r/AskAnthropology

Not sure if correct sub. Feel free to delete

The way I see it, a lot of the archaic collectivist social norms such as abrahamic religious traditions or Confucian filial piety that young people rebel against were formed during a time when they actually made sense.

Back then, productivity per individual was very low. Teamwork of some kind was essential to basic survival. People existed in relationships out of necessity that would today be easily labeled "toxic codependent". This is especially obvious in Confucian, rice farming civilisations like China.

Nowadays, productivity per individual has increased due to technological advances to the point where it should be very easy to merely survive (absent the artificial scarcity under capitalism), so people start prioritising higher needs like esteem.

At a local level, it is possible for a few people out of a population to co-operate to increase the esteem of all individuals in the local group. But at the population level, esteem is fundamentally "What percent of people are you better than?", so it's a zero sum game. In this environment, there's very little incentive for collectivism.

Am I onto something here? Is there any research on this?

Located in the us, rel major anth minor, 3.7 gpa. End goal is professor.

Need assistance finding primary source on the legend for a paper. Most papers I find only cite other papers or do their own field work. Thanks!

basically title

I've been researching early human parenting practices and got curious about something very specific — crying babies.

Modern parents have white noise machines, pacifiers, pediatricians. But what did mothers 10,000+ years ago actually do when their infant wouldn't stop crying?

I found some references to skin-to-skin contact being universal across early human societies, and some evidence of herbal remedies. But I'm wondering:

• Is there actual archaeological or anthropological evidence for specific soothing practices?
• Did communal child-rearing play a role — like other tribe members helping?
• Any evidence of early lullabies or rhythmic movement as soothing tools?

Genuinely curious what the research says here

I am curious if they don't even mingle with tribes that similar and close to them like the Onge.

Did they mingle with other hunter guntherers nearby prior to becoming completely isolated?

Hello- I’m looking for book suggestions around the anthropological + historical, sociological, cultural, and/or philosophical concepts of aging. I’m not looking for explanations of aging, per se, but how the concept of “older” or “senescence” came into being. Why do we have the cutoffs that we do (eg age 65 = retirement age, older adult)? Where did the idea of being “old” come from? How do different cultures approach the concept of aging and older adults?

I was thinking about modern long distance runners carrying all sorts in backpacks (water bottles, food, etc), and I thought about what our ancestors might have had with them when hunting prey. Obviously spears and whatnot but what about apples and other things to keep them going? Would they have used rudimentary bags to help them carry things?

Or in a broader sense, what is the earliest evidence of things being carried by humans while not being held in our hands?

What is the earliest evidence for this?

Hi everyone!

I am currently studying Anthropology in the US as an international student from Italy. i know I would eventually like to move back to a European country and hopefully get a professorship there. Now I am trying to decide where to apply for my PhD. Knowing that I would like to work and live in Europe, would you recommend I do my PhD in a European or American institution?

What I especially like about US PhD programs is that they are better funded and that you have more time to specialize in whatever you want; however, I know that doing my PhD in the US will prevent me from creating relationships in European universities, which might eventually help me get an academic job. Any recommendations?

I was just thinking about Universal's humanity got to without outside influence, or media, or messaging. One that I landed on (with no real research just in my noggin') is that self harm has been a practice that people landed on without influence or a manual across the world well before television or internet or messaging that it was a practice. I mean self harm as a means of self-soothing, not as a means to terminate life.

I was curious if anyone had any anecdotes, history, or ideas on how the cultural phenomena developed or had developed in the past in different people and in different cultures? If not a learned behaviour with no discernible benefit immediately, what compelled humans to start doing it without outside influence?

Humans I mean Homo sapiens.
Ancient, I mean hunter-gatherer tribes.
Modern, I mean agricultural and after.
I know the average age being 30 was due to high child mortality and plenty lived past 30 due to care from fellow tribe members but obviously not as long as today, with modern medicine, science, and sanitation.
With current human generation times being about 20 years and humans on average not reaching full mental maturity until their 20s, did they mature faster and our maturity has gotten slower over time due to living longer?
Like I know women due to better nourishment, start puberty earlier because it’s based on fat content.

So disclaimer, I am not American and thus didn’t have such a focus on American history in my education. But I have only just now found out that horses were only reintroduced to North America by European settlers and it’s blowing my mind.

All the Native American/colonisation of the west stories, iconography and mythos I’ve seen, whether apocryphal, racist, sensationalist, or accurate, seems to have horses as a central and almost spiritual part of their history and way of life. All the cowboy stories and depictions of native Americans I’ve seen always has Native American society centred around horses and having this deep connection to them. I know some of that will be European/coloniser bunk or generalisations, but the ubiquity with which horses are depicted in this culture must have had some basis in reality or it wouldn’t have become so ubiquitous in the first place. If they were only introduced so late on as the late 1500s/early 1600s, how is this the European/white person view of the culture?

I feel kind of stupid for not knowing this for so long. I also don’t want to offend or insult anyone, especially of Native American descent, by my characterisation of the culture - the central part of my question really is trying to find out what the reality was as opposed to the seeming mischaracterisation I’ve been brought up with in media and history, not to just paint with the same brush that brought us such hits as “the noble savage” and “they all wore feathered headdresses irrespective of tribe or status”.

Bonus points if you have any suggestions for good books to read about Native American culture/history/myths. I’ve been reading Dee Brown’s books *Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee* and *Creek Mary’s Blood* but I’d love some more reccs if anyone has any

Edit: a lot of people seem to have misunderstood. I understand why Native American tribes adopted the horse to readily into their culture - that makes total sense, it’s a technology so useful at the time that how could they not. The confusion is in the way it’s portrayed that horses were some deeply ingrained part of their way of life and religions/traditions that would typically speak to the pervasiveness, both geographically and temporally, of such a technology, most typically by the very people who introduced them to the horse in the first place and so must have been there right at the beginning of their modern relationship with horses. It’s about the imagery and reputation of Native Americans as being very associated with horses, not the fact that they obviously adopted a powerful new technology.

Thanks to everyone for your insights so far!

What I am referring to is the view that within religions animism progresses to polytheism, which eventually progresses to monotheism.

I want to make it clear that it is obviously problematic in the sense that it relies on a so-called “history of progress” that sees non-European traditions as less developed or less progressed, which is obviously racist, and most versions of evolutionary theory were put forward by white Europeans who didn’t bother to do any fieldwork and often took colonial European histories over the indigenous’ own oral or written histories. In that sense, I can understand why evolutionary theory is best left as discarded or put in the trash bin of anthropology.

My questions more so concern why a sort of revised evolutionary theory never took its place since it seems prima facie plausible that animism sometimes transforms into polytheism, which sometimes itself transforms into monotheism (with the caveat that this isn’t “progress” or “evolution,” just that as spirits continually become personified deities, animism is eventually replaced, and then eventually one god stands above all as *the God* in this pantheon of deities, replacing polytheism). Of course, this would no longer be an “evolutionary theory” in name, but the factual content of this theory doesn’t seem incorrect with some adjustments (as least as far as Abrahamic religions go from my precursory understanding, which is a very, very limited sample size and is very Eurocentric of me) even if the framing is often problematic (as I pointed to above).

Overall, my main questions are the following:

1. Is there any evidence that this proposed lineage that religions follow (animism → polytheism → monotheism) is wrong on a factual level and not just in the way that it is used to support racism and views that non-Europeans are primitive?
2. Has there been any attempts to revive this evolutionary theory (without, of course, the racism and European exceptionalism) among serious anthropologists?
3. What other theories have come to replace the evolutionary theory of religion regarding the historical trajectory and development of European and non-European religions, if any?

I am a young woman and have always had many questions about why men are the way they are. I am curious about other species and the way they seem to breed out violent males as natural selection. I wonder if the consciousness specific to humans is the reason that we have not allowed ourselves to rid the earth of men that foster unsafe ideals and environments. Is it that women have filtered out natural protective instincts due to the control that men have forced onto us historically? We are promised protection and provision through men, but grow up and realize that this is almost never the case. I know that the world is controlled by men, but I often wonder how they’ve made it this far. Did it begin with religion? Is this how the male species managed to grip onto control of females and their offspring contradictory to most animals in nature? For me, I have always felt that male leaders are totally incompetent compared to their female counterparts and this makes me wonder how they got control of society in the first place. I am not religious but have grown up around Christians who’s reasons for obeying men seem so simple compared to our complex nature. “If the world born from my body oppresses me, I will not let it exist.” This quote explains the way that I feel about breeding with hostile or unsafe men and will never understand the reasons that we continue this cycle. I also understand that men change and grow violent over time which are not the situations I am talking about. I often wonder why any female gives a man the time of day if they are not a safe biological match as far as security and protection. Natural selection does not seem to apply to humans in this sense lol, I am curious as to what others have on this topic!

Academic psychology has a few different frameworks where human psychology is described as some

The "big five" or "five factors" is a framework in academic psychology that measures and quantitatively describes human personalities. It models personality as being the sum of variations across the five factors. Researchers arrived at these five factors by statistically analyzing large sets of personality descriptions. They ran dimensionality reductions the data. For example, we might observe that if someone is described as "energetic", they're less likely to be described as "reserved"---and if you keep finding correlations like that, eventually you'll boil all variations down to a minimal set of "dimensions".

Has anything similar been done for entire cultures? Is there something like the five factors for cultures? Some possible "dimensions" that come to mind include social dominance, religiosity, and aggressiveness, but I have no idea if these are actually among some minimal set.

Hi! I am not at all educated in anthropology, but I find it very fascinating! I was wondering if we know how well upper paleolithic humans such as the ones living in the time of the aurignacian technocomplex or gravettian would do if they competed in a sports competition today. Stuff like a marathon or ultra, or would they be better at track and field. If anyone has any information or knows any literature on the subject please share!

I am super interested in medical anthropology and the colonization of medical systems, i.e. the shift from land-based, indigenous medicines administered more locally to a hierarchical, research-dominant structure of medical authority. if anyone could recommend some readings/sources, I would be very grateful!

my background is psychology and I've only dipped a toe in anthropology but I would rather be thrown in the deep end and figure it out from there.

Was wondering this recently.