Narrator Listen to part of a lecture in an anthropology class. Now g

OK, uh let’s um, let’s start with the definition. In one sense, anthropology is an old study. The Greek historian, Herodotus, sometimes called the "father of anthropology" as well as the "father of history", describes at length the physique and customs of the Scythians, Egyptians, and other "Barbarians". Chinese scholars of the Han Dynasty wrote monographs upon the Hiung-Nu, a light-eyed tribe wandering near China’s northwestern frontier. The Roman historian Tacitus produced his famous study of the Germans. Long before Herodotus, even, the Babylonians of the time of Hammurabi, collected in museums objects made by the Sumerians, their predecessors in Mesopotamia.
    The astonishing thing is that during the last decade or so, the word "anthropology" and some of its terms have come out of hiding to appear with increasing frequency in The New Yorker, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, detective stories, and even in moving pictures. It is also symptomatic of a trend that many colleges and universities and some secondary schools have indicated their intention of introducing anthropology in their revised courses of study. Although anthropologists— like psychiatrists and psychologists—are still regarded with a bit of suspicion, present-day society is beginning to feel they have something useful as well as diverting to offer.
    We don’t know ourselves very well. We talk about a rather vague thing called "human nature". We vehemently assert that it is "human nature" to do this and not to do that. Yet anybody who has lived in the American Southwest, to cite one instance, knows from ordinary experience that the laws of this mysterious "human nature" do not seem to work out exactly the same way for the Spanish-speaking population, and for the various Indian tribes. This is where the anthropologists come in. It is their task to record the variations and the similarities in human physique, in the things people make, in ways of life. Only when we find out just how men who have had different upbringing, who come from different physical conditions, meet their problems can we be sure as to what all human beings have in common. Only then can we claim scientific knowledge of raw human nature.
    The main trends of anthropological thought have been focused on a few questions of broad human interest, such as what has been the course of human evolution, both biologically and culturally? Are there any general principles or "laws" governing this evolution? What necessary connections, if any, exist between the physical type, the speech, and the customs of the peoples of past and present? What generalizations can be made about human beings in groups? How plastic is man? How much can he be molded by training or by necessary to adapt to environmental pressures? Why are certain personality types more characteristic of some societies than of others?
    To most people, however, anthropology still means measuring skulls, treating little pieces of broken pottery with fantastic care, and reporting the outlandish customs of savage tribes. The anthropologist is the grave robber, the collector of Indian arrowheads, the queer fellow who lives with unwashed cannibals. As Sol Tax remarks, the anthropologist has had a function in society "something between that of an Einstein dealing with the mysterious and that of an entertainer". His specimens, his pictures, or his tales may serve for an hour’s diversion, but are pretty dull stuff compared to the world of grotesque monsters from distant ages which the paleontologist can recreate, the wonders of modern plant and animal life described by the biologist, the excitement of unimaginable far-off universes and cosmic  processes roused by the astronomer. Surely anthropology seems the most useless and impractical of all the "-ologies". In a world of rocket ships and international organizations, what can the study of the obscure and primitive offer to the solution of today’s problems?
    "The longest way round is often the shortest way home." The preoccupation with insignificant non-literate peoples that is an outstanding feature of anthropological work is the key to its significance today. Anthropology grew out of experience with primitives and the tools of the trade are unusual because they were forged in this peculiar workshop.
    Studying primitives enables us to see ourselves better. Ordinarily we are unaware of the special lens through which we look at life. It would hardly be fish who discovered the existence of water. Students who had not gone beyond the horizon of their own society could not be expected to perceive customs which was the stuff of their own thinking. The scientist of human affairs needs to know as much about the eye that sees, as the object seen. Anthropology holds up a great mirror to man and lets him look at himself in his definite variety. This, and not the satisfaction of idle curiosity nor romantic quest, is the meaning of the anthropologist’s work in non-literate societies.