What does an anthropologist do, anyway?

Well, that depends. Do you mean, "What is anthropology?" or do you want to know what I do? Anthropologists are found engaged in a wide variety of professional activities, after all!

(Image coming soon!)

If you want to know about anthropology in general, keep reading. If you just want to know what I do specifically, click here.

Anthropology is the study of people, of culture. As a field it can be broken down into four main disciplines. Since you didn't come here to take a class, though, we'll go for the fun approach to telling what goes on in each one, and recommend you to your local university for more detailed information. Links are to specific examples of the area in question, not to broad overviews or resources.

Archaeologists are the folk out in the rain and hot sun, digging holes with toothbrushes and measuring the exact angles of inclination of buried sticks. They're also the folk sitting in labs painting little black numbers on chipped rocks. But we have to be grateful for their painstaking attention to detail and their incredible ability to discover the stories of our past from the physical evidence people left behind. Fantastic detectives of many kinds, archaeologists may specialize in a section of the world, may focus on an historical era, may be adept at interpreting ancient artwork or writing. Oh--and back in the ordinary world, don't forget to thank them for the permit that says there's nothing particularly significant buried beneath the dirt where you want to build your new office!

Once upon a time, someone was sitting at a table in a nightclub somewhere, considering the variety of footwear on the dance floor, and came to the brilliant realizations that (1) People all over the world make shoes, and (2) This fact is probably related in some way to the fact that people all over the world walk on feet that don't come equipped with, say, hooves. (But might we have developed hooves if we'd never learned to make shoes?) Now that's not how the discipline of Physical Anthropology was born, but that nightclub philosopher might have a future in a university somewhere. These are the people to ask if you have a question about human evolution, because they're interested in how our environment--including our culture--has shaped what we are. (Why do we stand upright? Why is our skin attached to our fat, unlike other land mammals? Why are we even able to ask these questions?) You can also find physical anthropologists working in forensics labs, figuring out what happened, for example, to a homicide victim who was killed fifty years ago and has now left nothing but bones.

Linguists are the innovative kinds of people who can obtain funding for things like traveling the country recording bathroom graffitti or singles-club pickup lines. They study the different ways in which people use language, artistic uses of language (like sonnets, haiku, and activist picket-line slogans), the connections among related languages, and how children--and maybe even computers--learn to use language. A linguist could define why it is that "Your mother" and "Yo mama!" don't mean the same thing. Or, a linguist might learn to read ancient Mayan hieroglyphs, might compare popular song lyrics, might examine the connections between modern African-American dialects and historical African grammars, or might just know plenty of good jokes!

Cultural anthropologists include people like me. We work with groups of people who are alive today, at their customs, values, ideas, clothing styles, writings, music, healing techniques, businesses, legal systems, games, recipes, you name it! Some of us write ethnography (that describes these kinds of things) or ethnology (that investigates and theorizes about the links among them, and among different cultures). Applied work, which is the focus of our department here at U of M, involves all kinds of hands-on fun. You'll see us involved in community development projects--including things like helping teenagers map out the things that make them proud of their neighborhoods. You'll find us collecting toothbrushes and other necessary items for refugee women. You might even see us helping a medical center develop culturally-appropriate programs, interviewing homeless men to help identify and eliminate some of the dangers they face, or working with a corporate office to help design personnel programs. We do have some things in common, despite the diversity of our projects, though--and I mean more than a tendency to write a lot and own a funny hat! Our approach begins in the grass roots, with the stories of real people, and grows until we're able to perceive some generalizations; we do use statistics on occasion, but we don't start with a big picture and assume individuals will fit it. We spend a lot of time talking with people, mapping, looking for patterns in our notes, and writing and speaking about what we find out. And yes, we try to make sure that the people who help us figure things out get something back for their efforts, whether that's a copy of a report that might help a minority group's court case, or a share in the profits of drugs developed from their rainforest plants, or direct compensation for the time they spent talking with us.

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E-mail me at Weavre_@hotmail.com