Welcome to the class

Welcome to ANTH 2700: Key debates in anthropology. This class is a required second-year unit for all majors and minors in anthropology. Our purpose is to give you a strong sense of the different schools of thought and perspectives among cultural anthropologists so that you can decide for yourself what kind of approach to anthropology makes the most sense to you.

Most people would say that scholars have to be specialized, and work in a “discipline,” a specific branch of knowledge. This is more or less true, but it doesn’t sit well with anthropology. We are like 7-Up, the Un-Cola (McDonald 2017). Anthropology is the un-discipline. Our discipline is not a specialization, it’s a conversation. It is a debate among many people who share a lot of the same interests and the same curiosity, but who don’t really agree on much else, except maybe an interest in keeping the conversation going. Who is an anthropologist? It’s people who want to talk to other anthropologists, even ones with whom they—in all honesty—don’t share a lot of ideas in common.

The anthropology conversation has been going on for over 100 years, and many of the original open questions in that debate remain unresolved, so the conversation will keep going for another 100 years. This class is your initiation into that conversation. It gives you the experience and the knowledge to join in the debates among anthropologists.

What we don’t know

Why would people who disagree, often on fundamental things, bother to keep talking to, even fighting with, each other? Because they are aware of what they don’t know. Even though they disagree, they are humble about what they think and believe, and they respect that other people, though different, have valuable perspectives.

Wikenigma is a web site where scholars can contribute articles describing “known unknowns” in all fields of knowledge (Gardiner 2025). No one knows why, for instance, it is easy to find lots of a compound called dolomite but the conditions for producing it don’t exist on earth.¹⁾ For each of these problems, everyone has to admit what they don’t know. Answers are up for grabs. Some answers are better than others but a good answer could come from anywhere.

Wikenigma doesn’t have an anthropology section, but if they wanted to, they could. There are many unanswered questions in anthropology too. The site would need to be a little creative about describing anthropology’s unsolved mysteries. Anthropologists often ask questions that can’t be answered with one single, statement of truth. They investigate questions that will never be fully solved. But the answers are not simply people’s opinions either; we learn more about the issues by debating them, even if we never agree on the one true answer. So our purpose, unlike dolomite researchers, is to come up with as many new answers as possible. When we are in touch with what we don’t know, we can participate in the conversation with other people to learn more about what we want to know better.

The unsolved mysteries of the un-discipline

As you learned in the introductory units, ANTH 1001 and ANTH 1002, anthropology has shown that the things people assume are normal and universal are more often particular to places and times. What we think is natural is learned from people’s socialization in a specific community. Yet, while this perspective powerfully challenges many dominant ethnocentric ideas and ideologies, it also raises new questions. These kinds of questions, and the debates they have sparked, are what defines anthropology. Here are some of them:

• If people are products of a social system and its cultural worldview, do people have free will, freedom to act, the capacity for meaningful action?
  • What part of one’s life is determined by rules and the social system they form, and what part is determined by one’s own actions or other people’s actions?
• Each society is like a world unto itself, but no societies are truly isolated and the evidence for the effects of contact and interaction among different societies is everywhere in history. This is a paradox.
  • So how much like a “world” is a society? Is it a sphere, a cell, an organism, or something else?
  • To understand people today, should we look at history, movement, change, and events, or look at how their community fits together as a system now?
  • Are there many histories or just one global history? Do societies evolve in the same ways or not?
• If everything is particular, and each society is like a precious little snowflake, completely unique, then how should we talk about big things that a lot of societies go through, like war, violence, or domination? How do we grasp the big picture?
• The idea that each person is a product of their unique culture means that everyone is different and same: They have different cultural worldviews, but they all have the same capacity to acquire a single worldview.
  • Should we all be neuroscientists to understand this universal capacity to acquire a culture? Are we studying a single human species, or the many different ways people make themselves into distinct beings?
  • Do human beings and human societies have a fixed essence from which several different varieties descend, or is humanity a bunch of apples, oranges, and other incomparably different things? Can it be both? Could it be neither?

We won’t necessarily treat each of these questions separately. Rather we will look at debates within anthropology and the formation of new schools of thought over time. As we will see some or all of these open questions inflect every big topic that anthropologists examine.

We won’t solve any of these questions completely either, because as I say above, they don’t really have a singular answer. It depends on how you look at them. We can make progress on understanding our own ideas about all of them by coming together to share what we think about different positions that anthropologists take on several different issues.

The heart of this class is the discussion students have with their peers in weekly tutorial meetings. In these discussions, everyone will have a chance to consider open questions with no easy answers. We want every student to hear perspectives from other people that they have never considered before, and to contribute their own ideas as well.

References

Gardiner, Martin. 2025. “Wikenigma: An Encyclopedia of Unknowns.” Wikenigma: An Encyclopedia of Unknowns. 2025. https://wikenigma.org.uk/start.

McDonald, Amy. 2017. “Uncola: Seven-Up, Counterculture and the Making of an American Brand.” The Devil’s Tale (blog). December 4, 2017. https://blogs.library.duke.edu/rubenstein/2017/12/04/uncola/.

Smith, Derek. 2023. “‘Dolomite Problem’: 200-Year-Old Geology Mystery Resolved.” University of Michigan News. November 23, 2023. https://news.umich.edu/200-year-old-geology-mystery-resolved/.