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There are 100's of definitions of
anthropology. The following definition comes from the American Anthropological Association:
Study of Human Kind
The word anthropology itself tells the basic story--from
the Greek anthropos ("human") and logia
("study")--it is the study of humankind, from its beginnings millions of years
ago to the present day.
Nothing human is alien to anthropology. Indeed, of the
many disciplines that study our species, Homo sapiens, only anthropology seeks to
understand the whole panorama--in geographic space and evolutionary time--of human
existence.
Though easy to define, anthropology is difficult to
describe. Its subject matter is both exotic (e.g., star lore of the Australian aborigines)
and commonplace (anatomy of the foot). And its focus is both sweeping (the evolution of
language) and microscopic (the use-wear of obsidian tools). Anthropologists may study
ancient Mayan hieroglyphics, the music of African Pygmies, and the corporate culture of a
U.S. car manufacturer.
But always, the common goal links these vastly different
projects: to advance knowledge of who we are, how we came to be that way--and where we may
go in the future.
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We [anthropologists] have been the first to
insist on a number of things: that the world does not divide into the pious and the
superstitious; that there are sculptures in jungles and paintings in deserts; that
political order is possible without centralized power and principled justice without
codified rules; that the norms of reason were not fixed in Greece, the evolution of
morality not consummated in England. Most important, we were the first to insist that we
see the lives of others through lenses of our own grinding and that they look back on ours
through ones of their own.
Clifford Geertz, Well-Known Anthropologist
What Gertz is describing is the Comparative Method
or Cultural Relativism that is common methodology among anthropologists. The Comparative
Method is used by anthropologists to relate their research findings to a larger human
context outside of their geographical and cultural focus.
"As a discipline, anthropology begins with a simple
yet powerful idea: any detail of our behavior can be understood better when it is seen
against the backdrop of the full range of human behavior. This, the comparative method,
attempts to explain similarities and differences among people holistically, in the context
of humanity as a whole.
Any detail of our behavior can best be understood when it
is seen in the context provided by the full range of human behavior.
Anthropology seeks to uncover principles of behavior that
apply to all human communities. To an anthropologist, diversity itself--seen in body
shapes and sizes, customs, clothing, speech, religion, and worldview--provides a frame of
reference for understanding any single aspect of life in any given community.
To illustrate, imagine having our entire lives in a world
of red. Our food, our clothing, our car--even the street we live on--everything around us
a different shade of red. And yet ironically, in a scarlet world, isn't it true that we
will have no real grasp of the color red itself, nor even the concept of color, without
being able to compare red with yellow, blue, green, and all the hues of the rainbow?"
- taken from the American Anthropological
Association web site.
In terms of research, anthropologists seek to answer
questions relating to theoretical underpinnings such as evolution, cultural ecology, and
kinship. Anthropologists use a variety of methods depending on the problem they are
seeking to describe and the sub-field where they are trained in. For instance, cultural
anthropologists use participant or direct observations, field notes, and in-depth
interviewing to collect data. Archaeologists use various methods, including lithics,
ceramics, dendrontology, and others to understand the past of human populations.
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As a field, anthropology brings an explicit, evolutionary approach to the study of human behavior. Each of anthropology's four main subfields--sociocultural, biological, archaeology,
and linguistic anthropology--acknowledges that Homo has a long evolutionary history that must be studied if one is to know what it means to be a human being.
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American
Anthropological Association web site
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