Week 3: Culture is not biology
ANTH 1002: Anthropology for a better world (Semester 2, 2026)
August 18, 2026
Cultural anthropology was formulated to oppose racial and biological explanations of human diversity. We’re caught in a time warp, and we need anthropology now more than ever.
Main reading: Baker (1998); King (2019)
Other reading: Boas ([1931] 1940)
Notes
In 2026, people are probably more aware than ever of the diversity of humanity. Most of us would have come from a school system in which not only were we taught that our own society, and every society, was made up of many cultures, but also (especially in Australia) we could see that looking at our own classmates.
At the same time, if you go online, you can easily stumble on detailed descriptions of facial features and skin tones, couched in terms that sound like a biology textbook but framed as beauty tips (OK, mainly for men).
And if that doesn’t max out your patience, tech billionaries are donating their sperm. Convinced that they are rich because they have superior genes, they want to have as many children as possible… y’know, to help everyone. It’s called babymaxxing (Sussman 2026).
Is this just the lunatic fringe? Maybe, but then consider how people think of immigration now.
Politicians and activists in the US, Australia, the UK, European countries, and South Africa, among others, publicly denounce immigrants every day it seems. US policy is to encourage “return” migration of basically all immigrants. A US Supreme Court justice has written that speaking Spanish, or even speaking English “with an accent,” can be used by police as a reason to suspect someone for being an illegal alien (Hernández 2025). Pauline Hanson is more popular than the leading right-wing party in Australia and is calling for a “monocultural Australia” (Busch 2026).
People may be aware of diversity, but it’s very common to focus on biological differences, and to assume also that biological differences link you to a distinct group of people who are all the same, and speak the same language, and come from the same place which is their homeland.
It’s like we are caught in a time warp, not to the 90s era of Pauline Hanson and Donald Trump, but the 1890s of eugenics and anti-immigrant riots. The idea that race, language, and nation were all the same thing, and that people were born with and could not change all the important traits that defined them, was common sense in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in European, American, and Australian societies. That’s what kids learned in schools. These ideas had a huge global reach because people thought this was a scientific fact.
Anthropology as we know it today was founded to respond to this pseudoscientific racism.
Possible discussion activities for tutorial
- Working in small groups, find examples of ethnocentrism in media.
- What assumptions about differences does this example ask someone to make?
- It is common to talk about differences as culture, but even people who describe differences as cultural can make ethnocentric assumptions. How would the authors of the examples you find define culture?
Keywords
pseudoscientific racism, W. E. B. du Bois
Learning outcomes
- Understand the motivation of Boasian cultural anthropology to challenge racism and ethnocentrism
- Be able to identify examples of ethnocentrism as an implicit assumption people make about differences in behavior and ways of life