Program 2: Introduction to Anthropology

Narr: David and Judith McDougal, two anthropological filmmakers have gone to northwest Kenya to make films about the people of the Turkana region. The McDougals lived with the Turkana for 7 months learning about their language, their customs and what they believe.

Especially close to two sisters, Nanural and Longoli, the two anthropologists asked the women what they should film to learn about the Turkana.

(People speaking Turkana.)

Narr: Where is it that we find the meaning in the lives of people who seem so different from ourselves? What objects in their world reveal their heart and their spirit? To know another, our vision must be wide and clear, not narrow and self absorbed! The camera, a window out onto the world, not a mirror to reflect back only ourselves!

(Children and adults speaking.)

(Band playing at funeral procession.)

Narr: Of all creatures on this planet, we alone acknowledge our mortality through formal rituals! We, alone, carry history in our consciousness, peer into the future, and prepare our young to do the same!

Singular in our self-awareness, we ponder our very nature. We ask, "Who are we?" "What are we?"

"You be here today, you're gone tomorrow, you know. You don't know what to look for after death. But you always can see what you can see in front of you, you know. But like me, you know, I like people to have a nice time, and when I leave this place, the earth, I like a little band behind me."

(Band playing, people cheering.)

Narr: As we look around us, we know that everywhere people are fundamentally alike, yet different: Part of one human family, but incredibly diverse in their ways!

Clearly human nature is not fixed, immovable, or given! On the contrary, human behavior swings through a wide arc of possibilities!

To determine what is the same in human behavior, to understand and explain diversity, that is the task of anthropology!

Anthropology is the study of human beings. We study anthropology because we want to affirm and celebrate life! And to do so, we must first understand it in all its richness, in all its complexity, in its incredible diversity.

The central insight of anthropology is the perception that each pattern of behavior, each human blueprint for survival, is in its own terms equally valid, worthwhile, creative!

Anthropology asks that we give up our ethnocentrism, the tendency to judge what others do solely by our own values and standards.

(People dancing, man and woman dancing while holding snakes in their hands.)

(Strange sound, like an insect, yet, humming a human tune!)

Narr: We note many solutions to the universal problems of survival--a multitude of adaptations! Without respect for the myriad adaptations that men and women have made to their environments, we're all in danger! Every culture is at risk!

If this desolate island could speak, if this windswept landscape could bear witness to the horror, they would tell of the most complete case of genocide on record!

For 12,000 years the Tasmanian Aborigines lived here in almost complete isolation. When the British came in 1803 there were 4,000 native inhabitants. In 1876, there were none!

Anthropologist Dr. Rise Jones and his associate retraced the fate of the Aborigines.

"It was into this penitentiary, Jim, that the Aborigines were brought. They were put in the downstairs room. Some of them were ill, some of them had already died. They had the common cold and pneumonia and stuff. By this time they were absolutely frightened, terrified of the place. 29th of July, the Aborigines were terrified to stop any longer at the penitentiary as they said the devils were there. They said, 'the devil run round the room, come to the windows and spear them!'

I inadvertently asked why they cried. When one of them, Dray, asked, 'Why black man's wife was not to cry as well as white man?"

Narr: The British recorded the brutal details of their destruction of the Aborigines in journals.

"They have a great abhorrence of the doctor whom they look on with suspicious horror! Last night he attempted to feel the pulse of one of the females. When he approached her, she screamed and shrieked and crouched beneath the blanket and tried to bite him."

"Can you imagine that kind of scene, eh? Without any defense at all against the disease, it just wiped them out."

"The end."

Narr: This is how the Aborigines looked when the British set up Tasmania as a penal colony. Rapists, arsonists, murderers, these were the colonists let loose upon the native population. As devastating to the Aborigines was the importation of millions of sheep, which throughout the 1820's and 30's drove them from their ancestral hunting grounds.

By 1858 there were only 15 remaining Aborigines on the island. One of these was Traganini who was to become the last full-blooded Tasmanian.

This was the great age of the biologists and geologists who in discovering the skeleton of Neanderthal Man developed an overwhelming interest in the Tasmanians, viewing them as the missing link in the human evolutionary chain.

In the ensuing hysteria, scientists rushed to obtain Tasmanian skulls for study and display. Graves were robbed and bodies exhumed.

When King Billy, the last Tasmanian male, died in 1869, a scandal ensued.

While his body was still in the morgue, his skull was stolen and another forced into its place! His body reduced to a mass of blood and fat, his hands and feet mysteriously missing!

Traganini's last years were dominated by the fear that her own dead body would be violated.

The scientific work of Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin on evolution in the animal and botanical world led to a popular generalization about human beings.

"Survival of the fittest," a phrase coined by Herbert Spencer, became the justification for genocide. By this logic, the Aborigines were doomed to become extinct because they were less fit!

The museum at Oxford University became, for a time, a monument to this point of view, and even Darwin, himself, when he first saw South American Indians remarked, "Their skin is of a dirty color! I could not have believed how wide was the difference between savage and civilized man. It is greater than between a wild and domesticated animal!" And what became of Traganini? Her worst fears came true. Her skeleton was hung in a museum as an example of so-called "primitive anatomy."

In 1974 the Tasmanian government, in part because of protests by Australian Aborigines, took possession of her remains in order to end the brutal disrespect visited upon her body. She was cremated and buried at sea off Brunai Island near Oyster Cove where she had once lived.

The case of the Tasmanian Aborigines is a tragic example of one culture assuming superiority over another, and then reducing that culture to silence and extinction!

Modern anthropology would soon come to condemn such a record!

This rare motion picture footage shot in 1914 is one of the earliest ethnographic films ever made. It shows the war rituals of the Kwakiutl Indians of the Pacific Northwest studied by esteemed pioneer in anthropology, Franz Boas.

For Boas, every culture was special and equal, as he wrote, "The more I see of people's customs the more I realize we have no right to look down on them! It is my view that the idea of a cultured individual is merely relative, that a person's worth should be judged by the warmth of his heart!"

Boas trained a whole generation of anthropologists demanding precision, scientific methods and a richly humanistic approach. One of his best known students was Margaret Mead.

Mead: "What I heard about Boas, himself, sounded exciting and so I took his course and found him someone who was absolutely the ground under one's feet, and he was so absolutely clear about what he knew, what he didn't know, what needed to be known, how things could be approached.

He had this tremendous sense of a landscape, which we all had to probe, and that you had a sense that each time he made a study, he went just as far in as he could go!"

Narr: Margaret Mead's career spanned nearly half a century during which time she did pioneering work on the relationship between culture and personality. Her contribution to anthropology went far beyond the study of specific cultures.

Mead: "It's a little hard, you know, to judge what impact that you've had on a field! Initially, I think the most important thing I did was to introduce anthropology to the general literate public. They didn't understand at all what the anthropologist did or why he went and studied those strange people on the other side of the world."

Narr: Mead's early work focussed on child rearing practices which she studied in Samoa, New Guinea, India and North America. She built on Boas's idea that human behavior is not so much biologically determined as influenced by our cultural environment.

Through her popular writings emphasizing the importance of learning, she provided a theoretical framework for both the civil rights movement of the 1960's and the modern women's movement.

Since those early days anthropologists like Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, Bronislaw Malinowsky, and A. R. Radcliff-Brown, have expanded the field of anthropology.

It is now divided into two main divisions: "physical anthropology," the study of human biology and evolution, and "cultural anthropology."

"When I entered anthropology our major task was to rescue vanishing cultures! This was presented to me as the thing that must be done because these precious cultures were disappearing all over the world as they were brought in contact with traders and missionaries."

Narr: But the issue of rescuing vanishing cultures is complex. Some early anthropologists have been accused of promoting the disappearance of cultural traditions and artifacts by stripping them of their social contexts.

These people, members of the Omaha Nation from Masse, Nebraska, are welcoming home a sacred object, a mohafte, a sacred pole. It was taken from the Omaha by anthropologists 100 years ago and placed on display in the Peabody Museum at Harvard University.

"Back in history when my grandfather had care of it, it was placed in a tent, a sacred tent, and this was a central part of the Omaha's lives. Anything that they did, they went to the sacred pole and prayed to it and considered it a human being. But the songs, the details of it, are gone. It's vanished and I don't thinkk that we can bring that back, but we can still carry on the meaning and the symbol of the sacred pole that was once here."

"They had this renewal ceremony which involved using buffalo fat and painting the pole with buffalo fat and red ocher. And when the buffalo disappeared, they couldn't do the ceremony any more."

Narr: A nineteenth century ethnographer named Alice Fletcher recorded information about Omaha culture for over 25 years. She persuaded many Omaha religious leaders to part with much of the people's secret lore. Over the years she forwarded to the Peabody Museum a collection of Omaha artifacts, religious objects, and medicine bundles, including the sacred pole.

Today, the Omaha Collection at the Peabody Museum is one of the most complete archives of Omaha material culture to be found anywhere, including the reservation! Cultural artifacts of the Omaha remain locked away from them!

After extensive negotiation the Omaha regained custody of the sacred pole. He has returned to his people after an absence of 100 years.

(Drums and chanting while people walk by and touch the pole.)

Narr: The human tapestry is made up of thousands of cultural threads, each colorful and extraordinary and rich in its own way! And every man and woman has a story that is finally the story of us all!

This is Lorang's story: A rich and esteemed leader of the Turkana tribe in Kenya, Lorang as a young man, served in the King's African Rifles. A success in the European world as well, he was asked to become a government official.

(Lorang speaking.)

(Wife speaking.)

Narr: Among the Turkana it is common for men to have a number of wives. And how many he may have depends on the size of his animal herds and on his ability to support an ever-increasing household.

(Wife speaking.)

(Lorang speaking.)

(Sound of people laughing and animals.)

Narr: If anthropology has one cardinal tenet, it is the belief in the equal validity of all cultures! That is "cultural relativism."

"Ethnocentrism," or the view that one's culture is superior to another, blinds us to the complexities of another society, to understanding why it is, for instance, that a man would have several wives!

(Wife speaking.)

(Lorang speaking.)

(Strange insect sound, like an insect, yet, humming a human tune.)