Culture and Anthropology, Essay Example

In this paper I will offer my explanation of what it means to say that “biology, language, and culture do not go together in neat bundles.” Scientists started out thinking that they did. Instead, all three factors are constantly changing, both themselves and each other, and they change at different rates, and of course for radically different reasons.

In the 19^th Century, scientists in both the social and physical disciplines learned that, contrary to appearances, the different races of people, their languages, and their cultures did not correlate well. By that I mean, races don’t have physical characteristics, languages, and cultures exclusive to themselves over time. This starts at the smallest scale, in our genes, which allow the interbreeding of different races. Even different theories must sometimes be combined to achieve fuller understanding, an example being the synthesis of Mendel and Darwin’s work on the forces driving heredity and survival. A disease can mutate to follow radically different pathways, from New World yaws to Old World syphilis. Our languages provides another example: what we call “English” is a part of the larger family of Germanic languages. And both the Romance and Germanic groups are members of the older and larger Indo-European group. By contrast, Arabic is not Indo European, yet in spite of that the Arabs have cultural and (of course) physical characteristics in common with speakers of Germanic and Latin languages (and all others).

To find the true correlations, you must look below the surface. That’s what anthropology is all about: to investigate scientifically and in detail to discover where the real connections are.