From its inception, anthropology has been concerned with the processes that transform an infant with indefinite potential into an adult with a particular role in a particular group (family, society, class, nation). To achieve adulthood, an infant must learn, and much of that learning depends on how the adults around them organize themselves. A child’s education takes place not only in schools and other formalized institutions but also through the unfocused processes that inform family and community life. Thus, anthropologists investigate the psychological processes of enculturation and the social processes involved in ensuring that the various human roles that form the web of a complex society are reproduced over the generations.

Learning is at the root of most definitions of culture. From the cultural perspective, learning activates human possibilities and shapes them to fit a particular human environment or “culture.” This process has many facets, including, for example, who attends to a child (mother, older children, other caregivers), when (at various times in the day and over the years), and with what consequences (some organizations are better in allowing children to achieve particular possibilities—failure at school, romantic genius, sensitive husband and father—as these might be mentioned in a eulogy). Without extensive and long-term interaction with adults, human infants cannot develop fully. Human reproduction is not solely a genetic or psychological process; it is also a sociocultural one that produces people with particular abilities specialized for particular positions (and often exhibiting particular disabilities when assuming positions to which they are not suited).

Interest in what is known as the “distribution of knowledge” has transformed enculturation studies and is beginning to converge with work in settings where education is formalized, particularly schools. Through these institutions complex societies reproduce their social organization. There are two vital issues in the field. The first is the need to clarify the processes through which children are placed in particular positions—who and what is involved in making some people janitors and others heads of corporations. The second concerns how to understand how certain processes—particularly those grounded in school examinations and psychological testing—have become the main legitimate means through which people are placed in positions. The democratic ideal that, through testing and examinations, personal merit can be identified and rewarded has seldom worked as hoped. Educational anthropologists point to the continuity between the education the children of the most prosperous receive at home and in their communities, the organization of schooling, and the pedagogical styles used in school. Thus, the children of poor or immigrant families are more likely to fail—whatever their individual merits—because of “cultural discontinuities,” the great dissimilarities between the cultures of their homes and neighborhoods and that of the school. Other studies focus on the structuring of schooling to show how the very concern with measuring merit continually reproduces failure on an ever-expanding scale, thereby devaluing the contributions each individual makes to the welfare of society.

These debates continue, producing ever more careful descriptions of everyday lives in classrooms and schools that reveal hidden processes—including processes of resistance, appropriation, and co-option. Each new description confirms the usefulness of the core methodological choices of the field: induction from ethnographic observation.

The study of ethnicity, minority groups, and identity

Ethnicity refers to the identification of a group based on a perceived cultural distinctiveness that makes the group into a “people.” This distinctiveness is believed to be expressed in language, music, values, art, styles, literature, family life, religion, ritual, food, naming, public life, and material culture. This cultural comprehensiveness—a unique set of cultural characteristics perceived as expressing themselves in commonly unique ways across the sociocultural life of a population—characterizes the concept of ethnicity. It revolves around not just a “population,” a numerical entity, but a “people,” a comprehensively unique cultural entity.

The concept of ethnicity contrasts with that of race, which refers to the perceived unique common physical and biogenetic characteristics of a population. The criteria used to characterize a group—whether comprehensive unique cultural characteristics or biogenetic ones—determine whether the group is regarded as an ethnic or a racial group. In the late 20th century and at the turn of the 21st century, “Irish” was considered an ethnic label, while “white” was a racial one.

A minority group is a group whose unique cultural characteristics are perceived to be different from those characterizing the dominant groups in society. In anthropology the term may refer to groups categorized by ethnicity, race, gender, or sexual orientation. The term is not without controversy: Many regard it as contradictory, for the relative population growth rate of subordinated ethnic groups in the United States, if continued, is such that after 2050 the “minority” could well be the numerical majority. Others regard the term as patronizing; by emphasizing the purely numerical dimension, it evades issues of group powerlessness as well as the substantive values and interests that “minority” groups may uphold.

Anthropologists regard ethnicity, race, and minority groups as social and cultural constructs and not biological ones. In all cases the formation and perception of identities are to be explained as a result of the operation of specific social, cultural, political, and economic relationships over a long period of historical time.

Identity refers to both group self-awareness of common unique characteristics and individual self-awareness of inclusion in such a group. Self-awareness may be formulated in comprehensive cultural terms (ethnic identity), in biogenetic terms (racial identity), in terms of sexual orientation, and in terms of gender. Persons and groups often adhere to multiple and fluid identities, features of which may be selectively relevant in specific social situations.

Some anthropologists go further and call attention to the growth of “hybridity”—the dissolution of rigid cultural boundaries between groups hitherto perceived as separate, the intermixture of various identities, in effect the dissolution of identities themselves. Much anthropology in this field demonstrates how identities have been and are invented and reinvented for political and other purposes, out of disparate historical and cultural experiences. Other studies have repeatedly shown that—contrary to a group’s self-representation and assertion of an identity—identities are riven with contradictions and are not to be understood as seamlessly unified comprehensive cultural entities.

Identity in terms of ethnicity, race, minority group status, gender, and sexual orientation is often contrasted with class consciousness—group self-awareness in terms of belonging to the same socioeconomic group. Some anthropologists write of the emergence of a new “identity” politics as distinct from an older “class” politics—the growth of what are called “new social movements.” The term new social movements refers to gay and lesbian, feminist, and civil rights and environmental movements and is used to distinguish these from trade union and other class-based movements. These distinctions sometimes suggest that persons have to choose between uniting for social and political action primarily on the grounds of common membership in perceived ethnic, racial, minority, gender, sexual orientation, or environmental groups rather than on the grounds of membership in a similar socioeconomic group.

Identities owe their formation and position in society to the operation of social, economic, cultural, and political forces that are inseparable from the forces that create and maintain socioeconomic groups. In this view, rather than being opposed, identity politics and class politics, while distinct, have the potential to be allied actors in a common political process.