How do anthropologists actually do research? This chapter explores anthropology research methods across the four subfields—from ethnographic participant observation to archaeological excavation—and why the discipline must reckon with its colonial origins.
This material was for Intro to Anthropology 2025, after reading “Our Babies, Ourselves”. We read chapter 2, “Doing Anthropology” in The Human Story. Next was on Why humans look different.
Doing Cultural Anthropology (23)
“What unites ethnographers is a commitment to describing . . . the world from the perspective of insiders” (23). Ethnography is “an intensive means of research that aims to identify and illustrate cultural patterns” (23). You want extended fieldwork—at least a year to understand cycles of life—though the process is never truly complete. You’ll never really be an insider, but you try. You maintain the position of an observer who participates when possible, and people should know you’re an observer.
Key elements include participant observation (observing while participating, guided by cultural relativism), key informants (people with different perspectives on their society), and systematic fieldnotes. People’s lives are patterned by inheritance from past generations and peers, but patterns constantly change and not everyone follows exactly the same pattern. We’re not robots controlled by culture.
Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead: Making Culture a Household Word
If you’d been a college student 90-100 years ago, Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934) wasn’t just assigned reading—people bought it because they wanted to. Benedict did something remarkable: she popularized the word “culture.” It wasn’t part of popular vocabulary before her work. When we hear people talk about “my culture, your culture” today, that’s partly because Benedict made the term mainstream.
Before Benedict, anthropologists collected stuff—stories, objects, recipes for cooking fish. Benedict brought systematic interpretation, organizing observations into coherent patterns of life, showing how different elements of a society connected into systematic wholes.
Margaret Mead’s 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa was probably the bestselling anthropology book ever. People would buy it and hide it from their parents because it was controversial. Mead was a household name—she received letters asking advice, appeared on lecture circuits, and later wrote for Redbook.
Mead’s revolutionary finding challenged biological determinism. She studied adolescent young women in Samoa and discovered—or asserted—that while Americans typically experience adolescence as rebellion, the Samoan girls didn’t. They had relatively greater sexual freedom, and their lives seemed less stressful than American teenagers’. The key insight: just because our hormones are raging doesn’t mean we’re going to rebel against our parents. Adolescent experience is culturally shaped, not biologically determined.
Mead’s goal wasn’t to say we should become like Samoans. She used the example to figure out how we might draw on other societies for ideas about making adolescence less stressful in our own.
Contemporary Approaches: Where the People Are
If Benedict and Mead were writing bestsellers 90 years ago, where are today’s anthropologists? The answer: wherever people are—increasingly, online.
Tom Boellstorff’s book Coming of Age in Second Life shows this evolution. The title tips its hat to Mead. Boellstorff did his fieldwork in a virtual world where people had avatars. You’ve got to go where people are.
Increasingly, anthropologists have become aware of positionality and reflexivity (29). We want to be as objective as possible, but we inhabit our own bodies and have our own perspectives. The knowledge we gather isn’t just “out there”—it’s shaped by who we talk to, when, where, and who we are as anthropologists. You don’t want to go overboard thinking about yourself, but these are important lessons for doing ethnography today.
Even though many anthropologists engage in interpretive approaches, many also use quantitative data and hypothesis testing. Victoria Reyes-García’s fieldwork documents people’s local ecological knowledge quantitatively—how knowledge of plants and animals influences hunting, fishing, and gathering practices (26-27).
Ontology: Taking Reality Seriously
Recently, anthropologists have started discussing ontology—how people and things exist in the world. What makes up reality? Are humans the only persons, or do other creatures qualify?
For example, imagine doing fieldwork with a healer who points to a tree and talks about its spirit. In some contexts, people would say “trees don’t have spirits.” But the ontological question asks: Is it possible that trees are involved in life processes in ways we don’t fully understand? A book called Do Glaciers Listen? explores a society where people talk about glaciers as persons who listen and guard over people.
Anthropology has been great at documenting people’s beliefs. The ontological turn asks: Do other people have something to tell us about reality itself that we might take seriously?
For an extended treatment of taking Indigenous ontologies seriously—including whether stones can be alive—see A Circumpolar Night’s Dream from Tim Ingold’s Perception of the Environment.
Doing Linguistic Anthropology (30)
Linguistic anthropology is the smallest subfield, but the study of language is fascinating. Early linguistic anthropology focused on recording and preserving Indigenous languages. Before DNA or extensive archaeological evidence, linguistic evidence traced migrations from Siberia into the Americas through language families—later corroborated by other methods, but the linguistic evidence came first.
But why were those languages being lost? Government policy was to stamp them out. Native American children were placed in boarding schools, removed from families, and prohibited from speaking Indigenous languages. While linguistic anthropologists tried to preserve these languages, official policy was destroying them.
Today, linguistic anthropologists still address language loss and preservation, but they also do immersive fieldwork like cultural anthropologists. Erin Moriarty Harrelson studies the emergence of a new sign language in Cambodia. Jonathan Rosa works in Chicago among bilingual Spanish and English speakers. There’s substantial overlap between cultural and linguistic anthropology.
Doing Archaeology (33)
Survey vs. Excavation
The first step in archaeology is the archaeological survey—walking around, using planes, satellites, or radar to map regions (33). This gives a broad picture of what’s going on in an area. Most of you probably want to do excavation—get dirt in your hands and dig stuff up. But surveys give us knowledge about broader issues, while excavations give detailed knowledge about small parts of sites.
Here’s the thing about excavation: it destroys the site (34). You have to be slow, systematic, scientific, and record everything because once you’re done, it’s never the same again. Most of what people made disappears over time anyway—structures fade, plants reclaim sidewalks. What remains is often garbage or leftovers, and interpretation is difficult.
Maritime archaeology is fascinating—many artifacts tracing human migrations are underwater. There are specific programs where you get to dive for artifacts (36).
The Lapita Pottery Migration
Consider Lapita pottery. You find this pottery not just in one place but scattered across the Pacific. A couple thousand years ago, people got into boats laden with chickens, pottery, and supplies, and just sailed eastward. They didn’t know what they’d find, but they were sure there were more islands. It’s one of the most incredible migrations in human history—you set sail knowing you were never coming back.
People sailed all the way to Easter Island off the coast of Chile, where they eventually put up those famous heads. We talk about Columbus, but these people were getting in canoes and sailing to colonize islands where no humans had ever lived. They knew they weren’t coming back. They probably lost ships along the way. We trace this amazing migration through ceramics, through pottery.
Doing Biological Anthropology (40)
Biological anthropology studies human biological variation (41)—why people look different, how that happened, and what it means—as well as human evolution.
Important preview: our crude, simplistic racial categories don’t match actual human biological variation. There’s much more biological variation than our racial boxes suggest, and race doesn’t correspond to meaningful biological distinctions.
However, racism—putting people into boxes and treating them differently—does have biological effects. An Indigenous community exposed to racism experiences stress that can increase miscarriages. Something socially created can affect bodies and health. Race isn’t biologically real, but racism becomes part of our developing biology.
Improving Anthropological Practice (44)
Since you’re new to anthropology, you might wonder: why does it need improving?
Colonial Origins
Anthropology emerged about 150 years ago during intense colonialism. The 1870s-1920s saw Africa partitioned by European powers, with European and American expansion and rule over other societies worldwide. This created a hierarchy where certain people were placed on top and others relegated to underclass. Ethnocentrism—believing your own society is the only true way and others are primitive or backward—was the dominant worldview.
Remember the Banaba people? That colonization was intense. After the beautiful Lapita migration established homelands across Pacific islands, colonizers discovered valuable phosphate on one island. They removed everyone and relocated them to another island so they could mine out all the phosphate. The world we live in—and that we’ve benefited from—was built on these hierarchies.
Anthropology’s Complicated Role
In anthropology’s defense, more than any other academic discipline, anthropologists spoke against racist and ethnocentric stereotypes. Margaret Mead taking seriously the experiences of Samoan young women was revolutionary. Malinowski documenting incredible trade networks in the Trobriand Islands challenged assumptions about “primitive” peoples. Anthropologists tried to preserve Indigenous languages that were being wiped out.
But anthropologists were also part of their time. They participated in extraction—digging up graves, taking artifacts, publishing only in languages people couldn’t read, displaying materials in inaccessible museums, removing bones for “scientific study.” The hierarchy of knowledge and power has been preserved: historically, anthropology meant people who look like me studying Indigenous peoples or people in other societies. We’re certainly not past this yet. We might even be going backwards.
Decolonizing and Decanonizing
Your textbook uses “decolonizing” (44)—trying to recognize, challenge, and address historical and ongoing harms to colonized peoples. For me, this means instead of studying people as if they’re outside us, having research guided by people themselves—learning from and with them, creating knowledge together rather than extracting it.
“Decanonization” (44) refers to opening up the canon—those books you’re supposed to read in a discipline. Patterns of Culture and Coming of Age in Samoa are canonical. But who was left out?
The Forgotten Three
Here’s what’s important: it’s not just that anthropology can be more diverse in the future. Anthropology was more diverse in the past, but we need to recuperate those efforts.
Ella Cara Deloria (1889-1971) was one of the first Native American anthropologists—a contemporary of Mead and Benedict who studied with the same people and worked with famous anthropologists. But she didn’t get credit for her work and passed away in poverty, unnamed. Only later did people rediscover her contributions. She’s mentioned in your textbook on page 16.
W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) is more famous—you might read him in sociology, ethnic studies, or history. His most famous book is The Souls of Black Folk, but he also wrote what might be considered an ethnography of African Americans in Philadelphia. He was a contemporary who lectured with famous anthropologists of his time. He should be considered just as much an anthropologist as they are, but traditionally isn’t read within the anthropological canon.
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)—you may have read her in literature class as one of the most famous African American women novelists. But she began as an anthropologist, trained at Columbia with Benedict and Mead, and did more fieldwork than any of them. She did extensive fieldwork in the American South among Black communities at a time when that wasn’t considered “real anthropology” or “real culture.” She never got an academic position. She had bestselling novels for a while, but passed away penniless and forgotten. It wasn’t until the 1970s, when Black feminist authors like Alice Walker recognized her work, that it was resuscitated.
These three should have been included in anthropology’s official canon all along. Anthropology does need to take account of its disciplinary history and its role within power structures that shape our world today (46).
Key Takeaways
- Ethnography aims to describe the world from insiders’ perspectives through extended participant observation
- Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead made “culture” a household word and challenged biological determinism
- Contemporary anthropologists go where people are—including online—while practicing reflexivity about their own positionality
- Linguistic anthropology documents languages while recognizing that government policies often destroyed them
- Archaeological excavation is destructive—you only get one chance to record a site
- Anthropology emerged during intense colonialism and participated in extraction even while challenging stereotypes
- Deloria, Du Bois, and Hurston were doing groundbreaking anthropology but were excluded from the canon
Continue Your Journey
For more on anthropology’s paradox—fighting for cultural difference while limiting who could be an anthropologist—see Anthropology’s Paradox: Who Gets to Study Culture?
Explore the Anthropological Foundations Hub for more core concepts.