the.com/anthropology
the science of getting paid to crash other people's parties and call it research
means The study of humans across all times and places — our cultures, languages, bodies, and how we came to be the way we are.
from From Greek 'anthropos' (human being) plus '-logia' (study of) — literally 'the study of man.' The word existed in Greek and Latin scholarship for the broad notion of human nature, but it only hardened into the name of a scientific discipline in the 19th century, as Europeans began systematically (and often imperially) cataloguing the world's peoples. The same 'anthropos' lurks inside 'philanthropy' (love of humankind) and 'misanthrope' (hater of it).
- founding scandal
- Early anthropologists ranked cultures, then their own data proved them wrong
- margaret mead
- Her Samoa study sparked decades of academic brawling
- four fields
- Bones, languages, cultures, and ancient garbage piles
- kula ring
- Islanders sailed dangerous seas to trade useless shell necklaces
- dig truth
- Most of human history is reconstructed from trash heaps
margaret mead's samoa — 1928 study of adolescent girls in samoa that shaped understanding of cultural development, later contested
lucy skeleton discovery — 3.2 million year old australopithecus afarensis found in ethiopia's afar valley in 1974
yanomami people study — napoleon chagnon's decades-long ethnographic research in venezuela and brazil starting 1964
potlatch ceremonies — tlingit, haida, and kwakwaka'wakw gift-giving rituals on pacific northwest coast that redefined economic theory