Crthuky

In the very near future, humans (somehow) travel an distant planet - and discover aliens who turn out to be uncannily like us. Their appearance is, to put it bluntly, freakish, but they are humanoid bipeds, and their life cycles, family structures, and basic needs are all reminiscent of human biology, albeit with the occasional surprising quirk. Their civilizations appear - at least at first glance - to have technologies and religious and political institutions analogous to bronze and late stone age cultures from the ancient Near East. It is not immediately obvious at first contact whether the differences run deep or are best said to be merely contingent.

Naturally, the very first thing the humans conclude is that these strange creatures are a veritable goldmine for the social sciences, and so they drop in teams of socio-cultural anthropologists (and perhaps also a scattering of psychologists, sociologists, economists, etc,) to do field research. The aliens prove very accommodating to all this ... at least for now.

Given current academic practices, how do these anthropologists first go about it? Most especially, what are the major questions to ask, and models to test? What is the likely order of priorities, and what (aside from the blunt fact of meeting aliens, anxiety over whether contact is even desirable, and excitement no longer having only one species to study) is most likely to generate controversy or excitement?

Actually, I wouldn't be 'dropping in' a team of xenoanthropologists; the first step in their scientific process would be 'observation', and preferably in an environment that precludes interaction (and therefore potential contamination of the culture).

Your anthropologists, and the rest of your scientists bar a special field team which I'll get to later, should be in orbit with absolutely no contact with this race. You use drones and stealthed sensors to pick up all the information you need, and then its shared with a team up top. That team will include linguists, psychologists, economists, anthropologists, etc., all of which contribute theory in their discipline to a more complete picture of how this race lives today.

Unfortunately, these teams won't have access to the one dimension of data that we take for granted here on Earth; time. In other words, they'll see current practice, but won't know how it formed or what aspects of their culture are new, what parts come from ancient sources or practices, etc.

A really simple example of this is that many of us who are in our 50s now were raised with parents who strictly told us to 'eat everything on our plate' at mealtimes. None of us knew why at the time, but our parents were almost pathological about it. That's because they were raised by parents who had grown up during the depression, and their parents had told them to eat everything on their plate knowing it might be the last meal they get for a while. They learnt the habit because of the emotional intensity of their parents, and passed it on with some intensity, which is only now starting to die away as a parenting practice in some quarters.

So, when your anthropologists see children being chastised for what looks like a minor transgression, is that because of something in the environment now, or something that happened historically?

Enter the one field team you need; archaeologists. Your drones and satellites need to be capable of deep scans, and they need to find remote, preferably uninhabited areas where there are remains in the ground of cities, burial sites etc. that can be excavated and studied. This field work should be done without interaction with the locals, and fills that missing dimension of historical perspective for your anthropologists.

The practical upshot of all this is that the way your anthropologists would begin their studies is observation; either from an orbital platform with remote feeds, or from inside some form of duck blind, but the ONE thing they wouldn't do is interact with the culture. That would effectively contaminate the site and make many of their subsequent observations invalid.