Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity that crosses biology and sociology, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including archaic humans. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavior, while cultural anthropology studies cultural meaning, including norms and values. The term sociocultural anthropology is commonly used today. Linguistic anthropology studies how language influences social life. Biological (or physical) anthropology studies the biology and evolution of humans and their close primate relatives.
Archaeology, often referred to as the "anthropology of the past," explores human activity by examining physical remains. In North America and Asia, it is generally regarded as a branch of anthropology. In contrast, in Europe, it is considered either an independent discipline or a subfield of related disciplines such as history and paleontology.
Etymology The abstract noun anthropology is first attested in reference to history.Oxford English Dictionary, 1st ed. "anthropology, n." Oxford University Press (Oxford), 1885. Its present use first appeared in Renaissance Germany in the works of Magnus Hundt and Otto Casmann. Their Neo-Latin derived from the combining forms of the Greek words ánthrōpos (, "human") and lógos (, "study"). Its adjectival form appeared in the works of Aristotle. It began to be used in English, possibly via French , by the early 18th century.
Origin and development of the term
Through the 19th century
In 1647, the Bartholins, early scholars of the University of Copenhagen, defined as follows:
Sporadic use of the term for some of the subject matter occurred subsequently, including its 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 founded in 1839 and focused on the methodical study of human races. After the death of its founder, William Frédéric Edwards, in 1842, it gradually declined in activity until it eventually dissolved in 1862.
Meanwhile, the Ethnological Society of New York, now 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.
Anthropology and many other current fields are the intellectual results of the comparative methods developed in the early 19th century. Theorists in diverse fields such as anatomy, linguistics, and ethnology started making feature-by-feature comparisons of their subject matters and were beginning to suspect that similarities between animals, languages, and folkways were the result of processes or laws unknown to them then. For them, the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was the epiphany of everything they had begun to suspect. Darwin himself arrived at his conclusions through comparison of species he had seen in agronomy and in the wild.
Darwin and Wallace unveiled the theory of 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. When he read Darwin, he became an immediate convert to Transformisme, as the French called evolutionism. 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".
Broca discovered the speech center of the human brain, today called Broca's area. His interest was mainly in biological anthropology. Still, 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 that would gather material from other fields but would differ from them in its 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. The history of civilization, as well as ethnology, is 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".
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. 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. 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 American Anthropological Association (1902), the Anthropological Society of Vienna (1870), the Italian Society of Anthropology and Ethnology (1871), and many others. The majority of these were evolutionists. One notable exception was the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory (1869), founded by Rudolph Virchow, known for his vituperative attacks on the evolutionists. Not religious himself, he insisted that Darwin's conclusions lacked empirical foundation.
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 offered some anthropology courses. None of the 75 faculty members were under a department named anthropology.
Some consider anthropology to have become a tool for colonizers, who study their subjects to gain a better understanding and control.
20th and 21st centuries Anthropology, as a specialized field of academic study, developed significantly by the end of the 19th century.
Beginning in the early 20th century, the field saw rapid expansion, to the point where many of the world's higher education institutions typically included anthropology departments. Thousands of anthropology departments have come into existence, and the field has diversified from a few major subdivisions to dozens more. Practical anthropology, the use of anthropological knowledge and techniques to solve specific problems, has arrived; for example, the presence of buried victims might prompt the use of a forensic archaeologist to reconstruct the final scene. The field has seen rapid growth on a global scale as well; the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences contains members from over 50 countries.
Since the work of Franz Boas and Bronisław Malinowski in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, social anthropology in Great Britain and cultural anthropology in the US have been distinguished from other social sciences by their emphasis on cross-cultural comparisons, long-term in-depth examination of context, and the importance they place on participant-observation or experiential immersion in the area of research. Cultural anthropology, in particular, has emphasized cultural relativism, holism, and the use of findings to frame cultural critiques.Hylland Eriksen, Thomas. (2004) "What is Anthropology?" Pluto. London. p. 79. . This has been particularly prominent in the United States, from Boas' arguments against 19th-century racial ideology, through Margaret Mead's advocacy for gender equality and sexual liberation, to current criticisms of post-colonial oppression and promotion of multiculturalism. Ethnography is one of its primary research designs as well as the text that is generated from anthropological fieldwork.On varieties of cultural relativism in anthropology, see Spiro, Melford E. (1987) "Some Reflections on Cultural Determinism and Relativism with Special Reference to Emotion and Reason," in Culture and Human Nature: Theoretical Papers of Melford E. Spiro. Edited by B. Kilborne and L.L. Langness, pp. 32–58. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
In Great Britain and the Commonwealth countries, the British tradition of social anthropology tends to dominate. In the United States, anthropology has traditionally been divided into the four field approach developed by Franz Boas in the early 20th century: biological or physical anthropology; social, cultural, or sociocultural anthropology; archaeological anthropology; and linguistic anthropology. These fields frequently overlap but tend to use different methodologies and techniques.
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 parts of the world influenced by the European tradition.Layton, Robert (1998) An Introduction to Theory in Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fields
Anthropology is a global discipline involving the 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.What is Anthropology – American Anthropological Association . Aaanet.org. Retrieved on 2 November 2016.What is Anthropology . Living Anthropologically. Retrieved on 2017-17-01. Early anthropology originated in Classical Greece and Persia and studied and tried to understand observable cultural diversity. As such, anthropology has been central in the development of several new (late 20th century) interdisciplinary fields such as cognitive science, global studies, and various ethnic studies.
According to Clifford Geertz,
Sociocultural anthropology has been heavily influenced by structuralist and postmodern theories, as well as a shift toward the analysis of modern societies. During the 1970s and 1990s, there was an epistemological shift away from the positivist traditions that had largely informed the discipline. During this shift, enduring questions about the nature and production of knowledge came to occupy a central place in cultural and social anthropology. In contrast, archaeology and biological anthropology remained largely positivist. Sociocultural