Chapter Summary

Anthropology is the study of the human species. Cultural anthropology studies human culture, cultural systems, and their variation. Our species’ most characteristic feature today is our cultural behavior, which is expressed in a great variety of ways among different societies.

Most human cultural systems that ever existed did so in the past and so have left us only meager physical remains of their presence and nature. A second major subfield of anthropology recovers and interprets these remains; this subfield is archaeology.

Biological anthropology studies the human species the way biology studies any species, examining our biological characteristics, our evolution, our variation, our relationship with our environment, and our behavior, including our ability to have culture.

Bioanthropology, as a scientific discipline, asks questions about the human species and then attempts to answer them by proposing hypotheses and by testing those hypotheses, looking for both evidence in their support and for anything that would refute them.

Scientific knowledge is important for any society, but it must be mediated by the nonscientific values of belief systems—the untestable ideas of philosophy, law, and religion that are taken on faith. Societies need both, interacting in harmony, to fully function.

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