Introduction
You navigate daily life through assumptions that feel natural, permanent, and universal. These unexamined beliefs about money, family, and progress often blind you to how much your worldview is shaped by specific social conventions.
Matthew Engelke demonstrates in How to Think Like an Anthropologist that you can escape this provincialism by adopting anthropological tools. The book reveals how participant observation, cultural relativism, and strange perspectives dismantle everyday certainties.
The following chapters examine how anthropology tackles core aspects of human life. You will explore how culture frames perception, why nineteenth-century evolutionists ranked human societies, how gift exchange creates social bonds, and the ways kinship systems organize power.
- How does anthropology make the familiar strange?
- Why are cultural boundaries always porous?
- What makes economic value a social construction?
1. Making the Familiar Strange
Anthropology excels at questioning common-sense concepts by making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. You can apply this perspective to turn everyday assumptions upside down. The discipline reveals how cultural frameworks shape our understanding of basic concepts.
Anthropology uses participant observation and cultural relativism to question common-sense concepts.
Marshall Sahlins exposed Western economic biases regarding hunter-gatherer societies. Adults in certain African and Australian groups worked only three to five hours a day. They did not have bourgeois desires for surplus.
Poverty is an invention of civilization rather than a natural state. Nomadic hunter-gatherers such as the Hadza in Tanzania chose not to adopt pastoralist lifestyles up until the 1960s. They downplayed property accumulation. Over the past fifty years, the Hadza have lost 90 percent of their traditional land.
Participant Observation
Fieldwork through participant observation is the central rite of passage and primary method of social and cultural anthropology. You immerse yourself in a community to understand the native's point of view from the inside.
To conduct participant observation successfully, you should follow these concrete steps:
- live with the locals;
- eat with them;
- learn their language;
- take part in as full a range of their activities as possible.
Researchers run the risk of going native if they become too deeply involved. Frank Hamilton Cushing set off for New Mexico in 1879. He stayed in Zuni for nearly five years. Caitlin Zaloom spent nine hours a day with eyes fixed on her screen among futures traders in London.
Cultural Relativism
Cultural relativism functions as an analytical sensibility that guards against assuming your own cultural categories are universal. It provides a critical self-awareness. You stop applying your own local standards of justice, affluence, or rationality as self-evident.
Clifford Geertz wrote Anti Anti-Relativism to address persistent misunderstandings of the concept. The tool prevents you from evaluating other ways of life through bourgeois impulses and paleolithic tools.
2. Culture and Its Limits
Culture functions as a set of cultural glasses that shape human perception, though real-world cultures are never neatly bounded.
Cultural Glasses
Culture functions as a set of cultural glasses that fundamentally shape how human beings perceive reality, order the world, and define common sense. This approach is associated heavily with Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski. A point of view is not a simple opinion. It is a comprehensive framework determining what you take to be the proper order of things, such as what qualifies as food.
Matthew Engelke was offered a fried cricket as a delicacy by his host brother Philip in Zimbabwe. Despite his anthropological training, his enculturated body physically rejected it because eating crickets violated his native American framework.
Culture has an unavoidable material dimension. Physical objects and infrastructure serve as the necessary conditions of possibility for meaning-making. Archaeologists and material culture theorists demonstrate that humans use objects, buildings, and domestic remnants to express identity. Culture itself cannot exist without a physical, material infrastructure.
During the 1970s Québécois independence movement, nationalists fostered a national patrimony that explicitly included antique chairs, plows, historic buildings, animals, and language as cultural property.
Franz Boas and his students fundamentally reshaped anthropology by fiercely combating biological determinism and scientific racism. They successfully shifted both academic paradigms and legal categories. Ruth Benedict and other Boasians utilized ethnographic case studies to argue that human biological constitution does not lock people into detailed, predetermined behavioral varieties. Their work aimed to dismantle the us-them divide.
Franz Boas actively denounced American eugenicists and racists. He critiqued physical anthropologists like Carleton S. Coon who accepted segregation. He also bridged his Columbia University circle with the NAACP, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Ruth Benedict published Patterns of Culture in 1934.
Critiques of Culture
The culture concept faces severe critiques for essentialism because real-world cultures are never neatly bounded in place, fixed in time, or internally coherent wholes. Postcolonial, postmodern, and feminist critiques emphasize that human groups constantly borrow across borders. They undergo rapid historical modernization and display internal conflict rather than uniform agreement.
Victor Turner presented the Ndembu people of Northern Rhodesia as pristine primitives outside of time in his classic 1950s studies. He completely ignored the massive macrolevel colonial and urban mining changes happening around them. Lila Abu-Lughod published her essay Writing against Culture in 1991.
3. Civilization and Evolution
Early anthropologists paired culture with civilization. They constructed a hierarchical framework of human progress.
Nineteenth-century social evolutionism used the concept of civilization to construct hierarchical frameworks of human progress.
Edward Burnett Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Herbert Spencer applied natural science evolutionism to human societies. They used a comparative method underpinned by the principle of the psychic unity of mankind. This method classified societies into stages of savagery, barbarism, and civilization based on specific cultural and technological markers. In 1871, Tylor published his magnum opus Primitive Culture.
Lewis Henry Morgan created a detailed scheme where savagery and barbarism had lower, middle, and upper stages. Technologies like fire, the bow and arrow, and iron smelting distinguished these stages, while civilization began with a phonetic alphabet and writing.
Social Evolutionism
Franz Boas rejected the social-evolutionary comparative method. He argued it was deductive, ahistorical, and blind to cultural borrowing.
Boas argued that dissecting cultures into isolated details to fit an evolutionary ladder is bad science. This approach ignores how traits are frequently borrowed and adapted. In 1896, Boas published his article criticizing the evolutionists. He championed an inductive approach built on historical specificity rather than a uniform, systematic history of cultural evolution.
Jean and John Comaroff demonstrated how Victorian missionaries reshaped daily life, morality, and social practices in Africa. They acted under the banner of Christianity, commerce, and civilization. This process drew local populations into a long conversation where they were forced to accept the terms and parameters set by Western actors.
David Livingstone recounted an exchange with a Tswana rain doctor. Despite the rain doctor holding his own, the entire debate ultimately took place within the conceptual parameters of Western science, reason, and theology.
Denial of Coevalness
Johannes Fabian coined the term denial of coevalness. It describes an analytical prejudice that treats contemporary non-Western or rural populations as if they belong to an earlier historical era.
Observers treat the Other as a living fossil or antique specimen. This operates as a time machine that transports the observer from the present into a time gone by. This rhetoric obscures the reality that all contemporary societies are shaped by the same modern global, political, and economic forces.
Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian, launched a development project in Katine, Uganda, on October 20, 2007, as a three-year experiment in aid. Headlines and straplines stated the project traveled 700 years back in time to help people trapped in the fourteenth century.
4. Value and Exchange
Material assets and exchange systems are driven by the desire to build social bonds and prestige rather than practical utility.
Material assets in traditional contexts serve as anchors for social relations and authority rather than mere economic capital.
The Bovine Mystique
During a severe drought in Lesotho, local villagers refused to sell off their starving cattle to cut economic losses. Anthropologist James Ferguson explained that cattle form the Bovine Mystique, acting as a pension fund, a symbol of male authority, a means to maintain patron-client ties, and the crucial currency for bride wealth, which preserves social cohesion rather than mere cash accumulation.
In 1983, 40 percent of cattle died in the village of Mashai, Lesotho, during a severe drought, yet local sales of cattle actually went down as villagers refused to minimize their financial losses.
The Gift and Reciprocity
Bronislaw Malinowski studied the Kula Ring in the Trobriand Islands, where men undertake dangerous sea voyages to exchange red shell necklaces and white shell bracelets that have no practical use and are never worn. The cyclical gifting of these items establishes crucial social bonds and builds the renown of their owners across islands.
Trobrianders, Dobuans, and Sinaketans participate in the Kula Ring, trading soulava necklaces clockwise and mwali bracelets counterclockwise.
Marcel Mauss demonstrated that no gifts are truly free, as the act of giving creates an obligatory and moral expectation of return that binds people together through social solidarity. Analyzing gift economies across Melanesia, Polynesia, and the Pacific Northwest, Mauss argued that opposing self-interest and altruism is a false dichotomy. Gifts carry an intrinsic part of the giver, creating social ties that resist the cold-hearted separation of persons from things found in modern capitalist systems.
The embarrassment experienced when failing to bring a gift for a distant cousin highlights the unwritten and often unspoken expectation of reciprocity in social interactions.
Anthropologists like Deborah James and Christine Jeske show how modern pressures and monetization replace the good debts of traditional cattle and bride wealth with the bad debts of bank loans and cash. Families often maintain that bride-wealth debts should never be fully settled because complete closure severs social ties.
In KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, marriage rates have dropped by 20 percent since 1970 as market economies reconfigure traditional customs.
5. Kinship and Blood
Cultures use idioms of blood, kinship, and biological substances to structure social relations, identity, and power.
Anthropologists study how different societies define who belongs and who remains an outsider. You might assume that biology determines family everywhere, but societies construct kinship through distinct cultural frameworks.
American Kinship
David Schneider explored this dynamic in his study American Kinship: A Cultural Account, relying on interviews primarily with middle-class white Americans, alongside materials on minority groups. He argued that biology acts as the ground upon which all other social relations are built in American culture.
Marriage bonds are dissoluble, but blood relations define the permanent terms of identity and reference. This emphasis on consanguinity and affinity creates a powerful system of meaning. When new reproductive technologies arrive, they challenge traditional categories by separating biological substance from social parenting.
Blood Quantum
Governments and official bodies have historically applied blood-based criteria to determine racial purity or tribal membership. This practice transforms identity into a rigid mathematical fraction regardless of cultural practice or lived experience.
- Virginia's Racial Purity Act of 1924 used the one-drop rule to classify citizens.
- The Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California required members to have at least one-quarter Washoe blood for federal recognition.
According to Virginia's 1924 registrar, the law affected an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 near white people with colored blood. The Racial Purity Act was later declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967. Meanwhile, the Washoe were granted federal recognition by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1937, and today the group has an approximate population size of 1,500 people.
Physical substances like blood are not merely arbitrary symbols. Drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotics rather than Ferdinand de Saussure's pure arbitrariness of signs, anthropologist Janet Carsten argues that blood's physical properties help explain its central role in gender, religion, politics, and economics.
Thai protestors soaked their clothes in their own blood and spattered it on government buildings after the 2008 global financial crisis to signal sacrifice and betrayal. You can see how the physical liquidity, color, and bodily provenance of blood carry heavy political weight.
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro demonstrates that non-Western cosmologies operate without imposing Cartesian dualism or universal reason. Amerindian perspectivism views humanity as the original shared condition of all living creatures, where animals retain distinct cultural points of view and subjectivity.
Animals have lost their humanity rather than humans transcending animality in these traditions. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro highlights Amerindian myths and accounts where animals see themselves as persons and occupy their own cultural worlds, such as a sixteenth-century chief telling a German explorer "I am a jaguar."
Conclusion
Anthropology combines participant observation, cultural relativism, and figure-ground reversals to strip away the illusion of inevitable common sense.
You can apply this critical sensibility to your everyday life to question assumptions and navigate a complex social world.
- Make the familiar strange by refusing to accept common-sense arrangements as natural or fixed.
- Adopt methodological relativism to understand other perspectives without abandoning your own moral judgment.
- Look for the social bonds and prestige structures hidden beneath material transactions and rational choices.
- Recognize that boundaries around cultures and traditions are fluid rather than absolute.
- Pay attention to how people use idioms of kinship and value to claim authority and organize belonging.
10 Key Ideas
- Anthropology uses participant observation and cultural relativism to question common-sense concepts.
- Culture functions as a set of cultural glasses that fundamentally shape how human beings perceive reality, order the world, and define common sense.
- Nineteenth-century social evolutionism used the concept of civilization to construct hierarchical frameworks of human progress.
- An analytical prejudice known as the denial of coevalness treats contemporary non-Western or rural populations as if they belong to an earlier historical era.
- Material assets in traditional contexts serve as anchors for social relations and authority rather than mere economic capital.
- Marcel Mauss demonstrated that no gifts are truly free, as the act of giving creates an obligatory and moral expectation of return that binds people together through social solidarity.
- Modern pressures and monetization replace the good debts of traditional cattle and bride wealth with the bad debts of bank loans and cash.
- Cultures use idioms of blood, kinship, and biological substances to structure social relations, identity, and power.
- Physical substances like blood carry heavy political weight because their physical properties help explain their central role in gender, religion, politics, and economics.
- Amerindian perspectivism views humanity as the original shared condition of all living creatures, where animals retain distinct cultural points of view and subjectivity.