Just Finished Reading: Think Like an Anthropologist by Matthew Engelke (FP: 2017) [319pp]

Despite regular contact with other cultures across the globe the study of Anthropology only became an academic venture in the late 19^th century. Unsurprisingly it took on the belief prevalent at the time that cultures evolve and that, quite naturally, white European culture was at the top with various grades of cultures extending below it covering Africa, South American natives and points South-East. This was of course self-congratulatory to the West and ‘justified’ much of the world’s colonial endeavours throughout that age. The problem was that once reliable data started coming back from field studies in often remote places it became almost impossible to maintain a defensible place for such theories. Although ideas of ‘advanced’ and ‘primitive’ or ‘simple’ cultures persisted (in some cases until today in popular imagination) on closer examination this proved to be nothing of the kind. Even so called ‘primitive’ cultures exhibited complex and nuanced social structures, beliefs, and what in any other context would be called political or economic activity. These were not societies that could be analysed and understood in a matter of weeks or months. Investigations lasting years or decades only began to unearth how these ‘primitive’ societies functioned and, as a result, forced western anthropologists to re-evaluate just how their own cultural, and often invisible or ignored, baggage influenced how they saw and subsequently studied their ‘primitive’ subjects.

Honing in on topics like culture and civilisation (both rather difficult to adequately pin down), values and value, blood, identity (hot button topic of the age!), authority and Nature this intriguing little volume both introduces the reader into the theories, practice and rather spotted history of Anthropology and shows how anthropologists (and by extension the reader) think about what they see and experience when they study the subjects of interest. It also allows the reader to see both the strange and the familiar both in far flung cultures as well as our own and gets you wondering exactly why we, in our far from neutral culture, do what we do and think how we do. Why are things certain colours? Why are our social structures the way they are? Is Patriarchy a default state? Are hierarchies inevitable? Is gender fixed or fluid? Looking at how other cultures or societies answer these and a whole host of other questions makes you start to wonder about your own in ways that calls, at least potentially, everything you do or see into question. Thinking like an anthropologist on a daily basis when you’re going out your daily life is quite eye-opening (and occasionally eye-popping) as you learn to see how things actually work in the world you have long taken for granted.

I think I’ve dabbled in anthropology for as long as I can remember. Whenever presented with a new situation or new group I’m always looking for power relationships, network structures and how organisations function (rather than seem to function or pretend to function). Whenever I’m watching a movie or reading a novel I’m looking at political systems or economic structures and thinking “right, that wouldn’t work” or “no one would follow HIM into battle” or some such. Reading SF in my teens and onwards whenever I’d encounter an alien civilisation or was dropped deep into a future society I was always more interested in how those societies functioned, what people (or aliens) believed and how that informed their behaviour, how they related to each other, brought up their children and, more often than not, mused “that’s nonsense” or “that would really conflict with their economics”. Books like this, both very readable and packed with information, let you see the world with different eyes, even just for a few minutes at a time. Next time you’re on your daily activities just pause for a moment and see if you can work out pecking orders or why a street sign looks the way it does and why, sometimes, a new piece of infrastructure isn’t working as the designers intended. Maybe it’s because they didn’t understand the essential anthropology of the situation? Recommended.