On the Prospects of Anthropology in the 21^st Century

At the beginning of the 20^th century, there was a burning debate about the survival of anthropology as an independent discipline. The expansion of the modern industrial civilization throughout the world threatened to absorb all non-Western indigenous cultures and to drive to extinction the ancestral ways of life of the more or less isolated peoples who still practiced them. On the other hand, the advances of evolutionary biology, genetics, neuropsychology and comparative anatomy began to answer with greater solvency those questions about the origin of humanity that had driven anthropological research since the end of the 19th century. Researchers then wondered whether anthropology really lacked a legitimate field of work or whether their subject had been taken away from them by the new sciences that subsequently emerged. The time passed by since has shown that the most gloomy predictions have not come true, although there are certainly still defects-some old, others new-that should be amended. The substitution of academic disciplines that worried anthropologists more than a hundred years ago has turned out to be a fruitful overlap between related areas. After all, if anthropology aspires to be the comprehensive study of man, few tasks will be more interdisciplinary than this. Human beings are characterized by a very high level of structural and behavioural complexity, which makes it necessary to collaborate with very diverse scientific formulations in order to acquire the most complete perspective attainable to that endeavour.

In fact, the intersection of research fields is a distinctive sign of fruitful science as opposed to pseudosciences, which remain isolated in intellectually closed circles without contact with experience and refractory to any theoretical debate. Overall, anthropology presents itself as a multifaceted science, whose goals coincide totally or partially with questions and lines of work shared by other sciences. Thus, specialties such as physical or evolutionary anthropology arose, in which the aspects of human condition shaped by biological evolution are studied. We also have cultural anthropology, which deals with the various formulas that different human cultures have developed to respond to the challenges of the environment as well as to their own needs for internal organization. Within cultural anthropology we find subspecialties, such as social anthropology, close to sociology, or the anthropologic study of beliefs, related to neurophysiology and evolutionary psychology. Nor should we forget the importance of the material evidence recovered from cultures and civilizations that have already disappeared, a mission entrusted to archaeology, which constitutes in its own right an independent discipline separated from anthropology, even though both of them remain closely interconnected in practice.

One of the main differences between anthropology and its related sciences is that it operates simultaneously along three axes, as no other discipline does. One of these axes is the one that marks the distinction between the individual and the community in which he lives. Man, as Aristotle rightly pointed out, is a social being who lives within an organized collective, and people are fully realized as such when they actively and positively participate in community life. However, we all possess at the same time a purely subjective dimension that shapes our identity and which we consider an essential and indispensable ingredient of our self. One of the aims of anthropology is to unravel the complex relationships between the individual and collective spheres in the lives of human beings. To what extent do the norms of the human group to which we belong influence the constitution of our personality or our conduct? Do we always act in conformity with these norms or do we do so even against our will? And reciprocally, to what extent do the actions of individuals-or some individuals-influence the performance of the group? Are these actions measurable or predictable in any way? These questions, and many others, are far from being answered, and they open up an extraordinarily promising field of research for the work of the anthropologist with the support of the most modern techniques available at any given time.

The second characteristic axis of anthropology, and one of the most controversial, is the connection between biology and culture in the configuration of human beings. Discussions about nature and nurture are presently regarded as an out-of-date concern, and overcome by the evidence that both are almost always inextricably intertwined. Culture can be understood as nature humanized by the work of man, and in turn nature can only be understood from a certain cultural platform that allows us to interpret it by appealing to a set of meanings intelligible to human mind. However, the question remains open as to the degree to which biological and cultural aspects interact in every specific case, and that target is the priority task of the anthropologist committed to his science. There is little doubt that a very important part of our cultural manifestations has a biological root, insofar as they conventionally express (that is, through particular and contingent manifestations) what were originally evolutionary adaptations that favoured the possibilities of survival and reproduction of our distant ancestors. Nor can there be any doubt that an equally large portion of cultural forms are purely circumstantial and undergo profound variations depending on the time and place we focus on. But the question remains as follows: to what extent can each cultural particularity be interpreted as a product of evolutionary adaptations or as a merely social product derived from the relations between individuals in a specific human group?

This query is often posed as a dilemma between evolutionary adaptations and the development of particular cultures, without considering the possible existence of a third option. Let us take the example of the origin of moral norms in a specific human group. Evolutionary anthropologists often resort to adaptive explanations to explicate that moral rule contributed to the survival and cohesion of the original tribes, which promoted the consolidation of a collective morality that has been slowly modified over time. On the other hand, anthropologists supporting a constructivist view will argue that morality arises from the power relations among the members of a society in which there may be numerous opposing groups and multiple conflicts of interest. There is no doubt that both sides are partly right, and most of the time there happens to occur a combination of those two factors. But this approach leaves out the possibility that certain cultural elements express traits of the human mindset that have not arisen as direct evolutionary adaptations, but as emergent properties derived from the structure and complexity of our brain.

In other words, the complexity of the human brain, which evolved primarily to increase our chances of survival and reproduction, may imply the development of higher intellectual faculties, such as morality, which proved useful in achieving those same objectives, or at least did not hinder them. This is what evolutionists call a super-adaptation or, in other cases, a side-effect of adaptations previously fixed by natural selection. The adoption of an emergentist perspective is still an open field of debate within anthropology. The third axis of anthropology comprises the duality of differences and similarities within members of the human species. The anthropologist must be interested both in what differentiates human beings from one another and in the similarities that evidently exist among them by virtue of their belonging to the same biological species. It is possible to correlate interpersonal differences with the particularities of the material environment and the historical development of societies, an issue from which interesting anthropological material is usually obtained. However, we must not forget that the similarities could be based on the existence of patterns of thought and behaviour shared by all human beings -or the vast majority of them- in almost all times and places.

Donald J. Brown’s human universals, which support the reality of that common basis shared by all members of the human species, offer the possibility of a wide and still largely unexplored field for a promising anthropological research. Now that we have reached the first quarter of the 21st century, anthropology should abandon the political biases that have crept into its intimate core and only focus on the search for answers about the fundamental nature of human beings, regardless of particular ideological positions. A good example of this is offered by the Spanish researcher Vicente Albert, within what we could call the pragmatic-functionalist school. In his opinion, human societies at their different scales operate as “solution-management systems” intending to overcome the continuous flow of specific problems that arise day after day. Such solutions do not need to be the optimal answers, since it is enough that they offer a practical and effective way of mending issues with the least possible consumption of resources. For Albert, the key concept is the collective management of social challenges within certain social, environmental or material coordinates. Another of his fundamental concepts is that of material or moral indebtment, which operates to stabilize social bonds and promote the maintenance of group cohesion. In short, contrary to what Marx claimed in the 19^th century about philosophy, the main task of anthropology is not to change the world, but to understand it without prejudice or moral supremacy. Because only by understanding the relationship between man and the world he inhabits will we be prepared to mitigate its less desirable consequences and, at the same time, achieve a better understanding of ourselves.