Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
History of anthropology in this article refers primarily to the 18th- and 19th-century precursors of modern anthropology. The term anthropology itself, innovated as a Neo-Latin scientific word during the Renaissance, has always meant "the study (or science) of man". The topics to be included and the terminology have varied historically.
One of the central characteristics is that anthropology tends to provide a comparatively more holistic account of phenomena and tends to be highly empirical. [17] 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 ...
He saw the average body as an ideal beauty and something to be desired and his work was influential on Francis Galton who coined the term eugenics. [ 5 ] [ 6 ] [ 7 ] Quetelet's student Pierre François Verhulst developed the logistic function in the 1830s as a model of population growth ; see Logistic function § History for details.
The term can be used interchangeably with humanocentrism, and some refer to the concept as human supremacy or human exceptionalism. From an anthropocentric perspective, humankind is seen as separate from nature and superior to it, and other entities ( animals , plants , minerals , etc.) are viewed as resources for humans to use.
The word "race", interpreted to mean an identifiable group of people who share a common descent, was introduced into English in the 16th century from the Old French rasse (1512), from Italian razza: the Oxford English Dictionary cites the earliest example around the mid-16th century and defines its early meaning as a "group of people belonging to the same family and descended from a common ...
The Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus was a prolific ethnographer in antiquity. The term ethnography is from Greek (ἔθνος éthnos "folk, people, nation" and γράφω gráphō "I write") and encompasses the ways in which ancient authors described and analyzed foreign cultures.
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of a posited anthropological constant. The term sociocultural anthropology includes both cultural and social anthropology traditions. [1]
Cultural ecology as developed by Steward is a major subdiscipline of anthropology. It derives from the work of Franz Boas and has branched out to cover a number of aspects of human society, in particular the distribution of wealth and power in a society, and how that affects such behaviour as hoarding or gifting (e.g. the tradition of the potlatch on the Northwest North American coast).