Anthropology What is it? What do you work on? What are you looking for?
Anthropology, by definition and decomposition of its roots (anthropo = Man and logos = Study), is the study of man, understanding this in its broadest sense, a more current concept could say that this scientific discipline is responsible for studying the human being and everything related to it.
In this context, with such a broad and complex object of study, it is necessary to define what is meant by human, for anthropological science the human being is a bio-psycho-socio-cultural entity, an issue that needs to be explained in detail.
The human being is considered as a biological organism, which has vital functions and biological potentialities that are common to other living beings, as well as peculiarities that define it as a unique species of its kind. It is argued that current humanity is the product of an interaction between environmental factors and the evolutionary processes to which every living form on the planet earth is subject.
The human being is conceived as a psychological unit, with superior mental processes that allow the association of concepts, abstraction, memory, imagination and the creation of new knowledge. In its psychological aspects this biological entity enjoys a rich variety of resources and conflicts that constitute the immense repertoire of possible mental responses.
Humanity can not be defined without stating that it exists in society, no human being survives its first years of existence by itself, nor is it considered to be only for a long period of time as a healthy environment for the development of human life . The human being not only enjoys the company of his peers, but also desperately needs it to stay alive.
Perhaps the most specific and proper tool of humanity, which has led him to become the best predator of the resources of his environment, is culture. Of course we must consider the term tool as something more than the tangible, it is the idea behind the word, culture can be understood as everything that is done by humans, but it turns out that human beings are volitional beings (they have their own will and exercise it) and often teleological (they have final motivations and pursue their fulfillment), so the acts they perform and the instruments they build have a meaning and a usefulness (be it material, spiritual, mental, aesthetic or another type) that make such a thing an expression of culture.
All the aspects that are indicated are only a simplification of what constitutes the term human. Everything I have said in the previous paragraphs is an indivisible system, when it is separated is only for explanatory purposes, in reality each human being is a compendium of everything that has been indicated, it is both a biological being, an active psyche , a social actor and a culture maker, all at the same time.
It is understandable that when it was said that the object was broad and complex, in truth it is. From this amplitude arises the need to divide the study of the human being in plots to develop scientific specializations that can give answers to the questions that are generated around our own existence.
Anthropology, initially proposed as a single science, presents at least four major areas that give rise to its disciplines or specializations. It has to address the biological aspect and is done from physical or biological anthropology (in some cases is designated as bio-anthropology or human biology depending on the approach you work with), which ranges from studies of population biology, genetics and blood polymorphisms, to the anthropology of nutrition, sports anthropology and medical anthropology.
The complex formed by the social and cultural elements (which in some cases have very diffuse limits and difficult to establish) is worked from the socio-cultural anthropology (called in some contexts simply social anthropology). This specialization of knowledge sought in the beginning the establishment of social mechanics or social engineering, that is, the way in which societies function in order to understand how to manage them, it is clear that the colonialist origin of this branch of anthropology It jumps at sight, nevertheless, with the advance of the knowledge has constituted like the one in charge to study the social relations and the cultural patterns that are own of the human groups, allowing that we know ourselves when knowing the other.
Traditionally, the branches that have been mentioned previously are usually applied to present or current time, but there is a very special one that is dedicated to studying the past, it is about archeology, which despite lacking the tagline that had the precedents is also a branch of anthropology. This discipline addresses the facts not necessarily recorded in the existing history, allows to explore vestiges of prehistoric times and can even correct serious errors in records of historical times that have suffered some kind of distortion or undue manipulation. Archeology seeks to know the past with maximum certainty, but remembering at all times that the way forward is pregnant with errors that have been made and that must be learned in order to overcome them.
Of the four branches, the last one corresponds to anthropolinguistics (or simply linguistic if one follows the simplification that the only one with articulated language is human), which focuses on studying the phenomenon of language in all its aspects, treating it as production of sound, of words, of representations of reality, of tools for the establishment of human relationships and of symbolisms that carry hidden senses.
It is worth mentioning that the identification of these four major branches does not detract from the intermediate points or the new specializations that appear on the horizon of anthropology. Example of interrelationships is paleoanthropology, where physical anthropology and archeology are mixed to study the human remains of the past; another example is the ethnohistory, which combines elements of archeology with social anthropology in order to study the everyday of the past and see history beyond just the Big Story (reduced to dates of battles and ephemeris). A last and risky example can be socio-biology, where part of the biological substrate of the human being to try to explain habits and behaviors both social and cultural.
As an example of new applications (and not so new, but if little known) it is necessary to mention ethno-psychiatry, which approaches the diseased psyche as an element within its cultural context, thus the patient must be seen in his own community to understand the pathology and to establish the patterns of normality and / or health of each human group, because that is how a therapy can be carried out without cultural subjugation, a treatment without imposing the concepts of one culture on those of another. The anthropology of sport is another possible example of new applications, although it is true that sports medicine is old, the anthropological conceptualization of sports and its improvement can be considered a recent rediscovery in the Venezuelan case.
All the examples given are not enough to show the breadth of anthropology, as much as it does not, even with all its branches, capture the immensity of the human being, object of study and performer of the study, a creature that can not see itself. same if it is not by means of others, an entity that is observed in the eyes of their peers.