Can anybody list 10 useful aspects of anthropology?

Question

Can anybody list 10 useful aspects of anthropology?

Answer 1

Because if we don't study our origins and history, in order to learn from our past mistakes, and cultivate our past successes, then we are at the same level as cattle, standing in line, waiting to be slaughtered...

If you must, you can say that 10 different ways!

Answer 2

Learning about human's traits toward making a more harmonious, happy society.

Answer 3

http://www.unt.edu/anthropology/whatis.h...

Answer 4

Sorry about the length but you did ask for 10 so it is what it is.

1. Anthropology practices a holistic approach to research on the human condition.

2.  Anthropology compiles information on diverse cultures and languages so that this information can continue to exist even as globalization makes the world seem a smaller and smaller place.

3.  Part of an anthropologist's research is scrutinizing the work of their colleagues and predecessors for bias in a perpetual self-critique of the discipline.

4.  Anthropology provides data and information that informs many other fields including medicine (for example, the "discovery" of medications from traditional remedies or an understanding of patient choice and how it affects treatment), politics, diplomacy, theology, etc.

5.  Anthropology helps people to see things from other perspectives, to walk in another's shoes.  In terms of communication and conflict resolution, this is vital.  Also remember that anthropologists are not just Western whites for example, my first anthropology professor was from India.  

6.  Through it's /method/ of cultural relativism (which is not the same as philosophical relativism), Anthropology evaluates biases like ethnocentrism and prejudices, especially those that must be acknowledged and possibly discarded in order for different people to get along amicably.  Clifford Geertz is one very important anthropologist and he said, " We [anthropologists] have been the first to insist on a number of things: that the world does not divide into the pious and the superstitious; that there are sculptures in jungles and paintings in deserts; that political order is possible without centralized power and principled justice without codified rules; that the norms of reason were not fixed in Greece, the evolution of morality not consummated in England. Most important, we were the first to insist that we see the lives of others through lenses of our own grinding and that they look back on ours through ones of their own."

7.  Anthropology uses a comparative method to understand the human condition.  By comparing different perspectives on the world, commonalities and differences can be mapped and informed judgements can be made about what is human vs. what is American or Polynesian or French or Siberian or Kuwaiti, etc.  Through this evaluation, a true understanding of humanity can form.  As with any field, definitions must be all-inclusive.  If a definition of humanity excludes, for example, all African bushmen despite their status as human, either that definition of humanity or that definition of human must be false.  Anthropology examines both possibilities (especially through the subfields of socio-cultural anthropology and forensic or biological anthropology respectively).

8.  Anthropologists work with activists and aide groups to help plan campaigns in ways that make cultural sense.  For example, cultural anthropologists have helped aide groups understand why their programs did not work in a particular cultural setting so that the program can be restructured so it will be effective.  This includes public health campaigns, development projects, reconciliation projects, aid work, and human rights activism, among others.  One prominent example is on AIDS in Africa where anthropologists look for the reasons people might know about AIDS and prevention strategies and yet choose not to practice those strategies (some examples of reasons found in various societies include attitudes about s*x as not real without skin-to-skin contact or misleading political propaganda about condoms as racially motivated population control or as ethnic cleansing because of people still getting HIV while using condoms with their husbands/wives and claiming that it was because the condoms were infected).

9.  Anthropologists look at problems from many angles.  Because anthropologists are trained to look for "the big picture", when presented with a problem such as Food Insecurity, they do not focus in on a specific field (as an economist would focus on production versus export and why the food that is exported isn't instead routed to the hungry within a country).  Instead, anthropologists look to understand as many factors as possible.  Anthropologists who have worked in development know that pointing to net food exports and saying we should feed our hungry with it doesn't solve the problem.  Instead, anthropologists document this information and recommend comprehensive plans like Oregon State University researchers did (http://oregonstate.edu/cla/anthropology/... ), suggesting that rural people suffering from Food Insecurity in Oregon can also be helped in the more immediate future by reconnecting with the ways of getting by from the Depression Era and drawing on local knowledge maintained by the elderly but not taught to youth who had taken to the fast food world instead.

10.  Anthropology also studies the part of the human condition which pertains to Evolution.  I suppose for some people, this would not be a useful aspect and might even be considered Satanic but I feel it should be included.