Cultural Anthropology as Natural History

The scientific method that most distinguishes cultural anthropology from the other social sciences is the natural history method.

In philosophy natural history is an example of induction – that is, reasoning from a set of observations to arrive at general principles.

Thus, for anthropology the facts always come first, and the principles – inferred from the facts – come second. Cultural anthropology always goes from particular to the general.

Moreover the principles (conclusions and, statements of order or “law”) vary according to the framework shaping any particular set of facts.

The principles, for example, that governed our emergence as a species were primarily those of adaptive value of physical traits (speech and a larger brain) in relation to a new ecological niche, hunting and gathering.

As another example, the transition from bands to the tribal level of sociocultural organization reflected the pressures of human population that had filled that niche over the entire world. Principles shift their levels of generality as the focus or spotlight on particular sets of facts shifts.

In its widest framework, evolution proceeds from the situational ability of apparently random events, such as genetic mutations or behavioral patterns, to solve some problem, such as the movement of a group of living beings into a new habitat.

The result is ever more complex biological and social “designs”. Living system exhibit over time, population growth, escalation in scale and increasing specialization of functional subparts. All living systems, whether a single biological organism or a larger social group, are self regulating, responding to exterior conditions in the environment from which they must derive and transform matter, energy, and momentum in the process of reproducing both the species and the group.

They also engage in a characteristics array of activities or actions to process that matter and energy, which are propelled by momentum. These activities form cycles, in the sense that they characteristically go through a “round” and start over again with the same sequence of behaviors.

Living species group themselves into “breeding populations,” or communities. Their characteristics activities also form natural, observable divisions in their behavior, which are the basis for what can be called ‘institutions’, or sets of more or less discrete activities that, taken together, solve some problem and perform some function for the benefit of the individual and the group.

Thus, the cluster of activities that surround a chimpanzee mother’s nurturing and raising of her infants and juveniles form a coherent social complex of activities that calls the “mother-offspring family.” One way to look at human social and cultural evolution is through the successive emergence, or “factoring out’” of human institutions. That is, when an institution has fully emerged, human beings have given it a name and attached names or labels to the “roles” one must play in them.

Thus, the human “family” has the roles of “mother” and “son” or “daughter,” as well as “husband” and “father,” two roles not present in the chimpanzee family prototype.
Cultural Anthropology as Natural History