An Anthropologist Looks at Biology

Abstract

This article sets out the foundations for an adequate integration of anthropology within the wider field of biology. In the discourse of social anthropology, the concept of ‘biology’ is commonly matched to one side of an opposition between humanity and nature, setting up persons and organisms as mutually exclusive objects of study. In biology itself, however, the established neo-Darwinian synthesis virtually eliminates the organism as a real entity, and the extension of this paradigm to incorporate ‘cultural inheritance’ likewise eliminates the person. An alternative biology is proposed that takes the organism as its starting point, and that comprehends the social life of persons as an aspect of organic life in general. Thus an anthropology of persons is encompassed within a biology of organisms whose focus is on processes rather than events, replacing the ‘population thinking’ of Darwinian evolutionary biology with a logic of relationships