So, one traditional way to start a course
like this would be to ask you what you know
of the title and the subject, just as the
most general possible thing. A second way,
traditionally again, to start this course
would be to answer this question by taking
the word "anthropology" and introduce it formally,
etymologically, like this:
Look at the "anthropo" in anthropology, and
remind you that it and "-ology" both come
from Greek words, where anthropos is ancient
Greek for "human being" and logos comes from
the ancient Greek for "speech, oration, or
discourse," but has come to mean "science"
and to be a signifier of a serious study of
anything. So anthropology means what people
a hundred and fifty years ago would have called
"the Science of Man," and what I will instead
introduce to you as "the study of humanity."
And if you look around a university campus
and you see all of the various "ologies,"
then you will know that this particular kind of
signifying, where the university is reminding
you that they offer a serious study of something.
And they do that with a marker of an Ancient
Greek word, or a bit of Roman or Medieval
architecture, to connect symbolically to a
source of wisdom or knowledge, and surround
you with the long chain of symbols that make
up the meaning-laden space of the university.
And so, on a morning like this one,
people across the university are introducing their own disciplines, one by one.
And I could go on from there.
And in fact, starting to go on from there,
not just saying I'm interested in telling
what anthropology is, but rather asking,
what is it about a university setting and
how is it arranged, and how have we come to
culturally mark certain things with certain
languages or architectural features, I am
starting down a path towards an anthropological
description in which the simplest act is already
embedded in a web of meanings
particular to the cultural setting in which it exists.
Okay, so back to our definition. You can only
get so far with this kind of four-word definition,
so I'm going to push us in one important direction:
"Anthropology as an academic discipline,"
the American Anthropological Association says,
"studies the bases and the forms of human
diversity and unity." 
So let's call it the study of human diversity.
And still you can't really know what a discipline,
or really any practice, is without knowing
about who does it, their beliefs and traditions,
their ways of acting. This is as true of anthropologists
themselves as it is for any culture.
So what if, instead, I gave you this very
different description, taken from a recent
biographical history of four leading twentieth
century cultural anthropologists.
“They were scientists and thinkers in love
with the challenge of understanding other
human beings.”
“The deepest science of humanity, they believed,
was not one that taught us what was rooted
and unchangeable about human nature.
Rather, it was the one that revealed the wide
variation in human societies—the immense
and diverse vocabulary of propriety, custom,
morals, and rectitude.”
“Our most cherished traditions, they insisted,
are only a tiny fraction of the many ways
humans have devised for solving basic problems,
from how to order society to how to mark the
passage from childhood to adulthood.”
So as a cultural anthropologist, this feels
like a lot better way to introduce you a field
through the scholars involved, and how they see the world.
It’s personal, it describes a smaller set of people without
losing sight of the importance their actions. It links emotion and belief.
If I shared a bit more it would name names and tell you
what those people did, and why they matter.
Okay, but why do I want to teach this to you?
A handful of you may actually decide to become anthropologists,
and all of you will—I hope—add
some words to your vocabulary from this class.
But that vocabulary is really in the service
of different ways of seeing the world.
I want you to walk away aware that there are many more ways of being human today than you now know.
I want you to come to understand how
identity, power, and institutions
are the products of
human imagination, and subject to being re-imagined
or replaced altogether.
I want you to encounter ideas that change
how you see the world.
Welcome.
