Anthropology is the only science whose subject matter encompasses humankind as a whole. This holistic approach has distinct advantages, but also brings unique challenges.
It has to hang somewhere on the tree of knowledge, so people typically classify anthropology as one of the social sciences. But it’s too holistic to fit neatly anywhere in our standard classification of disciplines. This strange study straddles the sciences and the humanities (As the science of humankind, how could it not?); while as science it encompasses both the biological and the social/cultural dimensions of our human being.
But anthropology’s holistic approach is more than a curriculum designer’s nightmare. As it became a genuinely theoretical science in the mid-twentieth-century (I’ll talk more about that later), anthropology (especially cultural anthropology) did so by participating in the major paradigm shift that was and still is sweeping all the sciences into a new configuration, a new dimension of knowledge, a new world-view of humankind in nature.
The hallmark of this new view is the shift from reductionism to holism—or at least the acceptance of holism as also valid and necessary—across all the sciences, and in much philosophy of science as well.
I don’t mean to say that everyone is on board here. Some people just like the established, “hard science,” linear logic of the reductionist program that Galileo and Descartes laid out about five centuries ago. This has been so even in anthropology, where the very nature of the discipline would seem to favour holistic perspectives. In many ways the respect people give traditional science is warranted. After all, the “hard science” programme has served us well in many respects.
But there’s another, almost instinctive, source of resistance to moving into more holistic forms of knowledge, too. This shift toward focussing on interconnection and whole system dynamics disquiets our cultural life. So much of how we live today still rests on earlier more simplistic ideas of the natural world and human society and relationships between them. Introducing notions of whole system dynamics, emergence, complexity and chaos into our existing cultural universe can be dizzying, turning things inside out and upside down, revealing gaps between what we now know and how we live that cause tensions and instability in politics, business, and many other aspects of life.
But science often does that. Always has. Today’s science demands that we face up to wholeness and interconnection just as the consequences of not doing so are becoming increasingly obvious and dire. And just as in times past people slowly and with much social turmoil came to terms with heliocentrism and evolution, so today we are slowly coming to terms with our inescapable embeddedness as but one element in a dynamic, complex web of living and non-living systems. More and more workers in various fields accept this shift in perspective, further it, and apply it in diverse venues.
The rise of systems theory as a formal discipline in the mid-twentieth-century perhaps most directly signals this shift of viewpoint. I’ll look further at this below. Meanwhile, anthropology’s original traditional focus on humankind in all its dimensions, all its levels of being—even despite resistance in some quarters of the discipline itself—gave it a unique place in the rise of systems theoretical understandings. Let’s begin there, with a quick review of anthropology’s four main sub-fields.
ANTHROPOLOGY’S FOUR FIELDS
Traditionally American anthropology has four main subfields: cultural anthropology, archeology, physical anthropology, and linguistics. These subfields all come together in anthropology’s holistic approach. Graduate students take required courses in all the subfields, and specialize in one—at least that was the program when I was going to graduate school at the University of Oregon in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. As knowledge and specialties have expanded, it’s been a challenge to keep anthropology’s integrated four-field approach alive.
Cultural Anthropology is the study of different cultures around the world. It includes both ethnography (when the anthropologist goes and lives in a different culture and writes about what she or he observes), and ethnology (when anthropologists study ethnographies and make generalizations or theories about different cultures). Ethnology shades off into theoretical cultural anthropology, which involves thinking and writing about anthropological theory as such; and that in turn shades into what I call philosophical anthropology. This latter interest includes, on the one hand, what basically is philosophy of science with a focus on anthropology as science; and on the other it explores what the findings and theories of anthropology mean for the humanities and for human life on Earth generally.
Archeology is the study of past human societies and cultures by means of excavating their remains. Tools, dwellings, settlements, buildings, trash heaps, and so on, buried deep in the past, and often deep in the earth or under more recent settlements, are all grist for the archeologist’s mill. Archeologist also have been known to look at our own modern dumpsites for insights or perspectives on contemporary Western culture.
Archeology’s main immediate focus is material culture (in contrast to non-material culture—beliefs, rituals, organizations, and so on); and accordingly it has its own set of specialized tools and concepts. But in the end it aims to reconstruct past human cultures as wholes. It looks at past human cultures, just as the ethnographer or ethnologist looks at different contemporary cultures and cultural differences around the globe. It also looks at the broad sweep of human cultural development in different regions, and compares regions. In the end, archeology views its subject matter from the perspective of cultural theory just as cultural anthropology does.
Physical Anthropology focuses on the human animal as a physical being. It includes human anatomy, embryology, and genetics, as well as human evolution reconstructed through rare fossil remnants.
You can see how from a holistic or systems perspective it all begins to tie together. How does humankind’s physical evolution relate to our cultural evolution, and to the evolution of language? What was the role of our distinctive upright posture? How does the advent of culture relate to human population genetics? How did obvious racial differences arise, and how does what they are from strictly biological perspectives differ from or relate to the cultural meanings different groups assign to them? What can bone and teeth fragments from the earliest cities tell us about effects of the cultural transition to city life on human health?
Linguistics. The study of language and languages. Language is a very complex human phenomenon with varied aspects. Its study therefore also, itself, gives rise to a number of subfields. On the other hand, it also is a core part of what it means to be human, so linguistics as a field of study overlaps or is part of other disciplines. You might find courses in linguistics not just in anthropology departments, but elsewhere in the social sciences and humanities. Some aspects of linguistics also relate to the natural sciences, and to new fields such as cybernetics. But for all that, linguistics remains a core piece of the anthropology curriculum, and I think it’s fair to say that most linguistics is done and taught in anthropology departments.
Those are the main sub-fields; but then there are sub-sub-fields: political anthropology, social anthropology, economic anthropology, ecological anthropology, human evolution…. All these different sub-fields, and even particular foci within sub-fields, exert tremendous centrifugal force on anthropology; but anthropology’s particular genius as a discipline is to constantly exert centripetal counter-forces to pull them all back together.
This genius of anthropology as a holistic discipline resides in our ultimate focus not on abstractions, but rather on humankind as a real entity (or as comprised of real, whole entities), in relation to other real entities in our real natural world. This means something rather specific, which is what we’ll look at next.
GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY & ANTHROPOLOGY
Before the mid-twentieth century the social sciences, including in large measure anthropology, still held up Newtonian physics as the ideal science—indeed, as the very definition of science—and tried to model their own understandings of human social life in terms of its linear, reductive approach. I mentioned that earlier; but there’s more. Indeed, our whole modern culture rests on that same intellectual foundation. It’s not surprising that even today the reductive approach still has many prominent adherents in the sciences; nor that challenges to it spill over into conflict in the streets over environmental and economic policy, and much else.
“Physics is still the paragon of science, the basis of our idea of society and our image of man,” wrote Ludwig von Bertalanffy, one of the preeminent early systems theorists, in 1968 (p. 187). Today Bertalanffy’s observation is widely accepted, and that insight itself, about the grip the “hard science” ideal still has on our minds and way of life, could only come with the shift to the new and alternate vision of reality that general system theory was even then building. But that’s another story for another time.
Systems theory has many practical implications. If you google it you’ll get a lot of references to “management science,” cybernetic control systems, and the like. But its real contribution in my view was and is to reframe how we think—how we think not just about this organization or that process, but about reality, about our own place in the big scheme of things.
Basically, systems theory signals a gestalt-shift in science from primarily thinking reductionistically to thinking holistically. Physical laws still hold, of course, for things like falling bodies, planetary orbits, the forces that hold atoms and molecules together, and so on. The difference is that now not everything is thought ultimately to be reducible to those laws.
Rather, reality is structured hierarchically, with phenomena at higher organizational levels governed by irreducible (i.e., emergent) laws and dynamics at that level. Thus, life, mind, emotion, art, culture, depend on physical and chemical phenomena, to be sure, but, in principle and in reality, can’t be fully explained by or reduced to physical laws.
That advance in understanding has huge implications which still are too little appreciated; and that failure, or lag, of imagination in turn has much to do with the gap between what we know and how we live. But I’m getting ahead of myself again.
Real vs. Abstract Systems
For now I’ll just mention one insight from systems theory—specifically, from sociologist Marion J. Levy’s 1952 book, The Structure of Society—that helps clarify anthropology’s unique place among the sciences. It also makes for clearer thinking in general. Levy distinguishes between analytic (I prefer the term abstract) systems, and concrete or real systems (pp 88-100)—a distinction that many policy-makers and scientists still too often ignore, but which can head off all kinds of muddled thinking.
An abstract system is one that could not, in principle, exist by itself. For example, take “the economy.” We talk about “the economy” as if it were a real thing in its own right (“the economy is in a downturn;” “what people really care about is the economy,”); but just try to imagine “the economy” as a real separable thing tangibly out there in the world in the same sense that you or I or a building or a family unit or a nation are real
“Economic behavior”—that is, behavior motivated primarily by economic calculation—sure. A set of social and legal rules that govern exchange, many of which are codified and written down? Absolutely. A currency that circulates according to the economic rules of the society? Yes. We abstract those behaviors, rules, and associated objects like money, and call it “the economy,” or “the economic system.” But all of that really only exists within a whole human society that also “has a political system,” a “social structure,” “a set of guiding cultural norms and beliefs,” and so on.
In fact and in principle you can’t have an economy, an “economic system,” all by itself. “An economy” (however much economic rules and dynamics influence other aspects of life) can in principle only be one aspect or dimension of life in a concrete human society that also has a political aspect, a social dimension, cultural norms and beliefs, and so on.
Now, contrast that with the social group, or corporation, or nation that has an economy, a politics, a social order, a culture. That organized definable group, however open its boundaries, is a concrete system. A real or concrete system is one that in principle might exist by itself. A whole society (with all its economics, politics, and so on), a family, even a network of telephone poles and wires, are concrete systems is this sense. Even a business firm as a concrete unit concerned largely with economic activity will still have a social structure, a political system, customs and values that might be abstracted as its “culture,” and so on. Such membership systems aren’t abstracted patterns of behavior. They have tangible, material reality as interactive systems in the real world.
A brief physical analogy might be helpful here. Physical objects with attributes are easier to visualize than human societies. Take a red rubber ball, for instance. The ball exists as a distinct thing in its own right—a “concrete” thing in Levy’s sense. You can hold it in your hand. You can throw it or kick it. You can see it rolling there on the ground or floating in the water. It also has various attributes: it is round, solid, of a certain consistency, mass, weight, and so on. In contrast to the ball itself, these attributes of the ball are not similarly things in their own right. They are “abstract”properties of the real ball. You can think “round” as an abstract idea; but you can’t have “round” by itself as a real, concrete, tangible object—it always is a characteristic or property of some thing (a ball, a ring, the Earth) that is real, and that also has other abstract properties, like a ball does.
That distinction between abstract systems that cannot even conceivably exist as separate entities in the real world, and the concrete systems of which they are aspects, from which they are conceptually abstracted—that important distinction helps define anthropology’s unique place among the social sciences. Among all the sciences, only anthropology focuses on humankind as a whole, and takes a uniquely holistic approach in studying particular human societies or groups. This is a challenging endeavor, not least because human societies are open systems with often ill-defined and in varying degree permeable boundaries. But even with that, anthropology’s holistic perspective coupled with systems theoretical concepts provides an indispensable platform to better understanding of ourselves and our place in the Earth’s natural systems, and in the cosmos.
Appendix: More About Systems Theory:
If you want to know more about systems theory and its broader implications for anthropology, I would begin with anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity
For more general introductions there are physicist Fritjof Capra’s The Turning Point, and The Hidden Connections, and Ervin Laszlo’s The Systems View of Life (1996). (Capra also has other books, too that are worth browsing). And of course there’s Wikipedia for a brief overview and links to more contemporary works.
Two early important systems theorists are economists. Kenneth Boulding published “General Systems Theory, The Skeleton of Science,” in 1956 (you can find a good overview here. Herbert Simon, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1978, contributed to various fields including general sys tem theory, most notably to my mind with his 1969 book, The Sciences of the Artificial.