Anthropology

to recognize (for instance) that behaviours which one group may dismiss as ‘backwardness’ or even ‘fanaticism’ constitute strategies of defence and protection in the eyes of another.

For example, advising some of our best-known politicians before they decided to invade and reorganize, according to Western values, the lands of people who live by different codes.

These examples introduce the way in which reference to basic differences in the biological makeup of our bodies may be used to express various social systems of classification.

In this way, the human body is used as a model for explaining and understanding the world around us, including the relationships between people.

Such distinctions in the selection of temporary coverings are found in all cultural groups, marking a person’s position in the group’s hierarchy as well as a person’s age, occupation, and role at an occasion.

Some of the most flamboyant bodily decorations are displayed at times when an individual is moving from one identity to another, such as when young people enter adulthood.

At times, people mark their membership in a group with more permanent modifications to the body.

As long as people have wondered where they come from, and speculated about the behaviour of neighbours brought up differently to themselves, they have been thinking anthropologically

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, scholars who thought about the evolution and behaviour of human beings and their communities were generally known as natural philosophers

They were used to justify the policies of assimilation and even elimination applied by ‘strong’ nations spreading around the world, invading and colonizing the lands of those they perceived as inferior