Anthropology can be an alleviator of anxiety

Until recently, anthropology wasn't something that the general population knew much about. It's only really in the last few years that it has become quite well-known and popular, and people have gone to study it in some numbers at universities.

I've been an anthropologist for some 40 or 50 years, and what I tell my students is that anthropology is the study of the other. It's a study of other civilizations, other communities and other societies, based on comparisons.

It's comparative and holistic — you study everything about the place you're interested in, not just the economy or the political system, but all the different parts of it integrated together. It's based on getting to know the society in depth, either through living there for a considerable period and learning the language, or through deep friendships and contacts with people there.

You get inside the worldview and the mentality and morality of another civilization and compare it to your own. That's why anthropology is useful in the age of artificial intelligence.

At the moment we're very worried about how AI will eliminate people's jobs. Now, if you look at anthropology, it immediately shows you that human beings are not obsessively hardworking creatures.

Historically — for roughly 95 percent of human history, until farming emerged about 10,000 years ago and the first civilizations arose several thousand years later — we lived as hunters and gatherers and lived a leisurely life. On average, it is reckoned that they spent about 15 to 20 hours a week hunting and gathering — and no more. A couple of days would provide all that you needed to live on. And the other five days you would fill with leisure. You would spend time with your children, talk or wander around. That's the kind of human beings we can be.

So, we could go back to a world where everyone did a couple of days of interesting work each week, if they wanted — work that was neither boring nor stressful. Two days of work would be allocated by a fair system in which meaningful work — now the scarce resource — is distributed fairly. And you would have the rest of the time for meaningful creative pursuits, painting, friendship, other arts, crafts, games, sports, writing, whatever you like.

Anthropology shows that this is possible. In many respects, what it does is take you beyond our present dilemmas and worries of this particular year or two, to the whole of human history and the whole world. And you can see the solutions to all sorts of problems, including problems analogous to those created by AI, and apply them.

It's a kind of withdrawing up a mountain and then looking down at the particular problems. As a familiar maxim has it, problems are never solved at the level at which they are set. So you have to go up and out and beyond our present problems. And anthropology, by taking you to all parts of the world and all different solutions and all of history, does that.

So I think it can be calming. I certainly find it calming when I'm faced with some particular crisis. I think, "Oh, well, this has happened many times before". So my goal in my social media work is to give some comfort and calmness amid the turbulence faced by young people, who are under pressure from illness, AI and a general uncertainty about the future. All these I try to address in answering questions from China and elsewhere.

And the ability not to talk down to them, not to think of children as inferior or less intelligent also matters. They may know less, but they're just as bright and intelligent as adults. And this assumption that children are our equals across any generational gap is one of the things that have attracted younger people on platforms such as Xiaohongshu (Red-Note).

I'm privileged to wish the readers of this newspaper and my many friends in China a happy and successful life, free from too much anxiety.

The author is emeritus professor of anthropological science at the University of Cambridge and a life fellow of King's College, Cambridge. He is also a content creator on social media platforms including RedNote, Douyin and Bilibili.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

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