Anthropology
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Anthropology |
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Anthropology is the
Etymology
The abstract noun
Origin and development of the term
Through the 19th century
In 1647, the Bartholins, early scholars of the University of Copenhagen, defined l'anthropologie as follows:[11]
Anthropology, that is to say the science that treats of man, is divided ordinarily and with reason into Anatomy, which considers the body and the parts, and Psychology, which speaks of the soul.[n 3]
Sporadic use of the term for some of the subject matter occurred subsequently, such as the use by Étienne Serres in 1839 to describe the natural history, or paleontology, of man, based on comparative anatomy, and the creation of a chair in anthropology and ethnography in 1850 at the French National Museum of Natural History by Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau. Various short-lived organizations of anthropologists had already been formed. The Société Ethnologique de Paris, the first to use the term ethnology, was formed in 1839 and focused on methodically studying human races. After the death of its founder, William Frédéric Edwards, in 1842, it gradually declined in activity until it eventually dissolved in 1862.[12]
Meanwhile, the Ethnological Society of New York, currently the American Ethnological Society, was founded on its model in 1842, as well as the Ethnological Society of London in 1843, a break-away group of the Aborigines' Protection Society.[13] These anthropologists of the times were liberal, anti-slavery, and pro-human-rights activists. They maintained international connections.[citation needed]
Anthropology and many other current fields are the intellectual results of the comparative methods developed in the earlier 19th century. Theorists in diverse fields such as
Darwin and Wallace unveiled evolution in the late 1850s. There was an immediate rush to bring it into the social sciences. Paul Broca in Paris was in the process of breaking away from the Société de biologie to form the first of the explicitly anthropological societies, the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris, meeting for the first time in Paris in 1859.[15][n 4] When he read Darwin, he became an immediate convert to Transformisme, as the French called evolutionism.[16] His definition now became "the study of the human group, considered as a whole, in its details, and in relation to the rest of nature".[17]
Broca, being what today would be called a neurosurgeon, had taken an interest in the pathology of speech. He wanted to localize the difference between man and the other animals, which appeared to reside in speech. He discovered the speech center of the human brain, today called Broca's area after him. His interest was mainly in Biological anthropology, but a German philosopher specializing in psychology, Theodor Waitz, took up the theme of general and social anthropology in his six-volume work, entitled Die Anthropologie der Naturvölker, 1859–1864. The title was soon translated as "The Anthropology of Primitive Peoples". The last two volumes were published posthumously.
Waitz defined anthropology as "the science of the nature of man". Following Broca's lead, Waitz points out that anthropology is a new field, which would gather material from other fields, but would differ from them in the use of comparative anatomy, physiology, and psychology to differentiate man from "the animals nearest to him". He stresses that the data of comparison must be empirical, gathered by experimentation.[18] The history of civilization, as well as ethnology, are to be brought into the comparison. It is to be presumed fundamentally that the species, man, is a unity, and that "the same laws of thought are applicable to all men".[19]
Waitz was influential among British ethnologists. In 1863, the explorer Richard Francis Burton and the speech therapist James Hunt broke away from the Ethnological Society of London to form the Anthropological Society of London, which henceforward would follow the path of the new anthropology rather than just ethnology. It was the 2nd society dedicated to general anthropology in existence. Representatives from the French Société were present, though not Broca. In his keynote address, printed in the first volume of its new publication, The Anthropological Review, Hunt stressed the work of Waitz, adopting his definitions as a standard.[20][n 5] Among the first associates were the young Edward Burnett Tylor, inventor of cultural anthropology, and his brother Alfred Tylor, a geologist. Previously Edward had referred to himself as an ethnologist; subsequently, an anthropologist.
Similar organizations in other countries followed: The Anthropological Society of Madrid (1865), the
During the last three decades of the 19th century, a proliferation of anthropological societies and associations occurred, most independent, most publishing their own journals, and all international in membership and association. The major theorists belonged to these organizations. They supported the gradual osmosis of anthropology curricula into the major institutions of higher learning. By 1898, 48 educational institutions in 13 countries had some curriculum in anthropology. None of the 75 faculty members were under a department named anthropology.[21]
20th and 21st centuries
Anthropology as a specialized field of academic study developed much through the end of the 19th century. Then it rapidly expanded beginning in the early 20th century to the point where many of the world's higher educational institutions typically included anthropology departments. Thousands of anthropology departments have come into existence, and anthropology has also diversified from a few major subdivisions to dozens more. Practical anthropology, the use of anthropological knowledge and technique to solve specific problems, has arrived; for example, the presence of buried victims might stimulate the use of a forensic archaeologist to recreate the final scene. The organization has also reached a global level. For example, the World Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA), "a network of national, regional and international associations that aims to promote worldwide communication and cooperation in anthropology", currently contains members from about three dozen nations.[22]
Since the work of
In Great Britain and the Commonwealth countries, the British tradition of
European countries with overseas colonies tended to practice more ethnology (a term coined and defined by Adam F. Kollár in 1783). It is sometimes referred to as sociocultural anthropology in the parts of the world that were influenced by the European tradition.[28]
Fields
Anthropology is a global discipline involving humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. Anthropology builds upon knowledge from natural sciences, including the discoveries about the origin and evolution of Homo sapiens, human physical traits, human behavior, the variations among different groups of humans, how the evolutionary past of Homo sapiens has influenced its social organization and culture, and from social sciences, including the organization of human social and cultural relations, institutions, social conflicts, etc.[29][30] Early anthropology originated in Classical Greece and Persia and studied and tried to understand observable cultural diversity, such as by Al-Biruni of the Islamic Golden Age.[31][32] As such, anthropology has been central in the development of several new (late 20th century) interdisciplinary fields such as cognitive science,[33] global studies, and various ethnic studies.
According to Clifford Geertz,
...anthropology is perhaps the last of the great nineteenth-century conglomerate disciplines still for the most part organizationally intact. Long after natural history, moral philosophy, philology, and political economy have dissolved into their specialized successors, it has remained a diffuse assemblage of ethnology, human biology, comparative linguistics, and prehistory, held together mainly by the vested interests, sunk costs, and administrative habits of academia, and by a romantic image of comprehensive scholarship.[34]
Sociocultural
Sociocultural anthropology draws together the principal axes of cultural anthropology and social anthropology. Cultural anthropology is the comparative study of the manifold ways in which people make sense of the world around them, while social anthropology is the study of the relationships among individuals and groups.[35] Cultural anthropology is more related to philosophy, literature and the arts (how one's culture affects the experience for self and group, contributing to a more complete understanding of the people's knowledge, customs, and institutions), while social anthropology is more related to sociology and history.[35] In that, it helps develop an understanding of social structures, typically of others and other populations (such as minorities, subgroups, dissidents, etc.). There is no hard-and-fast distinction between them, and these categories overlap to a considerable degree.
Inquiry in sociocultural anthropology is guided in part by
The study of
Comparison across cultures is a key element of method in sociocultural anthropology, including the industrialized (and de-industrialized) West. The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS) includes 186 such cultures.[38]
Biological
Biological anthropology and physical anthropology are synonymous terms to describe anthropological research focused on the study of humans and non-human primates in their biological, evolutionary, and demographic dimensions. It examines the biological and social factors that have affected the evolution of humans and other primates, and that generate, maintain or change contemporary genetic and physiological variation.[39]
Archaeological
Archaeology is the study of the human past through its material remains. Artifacts, faunal remains, and human altered landscapes are evidence of the cultural and material lives of past societies. Archaeologists examine material remains in order to deduce patterns of past human behavior and cultural practices. Ethnoarchaeology is a type of archaeology that studies the practices and material remains of living human groups in order to gain a better understanding of the evidence left behind by past human groups, who are presumed to have lived in similar ways.[40]
Linguistic
Linguistic anthropology (not to be confused with anthropological linguistics) seeks to understand the processes of human communications, verbal and non-verbal, variation in language across time and space, the social uses of language, and the relationship between language and culture.[41] It is the branch of anthropology that brings linguistic methods to bear on anthropological problems, linking the analysis of linguistic forms and processes to the interpretation of sociocultural processes. Linguistic anthropologists often draw on related fields including sociolinguistics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, semiotics, discourse analysis, and narrative analysis.[42]
Ethnography
Ethnography is a method of analysing social or cultural interaction. It often involves participant observation though an ethnographer may also draw from texts written by participants of in social interactions. Ethnography views first-hand experience and social context as important.[43]
Tim Ingold distinguishes ethnography from anthropology arguing that anthropology tries to construct general theories of human experience, applicable in general and novel settings, while ethnography concerns itself with fidelity. He argues that the anthropologist must make his writing consistent with their understanding of literature and other theory but notes that ethnography may be of use to the anthropologists and the fields inform one another.[44]
Key topics by field: sociocultural
Art, media, music, dance and film
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Social and cultural anthropology |
Art
One of the central problems in the anthropology of art concerns the universality of 'art' as a cultural phenomenon. Several anthropologists have noted that the Western categories of 'painting', 'sculpture', or 'literature', conceived as independent artistic activities, do not exist, or exist in a significantly different form, in most non-Western contexts.[45] To surmount this difficulty, anthropologists of art have focused on formal features in objects which, without exclusively being 'artistic', have certain evident 'aesthetic' qualities. Boas' Primitive Art, Claude Lévi-Strauss' The Way of the Masks (1982) or Geertz's 'Art as Cultural System' (1983) are some examples in this trend to transform the anthropology of 'art' into an anthropology of culturally specific 'aesthetics'.[citation needed]
Media
Media anthropology (also known as the anthropology of media or mass media) emphasizes
Music
Ethnomusicology is an academic field encompassing various approaches to the study of music (broadly defined), that emphasize its cultural, social, material, cognitive, biological, and other dimensions or contexts instead of or in addition to its isolated sound component or any particular repertoire.
Ethnomusicology can be used in a wide variety of fields, such as teaching, politics, cultural anthropology etc. While the origins of ethnomusicology date back to the 18th and 19th centuries, it was formally termed "ethnomusicology" by Dutch scholar
Visual
Visual anthropology is concerned, in part, with the study and production of ethnographic photography, film and, since the mid-1990s, new media. While the term is sometimes used interchangeably with ethnographic film, visual anthropology also encompasses the anthropological study of visual representation, including areas such as performance, museums, art, and the production and reception of mass media. Visual representations from all cultures, such as sandpaintings, tattoos, sculptures and reliefs, cave paintings, scrimshaw, jewelry, hieroglyphs, paintings, and photographs are included in the focus of visual anthropology.[48]
Economic, political economic, applied and development
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Economic
Economic anthropology attempts to explain human economic behavior in its widest historic, geographic and cultural scope. It has a complex relationship with the discipline of economics, of which it is highly critical. Its origins as a sub-field of anthropology begin with the Polish-British founder of anthropology, Bronisław Malinowski, and his French compatriot, Marcel Mauss, on the nature of gift-giving exchange (or reciprocity) as an alternative to market exchange. Economic Anthropology remains, for the most part, focused upon exchange. The school of thought derived from Marx and known as Political Economy focuses on production, in contrast.[49] Economic anthropologists have abandoned the primitivist niche they were relegated to by economists, and have now turned to examine corporations, banks, and the global financial system from an anthropological perspective.[50]
Political economy
Political economy in anthropology is the application of the theories and methods of historical materialism to the traditional concerns of anthropology, including, but not limited to, non-capitalist societies. Political economy introduced questions of history and colonialism to ahistorical anthropological theories of social structure and culture. Three main areas of interest rapidly developed. The first of these areas was concerned with the "pre-capitalist" societies that were subject to evolutionary "tribal" stereotypes. Sahlin's work on hunter-gatherers as the "original affluent society" did much to dissipate that image. The second area was concerned with the vast majority of the world's population at the time, the peasantry, many of whom were involved in complex revolutionary wars such as in Vietnam. The third area was on colonialism, imperialism, and the creation of the capitalist world-system.[51] More recently, these political economists have more directly addressed issues of industrial (and post-industrial) capitalism around the world.
Applied
Applied anthropology refers to the application of the method and theory of anthropology to the analysis and solution of practical problems. It is a "complex of related, research-based, instrumental methods which produce change or stability in specific cultural systems through the provision of data, initiation of direct action, and/or the formulation of policy".[52] Applied anthropology is the practical side of anthropological research; it includes researcher involvement and activism within the participating community. It is closely related to development anthropology (distinct from the more critical anthropology of development).[citation needed]
Development
Anthropology of development tends to view development from a critical perspective. The kind of issues addressed and implications for the approach involve pondering why, if a key development goal is to alleviate poverty, is poverty increasing? Why is there such a gap between plans and outcomes? Why are those working in development so willing to disregard history and the lessons it might offer? Why is development so externally driven rather than having an internal basis? In short, why does so much planned development fail?
Kinship, feminism, gender and sexuality
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Social anthropology Cultural anthropology |
Kinship
Kinship can refer both to the study of the patterns of social relationships in one or more human cultures, or it can refer to the patterns of social relationships themselves. Over its history, anthropology has developed a number of related concepts and terms, such as "
Feminist
Feminist anthropology is a four field approach to anthropology (
Feminist anthropologists have stated that their publications have contributed to anthropology, along the way correcting against the systemic biases beginning with the "patriarchal origins of anthropology (and (academia)" and note that from 1891 to 1930 doctorates in anthropology went to males more than 85%, more than 81% were under 35, and only 7.2% to anyone over 40 years old, thus reflecting an age gap in the pursuit of anthropology by first-wave feminists until later in life.[55] This correction of systemic bias may include mainstream feminist theory, history, linguistics, archaeology, and anthropology. Feminist anthropologists are often concerned with the construction of gender across societies. Gender constructs are of particular interest when studying sexism.[citation needed]
According to
Feminist anthropology is inclusive of the anthropology of birth[58] as a specialization, which is the anthropological study of pregnancy and childbirth within cultures and societies.
Medical, nutritional, psychological, cognitive and transpersonal
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Medical and psychological anthropology |
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Social and cultural anthropology |
Medical
Medical anthropology is an interdisciplinary field which studies "human health and disease, health care systems, and biocultural adaptation".[59] It is believed that William Caudell was the first to discover the field of medical anthropology. Currently, research in medical anthropology is one of the main growth areas in the field of anthropology as a whole. It focuses on the following six basic fields:[60]
- The development of systems of medical knowledge and medical care
- The patient-physician relationship
- The integration of alternative medical systems in culturally diverse environments
- The interaction of social, environmental and biological factors which influence health and illness both in the individual and the community as a whole
- The critical analysis of interaction between psychiatric services and migrant populations ("critical ethnopsychiatry": Beneduce 2004, 2007)
- The impact of biomedicine and biomedical technologies in non-Western settings
Other subjects that have become central to medical anthropology worldwide are violence and social suffering (Farmer, 1999, 2003; Beneduce, 2010) as well as other issues that involve physical and psychological harm and suffering that are not a result of illness. On the other hand, there are fields that intersect with medical anthropology in terms of research methodology and theoretical production, such as cultural psychiatry and transcultural psychiatry or ethnopsychiatry.
Nutritional
Nutritional anthropology is a synthetic concept that deals with the interplay between
Psychological
Psychological anthropology is an interdisciplinary subfield of anthropology that studies the interaction of cultural and mental processes. This subfield tends to focus on ways in which humans' development and enculturation within a particular cultural group – with its own history, language, practices, and conceptual categories – shape processes of human cognition, emotion, perception, motivation, and mental health.[61] It also examines how the understanding of cognition, emotion, motivation, and similar psychological processes inform or constrain our models of cultural and social processes.[62][63]
Cognitive
Cognitive anthropology seeks to explain patterns of shared knowledge, cultural
Transpersonal
Transpersonal anthropology studies the relationship between
Political and legal
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Social and cultural anthropology |
Political
Political anthropology concerns the structure of
Legal
Legal anthropology or anthropology of law specializes in "the cross-cultural study of social ordering".[66] Earlier legal anthropological research often focused more narrowly on conflict management, crime, sanctions, or formal regulation. More recent applications include issues such as human rights, legal pluralism,[67] and political uprisings.
Public
Public anthropology was created by Robert Borofsky, a professor at Hawaii Pacific University, to "demonstrate the ability of anthropology and anthropologists to effectively address problems beyond the discipline – illuminating larger social issues of our times as well as encouraging broad, public conversations about them with the explicit goal of fostering social change".[68]
Nature, science, and technology
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Cyborg
Cyborg anthropology originated as a sub-focus group within the
Digital
Digital anthropology is the study of the relationship between humans and digital-era technology and extends to various areas where anthropology and technology intersect. It is sometimes grouped with sociocultural anthropology, and sometimes considered part of material culture. The field is new, and thus has a variety of names with a variety of emphases. These include techno-anthropology,[70] digital ethnography, cyberanthropology,[71] and virtual anthropology.[72]
Ecological
Ecological anthropology is defined as the "study of
Environment
Social sciences, like anthropology, can provide interdisciplinary approaches to the environment. Professor Kay Milton, Director of the Anthropology research network in the School of History and Anthropology,[78] describes anthropology as distinctive, with its most distinguishing feature being its interest in non-industrial indigenous and traditional societies. Anthropological theory is distinct because of the consistent presence of the concept of culture; not an exclusive topic but a central position in the study and a deep concern with the human condition. Milton describes three trends that are causing a fundamental shift in what characterizes anthropology: dissatisfaction with the cultural relativist perspective, reaction against cartesian dualisms which obstructs progress in theory (nature culture divide), and finally an increased attention to globalization (transcending the barriers or time/space).
Environmental discourse appears to be characterized by a high degree of globalization. (The troubling problem is borrowing non-indigenous practices and creating standards, concepts, philosophies and practices in western countries.) Anthropology and environmental discourse now have become a distinct position in anthropology as a discipline. Knowledge about diversities in human culture can be important in addressing environmental problems - anthropology is now a study of human ecology. Human activity is the most important agent in creating environmental change, a study commonly found in human ecology which can claim a central place in how environmental problems are examined and addressed. Other ways anthropology contributes to environmental discourse is by being theorists and analysts, or by refinement of definitions to become more neutral/universal, etc. In exploring environmentalism - the term typically refers to a concern that the environment should be protected, particularly from the harmful effects of human activities. Environmentalism itself can be expressed in many ways. Anthropologists can open the doors of environmentalism by looking beyond industrial society, understanding the opposition between industrial and non-industrial relationships, knowing what ecosystem people and biosphere people are and are affected by, dependent and independent variables, "primitive" ecological wisdom, diverse environments, resource management, diverse cultural traditions, and knowing that environmentalism is a part of culture.[79]
Historical
Ethnohistory is the study of
Religion
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The anthropology of religion involves the study of religious institutions in relation to other social institutions, and the comparison of religious beliefs and practices across cultures. Modern anthropology assumes that there is complete continuity between magical thinking and religion,[81][n 6] and that every religion is a cultural product, created by the human community that worships it.[82]
Urban
Urban anthropology is concerned with issues of
Key topics by field: archaeological and biological
Anthrozoology
Biocultural
Biocultural anthropology is the
Evolutionary
Evolutionary anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of the
Forensic
Forensic anthropology is the application of the science of
Palaeoanthropology
Paleoanthropology combines the disciplines of
Organizations
Contemporary anthropology is an established science with academic departments at most universities and colleges. The single largest organization of anthropologists is the American Anthropological Association (AAA), which was founded in 1903.[91] Its members are anthropologists from around the globe.[92]
In 1989, a group of European and American scholars in the field of anthropology established the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) which serves as a major professional organization for anthropologists working in Europe. The EASA seeks to advance the status of anthropology in Europe and to increase visibility of marginalized anthropological traditions and thereby contribute to the project of a global anthropology or world anthropology.
Hundreds of other organizations exist in the various sub-fields of anthropology, sometimes divided up by nation or region, and many anthropologists work with collaborators in other disciplines, such as geology, physics, zoology, paleontology, anatomy, music theory, art history, sociology and so on, belonging to professional societies in those disciplines as well.[93][94]
List of major organizations
- American Anthropological Association
- American Ethnological Society
- Asociación de Antropólogos Iberoamericanos en Red, AIBR
- Anthropological Society of London
- Center for World Indigenous Studies
- Ethnological Society of London
- European Association of Social Anthropologists
- Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
- Network of Concerned Anthropologists
- N.N. Miklukho-Maklai Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology
- Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
- Society for Anthropological Sciences
- Society for Applied Anthropology
- USC Center for Visual Anthropology
Ethics
As the field has matured it has debated and arrived at ethical principles aimed at protecting both the subjects of anthropological research as well as the researchers themselves, and professional societies have generated codes of ethics.[95]
Anthropologists, like other researchers (especially historians and scientists engaged in field research), have over time assisted state policies and projects, especially colonialism.[96][97]
Some commentators have contended:
- That the discipline grew out of colonialism, perhaps was in league with it, and derives some of its key notions from it, consciously or not. (See, for example, Gough, Pels and Salemink, but cf. Lewis 2004).[98]
- That ethnographic work is often ahistorical, writing about people as if they were "out of time" in an "ethnographic present" (Johannes Fabian, Time and Its Other).
- In his article "The Misrepresentation of Anthropology and Its Consequence", Herbert S. Lewis critiqued older anthropological works that presented other cultures as if they were strange and unusual. While the findings of those researchers should not be discarded, the field should learn from its mistakes.[99]
Cultural relativism
As part of their quest for
Ethical commitments in anthropology include noticing and documenting
To illustrate the depth of an anthropological approach, one can take just one of these topics, such as "racism" and find thousands of anthropological references, stretching across all the major and minor sub-fields.[104][105][106][107]
Military involvement
Anthropologists' involvement with the U.S. government, in particular, has caused bitter controversy within the discipline. Franz Boas publicly objected to US participation in World War I, and after the war he published a brief exposé and condemnation of the participation of several American archaeologists in espionage in Mexico under their cover as scientists.[108]
But by the 1940s, many of Boas' anthropologist contemporaries were active in the allied war effort against the
Attempts to accuse anthropologists of complicity with the CIA and government intelligence activities during the Vietnam War years have turned up little. Many anthropologists (students and teachers) were active in the antiwar movement. Numerous resolutions condemning the war in all its aspects were passed overwhelmingly at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA).[110]
Professional anthropological bodies often object to the use of anthropology for the benefit of the
Anthropologists, along with other social scientists, are working with the US military as part of the US Army's strategy in Afghanistan. When ethnographic investigation is determined by military missions, not subject to external review, where data collection occurs in the context of war, integrated into the goals of counterinsurgency, and in a potentially coercive environment – all characteristic factors of the HTS concept and its application – it can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology. In summary, while we stress that constructive engagement between anthropology and the military is possible, CEAUSSIC suggests that the AAA emphasize the incompatibility of HTS with disciplinary ethics and practice for job seekers and that it further recognize the problem of allowing HTS to define the meaning of 'anthropology' within DoD.[115]
Post-World War II developments
Before
Basic trends
There are several characteristics that tend to unite anthropological work. One of the central characteristics is that anthropology tends to provide a comparatively more holistic account of phenomena and tends to be highly empirical.[23] The quest for holism leads most anthropologists to study a particular place, problem or phenomenon in detail, using a variety of methods, over a more extensive period than normal in many parts of academia.
In the 1990s and 2000s, calls for clarification of what constitutes a culture, of how an observer knows where his or her own culture ends and another begins, and other crucial topics in writing anthropology were heard. These dynamic relationships, between what can be observed on the ground, as opposed to what can be observed by compiling many local observations remain fundamental in any kind of anthropology, whether cultural, biological, linguistic or archaeological.[116][117]
Biological anthropologists are interested in both human variation[118][119] and in the possibility of human universals (behaviors, ideas or concepts shared by virtually all human cultures).[120][121] They use many different methods of study, but modern population genetics, participant observation and other techniques often take anthropologists "into the field," which means traveling to a community in its own setting, to do something called "fieldwork." On the biological or physical side, human measurements, genetic samples, nutritional data may be gathered and published as articles or monographs.
Along with dividing up their project by theoretical emphasis, anthropologists typically divide the world up into relevant time periods and geographic regions. Human time on Earth is divided up into relevant cultural traditions based on material, such as the
Commonalities between fields
Because anthropology developed from so many different enterprises (see History of anthropology), including but not limited to fossil-hunting, exploring, documentary film-making, paleontology, primatology, antiquity dealings and curatorship, philology, etymology, genetics, regional analysis, ethnology, history, philosophy, and religious studies,[122][123] it is difficult to characterize the entire field in a brief article, although attempts to write histories of the entire field have been made.[124]
Some authors argue that anthropology originated and developed as the study of "other cultures", both in terms of time (past societies) and space (non-European/non-Western societies).[125] For example, the classic of urban anthropology, Ulf Hannerz in the introduction to his seminal Exploring the City: Inquiries Toward an Urban Anthropology mentions that the "Third World" had habitually received most of attention; anthropologists who traditionally specialized in "other cultures" looked for them far away and started to look "across the tracks" only in late 1960s.[83]
Now there exist many works focusing on peoples and topics very close to the author's "home".[126] It is also argued that other fields of study, like History and Sociology, on the contrary focus disproportionately on the West.[127]
In France, the study of Western societies has been traditionally left to
Since the 1980s it has become common for social and cultural anthropologists to set ethnographic research in the North Atlantic region, frequently examining the connections between locations rather than limiting research to a single locale. There has also been a related shift toward broadening the focus beyond the daily life of ordinary people; increasingly, research is set in settings such as scientific laboratories, social movements, governmental and nongovernmental organizations and businesses.[129]
See also
- Anthropological science fiction
- Christian anthropology, a sub-field of theology
- Circumscription theory – Political theory
- Culture – Social behavior and norms of a society
- Dual inheritance theory – Theory of human behavior
- Emic and etic – Two kinds of anthropologic field research
- Engaged theory – Comprehensive critical theory
- Ethnobiology – Study of how living things are used by human cultures
- Human behavioral ecology – Study of human behavior and cultural diversity
- Human ethology – The study of human behavior
- Human Relations Area Files – International nonprofit membership organization
- Intangible cultural heritage – Class of UNESCO designated cultural heritage
- Origins of society – topic within evolutionary biology, anthropology, prehistory and palaeolithic archaeology
- Philosophical anthropology, a sub-field of philosophy
- Prehistoric medicine – Medicine in the time before the invention of writing
- Qualitative research – Form of research
Lists
- Outline of anthropology – Overview of and topical guide to anthropology
- List of indigenous peoples
- List of anthropologists
Notes
- British history, includes the passage "Genealogy or issue which they had, Artes which they studied, Actes which they did. This part of History is named Anthropology."
- John Kersey's 1706 edition of The New World of English Wordsincludes the definition "Anthropology, a Discourse or Description of Man, or of a Man's Body."
- ^ In French: L'Anthropologie, c'est à dire la science qui traite de l'homme, est divisée ordinairment & avec raison en l'Anatomie, qui considere le corps & les parties, et en la Psychologie, qui parle de l'Ame.[11]
- ^ As Fletcher points out, the French society was by no means the first to include anthropology or parts of it as its topic. Previous organizations used other names. The German Anthropological Association of St. Petersburg, however, met first in 1861, but due to the death of its founder never met again.[15]
- ^ Hunt's choice of theorists does not exclude the numerous other theorists that were beginning to publish a large volume of anthropological studies.[20]
- ^ "It seems to be one of the postulates of modern anthropology that there is complete continuity between magic and religion. [note 35: See, for instance, RR Marett, Faith, Hope, and Charity in Primitive Religion, the Gifford Lectures (Macmillan, 1932), Lecture II, pp. 21 ff.] ... We have no empirical evidence at all that there ever was an age of magic that has been followed and superseded by an age of religion."[81]
- ^ Anthrozoology should not be confused with "animal studies", which often refers to animal testing.
References
- ^ a b c "anthropology". Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster. Archived from the original on 22 August 2020. Retrieved 16 September 2020.
- ^ a b c "anthropology". Encyclopædia Britannica. Archived from the original on 15 April 2015. Retrieved 23 March 2015.
- ^ a b c "What is Anthropology?". American Anthropological Association. Archived from the original on 16 February 2016. Retrieved 10 August 2013.
- ^ "Sociocultural Anthropology and Ethnography | Department of Anthropology". Retrieved 25 September 2021.
- ^ "Archaeological Anthropology". UAPress. 12 July 2017. Retrieved 25 September 2021.
- ^ "Archaeological Anthropology". Archived from the original on 9 October 2022. Retrieved 25 September 2021.[dead link]
- ^ "Paleoanthropology". Britannica. Archived from the original on 26 September 2023.
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Works cited
- Hunt, James (1863). "Introductory Address on the Study of Anthropology". The Anthropological Review. I.
- Schiller, Francis (1979). Paul Broca, Founder of French Anthropology, Explorer of the Brain. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Waitz, Theodor (1863). Introduction to Anthropology. Translated by J. Frederick Collingwood for the Anthropological Society of London. London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts.
Further reading
Dictionaries and encyclopedias
- Barnard, Alan; Spencer, Jonathan, eds. (2010). The Routledge Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology. London: Routledge.
- Barfield, Thomas (1997). The Dictionary of Anthropology. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing.
- Jackson, John L. (2013). Oxford Bibliographies: Anthropology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Levinson, David; Ember, Melvin, eds. (1996). Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology. Vol. 1–4. New York: Henry Holt.
- Rapport, Nigel; Overing, Joanna (2007). Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Concepts. New York: Routledge.
Fieldnotes and memoirs
- Barley, Nigel (1983). The innocent anthropologist: notes from a mud hut. London: British Museum Publications.
- Geertz, Clifford (1995). After the fact: two countries, four decades, one anthropologist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1967). Tristes tropiques. Translated from the French by John Russell. New York: Atheneum.
- Malinowski, Bronisław (1967). A diary in the strict sense of the term. Translated by Norbert Guterman. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
- Mead, Margaret (1972). Blackberry winter: my earlier years. New York: William Marrow.
- —— (1977). Letters from the field, 1925–1975. New York: Harper & Row.
- Rabinow, Paul (1977). Reflections on fieldwork in Morocco. Quantum Books. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Histories
- Asad, Talal, ed. (1973). Anthropology & the Colonial Encounter. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities k.
- Barth, Fredrik; Gingrich, Andre; Parkin, Robert (2005). One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French, and American anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Darnell, Regna. (2001). Invisible Genealogies: A History of Americanist Anthropology. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
- Gisi, Lucas Marco (2007). Einbildungskraft und Mythologie. Die Verschränkung von Anthropologie und Geschichte im 18. Jahrhundert. Berlin; New York: de Gruyter.
- Harris, Marvin. (2001) [1968]. The rise of anthropological theory: a history of theories of culture. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
- Kehoe, Alice B. (1998). The Land of Prehistory: A Critical History of American Archaeology. New York; London: Routledge.
- Lewis, H.S. (1998). "The Misrepresentation of Anthropology and Its Consequences". American Anthropologist. 100 (3): 716–731. from the original on 5 March 2021. Retrieved 10 November 2016.
- —— (2004). "Imagining Anthropology's History". Reviews in Anthropology. 33 (3): 243–261. S2CID 162956412.
- —— (2005). "Anthropology, the Cold War, and Intellectual History". In Darnell, R.; Gleach, F.W. (eds.). Histories of Anthropology Annual, Vol. I.
- Pels, Peter; Salemink, Oscar, eds. (2000). Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
- Price, David (2004). Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists. Durham: Duke University Press..
- Sera-Shriar, Efram (2013). The Making of British Anthropology, 1813–1871. Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, 18. London; Vermont: Pickering and Chatto.
- Stocking, George Jr. (1968). Race, Culture and Evolution. New York: Free Press.
- Trencher, Susan (2000). Mirrored Images: American Anthropology and American Culture, 1960–1980. Westport, Conn.: Bergin & Garvey.
- Wolf, Eric (1982). Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley; Los Angeles: California University Press.
Textbooks and key theoretical works
- Clifford, James; Marcus, George E. (1986). Writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Geertz, Clifford (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
- Harris, Marvin (1997). Culture, People, Nature: An Introduction to General Anthropology (7th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
- Salzmann, Zdeněk (1993). Language, culture, and society: an introduction to linguistic anthropology. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
- Shweder, Richard A.; LeVine, Robert A., eds. (1984). Culture Theory: essays on mind, self, and emotion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
External links
- Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology.
- Haller, Dieter. "Interviews with German Anthropologists: Video Portal for the History of German Anthropology post 1945". Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Retrieved 22 March 2015.
Organisations
- "AAANet Home". American Anthropological Association. 2010.
- "Home". European Association of Social Anthropologists. 2015.
- Hagen, Ed (2015). "AAPA". American Association of Physical Anthropologists.
- "Home". Australian Anthropological Society. Retrieved 23 March 2015.
- "AIBR, Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana" (in Spanish). Antropólogos Iberoamericanos en Red. Retrieved 24 March 2015.
- "Home". Human Relations Area Files. Retrieved 24 March 2015.
- "Home". National Association for the Practice of Anthropology. Retrieved 24 March 2015.
- "About". Radical Anthropology Group. Retrieved 24 March 2015.
- "Home". Royal Anthropological Institute. Retrieved 24 March 2015.
- "Home". The Society for Applied Anthropology. Retrieved 24 March 2015.
- "Anthropology". American Museum of Natural History. Retrieved 25 March 2015.
- "Department of Anthropology". Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Retrieved 25 March 2015.
- "Anthropological Index Online". Royal Anthropological Institute. (AIO)