase all kinds of implements and services because one’s own
education has been limited to one’s specialty.
Over the past several thousand years, and in much of the world today, a
majority of people have lived in mixed economies, some based on production
for the market and some on subsistence production. A village in Bolivia, in the
center o f South America, is typical. The basic work unit is husband and wife,
living in a one-room adobe home with their children. The couple farms a few
acres, the husband guiding an ox-drawn plow as the wife walks behind, sowing
seed. The wife, or sometimes a child, takes their little flock of sheep out to
graze, spinning wool into thread as she guards the animals, and the husband or
an older child takes the cattle to other pasture. A pig will be tethered in a
muddy spot so it can dig its food and wallow. Chickens in the farmyard pick up
scraps of grain. The family seldom eats meat: The sheep provide wool for cloth
ing, the cattle provide milk to be made into cheese, the pig will be sold to gain
some cash. There’s a donkey that can carry big bundles of roof thatch or grain
or potatoes, and is lent or rented to other villagers who don’t own a pack ani
mal. (One villager owns and can repair a truck, but hiring a truck is expensive—
gas costs cash.) Husband and wife both weave their homespun wool into cloth,
blankets, and storage bags. They attend the village market held one morning
each week, buying a few vegetables such as onions, a bag of bakery rolls and
coffee for breakfasts, a small bag of detergent powder for washing clothes (in
the river), and perhaps as a special treat a couple o f apples or oranges that they
will divide with the children. A few times a year, the couple will buy factory-
made clothing from a market vendor; men today wear standard shirts and pants
and baseball caps, and the women like T-shirts, blouse-and-sweater sets, and
readymade petticoats and skirts—homespun wool is scratchy. To pay for their
purchases, the husband looks for manual labor jobs and the wife sells her
homemade cheese in the market. Another family in the village constructs an
adobe bake-oven and spends a day or two each week producing the rolls their
neighbors want to buy. One man has learned carpentry skills, has a few tools,
and makes benches and stools out of scrap lumber, trading them for produce.
A few men own small boats and net sardine-sized fish in the lake, selling them
door-to-door in the village or on market day. When a house is to be built, or
planting and harvest demand more labor, relatives help each other. The villagers
value being their own boss and knowing that others in the community will help
them if needed, but they don’t see their lives as idyllic. They’d like electric lights
and radios (some of the younger people have battery-powered ones), they’d like
160 I Chapter 10 Analyzing Societies: Economies
A Village in Bolivia
A. Village in the highlands of

Bolivia, on the shore of Lake Titicaca.
Houses are of adobe brick, with
thatch or tin roofs. At the right are
cement-block clinic building and
social-agency house (both seldom
staffed), and behind them the public
elementary school classroom build
ings. In the foreground, a man plows
with an ox while women in the center
wash clothes in the little stream, and
sheep graze.
B. Farmsteads outside the village. In

the center against the farmyard wall
is a round adobe-plastered bake-oven
in which the family bakes rolls to sell
in the weekly market. A few chickens
and a pig are in the yard, left, and
some guinea pigs inside the adobe-
brick hutch beside the cookhouse, right.
C. Homes in the village, from

the rear: In the patio (back
yard) of the small home in the
center, a woman is washing
dishes beside a small wooden
rack made by the village car
penter. The family raises
guinea pigs, to sell as meat in
the weekly market, in the
thatched adobe-brick cookhouse
on the left.
D. Inside the same one-room home, the

kitchen corner. Potatoes, the staple food, are
in the basin ready to be cooked for noon din
ner. Cooking is done on the kerosene burner
in center (with pot on top), or outside in the
patio on a small adobe-plastered stove burn
ing dried dung (wood is very scarce). The
Diet Coke can has been salvaged from
tourists’ discard, to serve as a container.
Homespun, home-woven wool blankets are
rolled up on chest at right, and the woman’s
spindle for spinning wool is tilted against the
wall, lower right corner. Two kittens play
behind the pots, right center. Their thin
mother survives on birds she can catch and
potato soup, all her owner has to feed her.
E. Market day in the village

plaza, looking south. Vendors sell
from cloths spread on the cobble
stones. During her participant
observation study, the anthropolo
gist lived in the whitewashed
house, third from left, in the
background.
F. Market day, view looking north

toward gravel highway running through
village on fa r side of plaza, and beyond
village, Lake Titicaca and the Andes
Mountains. Woman in lower left is sell
ing apples (imported from nearby Chile)
and bananas from the hot lowlands.
Vendors in upper left sell new and used
clothing. Men in center cluster around
vendor selling bicycle parts. Couple in
right center background are looking at
bolts of cloth. Trucks parked in right
background along highway transport
some vendors and their wares, other
vendors come by bicycle or walk.
G. Pick-up soccergame with

teenage girls and boys playing
outside village.
H. ccTraditional* Spanish -
colonial-style agriculture
along Lake Titicaca shore. A
pair of oxen pull the wooden
plow guided by a man, while
the women of his family plant
seed potatoes in the furrows he
plows. Much of these flat plains
around the Lake cannot be
used for Spanish-style plow
agriculture because they are
too marshy.
I. Women preparing seed pota

toes to plant in traditional field.
Glass bottle by womanys skirt,
lower left, held a little distilled
liquor sprinkled over potatoes in
a ritual praying for a good crop.
J. Reviving the ancient Tiwanaku culture

agricultural system, abandoned 800 years
ago when a decades-long drought lowered the
water table in the Lake Titicaca plains. An
archaeological project discovered the ancient
method and recruited members of the village
to rebuild the Tiwanaku raised fields (cen
ter).
K. Rebuilt Tiwanaku fields left back

ground, a community team working on
another field in background, raised fields
and ditches in right center still in their
abandoned state. In the foreground, a vil
lage family eats its noon dinner picnic style,
carrying prepared food and bottles of bever
age wrapped in homespun, home-woven
cloths slung over the shoulder. The pickax
(bottom right) and shovels behind the
standing man show that this family, too, has
been working on rebuilding the ridged
fields.
L. Women take a break from restoring the ancient field

system. Children accompany their parents to the fields
and play quietly.
M. Planting Festival. The

ancient Tiwanaku ridged fields
and ditches have been recon
structed and village women
leave the village with seed pota
toes in their carrying cloths. A
band of local musicians goes with
the women to the fields. Man on
right has a drum in his carrying
cloth.
N. Out on the ancient ridged

field, women pile the seed pota
toes beside a carrying cloth
with popcorn (right lower cen
ter) for the celebration. People
have put a green stalk in their
hatbands as a symbol of the
green plants to be grown.
O. Planting. Men use pickaxes

to make furrows on the ridged
fields, women follow, placing
seed potatoes in the furrows and
covering them with soil. Upper
left corner, the professional
agronomist who has been super
vising the restoration of the
ancient field system watches the
planting.
P. In the background, the neat rows of raised

fields and ditches, restored and planted after
a lapse o f 800 years. The Tiwanaku system
raises plants above the Lake Titicaca normal
high water table, draining the groundwater
into ditches that protect against frosts by
slowly radiating warmth after the sun goes
down, and that can be used as fish ponds.
Annual dredging of the ditches, piling the
dredged muck on top of the fields, renews soil
fertility—a productive, sustainable agricul
ture that does not require any imported fuel
or machinery. In the foreground, children
and some of the women wait for the planting
to be completed in the background.
Q, Planting completed, everyone

dances in celebration. One of the
project archaeologists, facing cam
era wearing tractor cap, and a
project assistant also wearing
tractor cap, left foreground, dance
with the villagers. This illustrates
participant observation, living in
the village, participating in vil-
lagers’ work, celebrating with
them, recording their way of life
with camera and words.
R. At the end of a happy day, with

every prospect of a bumper crop of
potatoes to come. Villagers return to
their homes, but although the drum
mer has packed up, two flute players
will provide the tune for a couple of
young women still dancing. Note
the head of a baby, wearing a white
knitted cap, in the carrying cloth on
the back of the woman in lower left.
Toung children kept close to the
mother in this manner enjoy secure
yet stimulating care.
Credit: Alice Beck Kehoe and Proyecto
Wila Jawira
a more varied diet, they’d like to be able to plaster their houses so adobe dust
doesn’t constantly fall on dishes and clothes, and most important, they’d like to
give their children education and opportunities to pursue city careers if they
wish or buy farms if they prefer. Even with limited access to modern medical
resources, more children grow up than the village can accommodate. This is not
a new problem.
Where do rural villagers’ children go? They go to the cities. They work on
construction, in transport, as maids and cooks and gardeners, in factories, and
in the little shops in the slums. Migration from farm villages to cities has been
going on for 5,000 years. Cities seem to be sponges soaking up excess popula
tion. Historically, cities have suffered very high mortality rates because the
many thousands of people living close together, usually without sanitary water
supplies or waste disposal, have been reservoirs of disease. A few societies pro
vided carefully for these needs of an urban population. Harappa, in third-
millennium B.C. India, built fine sewer systems, as did Classical Rome, and Rome
and the Aztecs of Mexico brought clean water to city dwellers via long aque
ducts from the hills. Even where authorities were concerned with cleanliness,
epidemics spread disastrously. As a result, city populations did not reproduce
themselves, creating a constant need—a market—for labor. Rural villagers may
appear to be isolated from the cities, to be self-sufficient with their farms and
crafts, but they are one component of national economic systems that require
the surplus population from farm communities to be absorbed into the labor
force in cities. Markets, for goods and for labor, integrate cities and country
sides.
Rural people may see the misery of the lower class in cities and seek instead
to colonize new land. Expanding populations spread agriculture throughout
the world, adapting technology and cultigens to previously uncultivated areas.
Europe’s cities could never have absorbed the millions of peasants and towns
people who moved to America over the last four centuries. This stupendous
migration not only relieved pressure on Europe’s farms and cities, it also fos
tered the growth of a global economy in which international imports and
exports are basic to fulfilling people’s needs. In the little Bolivian village, T-
shirts and bicycle parts from China, fruit from Chile, radio batteries from the
United States are always available in the weekly market. When the village cele
brates its annual festival, some of the people rent parade costumes from shops
in the city, and nowadays we see Bugs Bunnies and Sioux Chiefs out of Disney
movies dancing alongside the traditional legendary bears and water monsters.
Nor is this global economy so new: 300 years ago, Canadian Indians bought
pretty glass beads manufactured in the Czech Republic, paying for them with
beaver pelts that would be shipped to Europe to be made into fashionable hats.
Jobs for thousands of Europeans depended on this trade. Five millennia earlier,
Mesopotamia, Egypt, and India were shipping goods to each others’ markets
and exploring routes to untapped resources and consumers. Long-distance dis
tribution of highly valued raw materials and finished goods is visible in the
Upper Paleolithic, when high-quality flint for cutting blades and ornamental
seashells were taken hundreds of miles from their sources, and beautifully
carved spearthrowers were apparently traded to adjacent regions. The spread of
ideas, of techniques, of useful plants and animals, and of people occurs through
trade, and the spread expands and strengthens trade.
Anthropological economics covers societies that do not have markets or money

as well as those that do. Anthropologists suggest that reciprocity, that is to say
exchange, is important in every society because it not only distributes goods
and services but also symbolizes ties of mutual concern. Millions of years of nat
ural selection for gregarious living have produced sensitivity toward others and
a strong emotional need for the approbation of our peers in our social groups.
Possessions and behavior label members in a group, signaling who is in the
group and usually also each individual’s status—leader, commoner, fringe.
Value is assigned by the group to objects and behavior. Value is not inherent in
materials nor determined by inevitable scarcity; scarcity is often deliberately
maintained to prevent commoners from gaining signs of high status. Social
value is the key to economic behavior.
R EFEREN CES AND RECOMMENDED READINGS

Douglas, Mary and Baron Isherwood. The World of Goods. New York: W. W. Norton,
1979.
Lee, Richard B. The Dobe J u / yhoansi. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1984.
Lovejoy, Arthur O. Reflections on H um an Nature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1961.
Turnbull, Colin. The Mbuti Pygmies: Adaptation and Change. Fort Worth: Harcourt
Brace, 1983 (Turnbull’s earlier study of the Mbuti, The Forest People, is also avail
able in paperback.)
Weiner, Annette B. The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea. Fort Worth: Harcourt
Brace, 1988.
C * H * A * P * T * E * R 11
( I f f ) '
In this chapter we focus on the middle level of our chart
D
L V
R I
O £
IV W
V A L U E S
N 0
O F
I
T S
A O
L C
U I
G E
E T
R Y
l aw politics kinship religion
Human societies carry on patterned ways of organizing their members.

Americans think o f political structures, formal institutions, and job roles as
means o f organizing people. In addition we have the roles we think o f as “nat
ural,” particularly those anthropologists term kinship: family relations. Cross-
cultural comparisons reveal much variation in what societies believe to be
natural relationships—in some, it seems natural to see a few children with
women “fathers,” or all the boys and girls in a large extended family as broth
ers and sisters. Analysis shows that kinship is a means o f assigning roles to peo
ple, a form o f regulation especially important because it gives a role to
169
170 I Chapter 11 Analyzing Societies: Regulating Societies
everyone, beginning at birth and continuing even after death. People may be
given, or allowed to take, additional roles, and these may be what we conven
tionally call occupations, political positions, or social statuses. Giving names to
roles helps to regulate people in societies.
Another way to think about regulating societies is to examine the distribu
tion of power in a society. Who may act as he or she thinks best? Who must obey
another? What are the laws or rules that people acknowledge? How are they
enforced? A focus on power must, in an anthropological perspective, take in the
society’s worldview, the history it gives of the origin of its political structure
and beliefs about the nature of humans and social relationships. Contemporary
western people are likely to grow up believing that laws are established by gov
ernments and humans will not obey the laws unless coerced by police and the
threat of punishment, whereas many other societies believe that humans natu
rally live cooperatively with others. The extreme of the western worldview is
“spare the rod and spoil the child,” a belief that humans are born full of sin and
only beatings will keep them obedient to lawful authority; this belief horrifies
many nonwesterners. Anthropologist Ruth Underhill questioned Tohono
’O ’odham (commonly known as Papago Indians) until she learned their princi
ple of child-rearing: “Draw the children into your own life. Give them from
birth love, companionship, and responsibility.” ’O ’odham adults of course have
power over their children but they don’t see the parent-child relationship as
involving power. Instead, their worldview posits power as an impersonal force
pervading the world, outside ordinary human relationships, and humans as
innately cooperative. We can recall Arthur Lovejoy’s conclusion that people
seek the approbation of their peers and will regulate their conduct in order to
win approbation. Laws are codes of behavior that are supposed to win society’s
approbation, and power to enforce laws ultimately comes from consensus of the
adults in the community—even in dictatorships, which always risk rebellion by
the citizenry.
Regulation of society rests upon worldview. Describing political structures
without describing the habitus—the entire way of being—that embeds it is
short-sighted. From this perspective, religion is as much part of a society’s polit
ical structure as are legislatures, laws, and police. Thomas Hobbes’s concept
that societies represent a kind of truce in the “war of all against all,” a fragile
agreement between citizens to pursue their interests jointly because the alter
native is mayhem, came to him as he lived through the turmoil of seventeenth-
century England, when the lawful king, a Catholic, was beheaded by Protestant
Puritan rebels. Hobbes’s England indeed was a society in a fragile truce, torn
by conflict between those who believed kings ruled by divine grace and those
who held power to come from consent of the governed. Each side was con
vinced the other sinfully ignored God’s will. The final compromise (in 1688),
a constitutional monarchy, reconciled what had appeared to be opposed reli
gious beliefs and not incidentally encouraged greater religious toleration.
Political events, religious concepts, and worldview influenced each other in
Chapter 11 Analyzing Societies: Regulating Societies I 171
what can be labeled a dialectical process of assertions posed

Dialectic:
against others’ claims, and both subjected to efforts to dis thesis (statement of idea)
cover a common ground. The eighteenth-century philoso antithesis (the opposite idea)
pher Georg Hegel argued that the course of history may be synthesis (the two ideas have
said to follow a dialectic, factions setting up oppositions and some common features)
working these out as common needs are revealed, where
upon new factions appear and the process goes on.
PART I:
SOCIAL ORGANIZATION AND P0U/6R
A id *
Cross-cultural comparisons make us wonder why in some societies people put

up with what seems to us to be oppressive situations. We can understand that
slaves in the United States before the Civil War obeyed because the alternative
was brutal flogging, but why did free married women at that time accept the
handicap of being held legally incompetent to manage their own affairs? Pierre
Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus, in which, as he puts it, “history is turned into
nature,” helps explain oppressed groups’ acceptance of their lot. Probably few
slaves believed that Africans are biologically incapable of maintaining themselves
as responsible citizens in a modern state, but many nineteenth-century women
did believe that biology incapacitated them from filling the positions in gov
ernment and professions taken by men. Scientists at the time measured skulls of
men and women and proved that men had on average a larger brain capacity
than women. Larger brain capacity equals greater intelligence—who could
argue against scientific measurements? (The flaw in the scientific “proof’ is
leaving out the observation that overall brain size correlates with body size but
not necessarily with intelligence. The larger average size of men compared to
women meant men’s skulls would average larger. But the enormous size of
whales’ skulls doesn’t seem to equate with vastly greater intelligence compared
to puny humans.) Politico-economic history had produced a United States
where African immigrants were systematically treated like animals and women
excluded from competing in business, and the habitus, the customary way of
being, turned that history into assertions that the brains of Africans and women
“naturally” stayed underdeveloped compared to European men’s brains.
More ludicrous (to us) is the “knowledge” that a woman’s uterus could get
loose and float about inside her body, and thus, cause her to become hysterical.
The word “hysterical” comes from the Greek word for uterus, hustera. Some
medical authorities believed the uterus to be a parasitic animal that might
choose to roam about inside its hostess. Medical treatment for hysteria included
applying foul-smelling stuff to the woman’s nose and sweet-smelling perfume
to her vagina—this to induce the uterus to leave her upper body and return to
its proper lower place. Men of course could not become hysterical because they
lack a uterus. When Classical Greeks or nineteenth-century Americans said
women must be excluded from professional or political roles because having a
uterus made them liable to hysterics, this social decree was said to be dictated
by “nature.” There were no CAT-scan machines to show the uterus of a hys
terical woman. Who could deny respected doctors’ professed medical knowl
edge?
Who speaks authoritatively in a society? Here is the crux of political power.
British anthropologists Edwin and Shirley Ardener reminded us that not only
do respected authorities speak out, but also that disrespected groups are, in the
Ardeners’ words, muted. Muted groups—slaves, children, women—may talk a
great deal and talk loudly but they are not listened to. Their talk is labeled
“chatter,” the same word that labels monkeys’ vocalizations. Muted groups may
speak in a dialect that marks them as different from the group in power, or use
mannerisms that mark their lower status. Women in American society, for exam
ple, are likely to use question form more frequently than men. (A woman is
more likely to say, “Will you do the dishes?” while a man more likely says, “Do
the dishes.”) Women are more likely to use “we” forms (“Let’s see how this
problem is worked,” versus “This is how the problem is worked”).
Subconsciously, American women tend to avoid sentence forms that indicate
authority.
Legal scholars as well as anthropologists, sociologists, and linguists are
examining the language of authority. The most powerful expression of author
ity is silence. (“Be quiet!”) Emperors and presidents may sit silent on platforms
while underlings read out decrees. Next we have the measured slow speech of
judges and famous professors. Their audiences patiently listen. Low-status peo
ple often speak in a rushing babble o f words, not because they are too stupid
or immature to reflect, but because they’re eager to get a word in before they’re
ignored. The same situation can be seen in written forms: Legal documents
have the authority to demand close attention no matter how boring; writing
that carries no authority such as comic books tries to please the reader with
short snazzy lines. Analysis of discourse demonstrates how power, or its lack, is
socially signaled. Modes of discourse used in spheres of authority such as the
law and medicine are not, as we naively suppose, “natural” to men who go into
these high-status professions or even “natural” to the work of these professions,
but rather serve to mark authority.
In the 1980s, anthropologists became increasingly concerned with the ques

tion o f power in society. Exercising power, it had been assumed, was part of
the role assigned to some social actors, that is, a policeman exercised power
because that was his role in his society. Social actors were assumed to be
selected for their ability to fill a particular role: Police were selected from big
strong men, there couldn’t be women police because women wouldn’t be

strong enough to overcome male criminals. Along came the 1964 Civil Rights
Act, colonies were winning independence, a world power was unable to over
come the resistance of the small nation of Vietnam; and among these chal
lenges, how power is obtained, how it is and how it should be wielded, became
vital issues. Power could mean authority—power over others—or ability to
effect action—power to act. The issue of power brought together anthropolo
gists focusing on individuals negotiating the matters of social life, and anthro
pologists looking at symbols and rituals.
Victor Turner, a British anthropologist, gave a series of lectures published
in 1969 as The R itu al Process. Here, at the heyday of the counterculture “hip
pie” movement, when it seemed a whole generation had gone to a meadow in
Woodstock, peeled off their clothes, lighted a joint, and grooved to the heavy
rhythms of rock, Turner described a cycle he could document over and over,
cross-culturally: structure and antistructure. This is really a dialectic, with struc
ture (or hierarchical organization) frustrating people who eventually rebel and
try to live communally, sharing work and rewards equally. That second phase
Turner termed communitas, or antistructure. What history shows, he wrote, is
that pure communitas doesn’t keep people happy, either. “From each accord
ing to his ability, to each according to this needs” sounds nice, until you have
to decide whether Friend Joe’s “inability” to remember to wash the dishes
when it’s his turn ought to be accepted. And what about housemate Steve’s
“need” for money to go hear his favorite bands, when it comes out of the
pooled incomes of the house and there’s never much cash? Hierarchy, structure,
creeps into communitas living, Turner discovered, as leaders emerge and rules
get made. Victor Turner’s work in the 1960s and 1970s illustrates an approach
that abstracts out of events the recurring processes and symbols characterizing
social groups.
“Politics is power,” say some anthropologists. Political institutions are seats
of power, politicians are people eager to exercise power. Perhaps. Power is more
than the business of politics. Power lies within any human relationship, whether
that power is openly displayed or carefully avoided. That is possibly the most
crucial aspect of the issue of power, to indicate when and why participants avoid
openly exercising power over others. Victor Turner identified institutions in
many societies, including our own, highly valuing mutual respect between the
members, where no one is above the others ordering them about, no one is
considered below, obliged to obey orders, but all are held to be equally deserv
ing of respect, equally obliged to work and share. Avoiding the show of author
ity, Turner noticed, allows irresponsible members to sabotage the enterprise.
Most groups in societies expect people to employ a repertoire of persuasion,
negotiations, and assertive demands as occasions and company seem to warrant.
Using these several means of moving others to satisfy one’s wishes is labeled
“politicking” when it occurs on Capitol Hill, or between statesmen at a summit
meeting, or at a treaty council. Politics are obvious in public affairs, while
potentially at least, power is a consideration in all human relationships. Every

human has a repertoire of behavior learned as a member of a particular society.
Societies have both statuses and roles. Status refers to “standing” (from the
Latin word for “stand”), a fixed social position. People usually occupy a series
of statuses, beginning with baby, then child, perhaps student, young indepen
dent adult, married person, parent, worker, elderly person, finally dead person.
We can occupy more than one status at the same time, for example rich person,
manager, professional, as well as married, adult, etc.
Role refers to behavior, how a person acts. The term comes from our famil
iarity with actors playing roles. Having the status o f a child or a rich person
doesn’t itself guarantee certain behavior: Some rich people live very modestly,
some children behave like little adults (and some adults behave like children).
The role of “rich person” or “child” can be played by anybody, whatever their
real status. The sociologist Erving Goffman emphasized how demanding our
social roles are, how much like actors’ roles in requiring us to create an appro
priate appearance, voice, mannerisms, as well as accomplish appropriate tasks.
Think of college students getting ready to go to class, taking care to shower,
blow-dry their hair, apply deodorant, put on clothes of the style and brands
worn by their peers, sling the fashionable backpack over one shoulder (never
over both shoulders!). Goffman called it “the presentation of self in everyday
life,” but what he really meant was the acting o f roles in everyday life. He
implied that we don’t have much “self,” only roles. Think about it. Even the
person who wants to be a nonconformist finds that is a social role, too, with its
appropriate dress, mannerisms, and occupations—jeans, flannel shirt, work
boots, handyman jobs.
Between World Wars I and II, social anthropologists including Bronislaw

Malinowski and his English colleague A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and the American
sociologist Talcott Parsons presented a view of societies labeled “structural-
fimctionalist.” In this view, societies are built up of a number of “structures”
that would include a kinship “system,” political institutions, economic institu
tions, religious organizations, perhaps a class system. Each of these has roles or
offices for people in the society. Each structure serves a function in keeping the
society going. Kinship keeps new generations coming up, political institutions
keep people orderly, economic institutions organize work, religious ones instill
a moral order. Statuses and roles are part of the institutions.
After World War II, the radical political and economic changes in the world
highlighted a big question little discussed by the structural-functionalists: How
do societies change? The way structural-functionalists described societies,
everything either kept going or broke down. They couldn’t explain how peo
ple and groups muddled through. For a few years, anthropologists stayed with
a 1930s term, acculturation, used to describe colonial peoples’ changing from
their native culture to that imposed by the colonial power governing them.
American Indians, Africans, and Oceanic nations were said to have a function
ing indigenous culture and then to abandon it institution by institution as they
decided to follow the cultural pattern of their governors. There were thus
degrees of acculturation from minimal to complete (“assimilation”). The con
cept of acculturation was flawed by the assumption that it worked from the
indigenous cultural pattern to the colonial power’s culture, which was equated
with changing from “simple” to “complex.” That was, unhappily, another way
of saying from “primitive” to “civilized.” Acculturation implied the racist nine
teenth-century western idea that Western Europe and the United States were
the most evolved societies and all others were “backward.” American anthro
pologist Irving Hallowell showed how much had been absorbed in the oppo
site direction, from American Indians into U.S. culture—the people labeled
“civilized” acculturating to the nonwestern societies. The term “acculturation”
was also unsatisfactory because it didn’t address how or why the culture changes
happened.
Anthony F.C. Wallace, another American anthropologist, faced the inade
quacy of the notion of acculturation as a simple replacement of one culture’s
institutions by those of another. First, in 1956, Wallace published a model he
developed from his study of Iroquois Indian history. Contrary to simple accul
turation notions, many Iroquois had changed from their preconquest religion
to one introduced in 1799 in order to preserve Iroquois culture against the
demands of the conquering government. The modified Iroquois religion, called
the Gaiwiio (“Good Message,” or “gospel”) and the cultural pattern it pro
moted was preached by an Iroquois aristocrat known by his title, Handsome
Lake. Wallace found evidence of demoralization after the Revolutionary War, in
which a number of Iroquois allied with the British and subsequently lost much
of their homelands. Drunkenness and violence consorted with unemployment
in postwar Iroquois communities. Handsome Lake claimed he had been
escorted to Heaven and instructed to carry back the Good Message advising
how best to live in the postwar situation. Iroquois men, accustomed to travel
to hunt and to trade, should take up occupations such as farming still available
to them, though formerly performed by Iroquois women. Above all,
Handsome Lake urged sobriety and peacefulness both within the communities
and between Iroquois and others. The Good Message was eagerly listened to
and, in Wallace’s word, “revitalized” Iroquois societies. From this history,
Wallace drew his “revitalization model” of, first, a stage or period of stress suf
fered by a few individuals because traditional behavior no longer was successful
for them, next a stage in which the majority of people in the society suffered
frustration from the inadequacy of traditional cultural patterns to meet the pre
sent situation, then the revitalization “movement” when a gifted individual (the
“prophet”) articulates a new culture pattern. Disciples help the prophet dis
seminate the message, modifying it to better fit the needs of a large number of
people. If the new cultural pattern is well adapted to the people’s situation, pre
senting them with guidelines to a reasonably satisfying life, it can become the
dominant cultural pattern for the society.
Wallace’s revitalization model, drawn from in-depth historical research and
careful cross-cultural comparisons, charted how some societies, at least, have
changed their cultural patterns, and it broke away from the assumption that
successful change would invariably be simply from the non
western to the contemporary western culture. Wallace real Societies or cultures are not
ized that in the course of his analysis he had slipped from a “things” that can be
conventional to a more radical concept: Societies are not a mechanically reproduced. We
device for “replicating” culture, cloning themselves, but reify observations of behavior—
think of behavior as “things”
somehow they manage to “organize diversity,” he noted.
(Latin res, “thing”)— as we try to
Structural-functionalism saw variations within a society as understand our situation by
“deviance” from “the norm.” Wallace saw variety as the way organizing perceptions into
life really is, and the challenge to anthropologists was to fig categories.
ure out how that gets organized enough to carry out some
of the group operations contributing to individuals’ and families’ survival.
During the 1960s, a number of anthropologists focused on the dynamics
of social behavior. They traced “networks,” discovering that whatever the offi
cial line may be, it’s generally who you know that gets you a job, a date, into
the club. They followed out “transactions,” seeing social interaction as so many
business deals. “Brokers” were identified, people who brought together other
One example of ideal versus real came out of archaeologist William Rathje’s project to
understand the formation of prehistoric sites by analyzing how contemporary
Americans create household garbage. Rathje’s group interviewed householders at
their front doors about their consumption habits, then sorted out their consumption
discards from their regular garbage collection. People usually told interviewers that
their households consumed few or no alcoholic beverages— our ideal behavior— in spite
of the six-pack containers, gin and vodka bottles accumulating in their trash cans—
their real behavior.
people’s networks. “Culture brokers” were people such as interpreters and

government-recognized village headmen who brought together representatives
of different societies. “Case histories” were compiled, copying the way legal
scholars discover social behavior through records of questions at law. An earlier
concept, the important difference between the ideal behavior people claim to
be their goal and their real behavior, was re-emphasized. Overall, the 1960s in
anthropology, reflecting that period in the world in general, was a rebellion
against the smothering notion of a static society in which people played
assigned roles.
One of the most popular metaphors for social behavior in the 1960s was
that life is a game that people play by means of strategies. Social behavior could
Angola, Africa, 1930. Men play a game similar to chess, thinking out strategies to over
come the opponent.
be described as sets of strategies to gain one’s needs and pleasures. The

metaphor that life is a game goes back centuries, to the invention of games like
pacheesi (originally from India) where little peg “men” move along a board
according to throws o f dice. Pacheesi mirrors the image of humans as pawns
struggling through life plagued by the uncertainties o f luck. “Game theory”
was developed in mathematics, holding out to anthropologists the possibility
that social behavior could not only be more precisely described through math
ematical symbols, but also might be predictable through mathematical logic.
Some fuzzy truisms came out of this, for example, that people tend to maximize
satisfactions. Expecting that mathematical models could soon be devised to
adequately explain all social behavior was taking a much too limited view of
human life.
A lasting result of the radical shift: in focus during the 1960s from prewar
structural-functionalism has been recognition of the choices open to individu
als. The abstract concept “social institutions” is only a way of mentally catego
rizing sets of patterns of behavior; people are not locked like prisoners within
invisible walls in “social institutions.” Game theory continues to have some
application, especially where individuals or groups are clearly maneuvering

against each other for a definite goal. Case histories, incorporating individual
and group transactions, networks, and brokers, are invaluable in checking
whether a participant observer ethnographer’s experience marks an unusual sit
uation or a more general pattern.
P e it d lc fii $% u + ctw ic__________________________
American anthropologist Morton Fried arranged societal structures along a

continuum from the smallest known human communities to major modern
nations. He divided societies into four general categories according to public
relationships within them. These are:
1. Egalitarian societies. The principal economic unit is the household, usu
ally a married couple, their young children, and unmarried relatives such as a
widowed parent. Each household is autonomous (independent), but several
households normally cooperate in food-getting and other activities. Rela
tionships are face-to-face rather than impersonal, and usually appear informal.
The “egality” in egalitarian societies refers to the economic status of member
families; some persons in the community may be given more respect than
others.
Egalitarian relationships are found not only among the Ju/’hoansi and egalitarian:
Mbuti and similar small hunting-gathering communities, but also in many peas equal. The
ant villages. Anthropologist Dorothy Keur, for example, lived in a Dutch village spelling is
changed from
that strongly discouraged any family living in a richer manner than the rest. The “-qu-” to “-g-”
few farmers who had more money than the average hid the money until it could
be invested in setting up a newly married child. A representative from each
household attended an annual public meeting to discuss allocating use of com
munal land and other business of the community as a group. Next-door neigh
bors regularly assisted one another, linking the entire village in mutual-aid sets.
When someone was required to openly organize an activity, villagers tried to get
“outsiders,” the schoolteacher or minister, to take the “boss” role, preserving
the egalitarian relationships of the village households. The same device was
observed by English anthropologist Ronald Frankenberg in a Welsh village.
Frankenberg, a young man when he lived as participant observer in the com
munity, concentrated on the local soccer team, noticing how “outsiders” were
recruited to be coach, who of course had to order the players about. All losses
could be blamed on the coach, and because he was an outsider, it was easy to
fire him. The insights of these two anthropologists, among the first to apply
anthropological research methods to contemporary European communities,
clarify the means by which egalitarian societies maintain the political relation
ship: No community is entirely isolated, and it is usually when the people have
to take account of the outside world that organized leadership becomes neces
sary. Recruiting “outsiders” to deal with “outside” matters saves the precious
egalitarianism of the small community.
Mombasa, Kenya, 792$. Aw annual carnival allows all classes of society to mingle, dance,
feast, and express ribald opinions of cchigh-hatted gentsv and afancy-haired ladiesA
2. Rank societies. Societies with hundreds of people living together cannot

rely on informal face-to-face discussion to maintain cooperative relationships. A
manager is needed. Rank societies acknowledge the social status of leader; this
is more than the role of leader that may be activated occasionally in egalitarian
societies. Rank societies have a permanent office of leader-manager, an office
that may be called chief, headman or headwoman, cacique (term used in Latin
America), Beloved Man or Woman (Cherokee Indian terms), sachem
(Algonkian Indian), and so on. This official has the full-time duty to oversee the
welfare of the community, to lead, and to represent it. He or she directs others.
Chiefs in rank societies generally are chosen by a council from among adult
members of a “leading family.” There is no large class of aristocrats in the com
munity, only an extended family that expects and trains its children to be lead
ers. When a chief dies or becomes incapacitated, a council— of the family, or
drawn from the community— considers who in the leading family seems most
capable of assuming the office. There may be a custom of selecting the chief’s
brother or son, or his eldest sister’s son, but there is no absolute hereditary
right of succession that would put an imbecile in the office. Likely candidates
Upper class: the captain of a British ocean liner; 1928.

for chief frequently marry into chiefly families in neighboring regions, creating
strong alliances between their communities and, by being backed by the
alliances, strengthening the politically shrewd individual’s likelihood of being
selected for the office. Marriages between noble families set up an aristocratic
class in the region, but rank societies cannot be termed true class-based soci
eties because there is regularly also marriage between some members of the
chiefly families and respectable commoners in their own communities. Rank
societies have the rank of noble but do not separate noble families as a class
from the commoners in the community.
Morton Fried added that rank societies have redistributive economies, that
is, the chiefs take surplus production from the commoners and redistribute it—
to them in feasts and aid, and to visitors from outside. Chiefs live in houses
larger than those of commoners, pardy to symbolize their “larger” status in the
community, partly to give room to host visitors (dignitaries of other communi
ties, traders) and to prepare feasts. There is usually an open space or plaza in
front of the chief’s house so the people can gather together to attend the feasts,
trade, witness legal proceedings (chaired or attended by the chief), or petition
the chief. The chief is responsible for seeing that those unable to provide for
themselves, whether visitors from outside or widowed, orphaned, or handi
capped members of the community, are taken care of. Since rank societies usu
ally are agricultural or specialized producers for a market (for example,
fishermen), the chief’s redistributive duties include managing exchanges of sur
plus production as well as feasting the community.
3. Stratified societies. Societies with populations in theSocial classes are ranks in
thousands sustain classes of people in different social ranks. society. In a rank society, an
individual family occupies higher
Nobles are sufficiently numerous that they can find eligible
rank in a community. In class-
mates within their own polity (civic government), although stratified societies, hundreds
kings will seek alliances through marriage with royalty of occupy the higher class,
other polities. The classes in stratified societies are ranked, thousands are in the lower
perhaps with three recognized levels as in America—upper classes.
class, middle class, lower class—perhaps with five as among
the Patwin Indians of California—nobility, professional people, commoners,
slaves, and “no-account trash” (drifters, beggars). People expect to marry
within their own class, though they tell stories about marriages across classes,
whether about the poor but hardworking youth who wins the chief’s daughter,
or about weak, upper-class people who let foolish love for a callous ne’er-do-
well drag them down into poverty and contempt.
Stratified societies have enough surplus production to support hundreds of
upper-class members. These include the leisured class who not only do not
work in production themselves but also usually employ managers tosupervise
workers. The existence of leisured classes has baffled many analysts. Whydo the
commoners, who always outnumber them, allow this class to enjoy leisure and
luxuries at commoners’ expense? Why do British taxpayers pay the royal family,
even the younger sisters and brothers of the monarch, the equivalent of millions
Lower class: crew members of a British ocean liner, 1928.
Social classes, stratified: well-to-do passengers enjoy a deck game on a British ocean liner,
1928, assisted by a middle-class steward and a lower-class sailor.
of dollars? All the “royals” seem required to do is cut ribbons at ceremonies

opening new facilities. The answer seems to lie in the importance of symbols.
The monarch represents the nation, on coins and stamps and wherever public
contributions have built a facility. British taxpayers support Buckingham and
Windsor palaces, with their occupants, as U.S. taxpayers support the cost of the
White House: These are physical, tangible signs of the grandeur of the nation.
Ostentatious luxury symbolizes power. Power can be frightening, but it is good
when it’s on your side. A powerful nation or, in feudal societies, a powerful lord
protects its citizens. Being able to pay for ostentatious luxuries for the head of
state demonstrates the nation’s economy can pay, also, for armed forces and
social services. In stratified societies, the upper class controls a great deal of sur
plus production. Ideally, it invests in maintenance and development for com
moner needs as well as in ostentatious luxury. When an avaricious dictator
displays personal wealth while the public standard of living is falling, people plot
rebellion.
4. The Nation-State is the somewhat awkward term for societies with
hundreds o f thousands, or millions, of people. States (the more common
term) are class stratified; they differ from smaller stratified societies in having
a formal bureaucracy of civil servants to run the nation. The civil bureaucracy
is not a class but a political structure containing people from several social
classes. In the bureaucracy are the faceless clerks who keep the records, con
struct the office staffs and procedures for spending public money, make the
little operating decisions such as the time when street lights are turned on
each night. States have market economies and territorial boundaries.
Officially they operate under rules of law, not face-to-face relationships. The
hyphenated term nation-state notes that, ideally, the state coincides with a ter
ritory within which people share a common language and cultural traditions
(the citizens o f the state are “born into”— nation is from the Latin word for
birth—the culture maintained by the state government). In fact, states almost
always incorporate cultural diversity and impose an official language and
often an official religion upon all citizens. The United States and Canadian
federal governments wrestle with the problem of acknowledging demands
for self-rule from American Indian, French Canadian, and Hispanic nations
that were incorporated into the two dominantly English states. Political
factions within a nation-state may label themselves by an ethnic name and
claim they were “born into” a suppressed group fighting for its right of self-
determination.
Agra, India, the elegant, massive, state-supported Pearl Mosque.
Pisa, Italy, cloistered courtyard of the officially recognized church (Campo Santo). State
power is communicated through buildings leading visitors’ eyes along vast vistas to
guarded doorways.
Morton Fried’s categories are to be understood as marking rather arbitrary sec

tions of a continuum. His scheme has the virtue of highlighting political struc
ture while bringing in rough correlations with population size and economic
features. Fried’s scheme has a historical dimension, in that the archaeological
record shows a broad trend from early hominids who presumably, like apes and
monkeys, were basically egalitarian although allowing limited leadership,
through Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic village communities that look like
rank societies, to the early stratified city-states and eventually the large nation
states.
Other anthropologists have published schemes similar to Morton Fried’s.
Elman Service suggested, in a 1962 book, that early hominids and existing
hunter-gatherer communities can be termed “bands,” and that as populations
grew bands allied into “tribes” and then into “chiefdoms” and finally state
organization emerged. Fried criticized Service’s category “tribe,” arguing that
historical records suggest that “tribes” are alliances of small nations resisting
domination by expanding empires. Examples can be found in the histories of
U.S. expansion resisted by American Indian nations and of China resisted by
Central Asian nations. Service accepted Fried’s historically grounded critique,
dropping “tribe” from his scheme. The discussion between these colleagues,
Fried and Service, illustrates the importance anthropologists place on empiri
cal data— actual observations, by participant observation today or by examin
ing historical documents preserving descriptions and through archaeological
data.
Schemes such as Fried’s and Service’s are designed to reveal universal char
acteristics of human societies, in this case the need to devise social organizations
that will maintain communities and groups of communities. Natural selection
favored gregariousness in our ancestors. Our large and complex brains, another
feature selected for among our ancestors, amassed know-how and skills in har
vesting food and compensating for adverse climate so that, eventually, popula
tions in many regions grew large and densely settled. Similar management
challenges resulted in roughly similar forms of social organization in various
regions of the world. These rough similarities constitute the categories devised
by Fried, Service, and others. It is essential to keep in mind that contemporary,
small, egalitarian communities are not survivals from the Paleolithic, but mod
ern political groups who have resisted assimilation into nation-states at the cost
of foregoing some material benefits. Contemporary ranked societies are not sur
vivals from the Neolithic: some (e.g., Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea)
occupy areas that will not support dense populations, others (e.g., a number of
North American Indian nations) have retrenched social organization after suf
fering heavy population losses due to epidemics and European invaders’
unremitting wars against them. Contemporary societies that exemplify these

categories of social organization give us only a rough idea of possible Upper
Paleolithic and Neolithic societies. Every contemporary or historic human soci
ety is as evolved in its adaptation to its ecological niche as any and every other
modern society.
Political systems must structure the cooperation necessary for human survival.
Written laws, like written rules in general, are part of bureaucracies governing
states with many thousands, or millions, of residents. To manage such numbers,
procedures are standardized and recorded. Small societies, where everybody
knows, if not quite everybody else, at least some cousin or neighbor of every
body else, can operate without such repositories of rules accessible to thousands
of officials. In societies without marked class stratification, separation between
public and private, government and family is not an ideal. Anthropologists who
have been participant observers in small nonwestern communities describe how
people call back and forth from their houses, discussing public business. Even
if there is a formal council of senior men representing the families, women lis
ten and the opinions of the older women are influential.
Our society contrasts government with family, public with private spheres.
Opposition between public and private in community life is widespread in
Western Asia, Europe, and North Africa. This also goes back to Classical
Greece. Men were supposed to work and socialize outside the home, women to
remain inside. Greek freemen met in the agora, a plaza where markets, public
discussions, and elections were held. Their wives were expected to stay in the
house, spinning and weaving. (Household chores were done by slaves.) This
ideal separation between public and private, government and family, lessened
during the Roman Empire following Classical Greece but remained part of the
European cultural tradition, becoming strong again in the nineteenth century.
Women were to have no part in government, not even a citizen’s vote, for it was
said that if they participated in public affairs, family life would be harmed.
Doctors claimed that girls who studied and thought were diverting energy from
the growth of their reproductive organs and would be unable to bear healthy
children. Girls should devote themselves to learning sweet manners and how
to dress attractively—this included wearing excessively tight corsets that did
harm the reproductive organs of many young women—while boys went to
school, played hard, and roamed about with buddies. In Classical Greece and
in nineteenth-century Europe and America, the ideal separation between pub
lic and private, government and family, men and women had a hidden second
separation between upper and lower social classes. Only in well-to-do families
could men devote time to public affairs and ladies remain home, while employ
ees performed the daily grind of factory, farm, and household work. In these
societies, government was by and for upper-class men, with lower-class working
men as well as all women prohibited from voting or taking office. Classical
Greece’s famous democracy applied only to Greek men who did not have to
work as employees or slaves.
Contrasting custom with law is misleading. Small societies seldom possess
written codes of law, relying instead on the memories of the mature members,
some of whom may be rigorously trained in accurate recall. Anthropologists
have occasionally been able to check orally transmitted history against docu
ments, and generally found a high degree of accuracy. Oral tradition does allow
changes to slip in unnoticed (this too has been demonstrated), but so can writ
ten laws, their interpretation or application shifting as time goes on. Some
scholars say that “custom” applies only to a particular group, while “laws” are
written as if they would be of universal application, but the concept that laws
should apply universally without regard to individuals’ social status would be
rejected even by many European and American governments. “Jim Crow” laws
in many southern U.S. jurisdictions included parallel laws, one for blacks and
the other for whites. Europe and China used to have sumptuary laws stipulat
ing what classes of people were entitled to wear and to eat particular items:
Peasants, for example, might be forbidden to wear silk or eat white bread,
reserved for upper-class people. These were written laws; in other areas, similar
rules are only unwritten “custom.”
An African diplomat to the United Nations thoughtfully compared his expe
riences in his home country with his work at the UN. West African political sys
tems assume that conflict will be resolved by discussion, each party clarifying
their position and reasons until it becomes clear where mutual interests lie, and
the parties can construct a procedure or setdement meeting these common
interests. Palaver is the West African trade jargon term used for this process.
European political processes, in contrast, he felt were based on an assumption
that conflict will not be resolved but disputing parties will compromise to avoid
more damaging outcomes. European systems tend to pose involved parties as
adversaries, opposing one another until one side “wins.” Outwardly, palaver and
European political-legal processes look similar, people sitting together present
ing their arguments as forcefully as they can, but the diplomat
felt that the difference in underlying assumptions is critical: Zero-sum games take away from
European political and legal systems tend to be run as zero- the loser to give the gain to the
winner. Alternately, games may
sum games, while West African systems aim for a draw. The
be structured so that everyone
diplomat thought the U.N. should more consciously use a ends up sharing the pot or
palaver system, since its members are there to find agreement. selecting a prize. In real life,
Either palaver or adversarial systems can be used in any competition need not end in
size society, and both are likely to be used, with the choice somebody’s loss.
depending upon the situation. Australian desert Aborigines
(indigenous nations’ descendants) usually resolve disagreements by palaver, but
people can reject the wisdom of palaver and jump up, physically threatening those
who oppose them. Two bands might find each other so opposed that the men line
up as adversaries for a spear-throwing battle. Afterward, when anger has cooled,
the bands could restore fellowship through ritual gestures of intimacy. At the
other extreme of national size, in the United States the adversarial system of
two opposed political parties competing for votes, or opposed lawyers in the
courtrooms, is not the only process. Mediation or arbitration, based on the
palaver idea that the parties involved do have mutual interests, often is used in
setding disputes and setting up contracts. The European worldview, drawn in
part from the Bible, presents opposition as the common situation and glorifies
the winner, but unheroic cooperation is more typical of everyday life.
British anthropologist Max Gluckman studied the legal systems of the
African kingdoms of Zulu and Barotse. Gluckman’s own family contained sev
eral lawyers, giving him intimate knowledge of how British law really worked.
As he compared the processes of law in these three systems, two African and the
British, Gluckman realized that formal legal rules and procedures are only part
of societies’ maintenance of law and order. What tended to be overlooked is the
function of gossip. Neighbors chatting, citizens relaxing in coffeehouses, stu
dents whispering in class about the kids who . . .—all are articulating com
munity standards and defining unacceptable conduct. Informal face-to-face
evaluation of behavior is the other side of law enforcement. Community stan
dards are explicitly discussed in one area of American law, the question of what
constitutes pornography. Gossip condones posters of naked young women in
men’s locker rooms, yet demands jail for a man who entices young children to
look at such posters. A great deal of behavior is constantly discussed as people
decide what will earn them approbation from their peers and what will be con
demned. Modern, literate societies use news media to assist
in articulating community standards for millions. “Ann A reader of advice columns
Landers” and “Dear Abby” daily present situations for news wrote in to confess that as a
teenager, she and her friends
paper readers throughout the country to ponder, with Ann
thumbed their noses at parents’
or Abby suggesting what she feels would be majority opinion and teachers’ warnings about
on the case. When Ann or Abby miscall the case, letters flood the consequences of
in and are printed, clarifying actual community standards. misconduct. “We studied your
Gluckman assumed gossip works only in small communities, column,” she said, took to heart
its direful stories, and let it guide
but “Ann Landers” and her sister “Abby,” plus the letters-to-
them round the pitfalls of
the-editor and op-ed features in newspapers and magazines, contemporary life.
call-in shows on radio, and cable television shows enable mil
lions to hear and thousands to respond actively to form community opinion on
behavior.
\Pe/dJ.-Syifaw
In 1974, Immanuel Wallerstein, a sociologist, published a historical study of the
development of the modern multinational political economy. He showed the
inadequacy of limiting political or economic analyses to national boundaries.
Anthropologists were excited by Wallerstein’s perspective, for it related “tribal”
groups to the big picture. With Morton Fried’s argument that tribes are a
A tea plantation in Sri Lanka, 1930.

Local laborers producing a beverage for a
world market.
Laborers bring the tea leaves to the process

ing factory, Sri Lanka, 1930. Note that the
local headquarters of this world-system
enterprise is built in the style of the owners’
English homeland houses.
1932, Rotonia, New Zealand.

Surrounding a woodcarver creating a
traditional design, Maori in contempo
rary versions of indigenous dress recreate
Maori heritage for the world tourist
market.
response to—now we have a term—world-system encroachment, political

anthropology turned from neat categorizations toward the complex effects of
expanding businesses. There was a new frame for interpretation.
A 1982 book by American anthropologist Eric Wolf, Europe and the People
Without History, strengthened the impact of Wallerstein’s work by championing
the worth of the colonized nations whose earlier histories had been ignored.
Sixteenth-century Spanish conquerors literally destroyed Mexican history by
burning all the native books they could find—only four out of many thousands
survived the bonfires. Three centuries later, anthropologists had contrasted
“primitive,” “static” “tribes” without (known) history to “civilized,”
“dynamic,” historically documented western nations. Major John Wesley
Powell, founder and director of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American
Ethnology after the Civil War, told Congress that American Indians are primi
tive people whose minds cannot think like those of civilized citizens of
European descent; the U.S. government would have to administer Indian tribes
like a father supervising children. Powell assumed Indian cultures had hardly
changed over thousands of years. He read the statement of Lewis Henry
Morgan, a businessman of the time who interviewed American Indians, that no
American Indian society had ever “progressed” beyond a simple tribal organi
zation; Morgan insisted, without any evidence, that the chroniclers of the
Spanish conquests of Mexico and Peru must have lied about the splendor of
those empires. Morgan and Powell let their enthusiasm for what their genera
tion believed was America’s Manifest Destiny override reasonable judgment.
Abundant data on the complexities of nonwestern societies, on the intelligence
with which they adapted to different environments, and on their readiness to
change when change seemed the sensible course, had been systematically
denied by conventional anthropologists. Wallerstein and Eric Wolf, a century
after Powell and Morgan, pointed out that the so-called primitives were the less
powerful nations on the “periphery” of a world-system, nations conquered and
exploited for their labor and resources. Western industrial empires squared
these actions with their avowed moral precepts by claiming the conquered
nations were “backward.”
Ethnohistory is a growing subfield bridging history and anthropology.
Scholars researching the histories of nonwestern nations, and of ethnic groups
within the major modern nations, are contributing much new data to political
anthropology. An actual world-system may be a modern development, but con
tinental economic systems can be traced archaeologically back to the Upper
Paleolithic. Historically, in the St. Lawrence River region between New York
State and Ontario, the “rank society” Iroquois nations raised corn to trade for
meat and leather with the “egalitarian band societies” of the Algonkians. This
was a complex economic and political system that sustained yields for genera
tions. It wasn’t idyllic—the Iroquois nations warred against each other and tried
to dominate the Algonkians—but it, and the internal political structures of the
Indian nations, demonstrate the dynamic interactions of indigenous nations
within large sections of a continent. When first Norse, around A .D . 1000, and
then European fishermen beginning in the 1490s entered the Gulf of St.
Lawrence, the Indian nations extended their indigenous trading system to

include the newcomers. Norse colonists (Leif Eriksson and his brother
Thorvald) were hostile toward the First Americans, dooming the small colony.
The fishermen were less aggressive; from their barter, the international fur
trade developed that linked northern American Indians direcdy into the
Eurasian world-system. Ethnohistoric research strongly contradicts the racist
notions about so-called primitives in America and other continents. This
contemporary research adds greatly to our information on the range and vari
ety of systems of social organization.
pm II:
m m ___________________________
All political systems include the basic unit structured to promote reproduction
and the care of children. This basic unit Americans call the family. Nuclear
fam ily consists of parents and their children living together, extended fam ily
includes relatives of the couple and children. Americans also use the word “fam kin: relatives
ily” to indicate a group whose members support each other unstintingly, for (Old English
example a loyal varsity sports team or—famous example—Mafia gangsters. word)
kinship:
Conversely, when relatives refuse to support each other unstintingly, we may family
speak of a broken family. Remembering that we emphasize the characteristic of relationships
unstinting support marking families, we can more easily see how societies may
structure a residential group as the basic “familial” unit, regardless of genetic
relationships. We can also see how kinship terms may be applied quite differendy
than in English usage, according to the roles people play toward one another.
Nineteenth-century anthropologists began with kinship terms accepted in
English law. “Blood” relatives (consanguines, from the Latin words for
“together” and “blood”) were biologically—that is, genetically—related and
because no action can change genetic relationships once a child is conceived,
consanguineous relationships were held to be unbreakable. People learned to
think of these as their “real” relatives. A ffin al relationships were set up by mar
riages; these are one’s in-laws. Consanguines, especially the closest consan
guines in the nuclear family, had legal obligations to support one another. Close
consanguines are not permitted to marry one another. (If they did they would
commit incest, a sin or crime.) Why members of a nuclear family are not
permitted to marry one another has never been well understood; in-breeding
doesn’t necessarily promote genetic abnormalities. The usual anthropological
explanation is that marriage allies families, widening the net of unstinting sup
port on which survival may depend. Another explanation is that boys and girls
who grow up together don’t readily see each other as sexually attractive, since
they learned nonsexual roles toward one another before puberty awakened sex
ual feelings. This explanation is supported by observation that other primates
seldom seem to mate with the parents or siblings they grew up with. The two
explanations may both be true.
Lewis Henry Morgan, one of the pioneer American anthropologists, was

astounded to discover, as he came to know Seneca Iroquois Indians who lived
on a reservation near his upstate New York home, that Iroquois inherit surname
and property from their mothers’ families, i.e., matrilineally.
This was the mirror image of English law in which, especially matrilineal: mother’s line (Latin
in Morgan’s nineteenth century, a woman was obliged to mater “mother”)
patrilineal: father’s line (Latin
drop her family surname and take that of her husband upon
pater “father”)
marriage, children had their father’s name, and inheritance bilateral: both (Latin bi-) sides
was normally patrilineal, from the father’s family. In (Latin latus “side”)
Morgan’s time, custody of children in a divorce was awarded
to the father even if the children were very small (a custom that Morgan’s fem
inist neighbor Elizabeth Cady Stanton claimed caused unbearable distress to
wronged wives).
Wondering whether Iroquois matrilineal customs are unique, Morgan trav
eled to the Midwestern frontier to interview Indians from a number of other
nations, and sent questionnaires to missionaries and agents in nonwestern
countries. He found many variations on kinship terms and customs, enough to
make a thick volume published in 1871 by the Smithsonian Institution. Morgan
identified several contrasting systems, naming them from the Indian nations
where he had learned of them: the Iroquoian matrilineal system, the Omaha
patrilineal system, the Eskimo bilateral (both parents equally acknowledged). It
took half a century before anthropologists could understand that some soci
eties, for example the Mandan and Hidatsa in North Dakota and the Ashanti in
Ghana (West Africa), divided familial responsibility so that children inherited
such goods as residence rights and farmland from the mother’s family and reli
gious training and offices from the father’s family. (This is called “double
descent.”) Morgan, being a lawyer by profession, was most concerned with
inheritance, frequendy disputed and brought to law among his associates. It is
better to look at relationships as responsibilities, so that Hidatsa, for example,
place the responsibility for spiritual nurturance upon the father’s family and for
physical nurturance upon the mother’s. For a grown child, this becomes a claim
to religious office and to land for house and farm. To put it blundy, children
who don’t survive can’t inherit anything, so responsibility for nurturing chil
dren is more basic than inheritance rules.
Again from the basic perspective of survival, the fact that families may
include members who are not genetically related makes sense. The older notion
that kinship terms describe actual blood relationships left adoption a puzzle,
but if kinship terminology names social roles, and families are instruments for
children’s survival, then adoption is an obvious way to maximize the number of
children who survive in a society. What matters is that some adult take the role
of parent to an orphaned or neglected child and, if they act the role, they ought
to be called by the term for that role. It also makes sense that societies may
make little distinction between biological parents and other caretakers. Morgan
was shocked that in Hawai’i, he was told, Polynesian children addressed any
man in a household as “Father,” any woman as “Mother,” and the adults used
the same word for their biological children and for other children in an
extended-family household. This was not, as Morgan thought, because
Hawai’ian men and women had sex indiscriminately within a household and
couldn’t tell which child was theirs (obviously, a child’s birth mother could be
definitely identified, a fact he elsewhere suggested as the reason for Iroquois
preference for matrilineality). The terms reported to him by the missionary
actually referred to the roles o f “adult man in one’s household” and “adult
woman in one’s household,” all the men sharing the male householders’ duties
and all the women sharing the women’s. As for the term Morgan was told
meant “child,” it meant “little one,” and could be used to refer to a litde
coconut as well as to a child.
KINSHIP
A= O A= 0 A= 0 A= O
GGF GGM GGF GGM GGF GGM GGF GGM
— I I — I I
A= 0 A= 0
GF GM GF GM
r
A= O A= 0
U A U A
rv T1
A 0 A 0
C C A=
=0 ★ ==A / 0 0 ==A C C
BR SI-LAW EGO HU/WI SI BR-LAW
SIBLING SPOUSE SIBLING
rn i “1 1 1
AO A 0 A= 0 A == 0 A 0 A 0
C C NE Nl S 1 D-LAW S-LAW D NE Nl C C
1 1 1
AO AO A= 0 0 =A LV = 0 0= A A O
C C C C
1
—
_ G S J 6D| GS I GD C C
1 I 1 1 1 n r 1
A O A O A 0 A O
GGS GGD GGS GGD GGS GGD GGS GGD
NOTE: Cousins' children are cousins
AMERICAN KINSHIP
CONSANGUINES ("Blood Relations ")
GGF-GREATGRANDFATHER NE-NEPHEW
GGM-GREATGRANDMOTHER NI-NIECE
GF-GRANDFATHER C-COUSIN
GM-GRANDMOTHER S-SON
F-FATHER D-DAUGHTER
M-MOTHER GS-GRANDSON
U-UNCLE GD-GRANDDAUGHER
A-AUNT GGS-GREATGRANDSON
EGO-SELF (Latin="I") GGD-GREATGRANDDAUGHTER
BR-BROTHER \
[ s i b l in g s AFFINES ("In-laws ")
SI-SISTER > HU-HUSBAND *
[s p o u s e
WI-WIFE J
NOTE: S p o u s e s o f U n c l e a n d A u n t a r e a f f i n e s b u t
ARE COMMONLY ADDRESSED AS "AUNT" AND “UNCLE"
The American kinship system is a kindred: Note that the same terms are
applied to relatives on the father’s and on the mother’s side (that is, bilateral).
Note that the differentiating principles in American kinship are (1) genera
tion—people of the same generation are differentiated from those of older and
younger generations, and (2) sex—males and females receive different terms,
except for people more than two linking relations away (“cousins”). To see
what a diagram of a unilineal system looks like, copy the diagram and color in
the symbols that would represent people, including you (EGO, “I ”) with your
father’s last name: That will give you a patrilineage.
Kinship systems are one form of political structure. They name social roles
involved in the reproduction of the society through the reproduction of mem
bers. “Fictive kinship”—adoption, and also the institution of godparents—
broadens the family beyond what biological reproduction may provide, and
adjusts the number of supportive adults to the number of children. The
“rhetoric of kinship” describes political responsibilities as if they were familial.
Where there are formal governments, their officers are often said to be like par
ents, watching over citizens as parents do for children. U.S. government repre
sentatives to American Indian nations liked to say that the president would be
a “Great Father” to the Indians if they would sign a treaty. That term was as
much from European philosophy as from any Indian custom: 2,000 years ago
in Classical Greece and Rome, politicians promised voters they would be like
fathers to the populace, if elected. We’ve all heard that President George
Washington was the father of his country.
Americans contrast families with government. Families are what you’re born
into, families are warm and loving, they give unstinting support. Governments
are organizations constructed by people to manage public affairs; government
agents are appointed or elected by other adults; governments are rule governed,
impersonal, and cold. Political systems are not that simple. Families are the basic
political unit, their role set by law. Nuclear families are organized into larger
units with economic and political obligations: anthropologists categorize these
as lineages or kindreds, depending on whether membership is exclusive (lin
eages) or may overlap (kindreds). In societies without centralized government,
kindreds or clans (sets of lineages) protect their members by demanding justice
when one has been harmed. Kindreds or clans are present in modern nations,
kindred: relatives including both those of one’s father and of one’s mother, considered
equivalent; kindreds are what you see at family reunions; kindreds don’t own property
but members assist one another, economically and politically.
iineage: people who trace descent from an ancestor in common; lineages may be
grouped into clans; clans are like corporations, holding property in common,
transacting business, and held liable for fines if their members disobey laws; clan
members cannot marry one another because they are held to be related.
Societies may be divided into two complementary parts, or moieties, that
exchange services and marry each other.
A n extended family gathers in an American living room to enjoy holiday festivities.

Affines are merged with consanguines in this bilateral kindred.
informally assisting members with economic and political support while leaving
administration of justice to the formal government.
Some societies rely strongly on clans. The word “clan” is Gaelic from
Scotland, where territory was held by groups o f families said to be related
through their fathers (patrilineally)—hence the names beginning with Mac,
uson o f ’—and organized through clan chiefs from noble lineages within the
clan. Members of Scots clans have been permitted to marry one another, so
strictly speaking these clans are “ambilineal” rather than patrilineal. Clans, like
the Scots’, that are primarily territorial rather than strictly lineages are more
common than earlier anthropologists assumed. China before its 1949
Communist Revolution had a highly bureaucratized government centered in its
emperor and court, yet it also operated through patrilineal clans, in this case
house compounds sheltering families related through the husbands.
Iroquois Indians obtained rights to house and the produce o f farm land
through matrilineally inherited membership in clans. Iroquois government
operates through officers, called “chiefs” in English, who are appointed by the
senior women of each clan in a community. Chiefs are expected to convey their
clans’ opinions to the community and League of the Iroquois councils; if a chief
fails to present his clan’s concerns and opinions, the senior clanswomen depose
him and appoint another. The women can veto council decisions. Young men
are appointed by the clan to assist their chief in carrying out the wishes of the
clan. Iroquois nations are structured as representative democracies, with town
councils functioning as federations of the clans, and the League as a confeder
ation of small states. (Benjamin Franklin was familiar with Iroquois government
through serving at treaty councils, and pointed out at the U.S. Constitutional
Convention that the viability of Iroquois government proved a U.S. federal
government could be a success, too.)
Hopi and Zuni, two Pueblo Indian nations in Arizona, tie their matrilineal
clans to religious priestly offices, each clan carrying out its special ritual for the
welfare of the village. Government is exercised through the organization of
senior priests, in this manner coordinating the interests of the several clans.
Eastern Pueblos, in New Mexico, don’t have clans but instead divide villages
into moieties such as Summer and Winter, half the people in one, half in the
other. Summer moiety is in charge of rituals and governance during that half
the year, Winter during the other half. Several Pueblos, between the west and
east groups, have both clans and moieties, showing a gradation from one struc
ture to the other. Careful study of societies governing through clans reveals
their property ownership to be a highly significant aspect of their function, so
much so that people who live on the land of a certain clan are usually assumed
to be members of that clan even when villagers remember that particular indi
viduals were immigrants from elsewhere known not to be biologically
descended from the clan ancestor. Clans and moieties often operate much like
neighborhood property-owners’ organizations.
Kindreds seem a more flexible type of organization because they overlap,
giving people more choice of affiliation. Kindreds are bilateral, recognizing the
father’s and mother’s families as equally important, reflected in applying the
same kin terms to each side. American society is based on kindreds, with both
parents’ parents called grandfather or grandmother, brothers of both parents
called uncles, sisters of both parents called aunts, uncles’ and aunts’ children
called cousins (note that although the gender of the linking person is ignored,
gender of the person referred to determines which of two terms will be applied,
except for the more distant relatives called cousins, who are lumped under a sin
gle term regardless of gender). Rich and powerful people like the Kennedys and
Rockefellers have big kindreds because it is advantageous to be seen as related
to prestigious people. Poor but decent people are also likely to have large kin
dreds, because poor people need to help each other out. In northern Europe
during the time of the Roman Empire and several following centuries, fighting
men were recruited from leaders’ kindreds. Today, fishing boats, unions with
apprenticeship programs, and many businesses often recruit young workers
from bosses’ kindreds. Kindreds are a kind of network enabling people seeking
opportunities or assistance to find offers. Next time you go to a family reunion,
notice how your kindred is good fellowship and more, how the relatives tell one
another who might have a job for Cousin Jan, where you could get a good car
from Pat’s brother’s wife’s nephew, what courses Kim recommends at the col
lege. The socially designated tie of kinship brought all these people together
and tells them they ought to like and help one another.
Societies are regulated by many simultaneous means. Analysis of societies from

the perspective of politics focuses on power: how power is delegated, what marks
the offices and persons to whom power is delegated, how the existence and del
egation of power is explained within the worldview. From a broader anthropo
logical perspective, we see that power in a society is enmeshed in its economic
structure, reflected in its religion, expressed in its arts and games, and tied into
larger regional or even world systems. Anthropologists have set up categories of
social organization based upon number of people in polities, ranging from a few
cooperating households, through villages administering their affairs through a
chief, to class-stratified polities, and, at one extreme, large bureaucratic nation
states. People act the roles assigned them by their social group more thoroughly
than most of us realize, taking on particular speech forms as well as dress and
mannerisms, occupation, and recreation preferences. The way a social role per
vades a person’s behavior, directing their choices, makes it part of society’s reg
ulation of its members. It is characteristic of all societies to believe, and teach,
that some political structures are “natural” to humans, rather than social con
structions that could be changed. Kinship roles and family structures are partic
ularly likely to be assumed to be natural; the variety of these seen cross -
culturally shows that kinship is social organization more than genetics.
In the Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology Series
(H arcourt Brace)
Chance, Norman A. China^s Urban Villagers. 1991. Contemporary China is highly con
scious of its political structures and philosophy. Chance personalizes this with his
focus on Red Flag commune and adjacent Half Moon village.
Keesing, Roger M. Blota^s Story. 1983. The biography of a leader in a Melanesian com
munity in the Solomon Islands, largely told in a translation of his own lively remi
niscences.
Kuper, Hilda. The Swazi: A South African Kingdom. 1986. The Swazi kingdom was
gradually overcome in the nineteenth century by the Union of South Africa, and
since the 1960s has been contesting that nation’s dominance. Kuper describes the
traditional kingdom and its contemporary politics.
O ’Meara, Tim. Samoan Planters. 1990. An interesting contrast to ’Elota, the Samoans
in this study live in a stratified society adapting to incorporation in the contempo
rary world-system.
Trigger, Bruce G. The Huron. 1990. An account of one of the Iroquois nations in the
early seventeenth century. This is one of the more accessible descriptions of the
Iroquois for students.
REFEREN CES
Ardener, Edwin and Shirley. Perceiving Women (edited by Shirley Ardener). London:
Malaby, 1975. See also Shirley Ardener’s Introduction to Defining Females, edited
by her (New York: John Wiley).
Arnold, Arnold. Winners . . . and Other Losers in War and Peace. London: Paladin
Grafton Books (Collins), 1989.
Frankenberg, Ronald. Village on the Border. Prospect Heights; II.: Waveland Press, 1 957;
reprinted 1990.
Fried, Morton H. The Evolution of Political Society. New York: Random House, 1967.
Gluckman, Max. “Gossip and Scandal.” Current Anthropology 4 :(1 9 6 3 ) 3 0 7 -3 1 6 .
Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 1959.
Gubrium, Jaber F., and James A. Holstein. What is Family? Mountain View, Cal:
Mayfield, 1990.
Keur, Dorothy, and John Y. Keur. The Deeply Rooted: A Study of a Drents Community in
the Netherlands. American Ethnological Society Monograph No. 2 5 , 1955.
Underhill, Ruth M. Papago Woman. New York: Holt Rinehart Winston, 1979.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins
of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press,
1974.
Wolf, Eric R. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1982.
C * H * A * P * T * E * R 12
$4>/Ca £%*C4>
fc c C lg ' U f / h ' _______________________________________________
In this chapter, we focus on the upper sections of our chart:
D
L V
R 1
0 E
w W
V LA U E s
e x p r e s s i o n a n d r e c r e a t i o n
S 0 C 1 A L 1 Z 1 N G
A R T S (visual, musical, dramatic, literary)
N 0
0 F
1
T S
A 0
L c
U 1
G E
E T
R Y
religion
Religion, like families, is said to be universal in human societies. The family we

can understand, since our species would become extinct if men and women did
not copulate and then cooperate in nurturing the resulting baby. Religion,
unlike the family, does not appear to answer what Malinowski called a “biolog-
ical imperative.” Why should it be universal?
What is religion? The term applies to humans’ conviction that there is
199
200 I Chapter 12 Analyzing Societies: Religion
something greater than they, something beyond the everyday

world: transcendental. Every sensible person realizes that our Religious leaders may assert
senses are too limited to take in all the world, our intelligence that they teach knowledge
too limited to fully understand the world. Faced with the vast revealed by a transcendental
power. If this is so, it cannot be
unknown, people fear they will be overwhelmed. “Whence tested by scientific methods
cometh my help?” is an ancient cry. Many philosophers, over because science by definition
hundreds of generations, have offered answers, building cul limits itself to phenomena
tural traditions that teach members of human societies what observable in this world.
seems to them a reasonable and practical understanding of
the mystery of life.
The anthropological study of religions makes no attempt to discover which,
if any, is the ultimate Truth. As social scientists, anthropologists focus on
observable human behavior. What anthropologists discover is how religions
function to maintain human societies, and how religious beliefs relate to the
experiences of the people who hold them. Religion is part of
the habitus, to use Bourdieu’s term, that emphasizes how ritual: strongly patterned actions
much more than formal articulated knowledge is comprised believed to be necessarily
in an individual’s, or social group’s, “way of being.” That exactly repeated; usually refers
habitual interpretation of the nature of the world and its peo to religious actions
ple (worldview), shaped by the society’s environment and its myth: narrative of supernatural
beings and events
interaction with that environment, is expressed through
everyday arrangement of homes, communities, workplaces,
and interpersonal activities. Additionally, critical aspects of the habitus are rein
forced through ritual—highly patterned behavior. People often say they per
form certain rituals because these were taught in an ancient time by a
transcendental being; such explanations are said to be myth. Some anthropolo
gists have approached the study of religion by focusing on rituals (the action
side), others by focusing on myths (the intellectual side of religion). The two
approaches are like looking at the two sides of a coin: They may appear quite
different but they are not separable.
When anthropology, as a formal field of research, began in the mid-nineteenth

century, heated debates over the relative value of scientific versus religious
explanations were popular. During the previous two centuries, a number of
scientifically minded thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson had rejected the
quarrels between various churches over details o f doctrine. Instead, these
Enlightenment thinkers assumed that the Deity (God, but not necessarily God
as described in the Christian Bible) had created the world so that it ran like a
well-engineered machine without need of an operator. (They suggested this
world machine was like a finely crafted clock. Wealthy people enjoyed the
godlike feeling of winding up clockwork figures that imitated live beings—one
figurine, for example, would drop a dish of carved food in its mouth, then a lit-
Chapter 12 Analyzing Societies: Religion I 201
tie, turd-shaped carving would drop out of the opposite end of its torso.)
“Natural philosophers” should carefully observe the world and deduce how the
world machine and its principles of operation are constructed. God gave us a
“Book of Nature”—a technical manual—to read beside the Bible, it was said.
By the mid-nineteenth century, a couple hundred years of experiments
using increasingly elaborate apparatus, from telescopes to microscopes, static
electricity machines to the classification of hundreds of thousands o f fossils, all
had produced data and explanatory hypotheses that made the Bible seem inad
equate or even downright erroneous in places. Some clergymen insisted that
nothing should contradict the Bible even in details, that such mythlike pas
sages as the stories of Noah’s Ark or the Tower o f Babel must be historically
true. Scientific data are illustrations of these events, they asserted. The fact that
mammal fossils are found only in the higher strata of the earth does not mean,
they said, that mammals had not evolved until more recent times; no, the
explanation was that during Noah’s flood, mammals had run for the higher
mountains and finally died there as the waters rose. The Tower of Babel sup
posedly accounted for the diversity of languages in the world and, along with
the dispersal of Noah’s sons after the Flood, for the differences in human pop
ulations (“races”). “Savages,” these believers proclaimed, had degenerated
from the higher civilization at the time of Babel, losing technical knowledge
and also morality. Europeans had somehow retained more of the primeval
civilization.
Countering the literalist interpretation of the Christian Bible was the posi
tion that the Bible might be divinely inspired but that the copies we actually
have were written by human hands and therefore liable to copyists’ errors and
mistranslations. Two thousand and more years have elapsed since the Bible was
written; surely knowledge accumulated over so many generations should enrich
humankind rather than be forced into the mold of ancient belief, said adherents
of a liberal view. The rocks’ sequence of fossils from ancient, simple shellfish,
fish, and reptiles to mammals, higher primates, and at last humans, represents
evolutionary development. This is perfectly compatible with the Bible, liberals
noted, provided one understands the writers of Genesis to be using a poetic,
mythic mode of communication. “And God rested on the seventh day” should
not be interpreted to mean the white-bearded old guy flopped into a hammock
in the backyard on Saturday and reached for a cool one. The Deity—whatever
It is, It is beyond human ken—caused planets to coalesce, organic life to be
sparked, eventually the human species to evolve, but not in six workdays like
Grandpa down at the machine shop. The Bible is indeed an inspired guide to
moral behavior and a compendium of the work of some of the greatest literary
geniuses our species has known, but it was never meant to be a science text
book. “Progressive” thinkers advocated studying all the phenomena of the
world with the methods of science, free of preconceived explanations. That
included studying humans.
Nineteenth-century anthropologists collected data on the diversity of
human attributes and behavior the way zoologists and botanists collected data
on the diversity of plants and other animals. They went so far as to collect skele
tons from graveyards, sometimes over the protests of the deceased’s loved ones,
and to bring people from other continents to museums and zoos in Europe to
be measured and observed by scientists there. (The “specimens” often were
eager to get a free trip to exotic Europe, making it a two-way exchange of
observations.) Travelers’ and missionaries’ accounts were added to the store of
observations. A great pile of “facts” became available, unhappily without the
insistence on full context that later anthropologists have found to be absolutely
necessary. Pioneer English anthropologist Edward Tylor arranged his collection
of others’ observations to illustrate the logical progression from an “animistic”
stage of religion, in which “savages” confused dreams with spirit journeys,
through a “polytheistic” stage in ancient civilizations believing in many gods,
to modern monotheism (one god). Tylor predicted that eventually we should
progress to a purely scientific understanding which would be atheistic. (Can
you figure out the word? “a-”: “without”). Lewis Henry Morgan, Tylor’s
American contemporary, suggested much the same logical scheme. James G.
Frazer, a Scot, and his teacher W. Robertson Smith tried a different tack, fitting
a mass of historical and contemporary travelers’ observations into the premise
that the Classical Greeks and Romans had a basic human religion and other reli
gions are variations. One common failing marked all these armchair scholars:
None had lived in a nonwestern community for any length of time, none had
directly experienced life in a non-Christian community.
Bronislaw Malinowski, living for two years in a Trobriand Island commu
nity, 1916-1918, is credited with breaking this armchair convention. His clas
sic study, Argonauts o f the Western Pacific, is crammed with vivid details of real
life in this Melanesian society. Though brought up in Poland as an upper-class
scholar, Malinowski realized a real scientist has to get down and get dirty,
gather data direcdy from the field. Malinowski got hot, sweaty, pushed around
in the crowd of Trobrianders, recorded in his private journal his feelings
aroused by the young Trobriand women around him, his struggles writing his
notes with moths fluttering around his tent lantern—he dreamed of the cool
clean comfort back home, but he knew he could never understand the
Trobriand habitus without living it. Living it, he realized that much of
Trobriand religion consisted of ritual actions designed to extend human capac
ity to control their world. Trobrianders are superb boatbuilders and highly
knowledgeable navigators, but to avert dangerous storms at sea, they use ritu
als and prayers. These ritual actions were, to Malinowski, “skills” like wood
working in the sense that the religious actions were designed to accomplish
practical ends. Maybe they didn’t always work, but even the best woodworkers
may sometimes encounter a knot in the wood that makes the knife slip. No
human action is invariably totally successful. Often after the proper rituals,
Trobriand sailors did enjoy calm seas and safe voyages. Rituals gave the
Trobrianders confidence to try what might be dangerous undertakings.
H g U ____________________________________________________________
Living on the island, Malinowski discovered another aspect of Trobriand reli
gion. People in one village told him they were descended from the elder of a
pair of sisters who had quarreled in ancient times. The elder sister had
announced she would remain in the village, strictly obeying all their religious
laws, and exiled the younger woman to live among low-class people who
didn’t properly maintain religious strictures. In the village claiming to be
descended from the younger sister, he heard a different version: There, the
younger sister had ordered the elder one to stay in the puritanical village while
the younger woman happily moved to the enlightened community. Quite pos
sibly, the chiefly families of the two villages were descended from a pair of high-
ranking sisters who had quarreled; what fascinated Malinowski was how the
legend was used in each village to explain and justify its own customs.
Kiriwinans said their conservative values resulted from the elder sister’s com
mitment to such values, while the western coastal villagers said their more lib
eral behavior reflected the younger sister’s willingness to change. Each claimed
its point of view, identified with a revered, legendary ancestor, was admirable.
Malinowski concluded that legends, and myths, are often social charters spelling
out proper behavior. They function like the charters of corporations in western
nations that spell out the officers of the corporation and its proper business
activities. The legend of the two sisters “chartered” Kiriwina to have a chief
who scrupulously maintained traditional religious observances, and “chartered”
the western coastal village to innovate change.
Legends provide “social charters” for societies with long written histories,
such as the United States, as well as for small, nonliterate communities.
Sociologist Robert Bellah called attention to the “civil religion” of the United
States, carried on in civic observances and taught in public schools. George
Washington chopping down the cherry tree, Abe Lincoln walking miles to
return a penny, Indian chief Tecumseh refusing to sit on a chair instead of on
Mother Earth, are myths that “charter” admirable behavior for American chil
dren. These popular myths are invented; facts are not allowed to spoil the
preaching. The star-spangled banner that Francis Scott Key saw in the dawn’s
early light was a new flag just run up, but American civil religion uses the myth
that the old one was still there to “charter” the virtue of persistence against the
country’s enemies. American civil religion glorifies the United States as the
“redeemer nation” chosen by God to lead the world to salvation. The
Thanksgiving holiday teaches Americans to be grateful for living in God’s coun
try. Fourth-of-July celebrations intertwine war with the founding of the coun
try, “chartering” the wars of aggression that won the United States its territory
from sea to shining sea. Christmas exalts shopping, “chartering” America’s cap
italist economy by associating it with a blessed birth at the turning of the year
from darkness toward spring. Though the Deist founders of the United States
took pains to write a clause separating churches from the government, they
Ikoma, Tanzania (Africa), 1928. Men dance in military formation behind their flag,
carrying spears, ritually “charteringv their role as defenders of the nation.
could not forestall American society developing a set of symbols, myths, and rit
uals inculcating a faith in our country. The human urge to cooperate, part of
our nature as gregarious mammals, is expressed as shared faith.
Though people within a community are taught moral imperatives to coop
erate, it’s only too common that at the same time they’re taught to oppose
other communities. Ugly propaganda in wartime is familiar; racist stereotyping
can be as ugly, directed at keeping disadvantaged groups in low status, easily
exploited by upper status groups who are taught to avoid familiarity with the
disadvantaged. Scapegoating is common, blaming an outsider for the ills o f the
community. Anthropological studies of villages, in Europe and elsewhere,
where the members must cooperate to manage resources, show that frequently
an outsider such as a schoolteacher, government agent, or the local wealthy
landowner, is blamed for mismanaging when an enterprise fails. This allows the
villagers to vent their disappointment while remaining on good terms with one
another. On a larger scale, a nation can blame its ills on another country’s sup
posed schemes against it.
French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss believes that the human mind
operates by setting up oppositions, then figuring out how to resolve them.
Levi-Strauss was associated during the 1940s with a group developing comput
ers. They succeeded in programing computers by using a binary code (hi-: “2 ,”:
Natal, South Africa, 1928. Before a chorus of men and women, Zulu young women dance
with a male leader wearing the leopard-skin sash of office. The unity of the community, its
valuation of both its mature leaders and its lively young women, is ritually achartered* in
this dance.
on/off is a binary, or two-part, set). He reasoned that if computers can work

with binary coding and apparendy simulate human thinking, then it may be
that humans think through paired concepts in the process termed the dialectic
o f thesis, antithesis, and finally jywthesis. Levi-Strauss analyzed the structure of
hundreds of myths, beginning with many he had heard from Brazilian Indians
with whom he had lived in the 1930s, and concluded that myths are usually set
in the form of a dialectic: A situation such as a Garden of Eden paradise is
described, then its antithesis—a place of dirt, suffering, and evil—is disclosed,
finally the myth resolves the opposition by indicating a middle ground or syn
thesis, for example promising eternal life in heaven after death on earth. Thus,
according to Levi-Strauss, people are able to accept suffering by reasoning out
both its causes and possible alleviation.
Malinowski’s concept o f myths and legends as social charters and Levi-
Strauss’s focus on the philosophical content of myths are closely related.
Whether purportedly history, or “once upon a time,” myths begin with condi
tions quite different from what people are now experiencing. Then an event is
retold that disrupts the conditions, allowing a new situation to develop, the pre-
Bali, 1930. In contrast to the Zulu community pictured on previous page, Bali achar
tered” its young women to be demure, singing hymns from a still posture in their temple
enclosure.
sent. Do women suffer in childbirth? That’s because Eve displeased God, who
caused her daughters to inherit her sin. Are women forbidden to participate in
secret rituals where men commune with the Almighty? That’s because once
upon a time, women had owned the sacred instruments and hidden them from
men, who stole them and now must guard them lest women selfishly try to
monopolize them again. Are men forbidden to unwrap the holy objects kept in
containers out of the way of daily life? That’s because the holy objects were
entrusted once upon a time to a worthy woman by a powerful spirit taking pity
upon a wretched people. And so on; myths give a more or less plausible expla
nation for how things came to be, and that’s how it is and ought to be.
Must things always be so? Reforms can change conditions. Anthony F. C.
Wallace’s model of revitalization (page 159, Regulating Societies) shows how a
reformer can believe he or she has been commissioned by God to do away with
evil practices and institute or reinforce good ones. The prophet’s revelation
becomes the chartering myth for the reform. God doesn’t have to come into
it: Benjamin Franklin carefully made the Declaration of Independence say
that human rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are “self-
evident.” American civil religion mythologizes the Founding Fathers (noble
George Washington, brilliant Thomas Jefferson, wise Benjamin Franklin), sets

them against “mad King George,” and out o f that antithesis brings forth
American democracy carrying the ancient spirit of the Magna Carta to fruition
in the New World. If you think this is straightforward history, not myth, try
reading the actual records o f the 1787 Constitutional Convention.
Underlying the propositions that myth acts as social charter and explains the
conditions o f human life is the basic postulate that religions have social func
tion. This was claimed early in the twentieth century by the French social
Roman Catholic Massfor college students. To build and symbolize the cooperating social
group of students of this college, the priest has the young people face one another in a circle;
to make them feel comfortable with the churchy he has them attend in casual clothes and sit
at ease on the floor. He maintains his superior position as leader and instructor by stand
ing above them, separated, on a raised platform, wearing heavy formal vestments of rich
cloth. The formal authority of the church is symbolized by the Bible open in front of him—
note that only he can see this sacred book. Emile Durkheim would have understood how the
priest seeks to build the congregation into a community; Van Gennep would note how the
role of ordained leader is marked off from the role of layperson by empty space. Ralph
Linton might suggest that the small statue of a praying saint, on the wall middle left,
functions as a “totem”for the congregation-community, identifying and symbolizing its
common activity.
Credit: Gary G. Dineen, Marquette University
anthropologist Emile Durkheim. The practice of a religion, he emphasized, is a

means of maintaining the cooperating social group. Coming together to wor
ship, members of the group can see who belongs, whom they are morally
obliged to help, and from whom they can expect help. Worshipping together,
the members express in their common prayers their mutual desire for prosper
ity, health, and goodwill. Durkheim suggested that social groups create a visi
ble identifying symbol in the form of a founding ancestor or a “totem.” George
Washington, the father of our country, pictured on our most often used cur
rency, is such a founding ancestor and symbol for the United States. The Active
kin relationship, Washington as “father,” symbolizes the familylike mutual sup
port that citizens should give one another. “Totems” are nonhuman symbols of
the social group bound together in religious worship. (The word “totem” is
from the Ojibwe dodem, meaning a spirit partner or protector.) Generally, the
totem embodies qualities admired by the social group. The United States uses
the bald eagle as its totem, seeing itself as soaring highest, proud, powerful, and
fierce. Although Durkheim had thought, based on his read
ings, that “primitive” societies believed their totems were Ralph Linton, American anthro
gods, a half-century later Levi-Strauss, sensitized by actual pologist, pointed out that team
fieldwork experience, emphasized that the totem creature is mascots and advertising sym
bols such as the Campbell’s
seen as connected with the members of the group, not itself
Soup Kids or Betty Crocker, func
the object o f worship. Symbolizing a cooperating group by a tion like totems to communicate
single creature communicates the unity of the group. an appealing identity.
At the same time, early in the twentieth century, that
Durkheim focused on the congregation as a social group, a Belgian social
anthropologist, Arnold Van Gennep, analyzed individuals’ places in social
groups. Van Gennep wrote of rites de passage, rituals o f passing from one
social status to another. He identified three fundamental
changes in a person’s social status: from nonexistence to Every society recognizes 3 basic
being a person, marked by a ritual bringing a baby into the social transitions, marked by
rites of passage:
social group; from childhood to responsible adulthood; and
from living to deceased member of the social group, marked • birth, from nonbeing to social
person
by a funeral ritual. This focus emphasizes the dominance of
- maturity, from child to respon
social roles and statuses over individual lives, and the criti sible adult
cal importance of the social group’s recognition of its mem • death, from society member to
bers and their roles. nonmember.
Particular rites of passage vary from society to society.
“Birth” rites can be held for a newborn baby, or postponed for a year or more
if infant mortality is high and a baby’s chance o f survival not good. When a
birth ritual is held, the child is given a name so it can be addressed and referred
to in its social roles. Often, as in Judaism and Christianity, the birth ritual also
brings the child (or convert) into its social group’s religious congregation.
Adults adopted into a society, or newly into a church, are said to be “born
into” their new group through a ritual of incorporation very similar to the
birth ritual for babies. When a child becomes sexually mature, able to become
a parent, he or she usually passes through a ritual marking a new social role of
Angola, a village primary school, 1930. School classesfunction as age-sets, their members
passing through a series ofgrades that function as a prolonged rite of passage.
responsible adulthood. Since the real passage is to adulthood, not merely sex
ual capacity, the “puberty” ritual may be held for youngsters just barely begin
ning puberty or for young adults, depending upon when the society will be
giving them adult roles. In our society, we mask puberty rituals as “gradua
tions,” asking for completion o f schooling before adult responsibilities are
undertaken. This has created much confusion as American society encourages
teenagers to seek sexual relationships but denies them jobs that will support a
family. Weddings are another version of puberty ritual, solemnly yet joyously
marking a young couple’s entry into full adult roles. The final rite o f passage
is the funeral marking a person’s removal from living activity in the social
group. American society often marks also the passage from wage-earning to
retirement, a stage of physical capability without full adult social responsibili
ties that balances the similar, earlier stage o f adolescence. Because American
society stresses a finely detailed series o f social roles through life, Americans
mark their birthdays every year as a rite o f passage.
One final aspect of the anthropological study of religions is

the contrast frequendy made between shaman and priest. sham an: feels a call to practice
Since small societies don’t maintain formal seminaries for spiritual leadership and healing.
priest: is formally trained to reli
training priests, it was assumed that their religious practi
gious leadership by an organized
tioners don’t receive training but are simply inspired by a call group of recognized practitioners.
to a spiritual vocation. Fieldwork in such societies reveals that (In actuality, shamans are
people who feel such a call then seek out an experienced trained and priests usually feel
practitioner to train them by apprenticeship. Only after years a call.)
of close association, learning rituals, and gradually assuming
leadership, does the novice begin practice. Most societies combine psychologi
cal therapy with physical healing, though perhaps dividing practitioners much
like western societies do, into full-time, highly respected doctors and priests,
and part-time healers who receive less lengthy training. (Women’s child-care
responsibilities may make it difficult for younger women to apprentice to doc
tors, channeling women into part-time herbalist and therapist roles. This prac
tical conflict may be legitimized by a myth that women’s reproductive power
conflicts with “male” healing or spiritual leadership power.)
In urban states, there is likely to be a stronger contrast between shamans
and priests. States, like smaller societies, claim transcendental origin or blessing
and employ theologians to teach rulers and populace their God-given roles.
Even the United States with its Constitutional separation of church and state
indirectly supports theologians by exempting churches from taxes. Recognized
priests are trained to read and interpret a written text believed to be divinely
revealed for human guidance. This holy book is the core of what American
anthropologist Robert Redfield, in the mid-twentieth century, termed a Great
Tradition. Training to read separated the elite class, the leaders, from ordinary
people who remained uneducated. Those ordinary, “ignorant” people found
their own spiritual revelations in local prophets and shamans, members of their
communities who covertly challenged the elite priests’ domination. Sometimes,
as with the Shawnee Indian brothers Tecumseh and Tenkswatawa at the begin
ning of the nineteenth century, the local prophet ended up leading a political
battle. Sometimes, as Anthony Wallace described for the Iroquois, the prophet
leads a revitalizing reform. Generally, the officially unrecognized village healers
and ritual leaders maintain ethnic cultural traditions— Redfield’s Little
Traditions—outside official state culture. Sharing such a Little Tradition rein
forces community cooperation and may materially aid the members of the
group attempting to survive in the face of heavy taxes and restricted economic
opportunities.
Poverty may keep whole communities precariously near malnutrition, pro
ducing occasional convulsions and mental dissociation in the least well fed, and
Little Traditions may label such fits to be occasions when a spirit takes posses
sion of the sufferer. “Spirit possession” is more dignified than “having a fit,”
BLESSING OF THE BOCK BEER.

March 19, 1993 (St. Joseph’s Day)
St. Casimir Roman Catholic Church, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
In ccFirst Fruits” ceremonies, a community led by their priest offers thanks for harvests.
First-fruits ceremonies bond the members of the community and communicate the eco
nomic importance of the selected food to the community. Here, in a neighborhood of mostly
young adults, people gather in their parish church and their priest formally blesses the
product of a small local brewery.
and usually calls for gifts o f food to the spirit, thereby aiding the possessed per
son’s nutrition and restoring health, at least for a while. Involuntarily being
“possessed” by a spirit is farily common in many regions of chronic malnour-
ishment, where the sufferers gather into congregations ritually celebrating their
relationship with spirits and counseling one another, an important function of
religious groups. This general correlation between institutionalized spirit pos
session “cults” (i.e., congregations) and chronic malnourishment, particularly
of lower-class men or of women (whose nutrition needs differ from men’s, and
are less likely to be well fulfilled), illustrates the social function of religion
through reducing anxiety by counseling and good fellowship, and possibly ame
liorating adverse social conditions.
Possession is usually distinguished from trance, a condition deliberately pro-
duced by hallucinogens or sensory-manipulation techniques (rhythmic drum

ming, movement, darkness, intense concentration). The distinction is blurred
by practices: People who have suffered possession may induce the mental disso
ciation by intently concentrating on music and movement, inviting their spirit
to return to them so they can ritually dance with their fellow worshippers. It is
useful to note that trance is much more common than belief in spirit possession.
Practicing trance does not correlate with physical conditions, such as malnour-
ishment, that might induce involuntary dissociation. Trance may reduce anxiety
through relaxation. Societies that believe people’s souls can travel independently
of their bodies, for example many of the indigenous nations of Siberia, may ask
shamans to concentrate—which has been often observed—and send their souls
out flying to seek information or ordinary people’s lost and wandering souls, to
return them and thus restore bodily wholeness and health. Being told one’s
wandering soul has been restored and all will be well does usually improve
believers’ hormonal capability to regain health, sometimes resulting in cures—
this too has been observed—but whether a shaman’s soul has flown out and
retrieved another’s is not within a scientist’s capacity to observe. Anthropolo
gists as scientists record what they observe, how people in a society explain the
occurrence, and—from our knowledge of biology, social behavior, and so on—
suggest actual functions of the observed behavior.
In American communities, a great number of religious traditions express ethnic

origins and class and regional cultures. Some, such as the Old Order Amish,
physically separate their villages from the dominant society. Others may popu
late districts, for example, Irish Catholic neighborhoods in Boston or Southern
Baptist regions in Oklahoma. Still others, such as many Episcopalian and, at the
other end of the social ranking, Black storefront churches, mark class affilia
tions. Because public schools pass on American mainstream beliefs and civil reli
gion, adherents of some religions may school their children separately, not only
Roman Catholics but also Fundamentalist Christians who find public education
accepts principles at variance with their doctrines. The diversity of religions
practiced in American cities, almost always each with its regular meetings of a
congregation-community, offers anthropologists interesting studies of the
interplay between traditions of worldview and rituals, politically charged “eth
nic” or “racial” groupings, social class symbols, and personal quests for satisfy
ing ways of being.
America is interesting, too, for its efforts to distinguish and regulate spiri
tual and therapeutic practitioners. In line with the view of the natural world as
a complex, fine-tuned, clock mechanism, American culture has assumed the
human body is best understood as a physical mechanism. Only recently have the
effects of emotions upon hormones (and vice versa) been seriously studied.
Other societies have trained their doctors to administer plant pharmaceuticals
(“herb remedies”) and/or manipulate sensory stimuli, as in hypnosis, to affect
patients’ emotional states. Shamans’ training often includes learning sleight-of-

hand magic tricks to impress patients (and their friends and relatives, attending)
with the practitioner’s great power, an impression that raises the patient’s con
fidence in the cure, reducing depression and stimulating beneficial hormones.
Both shamans and local priests usually hear confessions, offer advice on allaying
anxiety, and monitor local gossip to be able to effectively counsel clients in their
particular social predicaments. On some American Indian reservations, includ
ing the Navajo Nation, the realization of the value of indigenous therapies has
led to native doctors— “medicine men”—attending patients alongside a
licensed M.D. Among Euro-Americans, faith healers offer treatment for afflic
tions not amenable to standard medical practice. Some faith healers are
unscrupulous frauds, but a great many are sincere carriers of Little Traditions
overlooked by the dominant society. The line between faith healing and “legit
imate religion” in America is thin when ordained ministers offer avowedly
blessed Bibles or holy oil. For an anthropologist, trying to draw a line between
spiritual and physical ministering would negate the holistic perspective from
which we work. Humans’ naturally selected-for need for social community cre
ates a role for leaders who bind people into a supportive cooperating group,
placed beyond casual manipulation by claimed spiritual empowerment.
Symbols are a major aspect of religions. Rituals incorporate symbols, both
openly as when a Christian priest holds up a crucifix or chalice during a service,
or a rabbi holds up the Torah, and also covertly as can be seen in the silk vest
ments of officiants, expensive beautiful clothing that silently communicates to
the congregation the high status of the servant of their deity. (If the servant of
the deity is of such high status, if the deity can command a person of such sta
tus, how very high indeed is the status of the deity!) Conversely, religious
groups who do not ornament their meeting places and officiants communicate
the importance they place on plain moral action as contrasted with rich show.
American civil religion has its places where mainstream American values are
symbolically communicated—in the department store and public lawn displays
at Christmas, showing people coming together giving gifts as symbols of social
bonds; in the fireworks at Fourth of July, symbolizing the blazing heavenly glory
of our nation.
Among the activities associated with religions are the creative arts. Around
the world, societies provide arenas for performance and display of the arts
within religious ceremonies. Many societies encourage craftsworkers to make
objects as beautiful as they can, to please deities or express humans’ joy in the
gift of life. If religions through their myths provide social charters, through
their ritual actions and objects they provide media to express, via tangible sym
bols, the worldview and principles of that social charter.
Symbols associated with particular religions—such as the turban worn by
Sikh men, the head covering worn by many Muslim women, the necklace with
a cross, Star of David, or crescent communicating the wearer is Christian,
Jewish, or Muslim—identify at a glance the person’s membership in one or
another of groups playing major roles in world affairs. Sadly, symbols can elicit
Darjeeling, India, 1930. A refugee Tibetan lama holds up his prayer wheel and rosary as
he leads religious worship.
hate and killing, too, under social charters that prescribe the annihilation of
opposing groups. It is the functioning of religious affiliation in prescribing
codes of behavior, within and across social groups, that demonstrates that, from
an anthropological perspective, religions are among the means of regulating
societies.
Religion is the label we give to socially patterned behavior said to be prescribed

by spiritual beliefs— belief in powerful beings or force transcending the physical
world we live in. Anthropologists work with observed behavior (including
expressed beliefs), and have concluded that religions serve important social
functions: Worshipping together molds people into communities, facilitating
cooperation, and religious leaders and rituals may allay anxiety, helping people
to act with confidence. Myths explain how things came to be as they are, and
are, in Malinowski’s words, “social charters” describing and validating advo
cated social behavior. Rituals, because they are so highly patterned, strongly
impress symbols of prescribed social behavior on people’s consciousness; they
communicate values through several media (visual, aural, movement). Rites of

passage are rituals that mark major transitions in the lives of members of soci
eties: Birth or naming rituals mark the inclusion of a new person in the com
munity, puberty or marriage rituals (and in our society, graduations) mark the
change from childhood to adult responsibilities, and funerals mark the loss of a
person from their community.
RECOMMENDED READING
Malinowski, Bronislaw. Magic, Science and Religion. Prospect Heights II: Waveland
Press, 1954 (1 9 9 2 reprint). A collection o f his papers including the classic “Myth
in Primitive Psychology”— his discussion of “social charters”— of 1926.
Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology Series (Holt R inehart

W inston/Harcourt Brace, Fort Worth)
Herdt, Gilbert. The Samhia: Ritual and Gender in New Guinea. 1986. Herdt was inter
ested in the Sambia belief (superficially like that of the Greeks of Classical Athens)
that homosexual experience with older men is valuable for youths’ development; he
describes this as part of Sambia culture.
Hostetler, John A., and Gertrude Enders Huntington. The Hutterites in North America.
1996. Hutterites follow a radical, conservative, communal way o f life they believe
to be the only true Christianity; they also carry on highly successful modern agri
businesses in Montana and western Canada. Hostetler and Huntington have pub
lished a comparable study of the Amish, less radical than the Hutterites but similarly
devoted to a conservative devoutly Christian way of life: Amish Children: Education
in the Family, School, and Community, 2d ed., 1992.
Kehoe, Alice Beck. The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization. 1989. Well-known
American Indian religious movements— the Ghost Dance, Black Elk o f the Lakota
Sioux, Navaho peyotism, and Handsome Lake’s Iroquois religious reforms— pre
sented in the context of American Indian ethnohistory.
Kintz, Ellen. Life Under the Tropical Canopy: Tradition and Change Among the Tucatec
Maya. 1990. Kintz connects the present Maya in lowland eastern Mexico with their
preconquest ancestors.
Tonkinson, Robert. The Mardu Aborigines: Living the Dream in Australia’s Desert. 1991
(2d ed.). Australian aborigines are often assumed to be enmeshed in a nature reli
gion that interferes with modernization; Tonkinson’s study of Mardu religion
shows it as part of the community’s means of preserving their identity and heritage.
Vogt, Evon Z. The Zinacantecos of Mexico: A Modern Maya Way of Life. 1990 (2d ed.). The
highland Maya have meshed their preconquest religion with Catholicism, and order
their activities by a religious calendar. These Maya can be compared with the lowland
Maya of Kintz’s book, to see some effects of ecological and historical differences.
Weiner, Annette. The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace,
1988. Update of Malinowski’s classic work in the islands.
Case Study Reprinted by Waveland Press

Deng, Francis Mading. The Dinka of the Sudan. Prospect Heights, II: Waveland Press,
1986 (reprinted). Deng describes his own people, close neighbors of the famous
Nuer cattle-herders presented in classic studies by E. E. Evans-Pritchard.
C * H * A * P * T * E * R 13
I
Q*>4*€h*lA4>
4*: lc*liU*C U'l
0\J£A,
Anthropology aims, above all, to look at humans as we exist, not broken apart
into psychology, biology, political science, religious studies, and so on. Our true
history through millions of years o f primate species followed by the develop
ment of hominids made us what we are. What we humans share, our physical
needs and the societal relationships through which they are met, are far more
important than the variations in behavior and beliefs our large and complex, fer
tile brains have devised. Particularly in the twenty-first-century world o f instant
global communications and supranational economic and political structures, we
humans must look beyond the flags to the reality of one species spread through
out Planet Earth.
Let us look again over the holistic perspective we have emphasized in this
textbook. From this broad perspective, anthropologists integrate the biological
and social facets o f human experience. Anything less is an incomplete view of
human life. This book sketches the essential features of the contemporary
anthropological perspective. We have deliberately kept it concise and short so it
doesn’t compete for your time with the case studies that give you the real taste
of anthropology. This text is the foundation upon which you, through your
reading and your actual experience, build an understanding of yourself and your
fellow humans.
Like the playwright Moliere’s character who was delighted to discover he
was speaking prose, not just talking, you have been making ethnographic obser
vations all your life. Between this short text and the anthropological studies
you’ve read, you can take our generalizations on human life and test them
against your own life as a human. We are each a participant observer in what
ever society we find ourselves.
It is through reading the case studies and perhaps carrying out an ethno
217
218 I Chapter 13 Looking Us Over
graphic observation project yourself that you can understand the anthropologi
cal method. Simply defining the anthropological method as participant observa
tion followed by cross-cultural comparisons doesn’t convey the feel of
anthropology; reading actual descriptions by anthropologists brings out the
unusual situation of the anthropologist in the field, a person who, in the words
of American anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker, is both “stranger” and
“friend” in a community. Perhaps “stranger and friend” is another way of say
ing “participant observer,” one who participates in the everyday life of a com
munity while observing in a scientific manner. It’s not always a comfortable
dual role, doing your fair share of work or joking while simultaneously taking
mental note of what’s going on. Unlike the laboratory scientist or experimen
tal psychologist who can control a situation to allow for record-keeping,
anthropologists must sharpen their memory to recall accurately when there’s a
natural break permitting recording notes. We find the participant observer sit
uation keys us up, so we do in fact recall a great deal as we scribble madly back
in the car or house right after an event. Then later we transcribe our notes, add
some notions of possible significance or explanation, and cross-reference to
other sets of observations. Our precious field notebooks, small enough to be
inconspicuous, stained and soiled, are our data banks from which we build our
cross-cultural comparisons that highlight basic human needs and particular
societies’ adaptations.
Biological anthropologists, archaeologists, anthropological linguists, and
anthropologists who practice in business or agency settings share much of the
basic methodology of participant observation and cross-cultural comparison.
Many biological anthropologists spend time in communities to observe behav
ior that may affect biological characteristics of the population. Archaeologists
may use ethnographic participant observation to figure out how archaeological
features may have been constructed and used. Linguists depend upon record
ing dictated texts in order to get phonemes and syntax correctly, but amplify
these with notes on natural speech. Applied anthropologists of course must take
ethnographic notes of the work situations they are paid to analyze. Participant
observation, being simultaneously friend and stranger in real-life activities, is a
common thread in much of anthropology.
Some anthropologists glory in being eclectic, using whatever ideas or methods

seem to produce insights. Others insist that their preferred techniques or basic
postulates are more valid than others. It is often the case that a bright, ambi
tious, young anthropologist loudly trumpets his or her breakthrough, hoping
to be offered a job in a prestigious institution. Once well known for a much-
discussed idea, the innovator sometimes sticks to it, disregarding criticism. The
conviction of many anthropologists that there is no one sure way to knowl
edge—a by-product of understanding cultural relativism—tends to discourage
Chapter 13 Looking Us Over I 219
exclusive claims to truth, and it is perhaps more common in anthropology than

in other disciplines for a mature professional to become more eclectic and tol
erant. The history of anthropology has come to show a succession of
approaches and explanations that have proven inadequate or misguided,
prompting the thoughtful anthropologist to be modest in claiming great ideas.
Anthropology began, as a profession and scholarly discipline, in the 1840s,
the decade when the traditional landed aristocracies of Europe and colonial
America lost power to the expanding middle classes of business owners and pro
fessionals. As the Industrial Revolution of the early nineteenth century
shifted economic weight away from agricultural estates to manufacturing and
distribution, the disciplines of history and the natural sciences developed to
rationally answer the question of why societies were changing so noticeably.
Anthropology was added to these studies as the expansion of European and
American economic empires raised the question of why foreign societies are so
different. The old explanation that God made them so seemed too simplistic,
once social change was so publicly discussed. For nineteenth-century middle-
class scholars in Europe and America, the evident answer to the Big Question
was Evolutionary Progress, that God or Nature (or God working through
Nature, you can have both together) had set up the universe so that there
would be Progress from small and simple to large and complex. Fossils in the
geological record seemed to demonstrate this Progress through time. It was
also supposed that the growth of embryos from single-celled eggs to larger and
more complex organisms “recapitulated” (repeated) evolution of species.
Pioneer anthropologists— Daniel Wilson of Scodand and then Canada, Edward
Tylor of England, Lewis Henry Morgan in America— arranged “races” and cul
tures into series supposedly revealing the Evolutionary Progress of humanity.
As we have mentioned in earlier chapters, the next generation of anthro
pologists, at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth,
challenged the validity of these series that invariably put conquered nonwestern
nations lower than the then-dominant conquering nations. Franz Boas, deeply
impressed by the culture as well as survival technology of the Baffinland Inuit
he lived with for a year, and the French scholar Emile Durkheim could not
accept any scheme that separated nonwestern peoples from their own.
Durkheim lacked Boas’s gut experience of life in a nonwestern society, but he
realized that it was, in the end, a sterile exercise to study other societies and
then say they were fundamentally different. If the Big Question remains why
societies are changing so noticeably, we have to postulate (assume) that non
western peoples are basically similar to us, so that we can seek to explain both
change in western societies and differences between societies: these are two
aspects of the same Big Question. The bottom line, Durk
heim understood, is “What is human nature?” Durkheim, Boas’s search for the particular
like Boas, figured that the particular history of a society history of particular societies
has been termed historical par
attempting to survive (i.e., adapting) in its particular envi
ticularism.
ronment should explain much difference. Underneath the
differences are the characteristics of the human species, forcing us to live in

groups, to find edible food and shelter. Durkheim argued that the totem ani
mals respected by American Indian or Australian Aborigine communities were
like the Eagle representing the United States, Austria, Germany, or Mexico,
impressive creatures seen in the society’s habitus (not the word he used, but the
idea is there) and taken as symbol of the worth of the community. Projecting
this symbol of worth, he said, the society identifies and respects itself, calling up
its members’ efforts to cooperate in survival and success. Durkheim thus devel
oped a functional explanation for societal customs.
Malinowski, in the next generation, accepted Durkheim’s emphasis on
functional reasons for cultural behavior. Ele grouped activities by the function
they served, for example, providing food. Malinowski’s English colleague A. R.
Radcliffe-Brown was more interested in the structures one could describe
through grouping activities by function, thus casting his descriptions in what
came to be called structural-functionalist terms. (These “structures” might be
actual, such as a village divided into households, or a metaphor of analysis, such
as the role of the mother’s clan’s male members in a matrilineal society.)
Structural-functionalism was a popular mode of explanation in sociology as well
as anthropology during the middle twentieth century. A parallel intellectual
movement in France, structuralism, developed for anthropology by Claude
Levi-Strauss, emphasized the “mental” (that is, analytical, not visible) “struc
tures” of various cultures’ thinking. Levi-Strauss was fascinated by the struc
tures of myths, which he found similar over broad regions and believed
reflected the human brain’s tendency to conceptualize ideas in terms of oppo
sites (“If this is like this, then something else must be different”). Structuralism
is rooted in linguistics, using the linguists’ method of comparison and contrast
and seeing words functioning as “signs” for concepts.
In the 1960s, an extreme version of cultural ecology called cultural m ate
rialism became popular in America, although not so much elsewhere. This
mode of explanation claimed factors in the environment so powerfully affected
a society’s behavior that the analyst need only identify the one or few environ
mental factors in order to explain cultural values and customs. The most famous
effort to demonstrate cultural materialism was American anthropologist Marvin
Harris’s argument that the reason Hindus in India will not slaughter cattle is
that allowing the animals to roam as best they can maximizes the amount of
nutrition (milk) available to the greatest number of people over the long run.
Harris listed figures in support of his argument, but it remains controversial.
Harris’s teacher Leslie White and his fellow student the archaeologist Lewis
Binford helped develop the theory of cultural materialism, and Binford built it
into what he called the “New Archaeology” of the 1970s. Somehow, cultural
materialism got hooked into the nineteenth-century notion of one-directional
evolution. White insisted that the harnessing of energy was the basis of human
activity, the more energy a society harnessed the more evolved it was, and, well,
with White writing in the 1950s, that meant the United States of America, the
country with the most nuclear power, was the most evolved. This was not at all
compatible with the concept of cultural relativism, and in fact Leslie White
strongly disparaged the deceased Franz Boas.
As former colonies gained their independence and war-ravaged countries
rebuilt competitive economies, the United States could no longer rest confident
that it was the Biggest and Best, period! More and more anthropologists began
questioning the assumptions of one-directional evolution. More and more saw
it tends to be jingoistic, that is (as the Oxford Dictionary puts it), chosen by
“vulgar, blustering patriots.” Worse, to a serious scientist, one-directional evo
lution is bad science, contrary to our contemporary understanding of evolu
tionary biology. (We’ve insisted in this textbook that you’ve got to understand
evolutionary biology if you want to understand human behavior.) Anthropolo
gists engaged in “development” projects often saw that sensible sustainable
practices were rejected in favor of building huge dams, clearing forests, and
other very expensive plans profiting the owners of heavy machinery but destruc
tive to the local environment and its human communities. Maybe it is time to
look again at others’ ways of life, to realize that most of these societies, such as
the Inuit in the Arctic North, have learned over thousands of years how to live
without destroying their resources.
The whole question o f how cultures change has radically shifted from the
assumption o f “acculturation” discussed in the 1930s. The “ac-” of “accul
turation” meant change toward (from the Latin prefix ad-, “to”); change
toward modern western culture was considered inevitable, either because uni
directional evolution was believed to be true, or because most Westerners
believed everybody must want the “superior” artifacts and government of
western democracies. The obvious fact that conquered people in colonies saw
no democracy, only foreign agents acting like totalitarian dictators, was
glossed over—except by a courageous few anthropologists (for example,
Godfrey and Monica Hunter Wilson in South Africa, and their friend
Hortense Powdermaker) who might find themselves out o f a job once their
opinions became known. After World War II and its aftermath of political
independence for colonies, a greater number o f anthropologists realized soci
eties, and cultures, changed through a diversity of causes ranging from force
imposed by a ruler, through efforts to adjust production to meet changed
resource availability, labor demands, or markets, to ideological shifts perhaps
preached by a charismatic prophet (like Martin Luther King, Jr.). Most
important, no one factor seems sufficient to explain societal change: Political,
economic, and ideological “causes” interact. One illuminating case has been
the movement for independence in India, where the British-educated lawyer
Mohandas Gandhi rejected international style of dress and economic struc
ture, organized thousands of followers for nonviolent protests against armed
police, and seemed to have proved to the world the power of idealism, only
to be assassinated by a political rival. One lesson from India has been the
recognition of many subcultures within political nations, and the manner in
which “cultural heritage” is often manipulated (even invented!) to identify

political-economic factions. The complexities of cultural change defy any sim
plistic “laws” of development.
Most recently, a number of anthropologists have been directly criticizing
standard anthropological notions. The emphasis on kinship as dominant in
nonwestern societies has been shown to often be a preconception in the mind
of the anthropologist, contradicted by observations and the words of the mem
bers of the observed communities. One anthropologist recently looked at the
marginal notes of a nineteenth-century anthropologist who put down in his
field notebook the frequent comments of a man named Two Crows who liked
to hang around when the anthropologist was questioning elders of the com
munity. From the field notes, it is apparent that the nineteenth-century anthro
pologist asked leading questions and insisted this American Indian society had
to be organized according to Lewis Henry Morgan’s theory. The recent analy
sis carefully included the information volunteered by Two Crows and others,
and came up with a picture of a more dynamic, sophisticated society than
Morgan’s theory would allow.
Other anthropologists are attempting to rectify omissions stemming from
earlier anthropologists’ neglect of women and of lower social classes. (Annette
Weiner’s study of the Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea, discovering the many
activities that Bronislaw Malinowski, as a man, was never invited to witness, is
a striking example.) Another trend today is to be much more aware of how the
form of our presentation affects the readers’ understanding. Should anthropol
ogists tell their participant observation experiences as a story, with themselves
as the hero (brave or simple, as the case may appear)? Such a narrative form
engages the readers’ sympathy and promotes an understanding of cultural rela
tivism, but it obscures variant behavior in the community since it must be told
from one point of view. Or should the anthropologist appear detached, describ
ing all the variant behavior in a cold distant manner as if the people in the com
munity were so many prairie chickens. This may make it easier to develop
cross-cultural comparisons and arrive at a more general understanding of
human behavior, but at the expense of a humane feeling for others. Should an
archaeologist excavate, to add to the store of human knowledge of the past,
when the descendants of the inhabitants of a site object to disturbing their
ancestors’ home? Should a biological anthropologist study ancient bones when
people in the locality believe that shows disrespect to souls? Our world today
no longer lets the western anthropologist simply follow the flag of a conquer
ing power: Anthropologists, including the many who now come from non
western societies themselves, find their commitment to cultural relativism
demands they plan their research so as to clearly respect the communities in
which they wish to participate. It turns out that, after all, most of the best
anthropology in the past came from fieldworkers who did respect those to
whom they came as stranger and friend.
\Pc Q to /ic ,____________________________________________________
If you feel more comfortable with yourself, your family, and the people you
work with, if you can better see how you and your section of society live within
the character of our species, then the purpose of this book will be accomplished.
Anthropology is not a set of facts to be memorized. It is the overview of
the human species, the picture of us in our millions, through time and across
the planet. We are us, we are human, and we can live only as humans. That’s
why we anthropologists have asked for your time, to sharpen your understand
ing of our world and all ourselves. Our species’ survival depends upon an intel
ligent approach to live on earth.
RECOMMENDED READING
Powdermaker, Hortense. Stranger and Friend. Prospect Heights, 111: Waveland. 1966.
One of the first autobiographies of a field anthropologist, Powdermaker’s story tells of
her efforts to study Hollywood and the segregated communities of Mississippi in the
1930s, as well as a Pacific island and African laborers.
Looking at humans from the broad holistic perspective, anthropology connects
biological and social factors that act upon our lives. To see the ecology of
humans is to recognize how wide our gaze must be, taking in the environments,
resources, physical nature, histories, and faiths of our fellows around the globe.
The method of anthropologists is to be human, to live amongst other peo
ple, observe their habitat and neighbors, listen to them, and highlight the par
ticulars o f their culture by comparison with many others, the remnants of past
societies and even the behavior of other primates. Out of the comparisons
comes knowledge of the basic needs and capacities of our species.
Recognizing our common humanity and respecting the diversity of cultural
adaptations to challenges to survival are anthropology’s goals. You and your
classmates have this world to sustain, and to delight in.
Cy
acculturation —changing toward another cultural pattern.

Acheulian —style of stone tools associated with Homo erectus, better designed
and showing more skill in the making than Oldowan style tools,
actualism, principle o f —scientists match evidence from the past to similar
effects observed in the present, assuming processes similar to those of the
present operated in the past,
adapt —adjust to.
affines—persons related by marriage, in-laws,
allele—one form of a gene that has alternative forms,
approbation —approval.
arboreal—living in trees.
archaeology —study of what remains of human activities in the past,
artifact — anything made by humans, not a natural object or feature.
Australopithecus—earliest genus of hominids. Several species developed
through four million years, overlapping with early Homo around two mil
lion years ago.
bilateral—using both sides, for example accepting relatives of both mother and
father as equally “grandparent,” “uncle,” “aunt.”
bipedal—walks on two legs.
chromosome —long strands of DNA in the nucleus of cells; segments of chro
mosomes are called genes.
clan — a group of persons who believe themselves biologically related and who
control territory or property as a group,
code-switch —change from one dialect or behavior pattern to another, as when
bilingual people switch from the language they speak at home to the lan
guage they speak in school, or a person has an impersonal professional man
ner while at work but is warm, lively, and expressive after work.
225
226 I Glossary
consanguines — “blood” relatives, persons who are biologically related,

conspicuous consumption —ostentatious display of expensive goods, meant to
signal the consumer’s high social status,
cross-cultural comparison —basic method of anthropological analysis, com
paring human behavior in one society with that in another to determine
what is universally human and what varies by societies, in response to dif
ferent environments or historical events,
cultural relativism —understanding that human behavior and values are
affected by a society’s geographical situation and history,
culture — behavior that is learned through being a member o f a social group or
community; includes beliefs, values, language, everyday behavior (both
public and private), rituals, recreation,
culture area —a geographic region and the human societies within it. Societies
sharing a geographic area will be similar because they have the same
resources and climate to work with, plus they are in easy contact with one
another and may have been affected by the same historical events.
Danubians— farming societies spreading across Europe around 4500 B . C . They
represent the Neolithic in central and western Europe,
differential reproduction —organisms with bodies well adapted to survive,
remain healthy, and mate in the environment in which they live will likely
produce more offspring than others in their populations who are sickly,
deformed, or poor at mating. Over the generations, the well-adapted
organisms’ alleles will predominate as their offspring outnumber those of
the poorly adapted: the population will increasingly resemble the well
adapted.
dimorphism —two body shapes or sizes, usually referring to differences in body
size and shape between adult males and adult females (sexual dimorphism),
diurnal— active in the daytime.
eclectic—using whatever seems useful (rather than rigidly sticking to one
school o f thought or method),
ecological niche—a way of surviving in a particular environment. In any local
ity, there will be more than one ecological niche: animals in the locality eat
different foods, may be active at night or only in the day, may stay on the
ground or in trees, etc.
ecology —the interaction of organisms and their surroundings in an environ
ment. Cultural ecology focuses on a human society’s interactions with its
environment.
egalitarian —persons are considered equal to one another,
ethnocentrism —the conviction that one’s own society and culture is superior
to any other.
ethnography —recording observations of people in communities,
evolution —change over time. Biological evolution is change in populations of
organisms (plants or animals), due to changes in genes and chromosomes
which affect organisms’ survival and reproduction, and differential
reproduction.
Glossary I 227
gender—in linguistics, an obligatory grammatical category. Indo-European

languages such as English oblige speakers to identify males, females, or
nonsexed in order to match pronouns (he, she, it) to nouns. The term
“gender” has been extended to mean social roles and behavior expected of
people because they are male or female,
gene— a segment of chromosomes (DNA strands) inside cells. Each segment of
the long strands of DNA produces a biochemical effect on the organism in
which the cell lies.
gene pool—a population reproducing through mating: the individuals in the
population “pool” their genes as they mate and pass on genes to the next
generation.
genetic drift—when a portion o f a population becomes separated and no
longer draws on the larger gene pool of the parent population, the sepa
rated population will lack some alleles in the parental population and will
have a greater or lesser proportion of many alleles compared to the parental
population. The result may be divergence, new phenotypes and eventually
new species.
genotype—an organism’s alleles (forms of genes). Genotypes are hidden in the
cell nucleus, and because not all the alleles in a heterozygous individual may
have distinct visible effects, an observer cannot be sure of the genotype just
by seeing the phenotype (organism’s appearance),
gregarious— social, living with others of its kind.
habitus—interaction o f society and environment, forming the society’s world
view and metaphors as well as its economy,
heterozygous— an organism that received different alleles of a gene from its
parents is heterozygous for that gene,
holistic perspective—analyzing human behavior by taking into account a wide
range o f observations (data) including human biology, ecology, history, lin
guistics, societal values, beliefs.
Holocene—present geological period, which began 10,000 years ago.
hominid—bipedal primate, most recently evolved type o f primate (last five mil
lion years), including australopithecines and humans.
Homo— Homo, the biological genus of humans.
Homo habilis, earliest species o f humans.
Homo erectus, species o f human for most of human existence, over a million
years. Some anthropologists prefer not to label these fossils erectus, not
ing that they are not radically different from the succeeding Homo
sapiens.
Homo sapiens, present species of humans.
Homo sapiens neandertalensis, race of humans living in Europe and Western
Asia during later Pleistocene; some anthropologists consider these dis
tinct enough to be named a species, Homo neandertalensis.
homozygous—an organism that received the same allele of a gene from each
of its parents is homozygous for that gene.
228 I Glossary
hypothesize—making a supposition based on some evidence, which is to be

tested by obtaining more evidence,
informal economy—off-the-record economic activities such as direct exchange
of goods and services, helping relatives and friends, or holding yard sales,
kindred—persons considered related to one another because they are related to
a married couple.
kula—in the Massim Islands off New Guinea, exchange of valuable ornaments
made of shell. Men go on long canoe voyages to present prized ornaments
to leaders on other islands; the exchange of these heirloom ornaments
maintains political and economic alliances,
lineage—persons descended from one ancestor,
linguistics—study of languages.
mammal—warmblooded animal, the females carrying their fetus inside the
body and nourishing the infant with milk from mammary glands,
matrilineal—the mother’s line, referring to inheriting from the mother and/or
being considered belonging to the mother’s family line.
Mesolithic—period in the early Holocene when climate was similar to today
but people had not yet developed an agricultural economy.
Mesopotamia—present-day Iran and Iraq.
millennium—a thousand years (ten centuries). “The first millennium B . C . ”
would be the years 1000-1 B . C .
mode of discourse—customary form of discussion in a particular field such as
a science, humanities, business, or sport. In anthropology, it is customary
to illustrate a topic by describing an actual observed case (method of apt
illustration).
moiety—half of something, such as a community divided into two sections,
morpheme—meaningful combination of phonemes. (A few morphemes consist
of only one phoneme.) Morphemes are words.
Mousterian— style o f stone tools associated with Homo sapiens and
Neanderthals, often using carefully prepared stone cores to more efficiently
flake off artifacts,
mutation—change in the chemical structure of DNA in a gene,
myth—narrative of more or less supernatural beings and events.
Neolithic—term means “new stone” but refers to relatively recent period of
human prehistory when agriculture was developed,
nocturnal—active at night.
Oldowan—style of stone tools found in the older layers of Olduvai Gorge,
Africa, likely to have been made by Homo habilis and Homo erectus.
omnivore— an animal that eats both plant foods and meat. Humans are omni
vores (we have some teeth adapted to chewing plant foods and some teeth
adapted to chewing meat),
palaver—discussion leading to a resolution of conflicts. Many societies reject
the adversary structure of western courts in favor of their procedures of
palaver and mediation.
Glossary I 229
Paleolithic—Old Stone Age: the cultural period lasting two million years,
known through stone tools that have resisted decay,
participant observer—one who observes behavior by joining with the persons
being observed, for example working with a farmer, mingling in a market,
sitting with worshippers, residing within a village, in order to fully observe
actual behavior.
patrilineal—the father’s line, referring to inheriting from the father and/or
being considered belonging to the father’s family line,
phenotype—an organism’s appearance.
phoneme—minimal sound or set of sounds used in a particular language to dis
tinguish meanings.
Pleistocene— geological epoch preceding the present, lasting one million years
and ending 10,000 years ago; called the Ice Age because several long peri
ods of increased cold occurred during the Pleistocene,
polymorphic—in a population, different alleles for certain genes are passed on
generation after generation, maintaining diversity in the population,
potlatch—Northwest Coast Indian (Chinook) term for a feast and gift-giving
meant to impress guests with the hosts’ importance and power,
practicing anthropologist—an anthropologist employed in a business, institu
tion, or project to apply anthropological methods and knowledge to busi
ness or societal needs,
primates— biological order including prosimians, monkeys, apes, and
hominids. Primates are characterized by grasping hands with flat nails,
stereoscopic vision, relatively large brains, one or few young at a birth and
relatively long juvenile stage, and teeth suited to a range of foods,
prosimians—earliest types of primates, surviving today only in a few tropical
jungle regions as lemurs, lorises, and tarsiers.
quadripedal—walks on four legs.
race—a population that maintains some distinctive gene alleles through repro
ductive isolation. Generally, races are separated by geographic barriers such
as seas, mountains, or deserts (geographic races). If reproductive isolation
continues for many generations, a race is likely to become so different from
ancestral populations that it is a new species. (This cannot happen with
modern humans because individuals frequently cross between our geo
graphic populations.)
reciprocity—exchange, giving back in return for a gift or assist,
reify—talking about abstract concepts as if they were actual things,
reproductive isolation—a population will not mate with any outside its own.
Reproductive isolation usually results in genetic drift. Isolation may be due
to geographic separation but can be due to other hindrances to mating,
revitalization— a social movement that gives participants a sense of renewed
life.
rite of passage— a ritual marking a change in social status, for example, from
childhood to adulthood or single to married.
230 I Glossary
ritual—strongly patterned action. The strict repetition of the pattern of action

communicates that the event is important.
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis—a language’s syntax affects its speakers’ thinking.
For example, Navajos more easily think of ongoing dynamic action without
an actor causing it, because their syntax does not require a noun subject in
every sentence, a verb without stated subject may be sufficient for a com
plete sentence. In contrast, English speakers must specify a noun subject
and so may expect always to identify actors causing action,
shaman—a religious practitioner who is trained to make contact with spirits on
behalf of ill and unfortunate members of a community,
simians—monkeys and apes, primates evolved after millions of years of
prosimian evolution,
social charter—Bronislaw Malinowski’s concept that myths and legends tell
how people ought to behave, providing a charter or organization blueprint,
species—actually or potentially breeding populations, differing in some gene
alleles from all other populations. Organisms can mate and produce fertile
offspring only with others of their own species,
status—a person’s (or group’s) standing in their community,
stratified— (1) in archaeology, layers of soil one above the other.
(2) in societies, social classes ranked higher or lower,
subsistence—means of staying alive. In a subsistence economy, workers pro
duce only the food, clothing, shelter, and artifacts necessary to support
families, not producing extra for a market,
symbiosis—two organisms living together in such a way that each assists the
other’s survival,
terrestrial—living on the ground.
totem—an animal exemplifying characteristics attributed to the human group
that honors it.
tribe— a political term denoting a less-complex nation fighting or conquered by
a more powerful nation-state. Members of the conquered nations generally
prefer to be recognized as nations,
world-system—international economic ties making each nation dependent, at
least partly, on other nations’ demand and supply,
worldview—a person’s or society’s beliefs about the universe and humankind,
zygote—new cell produced by union of sperm and egg cells.
f ^ A ^ t^ eA A ^ hJ- R ,i§ n e 4+ce4 _____________________________
Bernard, H. Russell, and Pertti J. Pelto. Technology and Social Change. Prospect Heights.
IL: Waveland, 1987.
Brettell, Caroline B., and Carolyn F. Sargent, eds. Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective.
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1997.
Bruhns, Karen Olsen. Ancient South America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994.
Chambers, Erve. Applied Anthropology: A Practical Guide. Prospect Heights, IL:
Waveland, 1985.
231
232 I To Follow Up Tour Interests: Further Readings
Fagan, Brian M. Ancient North America. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995.
People of the Farth: A n Introduction to World Prehistory. New York: Harper
Collins.
Godfrey, Laurie R. ed. Scientists Confront Creationists. New York: W. W. Norton, 1983.
Gubrium, Jaber F., and James A. Holstein. What is Family? Mountain View, CA:
Mayfield, 1990.
Jolly, Alison. The Evolution of Primate Behavior. 2d edition. New York: Macmillan, 1985.
Linden, Eugene. Apes, Men, and Language. Baltimore: Penguin, 1974.
McGrew, W. C. Chimpanzee Material Culture: Implications fo r H um an Evolution.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Miller, Barbara Diane, ed. Sex and Gender Hierarchies. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer
sity Press, 1993.
Netting, Robert M. Cultural Ecology. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1986.
Renfrew, Colin, and Paul Bahn. Archaeology: Theories, Methods, and Practice. New York:
Thames and Hudson, 1996.
Scheie, Linda, and David Freidel. A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient
Maya. New York: Morrow, 1990.
Spindler, George, ed. Education and Cultural Process: Anthropological Approaches.
Prospect Heights IL: Waveland, 1987.
Swann, Brian, ed. Coming to Light: Contemporary Translations of the Native Literatures
of North America. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Tannen, Deborah. Tou Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. New
York: William Morris, 1990.
Walker, Alan, and Pat Shipman. The Wisdom of the Bones: In Search of H um an Origins.
New York: Knopf, 1996.
Case Studies in Ethnography and Cultural Anthropology

Chance, Norman A. The Inupiat and Arctic Alaska: A n Ethnography of Development.
Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1990.
Chavez, Leo R. Shadowed Lives: Undocumented Immigrants in American Society. Fort
Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1992.
Deng, Francis Mading. The Dinka of the Sudan. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1986.
Dettwyler, Katherine A. Dancing Skeletons (Mali, Africa). Prospect Heights, IL:
Waveland, 1994.
Esman, Marjorie R. Henderson, Louisiana: Cultural Adaptation in a Cajun Community.
Frankenberg, Ronald. Village on the Border. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1990 (1 957).
Goldschmidt, Walter. The Sebei: A Study in Cultural Adaptation (Central Africa). Fort
Hallowell, A. Irving, and Jennifer S.H. Brown. The Ojibwa of Berens River, Manitoba:
Ethnography Into History. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1992.
Herdt, Gilbert. The Sambia: Ritual and Gender in New Guinea. Fort Worth: Harcourt
Brace, 1986.
Hostetler, John A., and Gertrude Enders Huntington. The Hutterites in North America.
Kehoe, Alice Beck. The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization. Fort Worth:
Harcourt Brace, 1989.
To Follow Up Tour Interests: Further Readings I 233
Keur, Dorothy, and John Y. Keur. The Deeply Rooted: A Study of a Drents Community in
the Netherlands. American Ethnological Society Monograph No. 2 5 , 1955.
Kuper, Hilda. The Swazi: A South African Kingdom. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1986.
Lee, Richard B. The Dobe J u / ’hoansi. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1994.
Lever, Janet. Soccer Madness: Brazil’s Passionfor the World’s Most Popular Sport. Prospect
Heights, IL: Waveland, 1995.
Parman, Susan. Scottish Crofters: A Historical Ethnography of a Celtic Village. Fort
Schaffer, Matt, and Christine Cooper. Mandinko: The Ethnography of a West African
Holy Land. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1987.
Tonkinson, Robert. The Mardu Aborigines: Living the Dream in Australia’s Desert. Fort
Turnbull, Colin. The Mbuti Pygmies: Change and Adaptation. Fort Worth: Harcourt
Brace, 1983.
Underhill, Ruth M. Papago Woman. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1979.
Vogt, Evon Z. The Zinacantecos of Mexico: A Modern Maya Way of Life. 2d ed. Fort
Weiner, Annette. The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace,
1988.
Williams, Melvin D. Community in a Black Pentecostal Church. Prospect Heights, IL:
Waveland, 1984.
Wong, Bernard. Chinatown: Economic Adaptation and Ethnic Identity of the Chinese.
Landm ark Anthropological Studies

Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1977.
Chappie, Eliot D. Culture and Biological Man., Fort Worth: Holt Rinehart Winston,
1970.
--------- Culture and Biological Man. Fort Worth: Holt Rinehart Winston, 1970.
Desmond, Adrian, and James Moore. Darwin. New York: Time Warner, 1991.
Fried, M orton H. The Evolution of Political Society. New York: Random House, 1967.
Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 1959.
Gould, Stephen Jay. Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 197 7 .
Mismeasure of Man; Time’s Arrow, and others, and collected essays beginning with
Ever Since Darwin.
Hall, Edward T. The Silent Language. New York: Doubleday, 1959.
Harrison, G. A., J. M. Tanner, D. R. Pilbeam, and P. T. Baker. 3d ed. Human Biology.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University o f
Chicago Press, 1980.
Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1966.
Lovejoy, Arthur O., and George Boas. Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity. Balti
more: Johns Hopkins University Press (1 9 9 7 reprint, first edition 1935).
Needham, Joseph et al. Science and Civilization in China. Multi-volume series.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 195 4 and continuing.
Powdermaker, Hortense. Stranger and Friend. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1966.
Wolf, Eric R. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University o f California
Press, 1982.
A 126-7, 133, 175, 190-1, 213, 215,
acculturation, 175, 221 220
Acheulian: artifacts, 91, 124; sites, 90; American Sign Language, 80-1, 85-6
photos, 93 ancestry: African, 66; biological, 72;
Acropolis, Greece, photos, 135 European, 66; See also kinship
Adams, John (British seaman), 70 Andes, 71, 103; See also Bolivia
adaptation, 16, 71-3, 107, 218, 224 Angola, Africa, 19, 177, 209
adoption, 192,194 animals: domesticated, 101-2; herd, 99,
adversarial systems, 187-8 101, 104
Africa, 52-6, 60, 62-3, 94, 104, 108, anthropoidea, 25, 39-44
111, 112, 140, 186 anthropological: economics, 145-8, 151,
African Americans, 18, 72, 120-21, 167; method, 5-7, 218; studies, 8
126 anthropologists: biological, 1, 6, 7, 9,
African(s), 67-8, 87, 88, 171, 175 218, 222; cultural, 1; forensic, 7, 33;
Age of Commerce, 87-8 medical, 9, 133; physical, 1;
agricultural: inventions, 101; practices, practicing, 2; social, 1
111-12; products, 16, 99, 181; anthropology: American, 18; applied,
societies, 105, 111-12 1-2; basic concepts of, 2-4; general,
agriculture, 26, 101-2, 103-7, 112, 218 7, 190; political, 188, 190; schools
Algonkian Indian, 124, 190 of, 218-22
alleles. See gene alleles antithesis, 171, 205
America, 61; Latin, 103, 109, 111; apes, 37, 39, 40, 41, 44, 46, 47, 50, 51,
North, 108, 111, 139; See also by 84, 97, 185; African, 48, 49, 55;
country name genera, 41, 58
American: civil religion, 203, 206, 213; approbation, 151, 153-4, 167, 170
kinship system, 193-194; society, 20, Arawak Indians, 69
154, 209,212 arboreal, 38, 45, 47, 49
American Indians, 10, 18, 61, 66, 67-8, archaelogists, 1, 6, 7, 9, 10, 75-7, 83-4,
72, 73, 87-8, 100, 102, 110, 218
235
236 I Index
archaelogy, 75-84, 90-94, 97-99, 138 bison, 103, 138-9

archaeological: data, 88, 185, excavation; Blackfoot Indians, 124, 138, 139, 146-7
photos, 78-82; grids, 76; photos, Bligh, Captain, 69-70
interpretation, 77, 83; mapping, 76; blood: antigens, 68-9, 73; relationships
photos, methods, 75-84; site(s), (consanguines), 191-3
75-7, 97, 111 Boas, Franz, 18, 19, 65, 71, 118, 121,
Archaeological Institute of America, 77 219,221
Archaeology magazine, 77 Bolivia, 116-17, 159, photos, 160-5
Ardener, Edwin and Shirley, 172 bonobos. See chimpanzee, pygmy
Arensberg, Conrad, 146 Book of Genesis, 24
art, 94, 98, 108 Boserup, Esther, 100
artifacts, 62, 75, 83-4, 86, 88, 89, 90, Botswana, 141
92, 111, 130, photos, 78-82 Boucher de Perthes, Jacques, 90
Ashanti, the, 192 Bourdieu, Pierre, 133, 138, 171, 200
Asia, 52, 55, 56, 61, 92, 94, 96, 102, Braidwood, Robert, 102
109, 112, 185, 186 brain: capacity, 171, 185; chimpanzee,
Asian(s), 67-8, 72, 73, 88 49; Homo erectus, 55, 57; human,
Aurignacian culture, 62-3, 94 2-3, 49; primate, 38, 53, 54
Australia, 52, 61, 71, 104, 111, 112 bricolage, 131
Australian aborigines, 72, 87, 104, 143, bricoleur, 131, 132
187-8, 215, 220 British Broadcasting Corporation,
Australoids, 67-8, 73 126-7
australopithecus, (australopithecines), Bronze Age, 88
49-55, 63, 86, 89-90; afarensis 50-1 Buffalo Commons, 140-41
authority, 172-3
Aztecs, 166
C
cacao, 156
B camas, 138
B.P. (before present), 95 Cameroons, Africa, 6, photos, 134-6
baboons, 41, 45, 46 Campo Santo, 184
BaLele, the, 153-4 Canada, 126
Bali, 18, 116, 158,206 case histories, 176, 178, 217-18
banana-fiber skirts, 153-4 catarrhini, 39
barley, 100 Caucasoids, 67-9, 73
Barotse, 188 cave paintings, 94, 101
Basarwa, 141-2, 143 cercopithecids, 41
bats, 26, 37, 46 Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, 66
beans, 103, 111 chiefs, 179, 181, 185, 195
behavior: culturally patterned, 3, 220 Childe, V. Gordon, 77, 99, 106, 107-8,
Bellah, Robert, 203 112
Bernstein, Basil, 125 chili peppers, 103
Bible, the, 188,200, 201,213 chimpanzee, 41, 44, 46, 48, 53, 55,
bilateral system, 192, 194, 195 84-6, 89, 113; pygmy, 41, 42,
binary code, 204-5 46, 49
Binford, Lewis, 220 China, 103, 108, 109, 110, 133, 185,
biology, 27, 217; evolutionary, 27, 29 187, 195, 197; history of, 133
bipedal, 49, 51, 53, 57, 63 Chomsky, Noam, 120
Index I 237
Christian, Fletcher, 70 D
Christianity, 110, 2 0 8 , 2 1 3 , 2 15 Dalton, George, 146
chromosomes, 2 9 , 3 0 -2 , 34; crossing Danubians, 102
over, 33; structural changes in, 33, Dart, Raymond, 86
68, 69 Darwin, Charles, 2 8 , 2 9 , 34, 88. See also
Civil War (U .S.), 6 7 , 171, 190 natural selection; descent with modi
civilized: definition of, 1 5 -1 6 fication, 2 9 ; On the Origin of the
clans, 1 9 4 -6 , 22 0 Species, 2 7 , 59
Clark, Gracia, 148 Darwin, Erasmus, 2 6 -7 , 28
class: biological, 2 5 ; conflict, 148; data, 2 7 , 76
leisured, 1 8 1 -2 ; social, 6 5 , 106, de Saussure, Ferdinand, 124
1 2 6 -7 , 181, 182, 186, 2 1 2 , 2 2 2 ; Declaration o f Independence, 2 0 6
stratified society, 1 0 8 -9 , 112, 1 8 1 -3 , Deity, the, 2 0 0 -1
186; system, 174 democracy, 187, 196, 2 0 7
classification, 89; biological, 4 1 ; of demographics, 137
organisms, 2 6 ; scheme, 34; systems, Dene Indians, 16, 159
111 Deng, Francis Mading, 141
codes of behavior, 170, 2 1 4 dentalium shells, 156
colobus monkeys, 4 1 , 4 7 dialectic, 171, 2 05
colonization, 6 1 , 8 7 , 108, 139, 190; dialects, 119, 1 2 5 ; and class and gender,
European, 2 4 , 139 126, 172
colugos, 37 Diderot, 2 4 -5
communication, 1 1 5 -2 7 Dinka, the, 141, 143
communitas, 173 discourse: mode of, 4 -5
Congo, 16, 107, 133 diseases, effects of, 6 1 , 6 9 , 185
contour mapping, 9 7 , photos, 7 8 -8 2 distribution, of goods, 130, 148, 166
cowrie shells, 157 diurnal, 23
cranium, 51, 58, 59 DNA (deoxribonucleic acid), 30, 33, 34,
Cree Indians, 138, 158; James Bay, 158 52, 58
Cro-Magnon. See Homo sapiens sapiens Dobe Ju/'hoansi, the, 1 4 1 -2 , 143, 151,
cross-cultural comparison, 6, 7, 2 0 , 75, 1 53, 155, 178
117, 137, 169, 171, 197, 2 1 7 -1 8 , domesticated plants and animals, 1 0 1 -0 2
222 domestication, 104
cultivation, 104, 106 Douglas, Mary, 153
cultural: differences, 19, 59, 87; diversity, Du Bois, W .E.B., 18
183; ecology, 1 2 9 -4 3 , 2 2 0 ; Durkeim, Emile, 2 0 7 -8 , 2 1 9 -2 0
evolution, 107, 2 2 2 ; materialism,
2 2 0 ; pattern, 125, 1 38, 155, 1 7 5 -6 ; E
relativism, 1 7 -2 0 , 2 1 8 -1 9 , 2 2 1 , Early Agricultural Stage, 99
2 2 2 ; stages of development, 8 8 , 107; early farming cultures, 100
tradition, 1, 8, 133, 139, 2 0 0 , 2 1 0 ecletic anthropoology, 218
culture resource management (CRM ), 9 ecological niche, 38, 4 1 , 4 5 , 4 7 , 53,
culture(s), 1, 6, 9, 58, 84, 1 38, 1 7 5 -6 , 186
2 1 2 ; as sets o f patterned behavior, ecology, 2 7 , 77, 1 3 1 -3 , 1 3 8 -4 3 , 2 2 4 ;
3 ,7 cultural, 1 2 9 -4 3 , 2 2 0
cuneiform, 1 1 0 -1 1 economics, 1 4 5 -6 7 ; formal, 1 4 5 -8 , 151;
customs, 3, 19, 138, 1 8 6 -8 , 192, 2 2 0 informal, 147, 148; systems, 190,
Czech Republic, 166 197
238 I Index
economy(ies): market, 156, 183; Fried, M orton, 1 7 8 -9 , 185, 1 8 8 -9 0

political, 188; redistributive, 181; function, Social, of objects, 115, 117
subsistence, 156
Efe, the, 16, 107, 112
G
egalitarian: relationships, 185; societies,
Gaiwiio, 175
178, 185
game theory, 1 7 7 -8
Egypt, 108, 109, 110, 111, 140, 166
Gardner, Allen and Beatrice, 8 5 -6
environment, 16, 19, 34, 39, 6 0 , 7 3 ,
Garifuna, 69
1 3 0 ^ 3 ,2 0 0 , 2 2 0 , 2 2 1 ,2 2 4
gene(s), 2 7 -8 , 3 0 -2 , 4 9 , 6 8 , 7 0 , 115,
Eskimo kinship system, 192
1 43; alleles, 3 0 -3 , 6 1 , 6 6 -8 , 7 0 , 7 3 ;
ethnic: affiliation, 125; groups, 72,
ancestral, 2 9 , 33; mutations, 2 4 , 34;
1 2 6 -7 ; heritage, 8
pool, 2 7 -8 , 33, 34, 69
ethnicity, 7 2 -3
genera, 4 1 , 4 5 , 4 7 , 53
ethnocentrism, 15, 19
Genesis, 201
ethnography, 5, 7, 141, 178, 2 18
genetic(s), 17, 2 7 , 3 0 -2 , 7 1 , 1 91, 197;
ethnohistory, 1 9 0 -9 1
delay in sexual maturity, 58;
Eurasia, 60, 6 2 , 6 3 , 9 4 , 9 9 , 111, 112,
diversity, 58, 6 9 ; drift, 32, 33, 34,
1 3 3 ,1 9 1
68 , 6 9 -7 0
Europe, 52, 56, 6 0 -1 , 8 7 , 9 4 , 102, 108,
genotype, 32, 33, 34
110, 186, 187; Western, 146, 175
genus, 2 5 , 4 5 ; Homo, 4 9 -6 4
European(s), 6 7 -8 , 69, 186; communities,
geologists, 37, 8 3 , 88
102, 178; invasions, 139; values,
Gandhi, Mohandas, 221
147
gibbon(s), 4 1 , 4 3 , 4 5 , 48
Evans-Pritchard, E .E ., 2 1 5 ; The Nuer,
gift(s): -giving, 147, 1 4 9 -5 0 ; as symbols
141
of; cooperation, 149
evolution, 2 4 -3 0 , 39, 50, 53, 2 2 1 ;
glaciation, 58, 6 0 ; Pleistocene, 59, 62
biological, 24, 27 ; Darwinian, 2 7 , 59;
glottal stop, 1 1 9 -2 0
human, 38, 53; organic, 2 4 , 2 7 -3 0 ;
Gluckman, Max, 188
parallel, 56, 68; theistic, 2 4 , 201
Goffman, Erving, 174
evolutionary: biology, 2 7 , 2 9 , 34, 87,
Goodall, Jane, 8 4 -6
221
gorilla(s), 4 1 , 4 2 , 4 4 , 4 6 , 4 8 , 53, 55,
8 5 -6 , 89
F gossip, 188, 213
family, 30, 197; extended, 191, 193, 195; grains, 100, 103, 111, 138
nuclear, 191, 194 Gravettian, 100
fire: use of, 55, 6 3 , 8 9 -9 1 , 9 7 Greece, 101, 1 08, 133, 137, 1 8 6 -7 , 194
flint, 9 2 , 167 Gros Ventres Indians, 138
form, 115, 117 groups, 172, 173, 188
fossils, 2 8 , 37, 39, 4 9 , 50, 55, 8 8 , 9 7 , Guatemala, 10
2 0 1 , 2 1 9 ; hominids, 52, 8 4 ; Homo,
5 2 -3 ; Neanderthalensis, 59; H
sapiens, 56 H.M.S. Bounty, 6 9 -7 0
Foster, Mary LeCron, 9 0 -9 1 , 1 2 3 -4 habitat, 2 , 4 1 , 131; Mediterranean,
Frankenberg, Ronald, 178 photos, 1 3 3 -7 ; tropical, photos,
Franklin, Benjamin, 8 4 , 8 7 , 196, 2 0 6 , 1 3 3 -7
207 habitus, 1 3 3 -4 1 , 143, 146, 170, 171,
Frazer, James G., 202 2 0 0 , 2 0 2 , 2 2 0 , photos, 1 3 3 -7
Index I 239
Halperin, Rhoda, 147-8 I

Handsome Lake: Good Message, 175 Ice Age, the, 90-96, 98-99
Harris, Marvin, 220 immigrants, 9, 71, 72, 139, 196
Hawai'i, 192-3 Inca, 110
Hegel, Georg, 171 India, 17, 103, 105, 108, 109, 110, 131,
heterozygous individuals, 30-3, 61, 166, 173, 203, 221
66 , 68 Indonesia, 18, 52, 55, photos, 133-7
Hidatsa Indians, 192 Industrial Revolution, 146, 219
hieroglyphics, 111 interbreeding, 56, 61
Higgs, Eric, 101, 104 interglacial period, 60, 61
Hindus, 220 International Phonetic Alphabet, 118
Hispanic(s), U.S. census category, interstadial period, 61
72, 73 Inuit, (Eskimo), 71, 107, 112, 158, 219,
history, 16, 145, 187, 190 221
Hobbes, Thomas, 142, 146, 170 Iran, 103
holistic perspective, 1, 7, 8, 11, 148, 213, Iron Age, the, 88
217, 224 Iroquois Indians, 175, 192, 196, 197-8,
Holocene, the, 58, 96, 99-100, 106, 210, 215; League of the Iroquois
111, 131-2 Councils, 195-6; matrilineal
hominids, 37, 41, 45, 49-63, 153; early, customs, 192, 193, 195-6
84-6, 89-99, 185; fossils, 54, 55, 84 Israel, 100
homozygous, 30, 68
Homo: erectus, 53-7, 54, 59, 90-91, 98;
genus, 49-64, 81-94; habilis, 53, J
Jakobson, Roman, 118-19
54, 55, 84, 90; early, populations,
Jamestown, 87-8
54; sapiens neanderthalensis, 58, 60,
Jefferson, Thomas, 200, 207
63, 91. See also Neanderthals;
jingoism, 221
Neanderthalensis; sapiens sapiens, 17,
58, 59-63, 67, 91, 94, 98, 107, Johnson, Mark, 122
137; sapiens, 54-6, 56-63, 91-2, 98 Judaism, 208, 213
Honduras, 69 Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, 24
Hopi, 122, 196
human(s), 2, 34, 37, 39, 40, 41, 44-5, K
48, 54, 58, 73, 217; anatomically Kalahari Desert, 141-2
modern, 62-3; archaic, 56, 61, 84; as Keur, Dorothy, 178
a species, 23-35; behavior, 4, 83, 84, kindred, 193, 194-5, 196
86, 200, 222; burial, 97-8, 208-09; Kingdom, 25; Animal, 27, 37;
communication, 115-27; evolution. Plant, 27
See evolution, human; gregarious, 2, kinship, 169, 191-8, 222; system, 174,
4; language. See language, human; 193, 194; terms, 191-2
populations. See populations, human; Kiriwinans, 203
rights, 15, 18, 19, 65,206; societies, knowledge, 14, 20; false, 20-1, 88
13,16,169-98 Koko, 85
hunter-gatherers, 89, 95, 99, 105-07, Koobi Fora site, East Africa, 53
111-12, 142, 156, 178 kula, 150, 153; voyages, 150
Hurston, Zora Neale, 18 Kurds, 91
hysteria in women, 171-2 Kwakiutl Indians, 149
240 I Index
L manifest destiny, 15, 190

Laetoli site, East Africa, 51 manufactured goods, 16, 1 30, 152,
Lake Turkana, Kenya, 53 219
Lakoff, George, 1 2 2 -4 Mardu relgion, 215
Lakota Sioux, 127, 137 market(s), 146, 1 56, 166, 167, 2 2 1 ;
language, 72, 115, 118, 122, 1 2 4 -5 , economies, 1 5 4 -6 7
172; and perception, 1 2 1 -4 ; and marmosets, 39, 4 0
power, 1 7 1 -2 ; and speaking, 1 2 4 -7 ; Marshall, Alan, 140
body, 115, 120, 121; human, 56, Marx, Karl, 130, 148
85, 9 0 -9 1 , 118; of authority, 172; material goods, 1 5 5 -6
structure of, 1 1 8 -2 4 ; teaching to matrilineal system, 1 9 2 -3 , 2 2 0
apes, 85, 113 Mauss, Marcel, 1 4 9 -5 0
langue, 1 2 4 -5 Maya, the, 143, 215
Law of Superposition, 7 6 -7 Mayr, Ernest, 2 7 , 28
law(s), 111, 170, 1 8 6 -8 ; Jim Crow, 187 Mbuti, the, 16, 107, 112, 133, 1 4 1 -2 ,
Leakey, Louis, 53, 84 , 90 151, 153, 155, 178
Leakey, Mary, 51, 84 Mead, Margaret, 73
Leakey, Richard, 53 meaning, 1 1 5 -1 7 , 119
Lee, Richard, 1 4 1 -2 medicine men, 213
lemurs, 37, 38, 4 0 , 4 7 medium of exchange, 1 5 6 -7
lentils, 100, 111 meiosis, 3 2 -3
Levalloisian flakes, 91 Melanesiano: See New Guinea, Trobriand
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 131, 2 0 4 -5 , 2 0 8 , Islands
220 Mendel, Johann Gregor, 67
lineages, 1 9 4 -5 Mendelian sorting, 6 7
linguists: anthropological, 1, 8, 9, Mesolithic, 8 8 , 9 6 , 102
1 1 8 - 2 7 ,2 1 8 ,2 2 0 Mesopotamia, 1 0 8 -1 2 , 166
Linne, Carl, 2 5 , 34, 37 metaphor, 1 2 2 -3 , 133, 177, 2 2 0
Linnean Classification System, 2 5 -6 , 30 Mexico, 103, 108, 109, 110, 190, 215
Linton, Ralph, 115, 117, 2 0 7 , 208 migration, 6 1 , 6 2 , 166; out-, 108
literacy, 1 2 5 -6 moieties, 194, 196
Locke, John: Treatises on Government, 87 Mongoloids, 6 7 -8 , 73
lorises, 37, 47 monkeys, 37, 39, 4 4 , 4 6 , 4 7 , 4 9 , 185;
Lovejoy, Arthur, 137, 151, 170 African, 4 0 ; Asian, 4 0 ; Catarrhine,
4 1 ; Platyrrhine, 41
M monogamy, 4 6 , 48
macaques, 4 1 , 42 moral standards, 1 8 -1 9
Madacasgar, 38 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 190, 191, 193,
Magdalenian, 9 3 , 94 2 0 2 , 2 1 9 , 2 2 2 ; Ancient Society, 88
maize, 103, 138 morpheme, 1 1 9 -2 0 , 121, 127
malaria, 3 1 -2 , 69 Mousterian culture, 6 3 , 9 1 , 9 3 , 98
Malinowski, Bronislav, 1 4 9 -5 0 , 174, multiculturalism, 7 -8
199, 2 0 2 -0 3 , 2 0 5 , 2 1 4 , 2 1 5 , 2 2 0 , Muslims, 213
2 2 2 ; Argonauts of the Western mutation, 3 2 -3 , 3 8 -9 , 50, 51, 56, 57,
Pacific, 202 6 8 , 73
mammals, 2, 2 5 -6 , 4 6 , 58, 8 4 -5 , 201 muted groups, 1 2 6 -7
mammoths, 9 5 -6 , 99 myth, 140, 2 0 0 , 2 0 3 -7 , 2 1 0 , 2 1 4 ,
Mandan Indians, 192 220
Index I 241
N Order, 2 5 , 30, 37; Primates, 37

Namibia, 141 Osteodontolokeratic culture, 81
nation-states, 183, 185
nations, 183, 2 2 1 ; American Indian, 88,
P
100, 127, 139, 183, 185, 1 9 0 -2 ,
Pacific Islanders, 6 8 , 7 2 , 7 3 , 8 8 , 104,
194; colonized, 190; non-western,
175; See also New Guinea, Trobriand
87, 190, 2 1 9 ; Western, 190, 203
Islands
natural: experiments, 7; philosophers,
palaver, 1 8 7 -8
2 0 1 ; relationships, 169; resources,
Paleo-Indians, 131
104, 106, 131
Paleolithic, the, 8 8 -9 9 , 101, 142, 185;
natural selection, 2 7 , 2 8 , 31, 34, 3 7 -9 ,
Lower, 9 0 -9 1 , 9 7 -8 , 124; Middle,
4 5 , 4 6 -7 , 4 9 , 56, 59, 6 8 -7 0 , 85,
6 2 , 9 1 - 4 , 9 8 ; Upper, 6 2 -3 , 9 2 -6 ,
89, 9 6 , 167, 185
9 8 , 1 0 0 -0 1 , 1 0 6 -7 , 110, 1 11, 124,
Navajo, 122, 2 1 3 , 215
131, 167, 185, 186, 190
Neanderthal(s), 6 2 -4 , 9 1 - 2 , 9 8 ;
Papago Indians, 170
population, 5 8 -6 1
parole, 1 2 4 -5
Neanderthalensis, 5 8 -6 0
Parsons, Talcott, 174
Near East, 52, 6 2 , 9 3 -4 , 100, 103, 109
participant observation, 10, 130, 148,
Needham, Joseph, 133
178, 185, 2 1 7 -1 8 , photos, 1 6 0 -5 ;
Negritos, 68
method of, 5
Negroids, 6 7 -8 , 73
patas monkeys, 4 1 , 42
Neolithic, 88, 9 6 , 9 9 -1 0 4 , 106, 112,
patrilineal system, 192, 1 9 4 -5
133, 185; colonizers, 102; cultures,
patterns of association, 7 6 , 84
9 9 , 101; farming, 1 0 1 -0 3 , 1 07, 131;
Patterson, Francine, 85
Revolution, 9 9 , 103, 106, 108,
Patwin Indians, 181
1 1 1 -1 2 ; villages, 100, 103
Pearl Mosque, India, 182
New Guinea, 111, 115, 150, 1 54, 185,
peas, 100, 111
2 2 2 , photos, 1 3 3 -7
peasants, 156, 166, 178
New Zealand, 189
perception, 1 2 1 -4 ; See also habitas,
Nez Perce Indians, 140
worldview
Nile floods, 1 4 0 -4 1
Peru, 103, 108, 109, 190
nocturnal, 38, 4 7
phenotype, 3 2 -3 , 34, 6 1 , 6 9 , 71
Norse, the, 1 9 0 -9 1
phone, 1 1 8 -2 0
Nuer, 1 4 1 -2 , 1 4 3 ,2 1 5
phoneme, 1 1 8 -2 0 , 121, 2 18
nutrition, 1, 2 3 , 4 5 , 53, 71
Phylum, 2 5 , 30
Pisa, Italy, photos, 1 3 3 -7
O Pitcairn Islanders, 6 9 -7 0
observation, 1 3 -1 4 platyrrhines, 39
obsidian, 1 0 0 -1 0 1 , 109 Pleistocene, 55, 9 4 -6 , 9 0 -1 0 1 , 111, 151;
offspring, 2 8 , 30; first and second gener late, 58, 6 2 , 9 4 , 107; Lower, 52;
ation, 6 7 ; nonfertile, 28 Middle, 52; races of hominids in the,
Ojibwe Indians, 110, 143, 2 0 8 ; homes, 5 8 -6 2 ; Upper, 52
photos, 1 3 3 -7 Pliocene, 96
Oldowan, 90 Polanyi, Karl, 146
Olduvai Gorge, 51, 53, 84, 8 6 , 9 0 , 98 political: institutions, 174; structures,
Omaha Indians, 192 170, 1 7 8 -8 6 , 194; systems, 1 8 6 -7 ,
omnivores, 2 3 , 4 1 , 4 6 , 4 7 , 53 191
orangutan(s), 4 1 , 4 4 , 4 5 , 4 8 , 85 polymorphic, 6 8 , 69
242 I Index
Polynesian(s), 67, 69-70, 109, 110 relationships: affinal, 191, 193, 195;
polytheism, 202 consanguineous, 191, 193, 195;
population(s), 28, 34, 39, 46, 54, 58, 70, cooperative, 178; egalitarian, 178
108; ancestral, 27, 37-8, 47, 49, 63; religion: and society, 170-1, 199-215;
human, 45, 52, 58, 64, 67-9, 71; and symbols, 212-14; civil, 203,
interbreeding, 29, 72; major 206; diversity of, 212; explanations
breeding, 68, 73; variability, 32-4 of, 200-2; functions of, 207-9, 211
potlatch, 149 religious: faith, 24, 200; organizations,
poverty, 116, 159-66, 181, 210 174; practioners, 210-12
Powdermaker, Hortense, 218, 221 reproduction, 23—4, 28, 194; primate,
Powell, Major John Wesley, 190 44-5
power, 171-5, 183, 197, 200 reproductive: isolation, 28-30, 54,
predators, 45, 80 67, 73
prehensile tails, 41 resources, 95-6, 99-104, 109, 145-6,
prehistory, 88-113 221,224
primates, 7, 37-48, 58, 217, 224; revitalization model, 175, 206, 210
anthropoid, 37, 49-50; arboreal, 45; rhesus monkeys, 41
early, 38; higher, 44; nonhuman, 7, Ridington, Robin, 159
84; reproduction of, 44-5, 58, 191; rights: civil, 173; human. See human
simiiform, 39; social behavior of, rights; residence, 192; self-
45-6; terrestial, 42, 45, 47 determination, 183
primatologists, 7 rites: of passage, 208-09, 215
primitive: definition of, 15-17 rites de passage, 208
principle: of actualism, 83; of scarcity, 151 ritual, 94, 173, 200, 202-3, 208, 213;
production, 130, 146, 148, 156, 181 birth, 208, 215; death, 208-9;
Prosimians, 37-9, 40, 46, 47 marriage, 209, 215; puberty, 209, 215
Pygmies, 16, 52, 68, 141 RNA (ribonucleic acid), 30
roles, 169-70, 179, 191-2, 194, 197,
Q 208-9
Qafzeh cave, Israel, 60 Roman Catholic Mass, 207
quinoa, 103 rural producers, 16, 102-5, 156
R S
race(s), 15, 65, 72-3, 219; biological, 58; Saami, the, 101
geographic, 68, 72, 73; of hominids, Sambia culture, 215
58-62 Sapir, Edward, 121
racist propaganda, 87 Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, the, 121-4
Radcliffe-Brown, A.R., 173, 220 Sarsi Indians, 138
radiocarbon dating, 77 Schrire, Carmel, 142
raffia cloth, 153-4 science, 34, 108, 130; characteristics of,
rank societies. See societies, rank 13-14,21
Rathje, William, 176 Scotland, 143
raw materials, 130, 145, 166 Sebei, the, 143
reciprocity, 148-51, 155, 167 self-determination: right of, 183
Red Elk, Cyrus, 140 Service, Elman, 185
Redfield, Robert, 210; Little Traditions, sexual: characteristics, 58; dimorphism,
210 42, 45-6, 47, 53; mating, 32-3, 34;
reification, 123, 176 maturity, 45, 57
Index I 243
shamans, 210, 212, 213 status and roles, 174, 179

Shanidar Cave, Iraq, 91-2, 100 stereotypes, 14-15, 20, 121, 124, 137,
Shawnee Indians, 210 204
siamang(s), 41, 44, 48 Stills, Jim, 148
Siberia, 61, 212 Stone Age, the, 86-7, 97
sickle-cell anemia, 31-2 strategies, 176-7
sign-language, 85-6 stratigraphy, 76-7, photos, 78-82
simians, 39, 47, 49 structural-functionalism, 174, 176-7,
slavery, 65-6, 69-70, 126, 156, 171, 220
172, 186-7 structuralism, 220
Smith, Adam, 130, 146, 148 structure(s), social, 173, 174, 220; and
Smith, W. Robertson, 202 antistructure, 173; categories of
Smithsonian Institute, 190, 192 political, 178-86; deep, 120; build
social: behavior, 176-7, 214; charters, ings, 95, 99, 102, photos, 134-6
203, 207, 213, 214; functions, 115, subsistence, 100-4, 155-67
151; groups, 2, 5, 95, 125, 145, subspecies, 25, 53, 58
153-4, 156, 167, 197, 208; Sudan, Africa, 141
institutions, 174-8; organizations, surplus, 156; production, 158, 179, 181
171-2, 185-6, 197; primate, 45-6; Sylvester Long, 66
relations, 146, 156, 217; roles, 121, symbiosis, 101-2, 104, 138-40
191-2, 197; status, 153, 167, 170, symbols, 94, 110, 115, 155, 173, 204,
208; transitions, 208; values, 153-4 207, 220; and religions, 212-14; use
socialization, 3-4, 137, 214 of, 84, 86, 182
societies: communication in, 115-27; syntax, 119-20, 122, 124, 126, 127, 218
cultural ecology of, 129-43; synthesis, in dialectic, 171, 205
economics of, 145-67; egalitarian,
178, 185, 190; human. See human T
societies; modern, 62, 186; ranked, Tahiti, 69-70
179-81, 185, 190; regulating, tarsiers, 37, 38, 40, 47, 49
169-98, 214; religion and, 199-215; technology, 16, 19, 62, 86, 88, 95, 99,
stratified, 181-3, 186, 197 112, 145, 159,219
South Africa, 142, 197 Tecumseh, 203, 210
South American Indians, 50, 69, 205 Tenkswatawa, 210
species, 25-6, 28, 29, 30, 34, 38, 41, 44, thesis, in dialectic, 171, 205
47, 53-4, 217, 220, 222, 224 Tibet, 71
speech, 118-19, 122-4 Tibetan lama, 214
Spencer, Herbert, 28 Tiwanaku agriculture, 170, 171, photos,
spirit possession, 210-12 insert between p. 160-6
spirituality, 24, 210, 214 Tohono 'O'odham Indians, 170
Sri Lanka, 157, 189 tool(s), 44, 53, 54, 58, 62-3, 97, 113;
St. Vincent Island, 69 Acheulian, 55, 93, 98; biface, 98;
Stage: of Agriculture, 87; of Barbarism, Magddenian, 88; making, 84-5;
82-3, 87-8; of Civilization, 88; of Mousterian, 93, 98; Oldowan, 55,
Savagery, 87-8 98; stone, 59, 83, 84, 86, 89,
stages: of human cultural history, 87-101 93-4, 98
Standard American English, 120, 121, Torah, the, 213
126 totem, 207-8, 220
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 192 trade, early, 101-2, 108, 112, 167
244 I Index
Trager, Lillian, 148 Washington, President George, 1 94, 2 0 3 ,

traits, biological, 70, 72 2 0 7 ,2 0 8
tree shrews, 37, 4 6 Washoe (chimpanzee), 85
Trobriand Islands, 1 4 9 -5 0 , 153, 185, Weiner, Annette, 2 2 2
2 0 2 -3 , 2 2 2 , photos, 1 3 3 -7 West Indies, 69
Turnbull, Colin, 1 4 1 -2 Western: economic systems, 1 4 5 -6 ;
Turner, Christy, 61 history, 137; societies, 137, 147;
Turner, Victor: The Ritual Process, 173 worldview, 170
Two Crows, 222 wheat, 1 0 0 -1 , 103, 139
Tylor, Edward, 2 0 2 , 2 1 9 White, Leslie, 84, 2 2 0 -1
Whorf, Benjamin, 1 2 1 -2
U Wilson, Daniel, 2 19
Underhill, Ruth, 170 Wilson, Godfrey and Monica Hunter,
United States, 2, 8, 7 2 , 126, 171, 175, 221
183, 190, 1 9 5 -6 , 2 0 8 , 2 1 0 , 2 2 0 , Wolf, Eric: Europe and the People Without
2 2 1 ; Founding Fathers, 2 0 6 -7 History, 190
urban: economics, 107, 166; revolution, Wolfram, Sybil, 148
1 0 4 -7 ; society, 1 0 7 -9 ; states, 99 world systems, 1 8 8 -9 1
use, defined, 115, 117 World War I, 174
World War II, 8, 174, 221
V worldview, 1 3 3 -9 , 143, 170, 197, 2 13
value(s), 2 0 , 110, 138, 1 5 1 -5 , 167, 2 2 0 ; writing, 108, 110, 124, 126; invention
assignment of, 155 of, 110
Van Gennep, Arnold, 2 0 7 -8
viruses, 2 7 , 69 Z
zero-sum games, 187
W Zhoukoudian cave, China, 5 5 -6
Wales, 1 2 6 -7 Zulu, 188
Wallace, Anthony F.C ., 1 7 5 -6 , 2 0 5 , 2 1 0 Zuni Indians, 196
Wallerstein, Immanuel, 188, 190 zygote, 30, 32, 34

Kehoe, Alice Beck - Humans - An Introduction To Four-Field Anthropology-Routledge (2013)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Kehoe, Alice Beck - Humans - An Introduction To Four-Field Anthropology-Routledge (2013)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Kehoe, Alice Beck - Humans - An Introduction To Four-Field Anthropology-Routledge (2013)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

This page intentionally left blank

Alice Beck Kehoe

Routledge is an imprint o f the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

C opyright © 1 9 9 8 by Alice B eck K ehoe

T h e text was set in Galliard

Library o f C ongress C atalo g ing-in-P u b licatio n D ata

Chapter 1 Anthropology—A General Introduction 1

Chapter 2 Knowing What We Know 13

Chapter 3 Humans as a Biological Species 23

Chapter 4 The Trimates 37

Chapter 5 Development of the Genus Homo 49

Chapter 6 Variation in Homo Sapiens 65

C hapter 8 Analyzing Societies: Communicating 115

C hapter 9 Analyzing Societies: (I.) Cultural Ecology 129

C hapter 1 0 Analyzing Societies: (II.) Economics 145

C hapter 11 Analyzing Societies: (III.) Regulating Societies 169

C hapter 12 Analyzing Societies: (IV.) Religion 199

C hapter 1 3 Conclusion: Looking Us Over 217

To Follow up Your Interest: Further Readings 231

Students introduced to a subject need a broad general outline of topics and

essence of contemporary American anthropology to a wide range of under­

Anthropology studies humans. Anthropology is unique in seeing humans

should be considered a fifth field, and they refer to themselves as practicing

Two statements will guide us through this book:

Humans are gregarious mammals adapted to a wide range of habitats

• Elumans are mammals. We are living organisms with backbones, brains,

• Humans are gregarious mammals. We live in groups with other peo­

• Humans are adapted to a wide range of habitats through a large and

Gregarious humans, hundreds together fo r Milwaukee Public Museum’s annual “fu n ra c e ”

When we observe certain patterns of behavior again and again in many

Mombasa, Kenya, 1928, annual public dance.

Cameroons, Africa, 1959. Anthropologist observing Bafut diviner.

basic needs—diverse cultures. Out of anthropologists’ cross-cultural compar­ cross-cultural

general cultural patterns of behavior persisting over a century or so. Although

Anything having to do with humans can be studied by anthropology, and

A popular image of an anthropologist is the dashing archaeologist slashing

Anthropologists aim to understand human nature and human societies. None

wombs. In our families, neighborhoods, playgrounds, schools, through televi­

O b itfid & l' t(>' P iiJ jh c p c L c p y __________________________________

well-supported knowledge. It is a false notion that the color of a person’s skin

Originally, “civilized” meant “being a citizen of a city.” Its modern sense

South India, 1930. Shaduf-

Rice paddies, Bali, 1930.

Franz Boas, the most influential leader of American anthropology in the

Angola, A frica, 1930.

To be human is to be a living creature—an organism, sharing Humans are unique animals

Contemporary biological science embeds the concept that variation in popula­

Linnean Classification System illustrated by the human species:

EGG-LAYING MAMMALS MARSUPIALS EUTHERIAN MAMMALS (young carried inside

CARNIVORES TREE SHREWS INSECTIV ORES

CETACEA PERIS SODACT YLSX ARTIODACTYLS PROSIMIANS

spider monkey, marmoset) CERCOpITHEcoiD S \

tions-long view that helps us comprehend changes appearing as some mates

I f You a re Interested in the Q uestion o f R eligiou s Issues R e la ted to Science

Pair of lemurs (Africa)

Pair of macaques (Tai­

Gibbon with her child (Asia)—gibbons are more

Gorilla (Africa)—Female gorilla with her infant in her

Chimpanzees, orangutans, and gibbons and siamangs are omnivores, feed­

essence of contemporary American anthropology to a wide range of under

• Humans are gregarious mammals. We live in groups with other peo

basic needs—diverse cultures. Out of anthropologists’ cross-cultural compar cross-cultural

wombs. In our families, neighborhoods, playgrounds, schools, through televi

Contemporary biological science embeds the concept that variation in popula

Pair of macaques (Tai

Chimpanzees, orangutans, and gibbons and siamangs are omnivores, feed

behavior. Behavior itself is ephemeral, it disappears as it is performed, but it fre

stretching them to breaking. Classification is an essential component of scien

Lower Paleolithic. The Lower Paleolithic—in deep deposits of human occu

well as complex financial transactions— not to mention ordinary citizens’ per

Neolithic refers to settled agricultural communities. These are evident in a num

Bali, 1930. Form: a mon