All's fair

The Strategy Toolkit - December 2022 edition

Excerpt:  Strategy and Anthropology

Anthropology is the study of human beings as an animal species, with a particular emphasis on the characteristics that are common across all humans, and the characteristics that make them different from the members of other species.  Anthropologists research humans across time and space, working closely with specialists in the other social and physical sciences such as sociologists, psychologists, biologists, and historians.  Anthropologists therefore have a strong claim to defining what it means to be human.  We argue that anthropologists, in turn, define what it means to be strategic.

According to the American Anthropological Association, “Anthropology is the study of what makes us human.”*  The research of anthropologists falls into four major areas:  archaeology (the study of human culture by analysing the objects people have made),  biological anthropology (the study of how humans adapt to different environments, what causes disease and early death, and how humans evolved from other animals), cultural anthropology (the study of how people in different places live and understand the world around them), and linguistic anthropology (the study of the ways people communicate across the globe).

* https://www.americananthro.org/

There are separate chapters on strategy and archeology, as well as strategy and linguistics, so we will focus our attention in this chapter on the biological and cultural dimensions of anthropology.