A 21st Century Introduction to Anthropology

Gallery Views of Ancient Rome (Giovanni Paolo Panini, 1758)

During this New Year of 2026, I have given much thought to the thoroughly abysmal state of academic anthropology in Canada and the United States. What began as a cautious and poorly funded early 20th-century attempt at fieldwork-based cross-cultural exploration of ethnography has turned into a Marxist/Feminist/Islamic matrix for the furtherance of radical leftist causes linked to a desire to take down modern Anglo-American life, culture, and politics. Contemporary anthropology textbooks are biased and unreliable, yet somehow, here and there, good work is done.

Hamas’ brutal attack against Israel on 10/7 is beginning to be called, and appears to be, another one of those modern historical watersheds, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, the election of President Trump, and now this clear pogrom-like expression by the clients of Iran of a civilisational jihad against the little and the big “Satan” (Israel and the US).

More and more scholars are showing that there was, and is, a direct line between the Nazis and the Arabs of the Land of Israel (as I call them). And no doubt, conservatives will be hearing more from their likes. I recommend Nazi Palestine: The Plans for the Extermination of the Jews in Palestine (I have read it cover to cover).

During my three academic runs in anthropology—as an undergraduate, an MA student, and later a doctoral candidate at McGill—I always, in the back of my mind, thought, “Why don’t these introductory textbooks end with an examination of the US Constitution and the Nazi ideology of the 20th century, as two contrasting philosophical end points for the search for underlying human nature that is supposed to be the cross-cultural goal of anthropology, in all its variants?” Well, the answer is that anthropology went woke, but that should not stop the rest of us from behaving as if anthropology has, and should have, a future. It just might.

And so, I think of a project whereby we might bring young students back to anthropology, for it is the conservative failing that we are accused of being better critics than planners, in all spheres of conservative endeavour. Here are some initial thoughts.

Six Fields, Not Four. As we in Canada had British, American, French, and Canadian professors, I was always fascinated by the non-biological, Durkheimian obsession of my British professors, like the esteemed East Africanist Philip Gulliver. They were also very uninterested in the cross-cultural challenge of the dynamic unconscious. Gulliver, whom I got to know well, once said to me in his imperious way, “Geoffrey, ego, id, superego—do not even talk to me about it!” (Of course, with a smile.)

Whereas with the Americans, one started with language and physical anthropology, archaeology, and ethnology—and Indians in the New World. It was implied that somehow, from studying these four fields, we were supposed to develop a model of unchanging human nature behind the masks of culture and social organisation. This did not work for me, and so I maintained my interest in history and was saved by the French Annales School of social history, with its longue durée and semi-Durkheimian worldview, which included a refreshingly materialist rediscovery of a social history inspired by social anthropology and archaeology.

And then along came ethnomusicology, which, to its credit at its best, is universal, ethnographic, cross-cultural, and not without its remarkable models, such as those proposed by Alan Lomax and his Cantometrics project (which is ongoing on the fringes of a now-woke ethnomusicology).

And so, for me, these have become my six fields, which help me better understand the world I was born into and which I try to make sense of from an anthropological perspective. The focus on the arts also shows how African music conquered the Americas and so puts to rest the World Bank stereotype which is, simply put, “the total failure of Africa.” No—among ethnomusicologists, Africa rules.

For example, the book Savannah Stompers needs to be summarised and presented, as it demonstrates the twin origins of jazz and blues—the one emerging from those slaves who came from the rainforests of West Africa, while the other emerged from those who came from the Sudan. As I am familiar with much of the ethnomusicological and Americanist writings on the emergence of American music and its curious 20th-century near world dominance, Savannah Stompers is an underappreciated anthropological tour de force. And so, here are my six fields that I think should characterise a one-year undergraduate Introduction to Anthropology.

1. Primatology and biological (physical) anthropology

2. Archaeology

3. Linguistics

4. Ethnology and cross-cultural studies

5. The arts

6. Social history/macrosociology

1) Primatology and Biological Anthropology

Without descending into dogmatic sociobiology, this is the place where students will learn about Darwin, evolution in some of its classical interpretations, and the paradoxes and problems in evolutionary theory, insofar as biological evolution and cultural ecology can go a long way in describing and explaining our primate heritage, but not the full nine yards. This will include the cultural ecology of tribal and preindustrial peoples, genetics, the study of DNA as an aid to understanding migration (providing a biological basis for prehistoric archaeology), and finally, some of the philosophical and even theological issues that evolutionary thought is incapable of addressing (such as the problem of evil).

For me, the most profound issue has been Western culture’s gradual disengagement from magical thinking, characterising the primitive world, and the slow growth of universal moral systems that move against the baser side of our primate nature (specifically during the Axial Age). One of the many books that should inform the bibliography of this section should include Napoleon Chagnon’s magnificent monographs and films on the Yanomamö of the Amazon Basin, as well as his autobiography, in order to give students an early introduction to how wokeness took over anthropology during the last 30 years. I have read much of the avalanche of polemical writings in the witch hunt against Chagnon that led to his premature demise. His autobiography is a tour de force.

I was struck by the confirmation of his work in the pre-WWII first-person narrative of a barely literate Brazilian woman who was captured by the Yanomamö and lived among them for some time. Her book, Yanoama: The Narrative of a White Girl Kidnapped by Amazonian Indians, confirms most of Chagnon’s observations and conclusions, with some truly gruesome eyewitness descriptions of Yanomamö raiding practices.

The radical left has ignored this testimony, as it was from a woman no less. Although Chagnon and his supporters were aware of this book, oddly, they neglected to highlight it, as it would have silenced the radical Marxist/Feminist crowd who hated him and would have gone a long way to turn the tide in his favour. He was not that kind of guy and preferred to fight head-on. Oh well.

An awareness of Keith Thomas’s magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic (now more than fifty years old since publication and still resonating strongly) shows how magic declined in the English-speaking world due to access to capital cities and, believe it or not, the rise of insurance among the maritime British of the 17th and 18th centuries, which had a strong effect on colonial America. And so, one could argue that at a certain yet-to-be-determined and uncertain level, our human unconscious may still have “chimpanzee roots,” and studies of these paradoxical relatives should begin this unit.

2) Archaeology

Ever since I began formal readings in archaeology in my twenties (my first undergraduate course being taught by Cambridge-educated Briton Gordon Lowther, a character straight out of Brideshead Revisited, but a fabulous mentor), I have looked at archaeology as the “material unconscious” of cultures, societies, and civilisations. Running through archaeological writings and investigations is that wonderful slight disconnect between material remains, social organisation, culture, and history.

The goal always seems to be to try to link these three domains in some explanatory fashion, but it often fails, the lesson being that our material worlds and socio-cultural worlds may “resonate” but not necessarily reflect one another. This is one of the great lessons that archaeology continues to give us. It is a negative lesson in an exciting and adventurous format, as the visuals are great.

I think that part of this section should have a subsection on the conundrum of Biblical archaeology, a field that I have followed for decades. Let me say that the material evidence for Biblical history can always be found, for both the Old and New Testaments, but the writings can never be reduced to the material conditions of the people who authored these books.

And so, one can use this subsection to show the disconnect between culture and the material world and throw in a bit at the end about the Biblical heritage that informs the lived experience of anyone living in the Anglosphere. There is a clear anti-Marxist subtext here.

This is subtle, because it eventually demands of the student that they take the Biblical heritage of America and the Anglosphere as seriously as the Founding Fathers did (the story of Jefferson’s Bible and the Gospel of Thomas should be mentioned). It is also a lesson against the simplistic cultural materialism of the late Marvin Harris and his neo-Marxist followers. A one-off lecture on the anthropological approach of the Swiss historian of the Renaissance, Jacob Burckhardt, in his evocation of the culture of the Renaissance and the rebirth of the classics, would also be helpful. It is a classic book worth reading and treats the Renaissance in a holistic manner worthy of imitation.

3) Linguistics

We must be grateful to Franz Boas, who in his opposition to the American social Darwinism and eugenics of his time, as well as his scepticism about British social anthropology, alerted us to the nuances of language and cross-cultural communication. Any anthropologist who has had to work among tribespeople and learn a tribal language becomes aware of the specifics of language and context, with its near-endless layers of meaning and nuance, which cannot be understood out of context.

My favourite anecdote was when translating a Rendille warrior song with my trilingual field assistants, and against my conversational Rendille, I came across the description of a shepherdess being called “horny” in a song. Following Boas, and using more recent methods from ethnomethodology and “domain” analysis, I finally figured out that for these camel and cattle pastoralists, “horny” meant “like cow’s horns,” meaning difficult, hard to get, and standoffish—the exact opposite of our own colloquial expression.

I also spent a lot of time listening to them talk about their one God and the fact that the spirits of other tribes were false, iben in Rendille, and so I concluded that the Rendille concept of God was as close to henotheism as I could determine.

Then there are those fabulous studies of language groups, migration, genetics, and archaeology suggesting that the five or six major language groups of the world’s peoples all emerged from a hunter-gatherer ur-language from East Africa some sixty to eighty thousand years ago—proto-Nostratic. Dolgopolsky and the Russian linguists are my go-to sources here.

But then there is a twist, and there are theories that suggest that language was, and is, constructed as much as it evolved, as argued by the most colourful American anthropologist Daniel Everett, who in many ways softens the hard sociobiology of Chagnon from a fieldwork and linguistic point of view. I like them both and believe they need to be read and considered side by side.

There is a proto–foreign policy issue in all this. The decline of the study of foreign languages in the CIA and diplomatic corps of the US, I think, is correlated with an almost total lack of understanding of other cultures (like the Iranians), for foreign languages and their worldviews are based on different assumptions from our own.

For example, Raphael Patai’s writings on the intentional vagueness of Arabic communication are a timely and telling topic that undergraduates need to become aware of. The same goes for the Russians and Chinese. The Chinese Have a Word for It, for me (a non-expert in the Far East), is the most intriguing and at times disturbing book I have come across on this emic/etic issue.

(BTW, it was part of my reading when I was recovering from my hospital stay during COVID. I was convinced that the Wuhan virus was not natural and that the Chinese had constructed it in some sense. And so I spent six weeks reading about ten books on China, both history and anthropology, and came to conclusions that, for the Chinese, the collective trumps everything, as they continue to be ruled by predatory elites who do not care if millions die—this is very ancient. I was a lucky survivor of the long arm of the CCP in this case.)

4) Ethnology

This is quite a challenge, as we need to provide short ethnographies or interpretive essays linked to ethnographies from the world’s major regions, first to be representative and then, towards the end, to be able to explain the Murdock Sample and other kinds of cross-cultural thinking, both qualitative and quantitative.

Nevertheless, it is wise to have a macro model to work with. I suggest the book by the English polymath Peter Watson. His book The Great Divide is a magisterial comparative archaeology and anthropology of Eurasia versus the New World—that is to say, an essay in comparative evolution, echoing the kind of approach that tried to explain much of the parallel evolution of New World and Old World societies that was once found in popular books like Farb’s Man’s Rise to Civilization and in those 1960s anthropology introductions which attempted to distil and survey the field.

The Great Divide is a much more sophisticated argument than that of Jared Diamond’s bestselling book Guns, Germs, and Steel and shows how social development mirrors Darwinian perspectives without succumbing to sociobiology. This provides a New World/Old World perspective which can also help North Americans understand the relation between ethnography, social theory, and the origins of the Constitution.

Then there is the intellectually challenging book by historian Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man and the Rise of Comparative Ethnology. Finally, students must be apprised of Murdock’s cross-cultural project (completely ignored by British and French social anthropologists) and its revalidation via the work of Cavalli-Sforza and his followers.

There will be a need to find key ethnographic and interpretive works on Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, South Asia, Europe, and the Slavic world. One interpretive example could be Octavio Paz’s essay The Labyrinth of Solitude on North American versus Central and South American mindsets, and something nuanced on the failure of modernity among Muslims and the consistency of jihad, such as What Went Wrong? by Bernard Lewis.

For sub-Saharan Africa, there is always Turnbull’s The Forest People, which makes a convincing ethnographic case for Rousseau’s argument about the nature of natural man—a healthy antidote to too much ethnographic pessimism. Not a bad way to end the course.

Curriculum Construction

The challenge for such a curriculum would be to put together the following:

1. A series of readings that reflects this outline

2. Limit it to sixteen units, given one unit a week for four months

3. Put it together in a series of sixteen or thirty-two readings

4. Put those readings together in a readable textbook with all the exercises and such

5. Turn that textbook into a popular book for the public

6. Turn those sixteen themes into an eight-episode documentary that uses a lot of wonderful archival imagery.

What this outline proposes is not a return to nostalgia, nor a rejection of anthropology’s past achievements, but a renewal of its original ambition: to understand humanity in all its variation without surrendering judgement, history, or reason.

Whether such a project attracts support remains to be seen. But if anthropology is to remain a serious discipline rather than a moral performance, it will require precisely this type of reorientation—away from politics and advocacy and toward understanding.