I. An Old Question With No Easy Answer
What is anthropology? The question sounds like the kind of thing a first-year seminar settles in its opening ten minutes, and the familiar answers arrive readily enough. Anthropology is the study of humans. It is the study of culture. It is the study of society. It is the comparative study of human diversity. It is the discipline that does long-term ethnographic fieldwork. It is the holistic study of human life. None of these is simply false. None of them, examined for more than a moment, actually settles the question.
The trouble becomes visible the moment the discipline's own range is taken seriously. Anthropologists study marriage, money, witchcraft, childbirth, pharmaceuticals, football, ritual, algorithms, bureaucracies, houses, nationalism, food, law, death, climate, kinship, and social media, often within a single career. Most disciplines can name something resembling their principal object, economics has price and exchange, linguistics has language, political science has the state. Anthropology looks, by comparison, able to annex almost anything humans do, and has spent more than a century doing exactly that.
A widely used introductory textbook, now in its fifth edition, makes perfectly coherent sense of the discipline through this established vocabulary: anthropology as the comparative study of cultural and social life, oscillating between the universal and the particular, distinguished above all by its commitment to long-term participant observation. This is not a criticism of introductory teaching but a historically accurate description of how anthropology came to understand itself, and generations of students have been served well by exactly this account. But an accurate description of how a discipline understands itself is not the same as a definition capable of bearing the weight the question what is anthropology actually asks it to bear, and the account is beginning to strain under scrutiny it did not have to withstand a generation ago.
The wager this article makes is simple to state and considerably harder to accept. Perhaps anthropology cannot be defined by finding the correct noun after the study of, because what gave anthropology its coherence was never a single object in the first place. Humans, culture, society, and difference have each, in turn, seemed to supply that object. Each has, on closer inspection, turned out to name a historically contingent pattern of attention rather than a stable thing waiting to be studied.
The argument proceeds in two movements. The first dismantles, one at a time and without contempt for any of them, four increasingly sophisticated candidate answers: humans, culture and society together, ethnographic fieldwork, and human diversity. The second offers a reconstruction rather than a demolition, proposing that anthropology is best understood as a historically evolving practice of disciplined wonder about human living, a practice now undergoing a particularly consequential reopening of its own assumptions about what a human being even is.
One distinction should be kept in view from the outset, since the rest of the article depends on it and returns to it at the end. Anthropology may be able to study almost anything about human living. It has never actually studied everything about human living. The gap between what the discipline could in principle make its object and what anthropologists have actually spent their careers describing is not a minor qualification to add once the definition has been settled but the central problem this article exists to examine.
II. Four Traditional Answers, and Why None Is Enough
Anthropology studies humans. The claim has the obvious virtue of matching the discipline's own name, anthropos and logos, reason or knowledge about the human. It has the equally obvious defect of matching almost every other discipline's claim as well. History studies humans. Psychology studies humans. Economics, medicine, epidemiology, and linguistics all study humans, each from its own angle. Humans identifies a range of possible subject matter, not a disciplinary principle capable of telling economics from anthropology. The four-field tradition, which holds biology, language, material remains, and social and cultural life together under a single institutional roof, partly answers the objection by taking the whole human being as its province rather than a fragment of one, and the tradition deserves to be taken seriously as a serious attempt at an answer rather than dismissed as an American institutional peculiarity. Contemporary social and cultural anthropology, though, generally does not encompass this whole, and most of the discipline's practitioners never touch the other three fields at all.
Anthropology studies culture. This was, for the better part of a century, the most powerful answer available, because culture named learned and transmitted variation rather than biological inheritance and thereby opened an enormous comparative domain that no other discipline had claimed. The difficulty is that the concept grew capacious enough to explain almost anything and, in doing so, stopped delimiting anything in particular. By the early 1950s two American anthropologists had already catalogued more than a hundred and sixty competing scholarly definitions of the word, a proliferation that looks less like healthy debate and more like a concept straining under a weight it was never built to carry. The long internal argument culture has generated within the discipline, over whether it is integrated or fragmented, shared or contested, bounded or unbounded, is itself evidence of the underlying problem rather than a sign of a field working its way toward a clearer answer.
Anthropology studies society. The parallel argument runs almost identically. Society once promised an encompassing relational object, a bounded system of interaction and structure an anthropologist could in principle map in full. Networks, practices, assemblages, infrastructures, and multispecies relations have steadily eroded that apparent boundedness over the past half-century, until fewer anthropologists would confidently say where one society ends and the next begins. What is interesting here is not that the discipline failed to arrive at the correct definition of society but that anthropology continued producing its best work while losing confidence in one of its two supposed master objects, which suggests the object was never doing the work of holding the discipline together in the first place.
Anthropology studies human diversity. This candidate comes closer than the previous three, and deserves to be taken more seriously before it, too, is set aside. Anthropology undeniably developed through sustained comparison across human variation, and a discipline's central problem, on one influential formulation, simply is the diversity of human social life. The same introductory textbook already cited presents the cross-cultural perspective as anthropology's distinctive corrective to the natural assumption that people everywhere think, want, and value in essentially the same way, and generations of students have found their own assumptions productively unsettled by exactly this corrective. This is where the article's most consequential critique has to begin, because a discipline that defines itself through diversity has to face an uncomfortable question about its own evidence. If anthropology is organized around finding difference, does it thereby begin selecting evidence in favour of difference, and mistake the selection for a discovery about the shape of humanity?
Perhaps anthropology's traditional definitions were never neutral descriptions of the discipline. Perhaps they partly generated the very patterns of attention the discipline subsequently mistook for properties of humanity itself.
III. Ethnography: Anthropology's Distinctive Method, But Not Its Definition
The fieldwork answer is the strongest of the conventional candidates, and deserves sympathetic treatment before the argument turns against it. Long-term ethnographic fieldwork is one of anthropology's most important methodological inventions. Living with people, learning routines, participating, observing, acquiring language, and remaining in place long enough for a first impression to become unreliable gives access to aspects of human living that a brief interview or a survey instrument simply cannot reach. An anthropologist arriving in an unfamiliar setting typically masters neither the language nor the codes of conduct well at first, something close to an accidental clown before becoming anything like a competent participant, and it is precisely this slow, often uncomfortable immersion that eventually yields the discipline's most distinctive insights.
Fieldwork's deepest strength lies in a kind of learning that happens before it can be articulated. An ethnographer begins to discern rhythms, hesitations, habitual material arrangements, bodily comportments, and awkward silences that nobody in the setting thought worth explaining, precisely because they had never needed explaining to anyone who already belonged there. This fits comfortably with an argument developed elsewhere in this corpus, that ethnographic competence typically forms well below the level of explicit articulation before it is reconstructed, often only partially, in writing.
A recent textbook offers a useful image for what participant observation is trying to achieve against its methodological rivals. Some social scientists survey a landscape from a hot-air balloon, drawing the big picture of hills, rivers, and settlements from a comfortable height, while the anthropologist walks the footpaths on foot, noticing the roadside detail a balloon's altitude was never going to reveal. The image flatters fieldwork, and it is not wrong to. What it leaves out is that a hiker on a footpath sees a different, not a more complete, slice of the same landscape, and a discipline that only ever walks will develop its own systematic blind spots exactly as a discipline that only ever flies would develop different ones.
Then the argument has to turn. Anthropologists routinely say that fieldwork is what holds the discipline together, and the claim is only partly true. Nobody spends an entire career in continuous participant observation. Anthropological arguments are built from archives, legislation, clinical records, censuses, photographs, films, historical documents, scientific literature, physical objects, maps, other ethnographies, newspapers, and social media archives, often in combination with fieldwork rather than instead of it. Even the most paradigmatic fieldwork projects, the ones held up as models of the method at its purest, draw on evidence considerably more heterogeneous than the phrase participant observation suggests on its own.
Ethnography, moreover, carries its own structural biases, and a mature discipline ought to be as alert to these as it has become, over decades of self-critique, to the cultural biases of individual ethnographers. Who can be approached shapes what gets recorded. Who wants to speak to a visiting stranger shapes it further. What can be seen during the specific period of a researcher's presence, what a given level of language competence permits, what local people consider narratable to an outsider at all, and what the anthropologist has personally learned to notice as significant, all narrow the resulting record well before any theoretical framework is applied to it. Ethnography is a powerful access mode. It cannot, on its own, explain why anthropologists have asked the particular questions they have asked rather than some other set entirely, since access and question are two different things that fieldwork's own mythology tends to run together.
A more general methodological point follows from this. Every method is an attention technology, a device that renders some phenomena easier to notice than others by the very shape of what it demands from the researcher using it. A structured survey makes certain patterns visible and others invisible in one direction. Long-term participant observation makes a different set visible and a different set invisible in another. Anthropology has generally been considerably better at scrutinizing the cultural biases carried by individual ethnographers, their class background, their gender, their prior training, than at asking the harder question about the structural biases built into ethnography as a method regardless of who happens to be practising it.
If neither a stable object nor a distinctive method is sufficient to define the discipline, the more promising move is to stop asking what anthropologists claim to study and start asking what has repeatedly attracted anthropological attention, and, just as importantly, what has not.
IV. The Great Paradox: Almost Anything May Be Studied, but Most Things Are Forgotten
This section states what may be the article's most memorable paradox as starkly as it deserves. Anthropology has perhaps the broadest licence of any human science, a standing permission for almost any region of human living to become a legitimate object of disciplined inquiry. Its actual archive, set against that licence, is astonishingly patchy.
The discipline has lavished sustained, sophisticated attention on kinship, ritual, exchange, classification, religion, ethnicity, identity, politics, personhood, gender, and inequality. None of these is a poor choice of object, and each has produced superb scholarship across multiple generations of researchers. The question worth asking is not what anthropology studied well but what never became an object worth studying at all.
Sleep supplies the decisive demonstration. Every human being sleeps. Sleep occupies something close to a third of an entire human lifetime, and it involves bodies, intimacy, households, architecture, temperature, light, sound, danger, technology, schedules, work, children, and care, along with every axis of social inequality that determines who gets to sleep safely and who does not. Anthropology has produced, relative to its sustained theorization of kinship, exchange, or ritual, remarkably little on sleep. Sleep was not inaccessible to fieldwork. Anthropologists were themselves doing it for roughly a third of every day they spent in the field, often in the same houses, on the same mats, under the same roofs as the people they had travelled to study, and the discipline still, for the most part, forgot to wonder about it. The same neglect extends, more cautiously, to sitting, waking, tiredness, ordinary bodily comfort, everyday temperature regulation, waiting, routine convalescence, and the countless small adjustments that fill most of an ordinary day without ever becoming an incident worth narrating.
A recent, unusually candid survey within the discipline makes a closely related point about happiness and well-being, and the parallel is worth drawing out because it shows the pattern is not confined to one topic. Anthropologists, on this survey's own admission, have shown far more sustained interest in pathology and oddity than in ordinary well-being, more attention to disease than to health, more curiosity, to borrow the survey's own deliberately deflating comparison, about basket-weaving than about what it feels like for a life to be going well. The cold-shouldering of well-being by a discipline that claims the whole of human life as its province is, on this reading, itself a fact about the discipline's own culture that deserves analysis rather than an oversight some future monograph will eventually correct.
This yields an important distinction the rest of the article depends on. Absence from anthropological theory does not indicate absence from human life. The conventional table of contents shared by most comprehensive introductions, language, subsistence, politics, kinship, gender, religion, ethnicity, colonialism, globalization, is an excellent map of what anthropology has chosen to notice. It is a strange and lopsided map of what an actual human life consists of, hour by hour, most of which is spent sleeping, sitting, waiting, digesting, resting, and otherwise not doing anything an ethnographer would normally think to write down.
Call this pattern a disciplinary attention economy. Topics become visible to a discipline built on narrative and interpretation when they are symbolically elaborate, institutionally recognizable, politically consequential, culturally distinctive, narratable, controversial, or already legible through an existing theoretical vocabulary. The ordinary disappears from view precisely because it succeeds at being ordinary. Nobody writes an ethnography of all the occasions on which a floor successfully supported everyone standing on it, and this is not a joke so much as a precise description of how stable coordination tends to hide itself from view while disturbance and breakdown attract reflection, articulation, and, eventually, a monograph.
Anthropology's blind spots are not, then, merely empty spaces patiently awaiting a future round of ethnographies that will eventually fill them in. They tell us something more consequential about the mechanisms by which anthropological knowledge itself has been produced, and about which mechanisms decide, well before any particular fieldworker arrives on the scene, what will count as worth noticing at all.
V. The Difference Machine: When Selection Becomes Theory
Anthropology's attraction to difference has been enormously productive, and nothing that follows should be read as diminishing that achievement. It broke provincial assumptions that had gone unexamined for centuries. It challenged casual ethnocentrism by insisting that arrangements a European observer took to be simply natural, monogamous marriage, private property, the nuclear household, were in fact historically and culturally variable, one arrangement among many rather than the default form human life takes wherever it is allowed to develop undisturbed. It greatly expanded the imaginable range of what a human life can be. None of this achievement is in question here.
The harder question concerns what happens once a discipline optimized for finding difference sets out to build general theories of humanity from what it has found. The selection effect runs in a fairly simple sequence. Anthropologists travel, literally and intellectually, toward difference, because difference is what a discipline defined by comparison is trained to notice and reward. Difference generates curiosity, publishable description, and professional recognition in a way that continuity with the researcher's own society rarely does. Highly distinctive practices accordingly receive disproportionate analytical attention relative to their actual weight in the lives of the people practising them. General theories then get built from this already selected archive. Those theories conclude, often with real conviction, that human worlds are profoundly different from one another. The circularity in this sequence does not invalidate any particular empirical difference an ethnographer has documented. It affects how large that difference appears once it has been extracted from everything around it and placed at the centre of an argument.
Difference becomes evidence. Similarity becomes background. That asymmetry is the whole of the difficulty, stated as compactly as it can be stated.
Call the underlying problem the denominator problem. An ethnographer may devote three hundred pages to a single distinctive ritual classification while thousands of shared bodily and practical activities, eating, resting, caring for children, avoiding pain, seeking warmth, remain unmentioned in the same account, not because they are unimportant to the people living them but because they generate no comparable interpretive payoff. Without some sense of the denominator, the full range of a life against which the documented difference is being measured, it becomes impossible to tell whether a given difference concerns one highly elaborated corner of an otherwise ordinary human world or actually reorganizes that world from top to bottom. Some of anthropology's strongest and most influential claims, particularly within culturalist and more recent ontological arguments, scale upward from a distinctive symbolic articulation, a classification, a cosmology, a ritual sequence, to a claim about an entirely different underlying reality, without ever pausing to ask how much of the rest of that world the articulation actually organizes.
The alternative this article proposes is not to flatten difference back into a bland claim that everyone is, underneath it all, the same but to insist on a more disciplined set of questions wherever a difference is proposed. What, precisely, differs. Across which dimensions of life. At what level, symbolic, institutional, or bodily. Against what background of continuity does the difference stand out at all. And how consequential is the difference for the ongoing, practical business of staying alive, coordinated, and cared for.
Sleep returns here as a clarifying case rather than a digression. Sleeping arrangements differ dramatically across the societies anthropologists have studied, who sleeps beside whom, on what surface, at what hours, under what expectations of vigilance and shared risk. The metabolic necessity of sleep itself does not differ at all. Both claims are equally real, equally anthropological, and equally in need of statement together rather than in place of one another, and a comparative anthropology capable of holding both in view at once is considerably harder to build, and considerably more valuable, than one that reports only the variation and lets the underlying continuity go without saying.
Anthropology's problem, stated as an aphorism worth carrying forward, has never been taking difference too seriously. It has been taking similarity too little seriously, for long enough that similarity started to look like the kind of thing that did not need an anthropologist's attention at all.
VI. Anthropos Among the Animals
The discipline's own name forces a question that centuries of debate about culture and society have allowed anthropology to postpone. What kind of being is anthropos, exactly, before anything is said about the culture or the society this being happens to have.
Anthropology has generally answered by searching for whatever seems uniquely human, culture, language, society, symbolism, morality, technology, ritual, reason, and building its account of the human around whichever candidate seemed most secure at the time. This repeats, at the level of an entire species, exactly the selection problem the previous two sections diagnosed at the level of ethnographic method. If the question asked is what makes humans different from other animals, the evidence gathered in response will predictably consist of differences from other animals, and nothing else will come into view no matter how much of human life actually runs along lines other animals share.
Humans are, whatever else they are, animals, and the argument this section makes is best approached by reversing the usual sequence. Before asking what makes humans special, ask what enormous regions of human living are continuous with the rest of life, and only then ask what, if anything, actually sets humans apart within that continuity.
Three mediations belong to life as such rather than to humans distinctively, and are worth naming individually because each has been treated, at different points in the discipline's history, as though it belonged to biology rather than to anthropology at all. Embodiment: humans sense, metabolize, move, tire, heal, sleep, suffer, age, and die, and while human embodiment is enormously elaborated and constantly reworked by symbolic and institutional life, embodiment itself is not a cultural invention that could in principle have been otherwise. Being-with: humans live continuously among other beings whose actions matter to them, and coordination, attraction, avoidance, dependence, competition, care, and responsiveness to another's conduct did not begin with Homo sapiens, which is exactly where social anthropology's long-standing privileging of human-human sociality over every other form of being-with can be gently but firmly provincialized rather than defended as though human relations were being-with's only serious instance. Multiversal dwelling: humans inhabit conditions they did not produce and cannot simply opt out of, temperature, gravity, pathogens, daylight, rainfall, seasonality, terrain, and the atmospheric chemistry of the planet they happen to have been born onto, and while human beings transform their environments on a scale no other species approaches, they never thereby become independent of dwelling as such.
None of these three mediations is merely biological background to be handed off to another discipline and forgotten. They constitute human life continuously, every hour of every day, in every society anthropology has ever studied. A discipline organized around culture and society can nonetheless treat them as background precisely because they are so continuous, so evenly distributed across every case an ethnographer might choose, that they generate no comparative payoff and therefore never rise to the level of a puzzle worth writing about. An argument developed elsewhere in this corpus states the needed reversal explicitly: begin from living as such rather than from the human case, and treat the human as an extraordinary specialization within life rather than as the template from which life in general is understood.
This licenses a harder look at holism, the value anthropology has long claimed as one of its distinguishing virtues. Traditional anthropological holism was historically important, and remains important, because it resisted the narrow causal specialization that fragments a person into an economic actor here, a political actor there, a kinship node somewhere else, with no discipline responsible for putting the pieces back together. But a discipline can call itself holistic while still disproportionately attending to exactly those dimensions of a life in which humans appear most unlike other animals, and largely ignoring the dimensions in which they do not, which is a much narrower holism than the word usually promises to deliver.
The question this section leaves standing is worth stating plainly before the next section answers it. What would an anthropology look like that took anthropos seriously as an animal first, before asking what, if anything, makes this particular animal unusual.
VII. Where Humans Really Are Peculiar: Material-Symbolic Cumulative Recursion
None of the preceding section should be mistaken for the equally crude claim that humans are just animals, no different from any other species once the flattering vocabulary of culture and society is stripped away. There are extraordinary human differences. The task is to locate them with more precision than culture or society, used as blanket terms, has generally managed.
Two further mediations belong to this more precise account, multimateriality and multisymbolization, and both need to be introduced while immediately resisting the temptation to draw a hard line between humans and every other species on their basis. Other animals make, alter, select, transport, and arrange materials: a bird builds a nest, a beaver dams a river, an octopus carries shell fragments to assemble a shelter. Other animals signal, communicate, classify, and exhibit representational capacities to a degree that keeps expanding as the relevant research gets better at looking for it. The human difference does not lie in the simple presence of either capacity, since both are present, in some form, well beyond the human case. It lies in their extraordinary elaboration, their accumulation over historical rather than merely biographical time, and, above all, in the way the two capacities have become coupled to one another.
The coupling deserves to be traced carefully, because it is where the real peculiarity sits. Symbols become materialized, carved, printed, encoded, stored. Marks become archives that persist well beyond the lifespan of whoever made them. Later humans recursively encounter these earlier symbolic deposits and are shaped by encountering them. Those deposits then coordinate further material making in turn. Buildings house archives. Documents regulate which buildings may be built and where. Money symbolically coordinates material exchange across strangers who will never meet. Scientific symbols allow instruments to be designed and built. Instruments then produce further inscriptions, which become further symbols, which coordinate further making, and digital systems have recently accelerated this entire loop to a speed no prior human society came close to achieving. Human living becomes historically cumulative in a way without real parallel elsewhere in the living world.
An ordinary university lecture theatre makes the point vivid enough to carry the whole argument on its own. Hundreds of primates sit for an hour in a purpose-built structure almost entirely motionless, while one of them produces a sequence of conventional sounds referring to primates who died decades or centuries ago and to entities, numbers, rights, nations, molecules, that exist nowhere except in symbolic form, the entire interaction scaffolded by books, screens, microphones, timetables, administrative systems, architectural codes, and a vast accumulated symbolic archive that made the lecture, the building, and the concepts being discussed all possible in the first place. This is a strange scene, considerably stranger than familiarity allows it to feel. What is strange about it, though, is not society or culture treated as free-floating abstractions but the extreme recursive coupling of making and symbolizing that produced a species capable of arranging itself this way at all.
This reframes anthropology's founding fascination with culture rather than abandoning it. The question worth asking is no longer how humans escaped nature into culture, a formulation that already assumes the very partition this article has been questioning throughout. It is how one particular lineage of animal became capable of accumulating material-symbolic recursions at this scale, coupling made things to symbolic things so tightly and for so long that each generation inherits an archive no single lifetime could have produced alone. Culture, on this reframing, becomes an outcome that itself requires explanation, a historically specific achievement of one recursively peculiar animal, rather than an explanatory ground anthropology can simply assume and build everything else on top of.
Locating human peculiarity here rather than in culture or society carries a further advantage the previous section's critique of selective attention makes visible. Culture and society, treated as the seat of human distinctiveness, invite exactly the kind of scaling-up from a striking symbolic instance to a claim about an entirely different reality that the denominator problem already warned against. Material-symbolic cumulative recursion invites a different, more tractable question instead, not how different is this people's reality from ours, but how extensively, and through which specific couplings of making and symbolizing, has recursive accumulation actually proceeded here, a question with an answer that can, in principle, be investigated rather than merely asserted.
VIII. Anthropology as a Wonder Profile
The positive definition this article has been building toward can now be stated. Anthropology does not have a stable object comparable to price for economics, language for linguistics, or the state for political science, and the preceding sections have shown why each of its traditional candidates, humans, culture, society, difference, fails to supply one. What gives the discipline its coherence instead is a distinctive wonder profile.
A wonder profile is the historically structured pattern by which some disturbances in living repeatedly become worthy of articulated, disciplined, and publicly answerable inquiry, while countless others, equally real and often equally consequential, never do. Anthropology is unusual among the human sciences because its disciplinary ideal is unusually permissive. Almost any region of human living may, in principle, become anthropologically askable, and the discipline has spent more than a century proving the claim by actually annexing an extraordinary range of subject matter, from witchcraft to algorithms, from bridewealth to social media.
This formulation resolves the apparent contradiction this article opened with, between a discipline whose licence looks limitless and an archive that turns out to be so selective. The permission is broad. The history of actual attention is narrow, and the narrowness is not a failure to live up to the permission but the specific, historically contingent shape the permission has taken in practice.
One further observation belongs here before the argument moves on. Other disciplines occasionally acquire something like a wonder profile of their own, but few institutionalize the permission itself as anthropology has, describing itself, in one influential formulation, not as a single subject matter but as something closer to a connective tissue running between subject matters, straddling history and the natural sciences, the humanities and the social sciences, rather than settling into any one of them. That self-description is usually offered as a badge of intellectual breadth. Read through the argument of this article, it is better understood as an accurate report of what a wonder profile actually looks like from the inside, not incoherence, and not comprehensiveness either, but a historically accumulated licence broad enough to feel limitless to the people exercising it, and narrow enough, in what it has actually made questionable, to have produced the very blind spots this article has been tracing.
A compressed intellectual history illustrates the shape rather than narrating it as a sequence of progressively superior theories. Bronisław Malinowski wondered how ordinary life keeps going under conditions of real uncertainty. Alfred Radcliffe-Brown wondered how durable social order manages to persist without any single person holding the whole of it in view. Edward Evans-Pritchard wondered how an apparently irrational practice could nonetheless possess an internal coherence of its own. Claude Lévi-Strauss wondered why symbolic patterns recur across societies that never had any contact with one another. Mary Douglas wondered how classification itself creates the anomalies it then has to manage. Victor Turner wondered what happens to a community when stabilized order deliberately loosens for a time. Clifford Geertz wondered how symbols make an otherwise opaque world intelligible to the people living inside it. Tim Ingold wondered how organisms, humans among them, come to dwell somewhere rather than simply occupy a location. Bruno Latour wondered how human and non-human agencies become truly inseparable from one another in practice. Read this way, the schools that later textbooks present as a sequence of increasingly sophisticated answers to one stable problem are better understood as different regions of human living becoming newly worth wondering about, one after another, as the discipline's collective attention moved.
This article's own contribution to that account is a single further step. A wonder profile does not only explain a discipline's intellectual fertility, its capacity to keep discovering new regions of human living worth taking seriously. It explains its blind spots with exactly the same logic, since a discipline is characterized as much by what has repeatedly failed to become puzzling to it as by what has succeeded. Sleep, on this reading, is not peripheral to the argument this article has been making but a diagnostic case of failed wonder, a region of human living every anthropologist has spent a third of every day inhabiting without its ever becoming, for most of the discipline's history, a question worth asking.
This yields the strongest available answer to the article's title question so far. Anthropology is the institutionally sustained practice by which selected aspects of human living are made recursively questionable. The single word doing the most work in that sentence is selected, since it is exactly what distinguishes this definition from a merely celebratory claim about total openness. A discipline that can study anything and a discipline that has actually studied everything are not the same discipline, and mistaking the first description for the second is among the most persistent errors in how anthropology has told its own history to itself.
IX. Anthropology Today: A Discipline in Recursive Reopening
This is a particularly good time to enter anthropology, because many of its foundational stabilizations are becoming unstable at once, and it would be a mistake to claim that a single agreed successor paradigm has already arrived to replace them. What is underway looks, from inside, less like a clean transition than a broad reopening of questions that had seemed settled for a working generation or two.
Several of these questions are worth naming directly, because naming them is itself part of what a reopening consists of. Is culture an explanation for human variation or something that itself requires explaining. How extensive, once measured against everything a comparison leaves in the background, is cultural difference actually. Where does the boundary between human and non-human belong, and does it belong anywhere at all in the sharp form the discipline inherited. Can society, as a term, still delimit a field of study in a world of networks, infrastructures, and multispecies entanglements. What is ethnographic fieldwork uniquely capable of establishing, once its structural biases are taken as seriously as an individual fieldworker's personal biases have long been taken. How should anthropology relate to biology, ecology, and archaeology, disciplines it has periodically claimed kinship with and periodically disowned. Is symbolic meaning as central to human life as twentieth-century theory assumed it had to be. What happens to comparison once similarity, and not only difference, is treated as analytically serious. And what vast regions of ordinary life have the discipline's own traditions simply never learned to notice.
Paradigm shifts are rarely visible as a clean replacement of one settled answer by another while they are actually happening. They feel, from inside, like proliferation, mild dissatisfaction with terms that used to feel adequate, unusually active cross-disciplinary borrowing, and the slow weakening of once-obvious vocabulary that nobody quite wants to declare dead outright. This is closer to what a live reopening looks like than any dramatic announcement of a new school would be.
A brief first-person aside seems warranted here, since a discipline claiming to value reflexivity should be willing to practise it on itself rather than only on the people it studies. When I began in anthropology, several propositions were taught as reasonably secure disciplinary achievements. Decades later, a number of them look considerably less secure, and some strike me now as straightforwardly mistaken, including some I once accepted and taught myself without much hesitation. This is not disciplinary embarrassment, and it should not be treated as an admission requiring an apology, but closer to the entire point of a field of inquiry that intends to keep inquiring rather than simply defending positions it settled on decades ago. A discipline that never discovers it was wrong about something is probably not learning very much, whatever else it may be doing with its considerable institutional energy.
This licenses a broader reflection on what disciplinary maturity actually requires. Accumulation, gathering more cases, more comparisons, more sophisticated theoretical vocabulary, is not enough on its own. A mature discipline also needs organized mechanisms for reopening its own closures, for treating its own settled terms as objects of the same disciplined curiosity it directs at everyone else's settled terms. Anthropology has historically been quite good at critique, better than most neighbouring disciplines at turning a sceptical eye on inherited categories. But critique on its own can simply produce another theoretical fashion to replace the last one, cycling through vocabularies without ever forcing a reconsideration of the deeper architecture, the assumption that culture explains rather than needs explaining, that society names a bounded thing, that difference is the discipline's natural home ground, that generated the problem being critiqued in the first place. The present reopening is worth taking seriously precisely because it reaches that deeper architecture rather than stopping at its latest symptom.
X. Pedagogy: Stop Teaching Anthropology as a Finished Building
This argument can be made tangible by looking at how the discipline is actually taught to the people who will eventually decide whether to stay in it. First-year teaching commonly presents a settled landscape: here are the founders, here are the schools, here are the key concepts, here are the methods, here are the subfields, arranged in a syllabus that implies, whether or not any lecturer intends it to, that the building is essentially finished and the student's job is to learn its floor plan. Students understandably experience this as established intellectual reality rather than as one historically contingent way of organizing a field that could have been organized differently.
The canon deserves better treatment than either uncritical reverence or dismissal, and the better treatment is to teach it as an archive of consequential attempts to understand humans rather than as a gallery of authorities to be bowed before. Some of these attempts were brilliant. Some discovered phenomena that remain indispensable to anyone working in the discipline today. Some were simply wrong, in ways their own later critics eventually demonstrated. Most combined real discovery with real distortion in proportions that vary from thinker to thinker and are worth working out case by case rather than assuming in advance. Understanding an argument is not the same thing as accepting it, and a student who can eventually say of a canonical figure that does not make sense, and explain precisely why, has very possibly learned more from the encounter than one who can only recite the position faithfully.
One practical experiment worth naming here is a life-course curriculum, an alternative to structuring an introduction around the discipline's inherited topical boxes. Instead of organizing the material by anthropology's own categories, an introduction could be organized loosely around an individual human trajectory, conception, birth, childhood, initiation, personhood, embodiment, gender and sexuality, marriage and kinship, house and home, exchange, consumption and eating together, health, work, sickness, death, memory, and how the dead are remembered by the living who come after them. This is not a claim that human lives everywhere follow one universal sequence, which would simply reintroduce the ethnocentrism the discipline has spent a century learning to guard against. Its purpose is methodological rather than substantive. For each stage of this loosely sketched trajectory, the relevant question becomes what anthropologists have actually noticed about it, what they have overlooked, which inherited categories illuminate that stage of a life and which distort it, what turns out to be culturally variable at that point and what turns out to be widely shared.
This reverses the usual relation between a discipline and the life it claims to study. A conventional introduction asks what anthropology's major topics are and organizes a life around the answer. A life-course introduction asks what actually happens in a human life and then asks how adequate anthropology's inherited toolkit turns out to be for making sense of it, stage by stage, which is perhaps the most concrete pedagogical expression available of the argument this whole article has been making.
XI. Conclusion: Anthropology After Awe
Return, in closing, to the question this article opened with. What is anthropology, today. Not simply the science of culture. Not simply the study of society. Not simply ethnography. Not simply comparison. Not simply human diversity. Not even, quite, the holistic study of humans, a phrase that has come to mean considerably less than it promises once holism itself is examined closely. Each of these candidates captures a real historical achievement of the discipline. None of them provides the disciplinary closure it was asked to provide.
The definition this article proposes instead can be stated in a single sentence. Anthropology today is a historically accumulated practice of disciplined wonder about human living, unusually open in principle to making any region of human life askable, yet radically selective in what it has actually learned to notice. Its greatness follows directly from the first half of that sentence. Its characteristic errors, the overestimation of cultural difference, the neglect of ordinary and metabolically continuous life, the tendency to define humans chiefly through whatever seems to separate them from other animals, follow just as directly from the second.
None of this calls for anthropology to abandon difference, culture, ethnography, or comparison, each of which remains among the discipline's real achievements. It calls for provincializing them, locating each within a wider frame that shows what it can and cannot do on its own. Difference has to be measured against similarity rather than reported in isolation. Culture has to be located within ongoing living processes rather than made their universal, all-purpose explanation. Ethnography has to be treated as an unusually powerful but still partial mode of access among several, rather than as the discipline's whole method by definition. Humans have to be situated among other living beings before their actual peculiarities can be specified with any precision. Materiality and symbolization need to be studied in their extraordinary human coupling rather than folded together into an undifferentiated culture that explains everything and therefore illuminates comparatively little. And the canon needs to become a history of questions, breakthroughs, omissions, and honest mistakes, rather than a procession of authorities a new student is expected to admire in the correct order.
Return, finally, to the paradox with which this article began. Anthropology can potentially wonder about almost anything a human being does. Its future may depend less on inventing ever more sophisticated answers to the questions the discipline has already spent a century asking than on noticing the enormous regions of living about which it has somehow never learned to ask anything at all.
Anthropology has spent more than a century teaching people to question what they had taken for granted about other humans. Its present opportunity is to turn that same capacity on itself. What would it take for a discipline to discover that what had appeared obvious was only habitual, that what had appeared universal was in fact local, and that what had appeared radically different may have rested the whole time on continuities it had simply stopped noticing. Anthropology has always been at its best when something apparently ordinary suddenly becomes strange enough to be worth asking about. Today, anthropology itself is one of those things, an extraordinary human achievement in its own right, one more thing that anthropos, among everything else it does, has somehow found a way to do.