Anthropology as an Ideal
Professional historians trace human history back some 30,000 to 40,000 years. Anthropologists trace human history back one or two million years and link that history seamlessly with the history of other creatures on our planet. Instruction in anthropology provides the perspective and insight into human reality that no other profession can provide. It gives us a much wider breadth of human reality than most other social professions. It helps remind us how variable human culture is and how hard it is to judge one culture from the perspective of another. Many of the world's problems are traceable to an ethnocentrism that the study of anthropology serves to correct.
|