People are the subject of anthropology.
Anthropologists are interested in all aspects of people--their biology and their culture and how those integrate with each other.
Anthropologists want to know about the legacy of the human past and how that past is shaped who we are today,
both biologically and culturally.
Anthropology literally means the study of humans,
But unlike other social sciences or disciplines that are interested in humans like political science or economics
or psychology or sociology,
Anthropology is interested in all aspects of humanity and so it's often referred to as a holistic
discipline, interested in humans as a whole.
Human culture or
traditions and beliefs that are transmitted through learning has allowed humans to occupy all parts of the globe and beyond.
Language is an important part of our cultural and biological repertoire that gives us the ability
to adapt to all kinds of environments and social situations.
Ralph Waldo Emerson knew this when he said what a little plastic creature?
He is so shifties so adaptive his body a chest of tools
and he making himself comfortable in every climate in every condition. A
Key concept in anthropology is cultural relativity,
which is simply trying to suspend judgment about another society in order to understand why that society does what it does.
This doesn't mean that all behaviors are acceptable because they exist, but that understanding
a society and deciding what is right and wrong are two different endeavors.
Anthropologists are really about understanding
why people do what they do.
The flipside of cultural relativity is called
Ethnocentrism. You've probably heard of the word
egocentric where a person puts himself at the center of the world.
Ethnocentrism is similar,
where you put your ethnicity or your culture the way you do things at the center and judge others by that standard.
 
Anthropologists are interested in both how people are different around the world and the ways in which we are similar--
what we all share as humans.
Language certainly qualifies as a cultural universal or something that is shared by every human society.
As you might have guessed
Anthropology is a very wide-ranging discipline covering everything from
Neanderthals to Nahuatl (which is the language).
This is why anthropology is referred to as holistic. It's interested in
everything that humans do and everything that humans ever did.
So for this reason to make things more manageable, it's broken down into four different subfields: physical anthropology,
archeology, cultural anthropology, and finally linguistic anthropology.
Linguistic anthropology looks at language in a social context. A number of different topics are related to this overarching theme
including the structure of languages, how we use language in different social
contexts, where did language come from, how does the brain make language possible, and
how language is learned, how it changes and how it dies.
Sometimes we assume that people are mentally primitive because their technology is simple, however,
hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari in southern Africa have one of the most complex languages with a wide sound inventory
that's quite remarkable for its click sounds. So it's really evident
it's not the case that simple technology
equates to simple language.
Linguists tend not to make the front page news,
but you may have heard of a few of them. Noam Chomsky,
Tolkien, and Jakob Grimm of fairytale fame are just a few, and we'll be talking about these guys
at different times during the semester.
Language is really hard to define. It certainly is a structured communication
system that can be delivered a number of ways, verbally, sign language or through writing. These are called delivery systems.
Language however is more than just passing along information
from one person to another as we'll see in subsequent lectures. Here are some examples of how language is not just about
communicating information, but about getting people to think a certain way. So
when politicians say something like "mistakes were made", they're deliberately
avoiding taking
responsibility for an action.
Other examples include things like "pre-owned cars",
which make used cars seemed more palatable.
We're all familiar with legalese which sometimes tries to obfuscate or hide the real content.
So an involuntary conversion of a 747 is in fact legalese for a plane crash.
Language is essential to humans. We're highly social and we require the ability to communicate complex thoughts in order to cooperate.
We have to know what's going on in other people's minds in order to go about our daily life.
Language allows us to take what is in our mind and transfer it to somebody else's mind,
hopefully.
reliably enough to get the result that we want. Imagine having to act everything out in order to communicate with somebody. As
we'll see later in the semester
sometimes our nonverbal signals actually reveal more about our thoughts and emotions than what we say.
Finally a beautiful statement about language comes from anthropologist Wade Davis in the wake of massive
language extinction on our planet.
We're losing not just language but thousands of years of accumulated knowledge a way of seeing the worlds that can never be recovered
Wade goes on to argue that this mass linguistic and cultural extinction is reducing the world's collective
imagination such that future generations will wonder what we were thinking. In
the next lecture we'll consider what is language.
