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Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including archaic humans. [1]
Evolutionary anthropology – interdisciplinary study of the evolution of human physiology and human behavior, and of the relation between hominids and non-hominid primates. Forensic anthropology – application of the anatomical science of anthropology and its various subfields, including forensic archaeology and forensic taphonomy, in a legal ...
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]
Whereas the Boasians were interested in the history of specific traits, White was interested in the cultural history of the human species, which he felt should be studied from an evolutionary perspective. Thus, the task of anthropology is to study "not only how culture evolves, but why as well....
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 ...
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 ]
The anthropology of religion, as a field, overlaps with but is distinct from the field of Religious Studies. The history of anthropology of religion is a history of striving to understand how other people view and navigate the world. This history involves deciding what religion is, what it does, and how it functions. [2]
Folklore studies (also known as folkloristics, tradition studies or folk life studies in the UK) [1] is the branch of anthropology devoted to the study of folklore. This term, along with its synonyms, [note 1] gained currency in the 1950s to distinguish the academic study of traditional culture from the folklore artifacts themselves.