Cultural Anthropology: What Is It and What Does It Have to Do with Being an Expert Witness in Racial Justice Act Motions?

Anthropology, broadly, is the science or study of humanity. Anthropos - human, logos - science of or study of (logos means a lot more than that but we’ll keep it simple). You really need a qualifier there to understand what about humanity the anthropologist/s in question study: forensic anthropologists study the decomposition of bodies, linguistic anthropologists study human languages, medical anthropologists study medical systems. I’m a cultural anthropologist, we study human culture.

Human culture is the ‘proper object’ of cultural anthropology. For each of the other subdisciplines I just listed before, I also gave their proper objects. Similarly, physics has forces, chemistry has atoms, cellular biology has cells, jurisprudence has the law. Defining culture has proven very difficult over the years because it’s such an overarching element of our world. There’s nothing that humans do that’s outside of culture; there’s a cultural element to everything that we do. Culture is that sea of meanings by which we understand the world and determine what actions to make in it. 

Here are some major definitions given over the years by eminent anthropologists:

• Edward B. Tylor (1871): "Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."

  • Source: Primitive Culture

• Franz Boas (1911): "Culture is composed of the totality of beliefs, ideas, values, and practices that are shared and transmitted within a social group."

  • Source: The Mind of Primitive Man

• Margaret Mead (1935): "Culture is a tool for survival, shaped by the historical and social context of the people who create it."

  • Source: Coming of Age in Samoa

• Clifford Geertz (1973): "Culture is a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life."

  • Source: The Interpretation of Cultures

• Raymond Williams (1981): "Culture is one of the most complex words in the English language, but it is fundamentally about the way of life of a people."

  • Source: Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society

Let’s take an example to help us understand what I’m talking about. A courtroom is a cultural scene, it’s a place where culture is happening. There are legal anthropologists who specialize in courtroom ethnography. I did some myself during my dissertation field work. When an anthropologist is interpreting a courtroom as a cultural scene, they’re trying to read the underlying symbolism, roles, logics, and patterns at play which help the people in the space understand what is happening.

In doing that, a cultural anthropologist might look at the ways people are physically distributed in the room, and how they move around in it. We might think about how people enter the room: lawyers, witnesses, and defendants who aren’t in custody enter from one side. The judge has their own chambers at the other side with its own door. Defendants in custody typically have a different entrance into a secure part of the courthouse. These things tell us something about what’s happening, symbolically, in the courtroom. It’s a place where people in the free world and people in custody can mix and interact, and where someone can become free or, conversely, be placed in custody. The fact that the  judge has their own entrance and space is instructive as well, the judge controls the activity of the courtroom and ultimately has the power to decide on the movement between freedom and custody. The physical location of the judge in the room (sitting in the middle, typically raised up, the rest of the room facing them), the distinctive clothes they wear, even their term of address ‘the court’ when addressing indirectly or ‘your honor’ when addressing directly, serve to distinguish the judge and make it clear that their role is both unique and their status is elevated (literally). 

There is a great deal more that can be said about just these elements of the court, and these are just a very few of the symbolic elements of a US criminal court. Others might include: the spatial division between the prosecution and defense; the location of the flag; the meaning of swearing on the bible or swearing an oath. All of these and more are the kinds of things which an anthropologist might take into their analysis to explain the operations of a US criminal court and its relation to US society at large. Notice I’ve spoken about the US only in this example - different countries have different symbols, conventions, patterns - and these all tell us something about the country itself, while the comparison might tell us about the difference in how law operates between the two.

The study of all these things, and many more, is cultural anthropology. The fact that other countries do things differently is proof that they needn’t be done exactly this way. The difference is culture. That culture isn’t just the key to understanding what’s going on in a given situation, it’s also the key to knowing how to act. It’s why we talk about culture shock, or why so many people freeze in a novel cultural context. If an alien, or someone from a very different cultural background, was teleported into a US court they wouldn’t have a clue what was going on. There isn’t enough information in the signs on the walls and in what the people are saying to decode everything that’s happening. Culture, and our knowledge of it (often unconscious) is how we decode what we see and hear, it is like a script which we use to help us understand the world and how to act in it.

That last point is really key so I will repeat it. Culture is the template which we use to help us understand the world and how to act in it. A cultural anthropologist uses their knowledge of the cultural scripts at play in a given situation to interpret the actions of, for example, an attorney or a police officer. We look at what they’ve written, what they’ve said, and what they’ve done and can ask: does race help us make sense of how they’re acting here? Are they revealing a racially biased perception of the world? I have a lot more to say about the methodology of applying cultural anthropology to RJA cases but that will have to wait for another post. For now, I’ll try to clear up one major confusion I run into often.

At this point, some readers might ask, how is this different from sociology? The truth is that the difference was once much more clearly defined than it is now. The answer has more to do with history and disciplinary conventions than a clear distinction in methods, axioms, or proper objects. 

Sociologists and anthropologists used to be differentiated by where they worked. Essentially, sociologists tried to understand the social arrangements and cultural patterns in countries with universities, the West, the ‘us’ who were doing the studying. Their focus was on understanding how society worked, and society was assumed to be something that only really pertained in the West. Anthropologists worked in places with colonial governments, the Rest, the ‘them’ who were supposed to people the parts of the world that weren’t Europe or settled by Europeans. 

That distinction was never fully worked out, particularly because it was based on a faulty assumption about a fundamental distinction between the social organization of people in the West and the rest of the world. Over the course of the 20th century the distinction blurred and now anthropologists study culture more or less everywhere: from Iraq to Mexico City to San Francisco Jails. 

One rule of thumb is that social and cultural anthropologists use ethnography (long term, embedded field work) more than sociologists, though sociologists and many other disciplines use the method too. Anthropologists tend to claim the method as their own however, and it is certainly true that it is the default and predominant method of research for social and cultural anthropologists. As a result, social and cultural anthropology is much less quantitative than sociology.

So if it’s not method or proper object or study population, what is the distinction between the two? The distinction comes down, essentially, to disciplinary boundaries and conventions. Social and cultural anthropologists and sociologists draw different bodies of theory, developed within their own disciplinary boundaries, to explain the phenomena they study. But we borrow those from each other too - I read and cite a lot of sociologists, specifically criminologists. But do we have different theoretical traditions and that’s important to understand how we ground ourselves in different texts.

Ultimately, the clearest distinction, even the only clear distinction, is a tautological one. Anthropologists work in anthropology departments, publish in anthropology journals, attend anthropology conferences, and are members of anthropological societies/associations. Sociologists do the same, but in sociology departments, journals, conferences, and associations. Both have their merits, and so I prefer to think of myself as a social scientist trained in anthropology, and leave the disciplinary boundary drawing to other people.