I. A Discipline With Unlimited Subjects
Every academic discipline usually announces itself through what it studies. Economics studies trade, money and banking. Law studies law. Medicine studies how to make people well again. Ask what anthropology studies and the question comes apart almost as soon as it is asked, because the honest answer is that anthropology studies whatever anthropologists have decided is worth studying, and that list is close to endless. Marriage, money, witchcraft, childbirth, houses, nationalism, social media: pretty much anything goes. Put the question to a room of new students and ask for an unusual hobby, and someone will offer dance, and within seconds it is possible to sketch what an anthropology of dance would look like, who learns it from whom, what a trained body is expected to do, what a performance is understood to communicate, who is allowed to watch and who is not. The same exercise works for almost any answer the room gives, because there is a good chance that somebody, somewhere, has already written an anthropology of exactly that.
This is not a reassuring way for a discipline to introduce itself in its first hour. If topic cannot do the defining work it does for economics or law, something else has to, and none of the usual candidates turns out to hold up on close inspection. What makes the situation stranger still is that the very fact showing anthropology can study nearly anything also reveals something close to the opposite of unlimited coverage: enormous regions of human life have simply never been looked at. A discipline with an almost unlimited licence has produced a strikingly patchy record, and that record is not patchy at random. It follows a pattern, and the pattern is one of the more useful things anthropology has to teach about itself.
The gap between what anthropology could study and what it has actually studied will matter more, over the course of this lecture, than any of the tidy definitions usually offered in its place. That gap is the puzzle this lecture, and the course built around it, exists to take seriously, and the rest of what follows is one way of trying to work out why the gap exists and what it has been hiding.
II. Four Answers That Almost Work
The first candidate answer is built into the word itself. Anthropos is Greek for human being, and the logy ending, the same one found in sociology or musicology, means the study or knowledge of something. Anthropology therefore looks, on the face of it, like the study of humans, and that is not wrong. The trouble is that almost every other discipline studies humans too. History studies humans, psychology studies humans, economics studies humans, and none of them would accept being folded into anthropology on that basis alone. Being interested in humans cannot be what marks the discipline out, however central it feels from the inside.
A second candidate is culture. Anthropologists talk about culture constantly, and for much of the twentieth century culture was offered as the discipline's defining object, the thing that distinguished a properly anthropological question from a psychological or biological one. The difficulty is that culture has accumulated so many competing definitions since the middle of the last century, well over a hundred by some counts, that many anthropologists no longer feel the word does much useful work at all. Some no longer describe their own research as being about culture in any straightforward sense, preferring more specific concepts that do not carry the same accumulated baggage. A word that can mean almost anything to almost anyone within a single discipline is not doing the defining work a discipline needs from its core concept.
A third candidate is method rather than object: long-term fieldwork. This is what social and cultural anthropology is popularly known for, the idea that an anthropologist goes and lives among the people being studied for an extended period, learns the local language, and records what daily life actually involves rather than relying on secondhand report. In my own case that meant years of research in Calcutta, asking people which doctors they went to when they were unwell, what medications they were taking, and how they drew the line, if they drew one at all, between a medicine and a food. I did as much of this as I could manage in Bengali rather than English, because so much of what people actually think slips away in translation, and because turning up somewhere for a short visit and asking questions through an interpreter produces a very different kind of knowledge from staying long enough to be trusted with the ordinary, unremarkable parts of someone's week. This kind of sustained, unglamorous immersion, sometimes called deep hanging out, is real and distinctive. It is still not sufficient to define the whole discipline. A great deal of anthropological work does not involve fieldwork at all, and even during my own fieldwork in Calcutta I was constantly drawing on other kinds of evidence besides direct observation and conversation, medical records, prescribing patterns, conversations with pharmacists, printed advertising. Fieldwork is one slice of what anthropologists do, an important slice, but not the whole of it.
The fourth candidate is difference. Surely anthropology is the discipline that studies how humans differ from one another, across culture, class, gender and every other axis along which people distinguish themselves, and how humans differ from other animals. This candidate gets closer than the previous three, because difference really has organised most of what anthropologists have chosen to write about. It still will not quite hold, though, because it leaves entirely open the question of what is actually distinctive about being human once similarity, rather than difference, is put back into the picture, and because a discipline that goes looking specifically for difference runs the risk of finding more of it than is actually there. Each of these four answers, human, culture, fieldwork, difference, captures something true about anthropology and still fails to pin the discipline down on its own. That failure is worth taking seriously rather than treating as an embarrassment to be explained away before moving on to something more comfortable.
III. National Schools and the Edges of a Discipline
Part of the difficulty in settling on a single definition is that anthropology has never been organised the same way in every country that practises it. In North America, what is taught as a single discipline is conventionally divided into four fields: physical anthropology, concerned with human evolution and often with forensic work on bones, archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and social or cultural anthropology, which studies contemporary social life through long-term fieldwork. In Edinburgh, by contrast, social and cultural anthropology stands largely on its own. It is entirely possible to spend a career here, as I effectively have, without ever encountering a physical anthropologist, since the disconnect between the fields feels less like a shared discipline and more like two separate ones that happen to share a name. Archaeology occupies a similarly uncertain position. Most of my colleagues have little regular contact with archaeologists, even though some of my own recent work has involved close collaboration with an excavation team, for reasons that will become clear shortly. Linguistic anthropology exists here too, though again as its own strand rather than folded into the core of what social anthropologists do day to day.
These are not just administrative curiosities. Even today, German, French and American traditions of anthropology differ from one another and from the British tradition in ways that go well beyond vocabulary, reflecting different histories of colonial contact, different relationships to sociology and philosophy, and different founding figures whose influence still shapes what counts as a properly anthropological question in each national context. A discipline that cannot even agree, across its own national traditions, on where its boundaries lie is not a promising candidate for a single tidy definition, and the disagreement itself is instructive. It suggests that anthropology has always been less a fixed body of subject matter than an evolving set of institutional arrangements for deciding what counts as worth studying, arrangements that differ by country and by decade for reasons that have as much to do with history as with logic.
It is exactly this loosening of boundaries that has, in recent years, brought me into closer contact with archaeology than most of my social anthropology colleagues ever experience, through a collaboration with a team excavating one of the most extraordinary sites currently known anywhere in the world.
IV. Göbekli Tepe: A Monument Without an Explanation
The site is Göbekli Tepe, in what is now southeastern Turkey, and it is arguably the single most sensational archaeological discovery of the past century. It was built roughly twelve thousand years ago, at a time when the people responsible for it were still hunter-gatherers. There were no cities at this point in human history, no centralised states, none of the organisational apparatus that would normally be assumed necessary to drag enormous stones into place and raise monumental structures comparable, in scale if not in style, to something like Stonehenge. Yet that is exactly what happened, and similar structures have since been found hundreds of kilometres away, raising the further question of how such widely dispersed groups managed to coordinate anything at all, and why they were motivated to gather in this particular way in the first place, long before agriculture or settled village life had taken hold.
The structures themselves are circular, held up by massive T-shaped stone pillars carved with animal reliefs, and excavators have found skulls and other remains associated with them. What excavation alone has not supplied is a secure account of what these spaces were actually for. The working assumptions on offer are ritual, or religious observance, or perhaps some kind of political gathering place, something like an early debating hall, but the honest position, shared by the archaeologists I collaborate with, is that nobody actually knows.
This is exactly where a social anthropologist can contribute something excavation cannot supply on its own: not a confident reconstruction of Neolithic belief, since no anthropologist has any special access to what people twelve thousand years ago believed, but a disciplined sense of what might plausibly hold true of human life at any place, in any era, regardless of how differently people organised their symbols and their politics. There is more continuity across human groups, separated by tens of thousands of years and by every kind of cultural difference imaginable, than most of social anthropology's history has been willing to notice, absorbed as it has been with cataloguing difference rather than continuity. Göbekli Tepe is as good a place as any to start taking that continuity seriously, rather than treating every gap in the archaeological evidence as an invitation to invent whichever story sounds most dramatic.
V. What Catches Our Attention
If anthropologists can study anything humans do, say or think, the obvious next question is what they actually end up studying, and the honest answer is that a narrow set of features reliably catches attention while everything else recedes. Something strange draws attention immediately, which is why early anthropology returned so often to practices like cannibalism, a subject so starkly different from the anthropologist's own habits that it seemed to announce its own importance without further argument. Something with an obvious symbolic charge draws attention. Something political, something people are prepared to fight over, something that lends itself to being turned into a story, something contested: these are the usual triggers, and they recur across the discipline's history with remarkable consistency.
The trouble with this list is that almost none of daily life actually meets any of these criteria. Most of a human life is lived in what philosophers have called being in the world, a seamless flow of activity that nobody has to stop and consciously interpret in order to carry out. Sitting in a lecture theatre is a good illustration of exactly this. No one in this room needed instruction to sit down on seeing a chair, no one paused to interpret the strange geometric shapes arranged in rows, and no one needed to check what the weather was doing outside in order to feel comfortable inside. None of this registers as strange, symbolic, political, narratable or contested, and that is precisely why it disappears from view. The world recedes from attention exactly to the extent that it is working smoothly, which is a good thing in itself, since nobody would want to spend their whole life consciously puzzling over chairs. But a discipline whose attention has been calibrated to notice difference will systematically fail to notice whatever is shared, and that asymmetry, difference becoming evidence while similarity sinks into an unexamined background, has shaped what anthropology has counted as worth knowing far more than any of its stated methods or theories ever admit.
VI. The Case of Sleep
Sleep is the clearest demonstration of this bias that I know, and it is worth dwelling on in some detail because of how completely it exposes the mechanism at work. A large reference work in the discipline, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology, edited by two former Edinburgh colleagues, Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer, runs to something like 900 pages across hundreds of separate entries. I went back and checked how many times sleep appears in it as a keyword. The answer is three, always in passing, never as the subject of its own sustained discussion. The one moment anyone says anything vaguely substantial about it at all belongs to another former Edinburgh colleague, Janet Carsten, whose work on kinship observes that a house is a place to eat, to sleep, to reproduce and to build a family. That single sentence is close to the entire accumulated wisdom of the discipline on a state that occupies roughly a third of every human life, and probably a somewhat larger share of the anthropologist's own life during long stretches of fieldwork.
Run the earlier list of attention triggers against sleep and it fails every one. There is nothing exotic about it, nothing that lends itself readily to symbolisation. Ask what sleep stands for and the honest answer is very little, because people do not generally sleep in order to send a message about themselves to anyone else. And yet sleep is where an enormous amount of ordinary social contact actually happens. If you live in halls, the very first exchange of the day is often exactly this: a shuffle into the communal kitchen, a good morning, and then something about how the night went, whether it was long, whether it was broken, whether anyone is hungover. That is real interaction with real social significance, and still it carries almost no obvious symbolic charge and no political weight, at least not in any obvious sense that would catch a traditionally trained anthropological eye.
Sleep also resists the kind of cross-cultural difference anthropologists have traditionally gone looking for. No human society has ever decided, as a matter of cultural choice, to stop sleeping, because sleep is a metabolic requirement that cannot be constructed away by belief or convention. Walk into any fieldsite anywhere in the world and there is no need even to ask whether people there sleep, because of course they do, and a question with an obvious universal answer will never become the centrepiece of an ethnography built on documenting difference. Add to this the fact that sleep is something almost every animal does as well, in one form or another, and sleep ends up disqualified twice over. It is too universal across human cultures and too widely shared across species to register as the kind of difference the discipline has spent a century training itself to notice.
VII. Once You Start Looking
The moment sleep is taken seriously as a topic in its own right, it turns out to organise an enormous amount of human life that has gone almost entirely unexamined. Domestic architecture is one obvious example. Walls, stable floors, duvets and blankets can all be read as a built response to the fact that bodies grow cold and need somewhere secure in which to lose consciousness for hours at a stretch, and an entire world history of housing could plausibly be written starting from that single observation rather than from the usual categories of style, status or climate. The history of artificial light belongs on the same list. It is easy to forget, sitting under electric light in a modern lecture theatre, that electrification is a recent and geographically uneven achievement, and that its absence still structures entire ways of living in large parts of the world today. My colleague and friend Annu Jalais carried out fieldwork in the Sundarbans mangrove forests of the Ganges Delta in West Bengal, among communities living without electricity of any kind, not even solar lamps, in a landscape shared with tigers and crocodiles that makes it one of the more hostile fieldsites anyone I know has ever chosen to work in. There the sun sets close to six o'clock, darkness is close to total within the hour, dinner is modest, usually rice with a little shrimp, since food is scarce, and people are generally asleep by half past eight, simply because there is nothing left to do once the light has gone. That is a history of sleep as much as it is a history of economics or ecology, and it is a history that a discipline focused on symbolism alone would never have thought to write.
Work and capitalism depend on sleep in equally concrete ways. An entire economy runs on the assumption that not everyone sleeps at the same time, which is why hospitals cannot allow it, and I once carried out research with hospital service managers in Scotland on precisely this question, the regulated sleep schedules of junior doctors. There was a period, within living memory, when junior doctors could be kept working for dangerously long stretches without any formal limit, until it became widely accepted that a doctor who has been awake for fifty hours straight is not operating at full capacity, brain surgery included, however dramatic that looks when a popular medical drama puts it on screen. War supplies an even starker version of the same problem. The amphetamines that later became a template for stimulant medication, including the drugs now prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, a diagnosis that has grown enormously over the past two decades, were developed during the Second World War specifically to keep pilots awake through long missions. Ritual and religion have their own sleep history too, from dream incubation practices in the ancient world to the entire field of sleep medicine that grew out of nineteenth and twentieth century attempts to measure and correct what happens to the body overnight, a field with its own instruments, its own diagnostic categories and its own history of medicalising something that had previously been left almost entirely alone.
Sleep debt is a newer twist on the same theme. Wearable trackers now tell people, often at the moment they wake up feeling perfectly fine, that they have accumulated dozens of hours of supposedly unpayable deficit, deficit that the device insists can never fully be repaid by an extra lie in at the weekend. There is now a recognised diagnosis for the anxiety this produces in people who have started trusting the device over their own body's report of how it feels, and the most sensible remedy in many such cases is simply to stop wearing the tracker. Meanwhile the advice industry that has grown up around sleep, endless recommendations from friends, family and self-appointed experts about what to do or avoid in the hours before bed, has never converged on a single reliable rule that works for everyone, because sleep resists exactly the kind of deliberate, willed control that most advice quietly assumes is available. You cannot simply decide to sleep the way you can decide to finish a piece of work, and an enormous amount of contemporary anxiety about sleep comes from expecting it to respond to willpower in a way it never has and never will.
VIII. Retraining Attention: Bodies, Others, and the World Before Symbols
Much of this blindness has a specific intellectual history rather than being some kind of natural or inevitable oversight. From the nineteen eighties onward, social and cultural anthropology became increasingly committed to the idea that culture is, at bottom, symbolisation, and that the anthropologist's central task is to retrieve meaning from whatever practice happens to be under study. That commitment produced a great deal of valuable work, and it also carried a real cost, because a discipline trained above all to look for meaning will struggle to notice anything that does not obviously carry any. Sleep is one casualty of this training. Sitting, waiting and digestion belong on the same list: ordinary, recurring activities that occupy enormous stretches of time and have received almost no anthropological attention, precisely because nobody trained in this way has been able to locate an obvious symbol lurking inside them.
Retraining that attention means starting somewhere other than meaning. It means beginning with embodiment, the simple fact of having a body that senses, tires, heals, sleeps, ages and eventually dies, with being-with, the fact of living surrounded by others whose actions and moods matter constantly whether or not anything is ever said about it, and with what I call multiversal dwelling, the climate, gravity, daylight, altitude and everything else making up the physical conditions of existence that no human hand created and that remain largely outside human control. None of these three is arbitrary or negotiable in the way a symbol is. Nobody in this room made the oxygen everyone here is currently breathing, and nobody present is seriously questioning gravity, because it continues to behave exactly as it always has, whatever anyone happens to believe about it.
A course built around the human life course, rather than around anthropology's more conventional topic categories, ends up organised along broadly these lines almost by necessity: conception, birth, childhood, becoming a person, work, sickness, death, memory. Death belongs firmly on this list as a metabolic certainty rather than merely an occasion for symbolisation. No culture has ever constructed its way out of dying, and the most important thing to understand about death, at least as a starting point, is not how a given society chooses to symbolise or mourn it but that it remains an absolute biological limit shared by every living thing that has ever existed, human or otherwise, a limit any anthropology of death worth the name has to hold in view before it turns to the meanings people build around it.
IX. The Non-Human Test
A useful discipline for checking any of this is what I call the non-human test. Take any topic under discussion and ask a simple question of it: would this also apply to an animal? Would it apply to a dog, an ant, a bee? Run embodiment, being-with and multiversal dwelling through that test and the answer is almost always yes, because these are conditions of being alive, not conditions of being specifically human. Science fiction cinema is unexpectedly useful here, since a good science fiction film often works by stripping away exactly these taken-for-granted conditions, altering gravity, removing a shared day and night cycle, imagining a world with no need to breathe, and it is precisely by removing them that the films make visible how much of ordinary human existence depends on planetary conditions nobody chose and nobody controls.
Run multimateriality, the making and shaping of things, and multisymbolization, the making and use of symbols, through the same test and the picture changes sharply. Some animals do build, and some animals do signal to one another in sophisticated ways, but nothing in the animal world approaches the scale and elaboration with which humans make things and make meanings, layering symbol onto material and material onto symbol across generations. It is in that elaboration, not in embodiment or sociality as such, that whatever is distinctive about being human actually lies, and locating the distinction there, rather than in some vaguer appeal to culture or society in general, is a far more precise way of stating what anthropology has always been trying to say about human peculiarity.
It is no accident that human-animal relations has become one of the fastest growing areas within the discipline over the past decade, with a large share of current doctoral students now working somewhere in this space. Anyone who has lived with a dog already understands the puzzle this research is trying to address. A dog reads its owner's mood with a precision that plenty of humans lack, is deeply attuned to another creature's state without anything resembling language or symbolic exchange, and yet remained, for most of the discipline's history, excluded from the categories a tradition built around meaning-making was ever equipped to describe. The lecture theatre offers the same lesson from the opposite direction. This room is full of primates sitting quietly still while one of them produces conventional sounds referring to people who died centuries ago and to entities that exist nowhere except in symbolic form, and at the very same moment nobody here is treating the colour of the walls, whatever shade of grey or brown someone once selected for this space, as carrying any significance whatsoever. Embodiment, being-with and dwelling recede into the background here exactly as they do everywhere else, and so, in this particular case, does most of the room's own materiality and symbolism. Both the shared and the strange are present in the same fifty minutes, and a discipline finally capable of noticing both at once is at last equipped to ask what actually makes this species peculiar, rather than assuming the answer in advance.
X. A Discipline That Keeps Changing What It Wonders About
None of this means anthropology has been getting its facts wrong for a century. What has been changing, whenever the discipline is said to be changing, is not the facts but the attention, the sense of what is worth wondering about in the first place. Bronisław Malinowski and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, the founding figures of British social anthropology, wondered about different things than Edward Evans-Pritchard did a generation later, and Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz, working in a more American tradition of cultural anthropology, wondered about different things again from Claude Lévi-Strauss working in France. Reading any of them well means asking not only what they found but why that particular feature of human life struck them as worth the years of sustained attention it took to write about, when so much else, equally present in front of them at the time, apparently did not.
Malinowski's own trajectory illustrates the point especially well. Before he became the founding figure most students meet first, associated above all with his long fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands, he attended lectures by Wilhelm Wundt, the German psychologist whose Völkerpsychologie, literally a psychology of peoples, treated comparative variation in thought and custom as a legitimate scientific problem in its own right, decades before anthropology existed as a separate university discipline at all. Malinowski's own later writing engaged directly and at length with Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis. Anthropology and psychology share closer origins than either discipline tends to admit today, and the two fields only drifted apart as psychology committed itself increasingly to laboratory experiment in a way that social anthropology, wedded to long fieldwork instead, never did. A student arriving at anthropology from psychology, as some of you have, is in a sense returning to a much older and closer relationship between the two than the current institutional separation between them would suggest.
What all of this points towards is that anthropology's history is best read as a changing wonder profile, an evolving sense of which corners of an almost limitless field of possible topics happen to seem worth the discipline's sustained attention at a given moment, rather than as the steady accumulation of a single settled subject matter that later scholars merely add detail to. Sleep's near total absence from a century of anthropological writing, and its sudden claim on this lecture's attention instead, is itself a small example of exactly this kind of shift taking place, in real time, in front of you.
XI. Trust Your Own Life as Evidence
If there is one practical instruction worth taking away from all this, it is to treat your own life as a legitimate first source of evidence, not as a poor substitute for evidence gathered somewhere more exotic. What happens to you, and around you, is exactly as significant as anything documented about a community thousands of miles away, if only because you are, as far as I am able to confirm from where I am standing, a living human being, and living human beings are anthropology's actual subject matter wherever they happen to be standing. Living in halls of residence is itself excellent material for this kind of attention, precisely because it puts people from very different backgrounds into daily contact over shared kitchens and shared routines, and difference tends to surface first in exactly these small domestic moments rather than in any grand pronouncement about culture in general.
I still remember, from my own first year at university, a flatmate taking a handful of fresh green lettuce and putting it into the microwave until it had cooked down to almost nothing. My first reaction was straightforward bewilderment: surely lettuce is meant to be eaten raw, straight from the bag. His answer was that cold, raw vegetables upset his stomach, and that cooking solved the problem easily enough. That small exchange, two students in a shared kitchen quietly disagreeing about lettuce, is close to ideal anthropological material, because it captures a real difference in bodily habit and expectation without needing any grand theory to make the difference visible in the first place. The skill worth developing over the course of this degree is noticing the moment such a small disagreement occurs and asking, seriously and without embarrassment, why one of you expected something different from the other, rather than letting the moment pass as a trivial curiosity about vegetables and nothing more. Every one of you already has years of exactly this kind of material sitting in memory, waiting for someone to take it seriously enough to ask why.
XII. What Anthropology Is
Taken together, this suggests a definition worth holding onto more than any of the four candidates considered earlier. Anthropology is the disciplined practice of wondering about how humans live, and especially about how other humans live differently from oneself. Its great strength is that almost any feature of human existence can, in principle, become a legitimate object of that wondering, which is not a small thing to be able to say of any discipline. Its equally great weakness is that the discipline has never wondered about everything equally, and has consistently mistaken the strange, the symbolic and the contested for the whole of what matters in a life, while sleep, digestion, sitting and the ordinary company of others receded into a background that was never actually as uneventful as it looked from the outside. Learning to notice both of these things at once, what has been wondered about and what has not, is very close to the whole of what this course is going to ask of you over the coming year.