Do We Know Who We Are?: The Significance of Anthropology

Studying anthropology, like travel and adventure, opens our minds to a world of eternal complexity and diversity. However, it is a discipline that struggles to reach wider audiences.

Wolfgang Hugo Rheinhold's 1893 bronze sculpture ‘Affe mit Schädel’. Courtesy: Wikimedia

“Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.”

-Jacob Bronowski

Do you ever soberly stare at yourself in the mirror and wonder “What exactly am I looking at?” Have you ever stepped back from time to time, glanced about your house, town, or city, and wondered how all this stuff got here? In short, “What are we” and “How did we get here” are the eternal questions anthropologists, philosophers, and every curious human on the planet have been asking and attempting to answer for centuries. We, all of us, are a part of a vast never-ending story.

From mythology and religion to philosophy and science, we’ve devised many diverse, and often conflicting, stories and institutions that attempt to explore and categorize our origins and evolution. How we make sense of our humanity is the enduring task of anthropology, a field of study that can be thought of as a kind of sense-making toolkit for interpreting our human story.

Every anthropologist who writes about or teaches anthropology is at some point prompted to justify their existence and their utility for their institution and wider society—a topic all the rage right now as humanities departments are in a crisis and threatened by budget cuts over their self-inflicted identitarian and activist shift in recent years.

Suppose annual income is any indicator of social utility. In that case, anthropology is low on the totem pole, and frankly, has always been because it is a field of study that’s always struggled to define direct applications for society and also simply never caught the attention of most of society. Most people find the subject interesting but always follow up with, “But what are you going to do with a degree in anthropology?” 

When I first stumbled across the subject during my senior year in high school, circa 2008, I researched how much anthropologists made—the average annual income was about $36,000 a year (around $52,000 in 2024). That’s remained fairly constant. Thus, I knew what I was getting into if I was going to go down this route of financial uncertainty and dubious social utility, but I liked the prospect of chasing after something so tantalizing as the study of humanity, despite not making much money doing it. Many parents and plenty of others in our society are often chagrined and bothered to see someone pursue a career in the humanities or social sciences with no clear return on investment. That is a fair critique in the context of our culture, but it’s also a narrow one in the grand scheme of things. 

During the early 19^th century, the English scientist Michael Faraday made significant discoveries in the study of electromagnetism, yet had no idea how revolutionary this knowledge would soon be. One day, after a lecture, a woman is reported to have approached him and asked what the utility of these discoveries was—what is this going to do for us? He is said to have replied, “Madam, will you tell me the use of a newborn child?” Thus, the future power and utility of knowledge often escapes us and ultimately rests in its potentiality. Anthropological knowledge is like that.

The concluding remarks in The Atlantic on ‘The Humanities Have Sown the Seeds of Their Own Destruction’ by professor Tyler Austin Harper resonates here,

Ironically, activist faculty and their conservative critics share the same nihilistic vision of the future of higher education: Both believe that the only valuable forms of research and teaching are those that accomplish something obviously useful. Such views are born of austerity, and they are utterly foreign to me. When I fell in love with English on a college campus many years ago, it was precisely because studying John Milton and James Joyce and Octavia Butler was so intoxicatingly useless in market terms. It rejected the assumption that value and utility are synonyms. The humanities captivated me—and foiled the best-laid plans of mice and pre-med—because literature and philosophy seemed to begin from a quietly revolutionary premise: There is thinking that does not exist merely to become work, and knowledge that does not exist merely to become capital. As a blue-collar undergraduate, that was a radical proposition. And it’s the only kind of politics we should expect—or require—from the humanities.

Anthropology, and the rest of the humanities, do not necessarily offer us riches, no, but they do enrich the mind in startling ways that have immense value that is ultimately incalculable. What’s more, we are granted a remarkable lens through which to view the world. Like travel and adventure, anthropology can take us around the globe and teach us to appreciate the diversity of human behavior and culture. I won’t pretend that reading Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific and learning of the Kula exchange system of Papua New Guinea is going to be useful at landing you a job at Goldman Sachs, but it will certainly broaden one’s perspective on alternate forms of economies, exchange systems, and human decision making in ways you probably won’t find in most economics department majors.

The perennial questions of anthropology that we are always returning to are:

• Who are we? 

• What are our origins? 

• What does it mean to be human?

• How do other cultures understand and interpret their world? 

• How do we explain the diversity of humanity, both physically and culturally? 

• How resilient are we and how have we evolved and adapted to changing environments? 

Anthropology at its best serves to guide all of us toward seeing and appreciating the diversity of human thought and culture across time and space. By design, it is meant to overwhelm and humble us with the magnitude of collective human wisdom. Anthropology at its worst devolves into simplistically categorizing people based on superficial traits of biology or culture and treating people differently based on those features. However, anthropology is also a discipline that morphs in time like everything else. 

What we have to understand is that, like any other serious inquiry, this is an iterative process, a story that is constantly tweaking, self-correcting, and never-ending. The present form of any discipline and what scholars of a given moment consider the “best” or most “socially and politically useful” research topics and agendas of the day don’t matter as much as the long arc or cumulative amount of knowledge it has gathered. That is what we should keep our eye on and is the story worth pursuing.

In the early 21st century, we have created an unusually complex and baffling world—one which many of us are struggling to comprehend and navigate. While our brains are wonderful mechanisms of evolution, they are not flawless nor are they fully prepared to grapple with present circumstances. We are not born with instant recall of everything that came before us and so we depend on a culture and society to give us some semblance of our history and a blueprint of how the world actually works. That too can be faulty and distorted but we deserve to know something about who we are and how we got here, or else, I’m afraid, we’re left with little to guide us toward answering those aforementioned questions. Is our present culture and society up to the task of informing us of our past? Are we capable of understanding our reality? Do we know who we are?

An alarming amount of us appear to be bewildered, anxious, depressed, and desirous of meaning in the modern world. As I’ve argued previously,

We’re still suffering from many of the same ailments to one degree or another. While life has undoubtedly improved for a lot of us in terms of our material conditions, we are still wracked with many anxieties and fears we just can’t seem to shake. Many of us seem to be suffering from a “crisis of meaning” in our lives. Thus, it’s questionable whether we’ve progressed as much as we think given that with each step forward in technology or culture, we often tend to introduce a new set of problems.

We are all searching for meaning. We all want something out of life.  More than anything we want purpose. What gives our lives meaning? Where do we derive happiness from? We might believe that we obtain happiness and meaning from the tangible objects of our desire, surrounding ourselves with plenty of comforts and luxuries, but if this were true, surely the abundance of our materialist culture that we’ve been accumulating for generations would have made most of us content by now. That doesn’t seem to be the case. Life satisfaction has much more to do with the psychology of our minds, the sensations we discover in new experiences, and the memories we construct with one another. Are we so sure that we’ve constructed a society that aligns with who we are? 

As I argued elsewhere,

Given our extensive evolutionary history being nomadic hunter-gatherers, I can’t help but think that part of the reason so many of us feel restless, anxious, depressed, angry, cynical, or lacking inspiration nowadays is that the structure of our society and culture is no longer fully in line with how we are physically and psychologically primed.

One lesson I’ve learned studying anthropology, and particularly the lifestyles of hunter-gatherers, is that for most of human history, most societies and cultures appear to have managed to live a rich and high-quality life without the excess materialism and standards we seem to heavily depend on today. While there are plenty of important cultural and technological innovations (not least the advancements in medicine) to marvel at today, there is also tremendous conceit in the idea that we’re the pinnacle of a great society, an exceptional culture unlike any that’s come before. 

Many of us seem to think that “our culture” invented everything out of whole cloth very recently. This belies the fact that most of us inherited the world we were born into without raising a finger. It’s odd to take credit for and have excessive pride in something we inherited (consider “American exceptionalism”). And for what it’s worth, it’s also hubristic to incessantly admonish your own culture and society, e.g., to call for its death as has been sadly an endemic phenomenon on many American college campuses of late. One can take pride in a culture without overinflating its worth. Likewise, one can critique a society in the hopes of it doing better without devolving into nihilism and self-loathing. Once more, I digress…

Few of us seem to recognize just how much of culture is not just confined to specific geographic boundaries and historical periods but the product of people who lived thousands and tens of thousands of years ago interacting and exchanging their knowledge and skills, sometimes over vast distances. The anthropologist Leslie White commented on the fundamental achievements of “primitive” peoples in his 1959 book The Evolution of Culture, summarizing,

The accumulated knowledge, skills, tools, machines, and techniques developed by primitive, preliterate peoples laid the basis for civilization and all the higher cultures. They invented and developed all the basic tools, weapons, and utensils. They developed the major arts and crafts, such as the ceramic and textile arts, and initiated the art of metallurgy. Food and fiber plants were brought under domestication by them, and they developed the techniques for their culture. They originated the domestication of animals…Thus during the first hundreds of thousands of years of culture history, primitive peoples were acquiring realistic and matter-of-fact knowledge and originating and perfecting rational and effective techniques. This age-old process of accumulation and development culminated in the Agricultural Revolution, which profoundly transformed the whole cultural tradition.

As much as we’ve inherited all this materialism and practical ingenuity, much knowledge and wisdom isn’t material at all but cognitive or symbolic, a lot of which has likely been forgotten, ignored, or erased over the millennia. Uncovering this nonmaterial realm of culture is also the domain of anthropology. 

Again, are we so sure that we’ve constructed a society that aligns with who we are?

What could be more advantageous for societal and individual well-being than the analysis of who we are and how we got here? I can’t help but think that these are some of the most important questions we may ever be able to ask and search for. What are we constructing a sustainable society for, if not for all of us to eventually be free to explore our world both in body and mind?

We cannot all just be moneymakers, profit-maximizers, and conspicuous consumers into the indefinite future. We need at least a few of us who step outside our normal routines to contemplate and attempt to answer some of these big questions with the hope that we may unexpectedly discover improved ways of thinking and being in the world that can then be relayed to the rest of us. Thus, consider this a defense of the humanities and social sciences.

It can seem like academics, scholars, and other intellectuals are merely pompous elites. Assuredly, some of them are, but not all of them are like this. They are human too and swayed by their egos, but there are a few in the bunch that know something about the long arc of human history and our place in the cosmos. These are very privileged positions to have and they should be taken seriously by those who occupy them, all the while recognizing they are in service to the public, not to some small interest group, corporation, or political agenda.

In my view, the significance of anthropology is the amount of knowledge it has amassed about who we are as a species. While there will always be a need for more research, I sense the more pressing issue is how we figure out how to better synthesize and distribute all this information to everyone. How do we better engage the public and show the significance of what this subject has been telling us about ourselves? That is another task for the anthropologist. As I’ve argued previously in The Role of the Anthropologist in the 21^st Century,

Given the dubious nature of what direct value we provide to the world at large, I believe the one thing we have to offer is our honest perspective on the human condition, the good and the bad. The only way to demonstrate that value then, is for us to learn better means of communicating, engaging, and interacting with the public. For those anthropologists interested in this project, we are tackling a monumental question—what does all of this accrued knowledge and data of humanity mean for all of us and how do we best preserve, curate, and share it with all those who care to listen?

The investigation into the material objects we leave behind (archaeology), the spread of language via writing and speech over time and space (linguistics),  how humans evolved (biological anthropology), or the differences and similarities between various societies and cultures (social and cultural anthropology) are all under the umbrella of anthropology. This is an immense and overwhelming field of study, and it can appear as something only for pompous intellectuals to care about. But I would argue this is, by definition, a domain of knowledge for everyone and should always be in service to humanity as a whole. Whether we realize it or not, we are all contributing to this discipline in one form or another through our behavior, speech, and thought patterns. All of us are a part of the story of anthropology—one that is never-ending in its quest to figure out who we are.

Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow!

Cheers!

-JSB