Overview

Since 1968, I've regularly taught Anthropology 101 ("Introduction to Anthropology") to a class of 375 to 550 students. Constant feedback from students, teaching assistants, and my fellow instructors keeps me up to date on the interests, needs, and views of the people for whom this text is written. I continue to believe that effective textbooks are rooted in enthusiasm and enjoyment of one's own teaching experience.

As a college student, I was drawn to anthropology by its breadth and because of what it could tell me about the human condition, present and past. Since then, I've been fortunate in spending my teaching career at a university that values and unites anthropology's four subdisciplines. Although I'm mainly a cultural anthropologist, I have daily contact with members of the other subfields, and as a regular teacher of the four-field introductory anthropology course, I'm happy to keep up with those subfields. I love anthropology's breadth. I believe that anthropology has compiled an impressive body of knowledge about human diversity in time and space, and I'm eager to introduce that knowledge in the pages that follow. I believe strongly in anthropology's capacity to enlighten and inform. Anthropology's subject matter is intrinsically fascinating, and its focus on diversity helps students understand and interact with their fellow human beings in an increasingly interconnected world and an increasingly diverse North America.

I decided to write this book back in 1972, when there were far fewer introductory anthropology texts than there are today. The texts back then tended to be overly encyclopedic. I found them too long and too unfocused for my course and my image of contemporary anthropology. The field of anthropology was changing rapidly. Anthropologists were writing about a "new archaeology" and a "new ethnography." Fresh fossil finds and biochemical studies were challenging our understanding of human and primate evolution. Studies of monkeys and apes in their natural settings were contradicting conclusions that were based on work in zoos. Studies of language as actually used in society were revolutionizing overly formal and static linguistic models. In cultural anthropology, symbolic and interpretive approaches were joining ecological and materialist ones.

I believe strongly that anthropology has a core, which any competent introductory text must explore: anthropology's nature, scope, and roles as a science and as a humanistic field. In Mirror for Man, one of the first books I ever read in anthropology, I was impressed by Clyde Kluckhohn's (1944) description of anthropology as "the science of human similarities and differences" (p. 9). Kluckhohn's statement of the need for such a field still stands: "Anthropology provides a scientific basis for dealing with the crucial dilemma of the world today: how can peoples of different appearance, mutually unintelligible languages, and dissimilar ways of life get along peaceably together?" (p. 9).

Part of anthropology's breadth is that it is a humanistic field as well as a science. Bringing a comparative and cross-cultural perspective to forms of creative expression, anthropology influences and is influenced by the humanities. Indeed, anthropology is among the most humanistic of academic fields because of its fundamental respect for human diversity. Anthropologists routinely listen to, record, and attempt to represent voices and perspectives from a multitude of times, places, nations, and cultures.

As I write this, more than 25 years after the publication of my first edition of Anthropology in 1974, anthropology hasn't stopped changing. It's been my aim throughout my nine editions to continue to write the most current, timely, and up-to-date textbook available. My approach is to be fair and objective in covering various and sometimes diverging approaches in anthropology, but I make my own views known and write in the first person when it seems appropriate. I've heard colleagues who use other textbooks complain that some authors seem so intent on presenting every conceivable theory about an issue -- the origin of agriculture, for example -- that students are bewildered by the array of possibilities. Anthropology should not be made so complicated that it is impossible for beginning students to appreciate and understand. So, the textbook author, like the instructor, must be able to guide the student.