Anthropology Textbook

We are like fish trying to see water. It is hard to see our own culture because we are immersed in it. This is a four-fields textbook. Anthropology includes Cultural Anthropology or Ethnology, Anthropological Linguistics, Archaeology, and Physical Anthropology. This is a traditional textbook in that it focuses on the uniqueness of each culture (rather than other textbooks' focus on power relations). Topics include living peoples and cultures, past cultures, language and culture, and relationships between biology, culture and environment.

We are like fish trying to see water. It is hard to see our own culture because we are immersed in it. Culture is the defining characteristic of the human species. Anthropology studies culture. Sub-disciplines include Cultural Anthropology or Ethnology, Anthropological Linguistics, Archaeology, and Physical Anthropology. This textbook has a chapter on each, a four-fields textbook. This is a traditional textbook in the sense that it focuses on the uniqueness of each culture (rather than other textbooks' focus on power relations in a culture). Topics include living peoples and cultures, past cultures, relationships between language and culture, and interrelationships between biology, culture and environment. All affect each other, all interact, all change, all are human ways of adapting to a changing world. Each changes the others.

Kenneth W. Johnson, Ph.D. is a native of Georgia and a graduate of Georgia Southern College, Florida Atlantic University, and the University of Florida (Ph.D., 1991). He taught courses in anthropology and geography for twenty-three years at Thomas College/ Thomas University, and at Georgia Gwinnett College, a unit of the University System of Georgia, and retired in 2017. This textbook is based on the introductory course, ANT 201 or ANTH 1101, Introduction to Anthropology, a four-fields course. He also taught other courses and did field projects with classes of students each semester to give them "hands on" archaeological experience.