The Anthropology of Human Origins

Anthropology:

• The study of what makes us human (??) - AAA website
• The study of human nature, human society, and the human past
• (BEST) A holistic approach to understanding the many aspects of the human experience, past and present

Oh, so it's like psychology, right? Not really! —> Covering how anthropology and psychology are different

Analyzing Families

Psychology

• Hierarchy and interpersonal dynamics
• Attachment
• Coping
• Personality

Anthropology

• Variability - time and space

• Who counts as family?

  • IVF, friends, adoption?

• What makes an ideal/acceptable marriage? What makes an ideal family?

  • How does our time period affect these understandings?

• Interface between families and other social institutions?

• Seen as SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS

  • Historical

• Anthropologists look at all of these relationships in contexts less familiar to us, like different cultures or time periods or (normally) both

• Two kinds of approaches to the same questions? Why do people do, act, and think?

Psychology: views behavior + perception of the world as tied to human thinking and the BRAIN.

• Universalism

Anthropology: (OPPOSITE) views behavior as shaped by CULTURE—an emergent phenomenon that shapes and is shaped by individual action, belief, and history.

• Particularism

• Why people justify certain behaviors to themselves and justify their actions?

• Relationship with colonialism

• Amazing Europeans bringing culture to indigenous folks

• New disciplines in the 1700/1800s

  • Phrenology (Pseudoscience)
    • The shape and size of the brain
    • "Large lump here...you are more destructive"
    • Physical differences = tied to behavioral/mental differences

Cesare Lombroso

• This other scientist believed that if someone was born a criminal, it could be identified physically

  • Criminals had charactersistics that could be seen as more ape like / sub human (HELLO RACISM!)
  • Tried to come up with a catalog type based on physical appearances
    • CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY

• Phrenology is alive in well, especially in AI (facial recongition software)

• Research paper: "Automated Inference on Criminality using Face Images"

• Different ethnic groups seen as less desirable, less civilized

  • This is what Lombroso did