People who study anthropology may have answered
this question time and again―What is anthropology? Dr. Gerhard Hoffstaedter, a lecturer
in anthropology in the School of Social Science at The University of Queensland,
had talked to different anthropologists and asked their definitions towards the
subject in the first lecture of his open online course “World101x Anthropology
of Current World Issues”.
Dr. Hoffstaedter, in the opening of the
video, says, “The best way to start defining anthropology is perhaps by what
it's not. We are not, unfortunately, Indiana Jones-like figures finding
treasures in cowboy hats with whips attached… We're also not generally
concerned with dinosaurs and leave that for the paleontologists. Nor do we
study insects. That's for the entomologists. Social or cultural anthropology is
about people: the environments they inhabit and the things they get up to.”
Other anthropologists also give inspiring
definitions towards anthropology. Daniel Goldstein, a Professor in the
Department of Anthropology at the Rutgers University, defines anthropology in
this way, “It's not about lab work, at least not the kind of anthropology that
I do. It's not about quantification, numbers and formulas and things. It's
about going out into the world and talking to people and meeting them as equals
and getting to understand their lives and their worlds through the perspective
of people living those lives. That was fascinating to me when I was 19, and it
still is today.”
Sarah Kendzior, a coloumnist of Al Jazeera,
talks about anthropology in this way, which is indeed very true, “You can go in
with your own research question, and you'll often end up, as an anthropologist,
in a completely different direction because you're following the lead of the
people you're talking to. You're finding out what matters to them, what's
important to them.”
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