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American anthropology has culture as its central and unifying concept. This most commonly refers to the universal human capacity to classify and encode human experiences symbolically, and to communicate symbolically encoded experiences socially. American anthropology is organized into four fields, each of which plays an important role in ...
Evidence for copper smelting in North America is disputed. Andean civilizations had bronze smelting, discovered by the Moche culture and used by the Calchaquí and Inca; Metallurgy in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica appeared after 600 CE, including alloys of copper; later, bronze techniques were probably imported from South America
The approach is conventionally understood as having been developed by Franz Boas, who developed the discipline of anthropology in the United States. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] A 2013 re-assessment of the evidence has indicated that the idea of four-field anthropology has a more complex 19th-century history in Europe and North America. [ 3 ]
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.
Marvin Harris, a historian of anthropology, begins The Rise of Anthropological Theory with the statement that anthropology is "the science of history". [10] He is not suggesting that history be renamed to anthropology, or that there is no distinction between history and prehistory, or that anthropology excludes current social practices, as the general meaning of history, which it has in ...
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]
In North America, anthropology is traditionally divided into four major subdisciplines: biological anthropology, sociocultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology and archaeology. [ 6 ] [ 7 ] Other academic traditions use less broad definitions, where one or more of these fields are considered separate, but related, disciplines.
By the late 1960s, political anthropology was a flourishing subfield: in 1969 there were two hundred anthropologists listing the subdiscipline as one of their areas of interests, and a quarter of all British anthropologists listed politics as a topic that they studied. [7] Political anthropology developed in a very different way in the United ...