Each person has a first-person point of view on themselves. Every one of us has an I-centered picture of the world around them. This perspective is uniquely yours; no one else sees the world the same way, because you see it as yourself and another person sees it as herself or himself. Hence, if anthropology examines all the ways of being human, it must also consider the fact that the human person is a subject, and has a subjective perspective on the world.

One of the ways in which the mind has appeared in this class is the ethical aspect of anthropology. Anthropologists are social scientists. Like scientists, they are interested in the real world, and want to know about people by observing and recordings empirical facts about them. Unlike scientists of the natural world, however, they cannot and do not want to treat people as if they were things. Rather we want to enter another person's mind. For that we need permission, of course. (And many other fields also respect people's autonomy even if the exercise of their autonomy is not part of what they are studying.) It also means giving up a little of one's authority. As the observer, you do not have the final say on a person's values and worldview. Anthropology learns by listening to people and letting other people tell us what we should be paying attention to. The emic perspective matters more than the etic perspective.

Another way in which anthropology deals with the presence of people's minds is in the Boasian concept of culture itself. Everyone has a uniquely first-person perspective on their environment. One does not see or experience the environment as a collection of disconnected things—there's a rock, that's a house, there are a few clouds up there, etc. It is all naturally connected together as a complete world with you at the center. This is a complete whole. (This is where the German word Weltanschung, or worldview, comes from.)