Why are biological physical anthropologists concerned with studying human variation today?

Introduction

Biological anthropology deals with human evolution and human biological variation. The place of disease in this framework is as an environmental stressor that can shape human population structure and variation through differential mortality and fertility. The emphasis on human–environmental interactions in the production of disease has obvious synergies with epidemiology, and it is no surprise that there are many biological anthropologists working with epidemiologists and in public health. Human ecology is a subfield of biological anthropology that deals with human adaptability, or the ability of populations to adjust, biologically and behaviorally, to environmental conditions. These are the processes that lead to human population variation. Humans inevitably change their environments while adapting, and this leads to new stresses. Understanding the interactions between humans and their increasingly complex environments, especially with economic modernization and change across the past 50 years, has also become part of the remit of human ecology and therefore also of biological anthropology (Ulijaszek and Huss-Ashmore, 1997). Since society and culture construct the environments that humans negotiate and the behavioral responses to them, the incorporation of social and societal factors into studies of human adaptability is essential (Thomas, 1997). Biocultural anthropology is a subdiscipline of biological anthropology that considers this. With respect to health and disease, biocultural anthropology acknowledges different cultural models of disease (including biomedicine) and examines how society, culture, and behavior shape patterns of disease (Wiley and Allen, 2009). This chapter will describe the ways in which biological anthropology and biocultural anthropology study disease.

Statistical Methods and Anthropology: An Uneasy Relationship

As a discipline, anthropology, with the notable exception of biological anthropology and to a lesser extent archeology, has long had an uneasy relationship with quantitative methods and analysis. The uneasy relationship stems, in part, from a presumed incompatibility between the full richness of human experience as it might be captured and expressed qualitatively in an ethnography and the supposed loss of that richness when behavior is reduced to summary, quantitative measures. Whether or not the uneasiness is valid, the trend in cultural anthropology toward a more humanistic, interpretive, and literary approach has substantially reduced the usage of quantitative methods in anthropology as measured by the percentage of articles that make use of any kind of quantitative analysis or reporting of quantitative data. A study of six of the major journals of anthropology by Michael Chibnik (1999) concludes, “The gap between quantifiers and nonquantifiers in sociocultural anthropology may be widening. There was a striking drop in the use of simple descriptive statistics from 1985–1986 to 1995–1996” (p. 155). Yet anthropological research has a long tradition of both using and developing quantitative methods of analysis and continues to use and develop quantitative methods that are part of statistical methodology.

Broadly speaking, the utility of statistical methods for anthropological research arises from the methods providing a way to represent and analyze patterns in phenomena through quantitative measurements. As a discipline, statistics is concerned with numerically expressed data that are individually idiosyncratic but display patterning in the aggregate. This core concept of patterning in the aggregate identifies and brings together two key methodological features central to the application of statistical methods in general and to anthropology in particular: (i) the use of quantitative measures as the basis for the display and discernment of pattern in phenomena and (ii) the use of an aggregate, or a population, rather than individual cases, as the reference point for discerning and expressing patterning found in measurements made over phenomena.

Of these two features, the first raises the issue of implementation (What are appropriate quantitative measures in anthropology, especially with regard to culture?), and the second raises a conceptual issue relating to a discrepancy between the way cultural patterning is presumed to be distributed with respect to culture bearers versus the statistical concern with patterning found in an aggregate but not on individual cases. Together, these two issues highlight the unease that many anthropologists have found with quantitative methods and analysis.

In fact, there is legitimate concern regarding the fit between the concepts underlying statistical methods and the understanding anthropologists have about the nature of culture and its distribution among societal members. The unease many anthropologists have had with quantitative analysis is not due solely to a shift toward a humanistic and interpretive approach. In part, it stems from a conceptual discordance between the underpinnings of statistical methods and the assumptions anthropologists make about how phenomena of interest to anthropologists are structured. Consequently, this article focuses primarily on the relationship between the conceptual foundation of statistical methods and the conceptual foundation that anthropologists bring forward in their analysis of human societies and human culture. The range of quantitative forms of analysis that have been implemented in anthropology will be discussed briefly.

This article describes how different philosophical, cultural, social, and biological anthropologies have influenced not only ‘object theory’ (the way in which mental illness can become an object of scientific research) but also methodology (the access to this respective object) in psychiatry. Anthropological prepositions determine research as well as practice in psychiatry in a latent way or explicitly in the approaches which are summarized here under the description of phenomenological-anthropological psychiatry. These existential approaches as well as those of a constitutive or transcendental phenomenology in psychiatry try to understand psychiatric disturbances as regular variations of basic human structures, such as individuality and subjectivity, temporality and history, consciousness and freedom. Hereby not mainly the factual conditions for the development of psychopathological phenomena are investigated but the conditions which make the phenomena possible, originating from the essence of a person. The contribution of these approaches to a humanization of psychiatry lies above all in their endeavor to make the scientific methods and therapeutic measures adequate to the mentally ill as a person.

RESEARCH IN PALEOPATHOLOGY AT THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

There is a rich tradition of research and education in paleopathology at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Dr. Aleš Hrdlička, who established biological anthropology as a discipline in the United States, had a particular interest in health among living Native American groups (Hrdlička 1909) and this interest carried over to the study of the skeletal remains as well. Dr. T. D. Stewart, who succeeded Hrdlička as curator of physical anthropology at the NMNH, carried on this tradition of research on paleopathology. Both scientists emphasized careful, basic descriptive research. Stewart featured paleopathological cases in his exhibit hall on physical anthropology, one of the most popular exhibit halls ever done at the NMNH. Dr. J. Lawrence Angel, who succeeded T. D. Stewart as curator of physical anthropology at the NMNH and was a student of Dr. Ernest Hooton, was a major innovator in using data from archeological skeletons to show trends in disease that he related to cultural changes (Angel 1971a).

Skeletal paleopathology remains a major focus of osteological research at the NMNH today. Although many of the incomparable samples of archeological Native American skeletal remains have been or will be returned to descendant communities, most of the pathological cases have been documented with osteometric observations, photographs, and radiographs where appropriate. This assemblage of information represents an important source of descriptive information on pathology in past North American populations. Three of the four current curators of biological anthropology actively engage in research on skeletal disease in archeological populations. All three publish, work with students interested in the subject, and give lectures on paleopathology as well. All use evidence of disease in skeletal samples to reconstruct the relative health of past populations.

In the United States, Dr. George Huntington, College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City, Dr. T. Windgate Todd, Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and Dr. Robert Terry in collaboration with Dr. Mildred Trotter, Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, developed major anatomical skeletal collections from anatomical, dissecting–room cadavers. Each of these collections contained about 2000 skeletons, among which are pathological specimens. Aleš Hrdlička obtained the Huntington skeletal collection for the National Museum of Natural History. This collection was accessioned in 1921, partially in the hope that it would become the nucleus of a reference collection on pathology of the skeleton (Hrdlička letter to J. H. Kellogg, 31 January 1921). Using volunteers, Dr. David Hunt has recently undertaken the monumental task of reorganizing the storage arrangements of the Huntington collection to make it more useful for research. In the process of doing this, he has identified many cases of skeletal pathology. In the 1960s the Terry collection was transferred to the Smithsonian as a permanent loan. The Todd Collection is currently housed at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Cleveland, Ohio.

It is clear that collections of documented bone pathology will need to be added to these fine skeletal collections to supply adequate comparative material for the needs of paleopathologists. In the United States, there are a few skeletal collections specifically devoted to pathological conditions including those of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, DC, The Warren Anatomical Museum at Harvard University, and the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. The San Diego Museum of Man, San Diego, California, has a collection of modern pathological specimens that are available for study (Stanford–Meyer Osteopathology Collection). These collections provide a useful nucleus for the study of human skeletal disease. However, it will also be important to identify and collect additional documented cases to broaden the base of information on the range of manifestations of skeletal disease.

Anthropology as a discipline is concerned with human diversity. In its most inclusive conception, this is what brings together the four fields of sociocultural anthropology, archaeology, biological (or physical) anthropology, and linguistics. With its formative period in the historical era when Europeans and people of European descent were exploring other parts of the world, and establishing their dominance over them, and when evolutionary thought was strong, it also came to focus its attention especially on what was, from the western point of view, distant in time or space—early humans or hominoids, and non-European peoples. Understandings of the discipline have changed over time, however, and they are not now entirely unitary across the world. The ‘four-field approach’ is now mostly North American. The article deals largely with sociocultural anthropology. It discusses varying understandings of what is the core of the anthropological perspective: the central position of the culture concept, field work and ethnography as key methodology, the role of ‘outsider’ and ‘insider’ perspectives, and notions of comparison. Dimensions of specialization are identified: regional (e.g., Africanists), institutional fields (e.g., economic anthropologists), or types of society (e.g., specialists on peasant societies). With regard to the practical uses of anthropology, the areas of development, health, education, minority affairs, and organizations are mentioned as current examples. Finally emergent trends are noted. The nature/culture divide is being rethought, science is itself increasingly seen as a cultural phenomenon, and an increasing interconnectedness of the world makes it necessary to reconsider concepts, units of study, and methods. While at times anthropology has seemed rather inwardly-turning academic, there is a growing interest in a public anthropology, and in anthropology as cultural critique. There would seem to be a place in the public life of the present era for a cosmopolitan imagination which both recognizes diversity and seeks for the ground rules of a viable and humane world society. For such a cosmopolitan imagination, anthropology could continue to offer materials and tools.

The focus of culture contact, as currently defined, is the study of culture change within the context of contact situations involving different cultures. Much of the recent effort in this field has been on early encounters of indigenous peoples with Europeans in colonial contexts. The current archaeological approach integrates lines of evidence from archaeology, ethnography, ethnohistory, linguistics, biological anthropology, and native oral traditions. Beginning with ‘acculturation,’ the article alludes to subsequent theoretical and methodological trends. While no single theoretical position captures the field, certain ubiquitous issues include: (A) world economy and the intensification of regional exchange and innovations in material culture; (B) demographic collapse, lethal epidemics and changing natural landscapes; and (C) implications of demographic collapse for social disruption and reformulation including native responses of resistance, domination, and cooperation. A discussion of how issues relating to culture contact articulate with the greater theoretical agendas that dominate anthropology today leads to the recognition of methodological issues or problems as well as future directions involving historical anthropology and an increased interest in the development and negotiation of status hierarchies, ethnic identities, and gender relations in pluralistic colonial communities.

Environmental Determinism Redux?

For geographers, social anthropologists, and other scholars of the social sciences and humanities, environmental explanations for human difference and development were, by the middle decades of the twentieth century, largely considered to be obsolete – symbolic of scientific racism and profoundly tarnished by their deployment in support of Nazi geopolitics. Nevertheless, the doctrine of environmentalism (in its deterministic and possibilistic stripes) was never entirely eliminated and has found continued explanatory validity in biological anthropology and archaeology while also exerting a certain commonsensical appeal to those social scientists for whom the wholesale rejection of environmental explanations during the second half of the twentieth century was akin to throwing out the baby with the bathwater (Merrett, 2003).

Recent contributions to neoenvironmental determinism – such as Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) and Collapse (2005), and Robert Kaplan's The Revenge of Geography (2012) – have sought to draw attention to the explanatory significance of geography and of climate in accounting for human populations' relative successes and failures. For their critics, Diamond and Kaplan are guilty of uncritically repackaging deterministic philosophy – reinvigorating ideas that previously were used to construct hierarchies of human difference and to justify damaging political ideologies – and of failing to “break free … from an environmental determinist straightjacket that sees geography as nothing more than a three-dimensional physical manifestation” (Johnston, 2013: p. 3). What such criticisms reveal is quite how polarizing environmental explanations (rendered toxic by their earlier socially and scientifically dubious iterations) remain for geographers, among others. Rather than heralding a revivified debate, the response to Diamond and Kaplan suggests that existing positions are being retrenched.

Subdisciplinary Approaches within Anthropology

Anthropology contains four subdisciplines: cultural, physical or biological, linguistic, and archaeological. Each one of these subdisciplines has engaged with physical appearance and body image, though the vast majority of research has been conducted in cultural anthropology.

Cultural anthropology examines how culture affects both group- and individual-level ideas, ideals, and practices as well as institutions. In short, cultural anthropology applies a multilevel analysis that focuses on studying the topic of interest as it interacts with its sociocultural context. Cultural anthropology also provides a rich and varied ethnographic record of how various peoples value and make meaning of particular appearances and appearance-related practices. Thus, for example, cultural anthropologists are interested not only in the question of how widespread globally pursuit of a thin body among women is, but also in the local iterations of why, how this is pursued, and how it is represented. In many Western nations, a thin body may be considered ‘beautiful’; in rural Fiji, it may be considered a means to a successful end; and in urban South Africa, it may be considered ‘sick’. Cultural anthropologists believe that these local meanings matter significantly in understanding appearance and body image, particularly when pathology is involved. In contemporary practice, cultural anthropological and psychological studies are increasingly coming to shared ground.

Physical or biological anthropology approaches the study of human appearance and body image in two primary ways. First, physical anthropologists engage in the classification of global human diversity of the body. These classifications can be related to the size, shape, composition, and appearance of the body such as cataloging differences in stature, hip-to-waist ratio, genetic composition, or biological adaptations to extreme climates. They can also relate to the function and performance of the body such as perception, metabolism, and various aspects of brain function, among many others. Biological anthropologists may investigate how dietary differences around the world affect variables such as body mass index (BMI), heart disease prevalence, or the age of onset of puberty in the population. Second, biological anthropology, sometimes in conjunction with cultural anthropology, engages in studies of embodiment. Embodiment is often defined as “how culture gets under the skin.” Examples of recent embodiment studies look at how structural inequalities such as racism and poverty affect obesity or chronic disease rates, or how gender inequality affects the development of eating and body image disorders. Many physical anthropologists employ an evolutionary perspective in their work.

Linguistic anthropology is engaged less than the aforementioned subfields in the study of human appearance and body image; however, some key studies have been conducted, particularly in body image development. Linguistic anthropologists may investigate how appearance is discussed or valued in a society or in a particular language. For example, linguistic anthropologists in the United States have documented how young girls in particular are socialized into valuing thin bodies in both home and school contexts through looking at their engagement with speech surrounding ‘fat’ and ‘thin’. In a seminal study contesting some common wisdom on adolescent US girls’ speech regarding body size, the anthropologist Mimi Nichter looked at how adolescent girls in the United States use what she calls ‘fat talk’ to bond with each other, rather than to police actual body size. She convincingly argues that girls’ bantering of phrases such as “I’m so fat” among groups of friends, which then demand the response “No, you’re not,” serves a social bonding purpose more than actual commentary on body size. Linguistic anthropology has been particularly fruitful in the realm of examining socialization of groups of people (e.g., groups based on age, gender, athletics) into particular body ideals.

Archaeologists are the least engaged in the study of human appearance and body image compared with the other subdisciplines. However, archaeologists too have added to the understanding of human diversity, particularly across human history. Archaeologists have been able to catalog variations both in the body itself (especially as related to size) through examination of human remains and in grooming and adornment practices through examination of artifacts. Of particular interest to the study of human appearance are studies that have cataloged social group differences throughout time in how bodies were modified and adorned. For example, among colonial burial sites in the United States, slaves were more likely to be buried with beaded jewelry than nonslaves, and blue beads in particular signaled African American heritage. Women were buried with considerably more jewelry than men, and young women with more jewelry than older women. Archaeologists speculate about the role of jewelry in adornment to mark important ethnic and gender identities even under highly constrained conditions.

Taken together, the subfields of anthropology have produced a diverse body of knowledge in both contemporary and historical societies of human appearance and body image. The remainder of this article examines some of the empirical and theoretical contributions in these areas and suggests areas of collaboration between anthropology and psychology, particularly as related to methods.

Terminologies and Boundaries

It is particularly in North America that academic anthropology has retained what has come to be known as ‘the four-field approach.’ Generally, it seems to have had its greatest strength in countries where dominant settler populations faced sizable indigenous populations, and may have found it practical to assemble academic knowledge about these in a single discipline. In recent times, the continued viability of this arrangement has come under debate. Among the founders of the discipline, some were perhaps able to work (or at least dabble) in all the main branches, but with time, in American anthropology as well, it has certainly been recognized that most scholars reach specialist skills in only one of them – even as it may be acknowledged that a broad intellectual sweep across humanity has its uses, and at the same time as it is recognized that, here as elsewhere, research in the border zones between established disciplines or subdisciplines often brings its own rewards. On the whole, in any case, scholars in archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistics, and sociocultural anthropology now mostly work quite autonomously of one another, and while terminologies vary, in many parts of the world, they are understood as separate disciplines.

In Europe, varying uses of the terms ‘anthropology,’ ‘ethnology,’ and ‘ethnography,’ between countries and regions as well as over time, often reflect significant historical and current intellectual divides (Vermeulen and Alvarez Roldán, 1995). In parts of the continent, in an earlier period, the term ‘anthropology’ (in whatever shape it appeared in different languages) tended to be used mostly for physical anthropology, but since the later decades of the twentieth century, it has largely been taken over by what we here term ‘sociocultural anthropology’ – itself a hybrid designation for what is usually referred to either as social anthropology or as cultural anthropology (in German usage especially, however, ‘anthropology’ also frequently refers to a branch of philosophy). Physical or biological anthropology, meanwhile, was absorbed in many places by other disciplines concerned with human biology, while archaeology and linguistics maintained their positions as separate disciplines.

In some European countries, now or in the past, the term ‘ethnography’ has been used, unlike in present-day usage in Anglophone countries, to refer to sociocultural anthropology as a discipline. Matters of discipline boundaries are further complicated, however, by the fact that sociocultural anthropology, especially in Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe, is often itself divided into two separate disciplines, with separate origins in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One, which was often originally designated something like ‘folk life studies,’ had its historical links with cultural nationalism, and concerned itself with local and national traditions, especially with regard to folklore and material culture. This discipline mostly did not acquire a strong academic foothold in those Western European countries that were most involved in exploration and colonialism outside Europe, particularly Great Britain and France, where, on the other hand, sociocultural anthropology that focused on non-European forms of life was earliest and most securely established. The more Europe-oriented, or nationally inclined, ‘folk life studies’ discipline has tended, in recent decades, to redesignate itself as ‘European ethnology’ – or, in some contexts, simply as ‘ethnology’ – in contrast to a rather more globally oriented ‘anthropology.’ In another usage, ‘ethnology’ has been taken to refer to a more historical and museological orientation (in contrast with what was for a time a more presentist social anthropology), while in other contexts again, it is more or less synonymous with ‘sociocultural anthropology.’ Yet further national variations in terminology continue to make direct transpositions of terms between languages treacherous.

Furthermore, if in its historical beginnings anthropology tended to be a matter of ‘the West studying the rest,’ with the colonial powers and their settler offshoots taking the greatest interest in establishing the discipline as an academic field, this is no longer the situation. Since the latter half of the twentieth century, the number of practitioners has grown conspicuously, and their global distribution has changed. There are now anthropologists everywhere, locals of just about all countries, based in their home academic institutions or other organizations (Fahim, 1982; Ribeiro and Escobar, 2006; Boskovic, 2008).

Yet this is not always clearly reflected in the terminology of the academic landscape. In India, where anthropology has an extended history, its distinctiveness is frequently taken to involve a particular preoccupation with ‘tribal’ populations, and perhaps with physical anthropology – while some of the scholars recognized internationally as leading Indian anthropologists, concerned with the mainstream of Indian society, may be seen as sociologists in their own country (Uberoi et al., 2007). In African universities, too, founded in the late colonial or the postcolonial period, there has often been no distinction made, at least organizationally, between anthropology and sociology. If in Africa, anthropology has also for a period had to carry the stigma of being historically associated with the evils of colonialism, it seems now to find its own intellectual base in a collaboration between local and expatriate scholars (Devisch and Nyamnjoh, 2011).

Back in North America and Europe, again, the framework of academic life is not altogether stable over time. ‘Cultural studies,’ born in Britain but expanding from there, and putting itself on the intellectual map mostly from the 1970s onward, has been most successful as a cross-disciplinary movement in the Anglophone countries but has had an impact elsewhere as well. Its center of gravity may have been mostly in literary and media studies, but insofar as it has engaged with methods of qualitative field research and with issues of cultural diversity, not least in the areas of multiculturalism and diaspora studies, it has sometimes come close to sociocultural anthropology and – in certain European countries – to ethnology, as discussed in this article. While some anthropologists may see this as an undesirable intrusion into their disciplinary domain, others see it as a source of new stimuli (Dominguez, 1996; Nugent and Shore, 1997).