Anthropology
Anthropology is the holistic, comparative study of humanity — human biology, evolution, language, and culture across all societies and throughout time.
Scope
The discipline classically comprises four fields: cultural (or social) anthropology, biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology. Its signature method is ethnographic fieldwork through participant observation, complemented by cross-cultural comparison.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- What is culture, and how does it shape human life?
- How are human societies similar and different across time and place?
- How did humans evolve biologically and culturally?
- How do kinship, exchange, religion, and power organize societies?
- How can one society understand another without distortion?
Key concepts
- Culture
- Cultural relativism
- Ethnography and participant observation
- Kinship
- Reciprocity and exchange
- Structure and function
- Ethnocentrism
- Thick description
Key theories
- Evolutionism and the culture concept
- Tylor gave anthropology its founding definition of culture and an early (unilineal) evolutionary scheme later heavily revised.
- Historical particularism and cultural relativism
- Boas rejected racial determinism and unilineal evolution, insisting cultures be understood in their own historical terms.
- Functionalism and fieldwork
- Malinowski established intensive participant-observation fieldwork and explained institutions by the needs they serve; Radcliffe-Brown developed structural-functionalism.
- Structuralism
- Lévi-Strauss analysed kinship, myth, and classification as expressions of universal structures of the human mind.
- Interpretive anthropology
- Geertz reframed culture as systems of meaning to be read through 'thick description', shifting the field toward interpretation.
History
Anthropology emerged in the nineteenth century with evolutionist theorists (Tylor, Morgan). Boas in the US and Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown in Britain established professional, fieldwork-based anthropology in the early twentieth century, displacing armchair evolutionism. Structuralism (Lévi-Strauss), then interpretive and, from the 1980s, reflexive and critical approaches reshaped the discipline, which today spans four interlinked subfields.
Debates
- Universalism versus relativism
- Anthropologists debate how far human cultures share universal features versus how far each must be understood on its own terms.
- Science versus interpretation
- A tension runs between anthropology as a generalizing science and as an interpretive, humanistic enterprise.
Key figures
- Edward B. Tylor
- Franz Boas
- Bronisław Malinowski
- Margaret Mead
- Claude Lévi-Strauss
- A. R. Radcliffe-Brown
- Clifford Geertz
Related topics
Seminal works
- tylor-1871
- boas-1911
- malinowski-1922
- levi-strauss-1949
- geertz-1973
Frequently asked questions
- What are the four fields of anthropology?
- Cultural anthropology, biological (physical) anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology.
- How does anthropology differ from sociology?
- Anthropology emphasizes cross-cultural, ethnographic study of all human societies (historically non-Western and small-scale); sociology has focused on modern industrial societies, often with quantitative methods.