Aware-ology

I’ve been a working a musician since I was 12 years old, and I’ve never had a job that didn’t involve either making music or helping other people make music.

So it’s no surprise that I get funny looks when people find out I was an Anthropology major in college.

Typically, people respond with something like, “Oh, wow! Anthropology, how cool! But uhm…what is anthropology?”

I’ve never been able to come up with an answer that felt right. I would give the standard definition, “It’s the study of humanity,” which is technically true. But it doesn’t capture what fascinated me about the subject - what still fascinates me.

Perhaps anthropology is best explained by throwing a bunch of anthropology jargon at you. A good anthropologist: uses holism as a lens for understanding; is trained in ethical ethnography; uses mixed-methods research in cross-disciplinary analyses to understand who, what, where, when, how, and (potentially) why.

On second thought, maybe that isn’t the best way to explain it. (Don’t worry, we’ll explore what all those words mean later).

Today, as I was reading a book about spirituality, I stumbled across a better answer to the question, “What is anthropology?”

For me, studying anthropology is about learning awareness. Anthropology is not about learning a specific set of related facts or figures; it’s about learning to understand.

Let’s pretend for a second that we want to understand a particular group of people. We could pick all kinds of groups based on location, time, social role, all sorts of demographics: “Roman soldiers in 125 AD”; "NYC Taxi Drivers”; even “CEOs of Silicon Valley Startups”. For now, though, let’s decide we want to understand “People Who Live in Las Vegas in 2019”. This is too broad a group of people for an actual study, but it sounds fun for our hypothetical research.

One of the easiest ways we can begin to understand “People who live in Las Vegas in 2019” is simply to go to there and directly observe people going about their day, taking notes all the while (one of the most simple methods of ethnography, or the study of a particular cultural group) .

Some people might be doing things we don’t understand - walking into certain buildings, avoiding certain parts of town, only visiting some places on certain days.

If we can’t find out just by observation, we can do a few other things, including asking the people directly (interview, another ethnographic method) or by moving to Las Vegas ourselves and experiencing firsthand why someone might go one place and avoid another (participant observation, another method).

We could also incorporate public records into our quest for understanding: census data such as population, income, family composition, and marital status. Surely these elements would help us better understand “Who Lives in Las Vegas”.

The combination of qualitative data (why and how people do certain things) combined with quantitative data (how many of people are doing those things, and/or how often) is an example of mixed-methods research.

By combining quantitative data with the qualitative data we collected through ethnographic methods, we know a lot more about people living in Las Vegas than when we started.

Interestingly, all of the things we’ve discussed so far fall under the umbrella of Cultural Anthropology, one of the study’s four sub-disciplines.

But the great thing about anthropology is that, in seeking awareness, we can always seek further.

If you really wanted get inside the heads of Las Vegans, wouldn’t it be useful to study how they speak to each other (the slang, the accent(s), the ways people of different social status interact)?

Or how about looking at the history and origins of culture in Las Vegas? E.g., does the old Mormon Fort downtown have anything to do with the culture today? Could we learn anything about Las Vegans by examining the physical elements of the city, like its architecture or even the trash heaps?)

And while we’re at it, if we want to understand the people in Las Vegas, wouldn’t it be useful to understand people in general? As in, what can we expect from people based on human physical mechanics, genetic tendencies, and psychological and social patterns?

All of these questions fall into the other sub-disciplines: Linguistic Anthropology, Archaeology, and Biological Anthropology. If we take what we learned from each of these, together with what we learned from Cultural Anthropology, we now have a framework for an incredibly holistic understanding of “People Who Live in Las Vegas in 2019”. That is, we would understand a lot about Who lives there, What they do, Where they do it, When they do it, and How they do it, and we would be the most qualified to guess Why they do it.

A historian, a biologist, and a psychologist could each look at the question, “Who lives in Las Vegas in 2019?” and give a deep and thorough answer, but it would likely be limited by the conventions of their respective disciplines. Additionally, these three professionals may bring judgements, misinterpretations, or other misunderstandings to their analyses. The anthropologist is just as likely to judge - but she’s also trained to suspend these judgements and seek to understand a group of people using their own internal cultural logic.

To me, the magic of anthropology is this explicit search for holism, a more complete and informed understanding of the elements that make up and affect human nature as understood by the people who are being studied. Rather than judging other people by fixed universal standards, the anthropologist seeks to understand them on their own terms, taking into consideration her other relevant research and knowledge.

And what is all that holistic knowledge, if not Awareness?