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anthropology
Encyclopdia Britannica Article
Introduction
the science of humanity, which studies human beings in aspects ranging
from the biology and evolutionary history of Homo sapiens to the features
of society and culture that decisively distinguish humans from other animal
species. Because of the diverse subject matter it encompasses,
anthropology has become, especially since the middle of the 20th century,
a collection of more specialized fields. Physical anthropology is the branch
that concentrates on the biology and evolution of humanity. It is discussed
in greater detail in the article human evolution. The branches that study
the social and cultural constructions of human groups are variously
recognized as belonging to cultural anthropology (or ethnology), social
anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and psychological anthropology (see
below). Archaeology (see below), as the method of investigation of
prehistoric cultures, has been an integral part of anthropology since it
became a self-conscious discipline in the latter half of the 19th century.
(For a longer treatment of the history of archaeology, see archaeology.)
Overview
Throughout its existence as an academic discipline, anthropology has been
located at the intersection of natural science and humanities. The
biological evolution of Homo sapiens and the evolution of the capacity for
culture that distinguishes humans from all other species are
indistinguishable from one another. While the evolution of the human
species is a biological development like the processes that gave rise to the
other species, the historical appearance of the capacity for culture
initiates a qualitative departure from other forms of adaptation, based on
an extraordinarily variable creativity not directly linked to survival and
ecological adaptation. The historical patterns and processes associated
with culture as a medium for growth and change, and the diversification
and convergence of cultures through history, are thus major foci of
anthropological research.
In the middle of the 20th century, the distinct fields of research that
separated anthropologists into specialties were (1) physical anthropology,
emphasizing the biological process and endowment that distinguishes
Homo sapiens from other species, (2) archaeology, based on the physical
remnants of past cultures and former conditions of contemporary cultures,
usually found buried in the earth, (3) linguistic anthropology, emphasizing
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the unique human capacity to communicate through articulate speech and

the diverse languages of humankind, and (4) social and/or cultural
anthropology, emphasizing the cultural systems that distinguish human
societies from one another and the patterns of social organization
associated with these systems. By the middle of the 20th century, many
American universities also included (5) psychological anthropology,
emphasizing the relationships among culture, social structure, and the
human being as a person.
The concept of culture as the entire way of life or system of meaning for a
human community was a specialized idea shared mainly by anthropologists
until the latter half of the 20th century. However, it had become a
commonplace by the beginning of the 21st century. The study of
anthropology as an academic subject had expanded steadily through those
50 years, and the number of professional anthropologists had increased
with it. The range and specificity of anthropological research and the
involvement of anthropologists in work outside of academic life have also
grown, leading to the existence of many specialized fields within the
discipline. Theoretical diversity has been a feature of anthropology since it
began and, although the conception of the discipline as the science of
humanity has persisted, some anthropologists now question whether it is
possible to bridge the gap between the natural sciences and the
humanities. Others argue that new integrative approaches to the
complexities of human being and becoming will emerge from new subfields
dealing with such subjects as health and illness, ecology and environment,
and other areas of human life that do not yield easily to the distinction
between nature and culture or body and mind.
Anthropology in 1950 wasfor historical and economic reasonsinstituted
as a discipline mainly found in western Europe and North America. Field
research was established as the hallmark of all the branches of
anthropology. While some anthropologists studied the folk traditions in
Europe and America, most were concerned with documenting how people
lived in nonindustrial settings outside these areas. These finely detailed
studies of everyday life of people in a broad range of social, cultural,
historical, and material circumstances were among the major
accomplishments of anthropologists in the second half of the 20th century.
Beginning in the 1930s, and especially in the post-World War II period,

anthropology was established in a number of countries outside western
Europe and North America. Very influential work in anthropology
originated in Japan, India, China, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, South Africa,
Nigeria, and several other Asian, Latin American, and African countries.
The world scope of anthropology, together with the dramatic expansion of
social and cultural phenomena that transcend national and cultural
boundaries, has led to a shift in anthropological work in North America and
Europe. Research by Western anthropologists is increasingly focused on
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their own societies, and there have been some studies of Western societies
by non-Western anthropologists. By the end of the 20th century,
anthropology was beginning to be transformed from a Westernand, some
have said, colonialscholarly enterprise into one in which Western
perspectives are regularly challenged by non-Western ones.
Ralph W. Nicholas
History of anthropology
The modern discourse of anthropology crystallized in the 1860s, fired by
advances in biology, philology, and prehistoric archaeology. In The Origin
of Species (1859), Charles Darwin affirmed that all forms of life share a
common ancestry. Fossils began to be reliably associated with particular
geologic strata, and fossils of recent human ancestors were discovered,
most famously the first Neanderthal specimen, unearthed in 1856. In 1871
Darwin published The Descent of Man, which argued that human beings
shared a recent common ancestor with the great African apes. He
identified the defining characteristic of the human species as their
relatively large brain size and deduced that the evolutionary advantage of
the human species was intelligence, which yielded language and
technology.
The pioneering anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor concluded that as
intelligence increased, so civilization advanced. All past and present
societies could be arranged in an evolutionary sequence. Archaeological
findings were organized in a single universal series (Stone Age, Iron Age,
Bronze Age, etc.) thought to correspond to stages of economic
organization from hunting and gathering to pastoralism, agriculture, and
industry. Some contemporary peoples (hunter-gatherers, such as the
Australian Aboriginals and the Kalahari San, or pastoralists such as the
Bedouin) were regarded as primitive, laggards in evolutionary terms,
representing stages of evolution through which all other societies had
passed. They bore witness to early stages of human development, while
the industrial societies of northern Europe and the United States
represented the pinnacle of human achievement.
Darwin's arguments were drawn upon to underwrite the universal history of

the Enlightenment, according to which the progress of human institutions
was inevitable, guaranteed by the development of rationality. It was
assumed that technological progress was constant and that it was matched
by developments in the understanding of the world and in social forms.
Tylor advanced the view that all religions had a common origin, in the
belief in spirits. The original religious rite was sacrifice, which was a way
of feeding these spirits. Modern religions retained some of these primitive
features, but as human beings became more intelligent, and so more
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rational, primitive superstitions were gradually refined and would

eventually be abandoned. James George Frazer posited a progressive and
universal progress from faith in magic through to belief in religion and,
finally, to the understanding of science.
John Ferguson McLennan, Lewis Henry Morgan, and other writers argued
that there was a parallel development of social institutions. The first
humans were promiscuous (like, it was thought, the African apes), but at
some stage blood ties were recognized between mother and children and
incest between mother and son was forbidden. In time more restrictive
forms of mating were introduced and paternity was recognized. Blood ties
began to be distinguished from territorial relationships, and distinctive
political structures developed beyond the family circle. At last
monogamous marriage evolved. Paralleling these developments,
technological advances produced increasing wealth, and arrangements
guaranteeing property ownership and regulating inheritance became more
significant. Eventually the modern institutions of private property and
territorially based political systems developed, together with the nuclear
family.
An alternative to this Anglo-American evolutionist anthropology
established itself in the German-speaking countries. Its scientific roots
were in geography and philology, and it was concerned with the study of
cultural traditions and with adaptations to local ecological constraints
rather than with universal human histories. This more particularistic and
historical approach was spread to the United States at the end of the 19th
century by the German-trained scholar Franz Boas. Skeptical of
evolutionist generalizations, Boas advocated instead a diffusionist
approach. Rather than graduating through a fixed series of intellectual,
moral, and technological stages, societies or cultures changed
unpredictably, as a consequence of migration and borrowing.
Fieldwork
The first generation of anthropologists had tended to rely on
otherslocally based missionaries, colonial administrators, and so onto
collect ethnographic information, often guided by questionnaires that
were issued by metropolitan theorists. In the late 19th century, several
ethnographic expeditions were organized, often by museums. As reports
on customs came in from these various sources, the theorists would
collate the findings in comparative frameworks to illustrate the course of
evolutionary development or to trace local historical relationships.
The first generation of professionally trained anthropologists began to
undertake intensive fieldwork on their own account in the early 20th
century. As theoretically trained investigators began to spend long
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periods alone in the field, on a single island or in a particular tribal

community, the object of investigation shifted. The aim was no longer to
establish and list traditional customs. Field-workers began to record the
activities of flesh-and-blood human beings going about their daily
business. To get this sort of material, it was no longer enough to
interview local authority figures. The field-worker had to observe people
in action, off guard, to listen to what they said to each other, to
participate in their daily activities. The most famous of these early
intensive ethnographic studies was carried out between 1915 and 1918 by
Bronisaw Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands (now Kiriwina Islands) off
the southeastern coast of New Guinea, and his Trobriand monographs,
published between 1922 and 1935, set new standards for ethnographic
reportage.
These new field studies reflected and accelerated a change of theoretical

focus from the evolutionary and historical interests of the 19th century.
Inspired by the social theories of mile Durkheim and the psychological
theories of Wilhelm Wundt and others, the ultimate aim was no longer to
discover the primitive origins of Western customs but rather to explain
the purposes that were served by particular institutions or religious
beliefs and practices. Malinowski explained that Trobriand magic was not
simply poor science. The function of garden magic was to sustain the
confidence of gardeners, whose investments could not be guaranteed. His
colleague, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, adopted a more sociological,
Durkheimian line of argument, explaining, for example, that the
function of ancestor worship was to sustain the authority of fathers and
grandfathers and to back up the claims of family responsibility. Perhaps
the most influential sociological explanation of primitive institutions
was Marcel Mauss's account of gift exchanges, illustrated by such diverse
practices as the kula ring cycle of exchange of the Trobriand Islanders
and the potlatch of the Kwakiutl of the Pacific coast of North America.
Mauss argued that apparently irrational forms of economic consumption
made sense when they were properly understood, as modes of social
competition regulated by strict and universal rules of reciprocity.
Social and cultural anthropology

A distinctive social or cultural anthropology emerged in the 1920s. It
was associated with the social sciences and linguistics, rather than with
human biology and archaeology. In Britain in particular social
anthropologists came to regard themselves as comparative sociologists,
but the assumption persisted that anthropologists were primarily
concerned with primitive peoples, and in practice evolutionary ways of
thinking may often be discerned below the surface of functionalist
argument that represents itself as ahistorical. A stream of significant
monographs and comparative studies appeared in the 1930s and '40s that
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described and classified the social structures of what were termed tribal
societies. In African Political Systems (1940), Meyer Fortes and Edward
Evans-Pritchard proposed a triadic classification of African polities. Some
African societies (e.g., the San) were organized into kin-based bands.
Others (e.g., the Nuer and the Tallensi) were federations of unilineal
descent groups, each of which was associated with a territorial segment.
Finally, there were territorially based states (e.g., those of the Tswana of
southern Africa and the Kongo of central Africa, or the emirates of
northwestern Africa), in which kinship and descent regulated only
domestic relationships. Kin-based bands lived by foraging, lineage-based
societies were often pastoralists, and the states combined agriculture,
pastoralism, and trade. In effect, this was a transformation of the
evolutionist stages into a synchronic classification of types. Though
speculations about origins were discouraged, it was apparent that the
types could easily be rearranged in a chronological sequence from the
most primitive to the most sophisticated.
There were similar attempts to classify systems of kinship and marriage,
the most famous being that of the French anthropologist Claude
Lvi-Strauss. In 1949 he presented a classification of marriage systems
from diverse localities, again within the framework of an implicit
evolutionary series. The crucial evolutionary moment was the
introduction of the incest taboo, which obliged men to exchange their
sisters and daughters with other men in order to acquire wives for
themselves and their sons. These marriage exchanges in turn bound
family groups together into societies. In societies organized by what
Lvi-Strauss termed elementary systems of kinship and marriage, the
key social units were exogamous descent groups. He represented the
Australian Aboriginals as the most fully realized example of an
elementary system, while most of the societies with complex kinship
systems were to be found in the modern world, in complex civilizations.
American anthropology since the 1950s

In the United States a culture-and-personality school developed that
drew rather on new movements in psychology (particularly psychoanalysis
and Gestalt psychology). Later developments in the social sciences
resulted in the emergence of a positivist cross-cultural project,
associated with George P. Murdock at Yale University, which applied
statistical methods to a sample of world cultures and attempted to
establish universal functionalist relationships between forms of marriage,
descent systems, property relationships, and other variables. Under the
influence of the American social theorist Talcott Parsons, the
anthropologists at Harvard University were drawn into team projects with
sociologists and psychologists. They came to be regarded as the
specialists in the study of culture within the framework of an
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interdisciplinary social science.
In the 1950s and '60s, evolutionist ideas gained fresh currency in

American anthropology, where they were cast as a challenge to the
relativism and historical particularism of the Boasians. Some of the new
evolutionists (led by Leslie White) reclaimed the abandoned territory of
Victorian social theory, arguing for a coherent world history of human
development, through a succession of stages, from a common primitive
base. The more developed a society, the more complex its organization
and the more energy it consumed. White believed that energy
consumption was the gauge of cultural advance. Another tendency, led
by Julian Steward, argued rather for an evolutionism that was more
directly Darwinian in inspiration. Cultural practices were to be treated as
modes of adaptation to specific environmental challenges. More skeptical
than White about traditional models of unilineal evolution, Steward urged
the study of particular evolutionary processes within enduring culture
areas, in which societies with a common origin were exposed to similar
ecological constraints. Students of White and Steward, including Marshall
Sahlins, revived classic evolutionist questions about the origins of the
state and the consequences of technological progress.
The institutional development of anthropology in Europe was strongly
influenced by the existence of overseas empires, and in the aftermath of
World War II anthropologists were drawn into development programs in
the so-called Third World. In the United States, anthropologists had
traditionally studied the native peoples of North and Central America.
During World War II, however, they were called upon to apply their
expertise to assist the war effort, along with other social scientists. As
the United States became increasingly influential in the world, in the
aftermath of the war, the profession grew explosively. In the 1950s and
'60s, important field studies were carried out by American ethnographers
working in Indonesia, in East and West Africa, and in the many societies
in the South Seas that had been brought under direct or indirect
American control as a result of the war in the Pacific.
In the view of some critics, social and cultural anthropology was
becoming, in effect, a Western social science that specialized in the
study of colonial and postcolonial societies. The war in Vietnam fueled
criticism of American engagement in the Third World and precipitated a
radical shift in American anthropology. There was general
disenchantment with the project of modernizing the new states that
had emerged after World War II, and many American anthropologists
began to turn away from the social sciences.
American anthropology divided between two intellectual tendencies. One

school, inspired by modern developments in genetics, looked for
biological determinants of human cultures and sought to revive the
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traditional alliance between cultural anthropology and biological

anthropology. Another school insisted that cultural anthropology should
aim to interpret other cultures rather than to seek laws of cultural
development or cultural integration and that it should therefore situate
itself within the humanities rather than in the biological sciences or the
social sciences.
Clifford Geertz was the most influential proponent of an interpretive

anthropology. This represented a movement away from biological
frameworks of explanation and a rejection of sociological or psychological
preoccupations. The ethnographer was to focus on symbolic
communications, and so rituals and other cultural performances became
the main focus of research. Sociological and psychological explanations
were left to other disciplines. In the next generation, a radically
relativist version of Geertz's program became influential. It was argued
that cultural consensus is rare and that interpretations are therefore
always partial. Cultural boundaries are provisional and uncertain,
identities fragile and fabricated. Consequently ethnographers should
represent a variety of discordant voices, not try to identify a supposedly
normative cultural view. In short, it was an illusion that objective
ethnographic studies could be produced and reliable comparisons
undertaken.
European anthropology since the 1950s

In Europe the social science program remained dominant, though it was
revitalized by a new concern with social history. Some European social
scientists became leaders of social thought, among them Pierre Bourdieu,
Mary Douglas, Louis Dumont, Ernest Gellner, and Claude Lvi-Strauss.
Elsewhere, particularly in some formerly colonial countries in Latin
America, Asia, and Africa, local traditions of anthropology established
themselves. While anthropologists in these countries were responsive to
theoretical developments in the traditional centres of the discipline, they
were also open to other intellectual currents, because they were
typically engaged in debates with specialists from other fields about
developments in their own countries.
Empirical research flourished despite the theoretical diversity. Long-term
fieldwork was now commonly backed up by historical investigations, and
ethnography came to be regarded by many practitioners as the core
activity of social and cultural anthropology. In the second half of the 20th
century, the ethnographic focus of anthropologists changed decisively.
The initial focus had been on primitive peoples. Later, ethnographers
specialized in the study of Third World societies, including the complex
villages and towns of Asia. From the 1970s fieldwork began increasingly to
be carried out in European societies and among ethnic minorities, church
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communities, and other groups in the United States. In the formerly

colonized societies, local anthropologists began to dominate
ethnographic research, and community leaders increasingly insisted on
controlling the agenda of field-workers.
The liveliest intellectual developments were perhaps to be found beyond

the mainstream. Fresh specializations emerged, notably the anthropology
of women in the 1970s and, in the following decades, medical
anthropology, psychological anthropology, visual anthropology, the
anthropology of music and dance, and demographic anthropology. The
anthropology of the 21st century is polycentric and cosmopolitan, and it
is not entirely at home among the biological or social sciences or in the
humanities.
Adam J. Kuper
The major branches of anthropology

Cultural anthropology
Cultural anthropology is that major division of anthropology that explains

culture in its many aspects. It is anchored in the collection, analysis, and
explanation (or interpretation) of the primary data of extended
ethnographic field research. This discipline, both in America and in
Europe, has long cast a wide net and includes various approaches. It has
produced such collateral approaches as culture-and-personality studies,
culture history, cultural ecology, cultural materialism, ethnohistory, and
historical anthropology. These subdisciplines variously exploit methods
from the sciences and the humanities. Cultural anthropology has become
a family of approaches oriented by the culture concept.
The central tendencies and recurrent debates since the mid-19th century
have engaged universalist versus particularist perspectives, scientific
versus humanistic perspectives, and the explanatory power of biology
(nature) versus that of culture (nurture). Two persistent themes have
been the dynamics of culture change and the symbolic meanings at the
core of culture.
The definition of culture has long provoked debate. The earliest and most
quoted definition is the one formulated in 1871 by Edward Burnett Tylor:
Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is
that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art,
morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits
acquired by man as a member of society.
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Three things of enduring relevance are to be remarked in this definition.

First, it treats culture and civilization as interchangeable terms. Second,
it emphasizes ethnography. And third, it singles out that which is learned
by means of living in society rather than what is inherited biologically.
In respect to culture and civilization, Tylor collapses the distinction

between the total social legacy of a human group, including every
mundane matter from pot making to toilet practices, and its most refined
attainments, such as the fine arts, that has been at the heart of the
debate over what culture is. On the second point, he emphasizes what
has continued to be the anchor of cultural anthropology in ethnographic
fieldwork and writing. At the same time, the positioning and gender of
the ethnographer and the bias in ethnographic data have undergone
increasingly close scrutiny. On the third point, by emphasizing what is
socially learned rather than what is biologically transmitted, Tylor points
up the enduring problem of distinguishing between biological and cultural
influences, between nature and nurture.
Tylor's definition is taken as the inception of the awareness of culture in

anthropology, but Classical thinkers such as Herodotus and Tacitus were
also aware of differences in beliefs and practices among the diverse
peoples of the then-known worldthat is, of cultural difference. It was
the age of exploration and discovery that exposed the breadth of human
diversity, posing those fundamental questions of universality and
particularity in human lifeways that have become the province of cultural
anthropology. In the face of such diversity, Enlightenment thinkers sought
to discover what could still be taken as universally
reasonableenlightened or truly civilizedin the living out of human
relationships. The French Enlightenment emphasized universals grounded
in human reason against which the German thinkers, most notably Johann
Gottfried von Herder, spoke of Kultur, which is to say the particular
identity-defining differences characteristic of peoples and nations. This
universalism-particularism debate between French and German thinkers,
which is a version of the debate between Classicism and Romanticism,
has continued to be central in cultural anthropology. There is also the
related debate between idealism and materialism: European idealism
emphasized the subtle meaningfulness of local configurations of thought
and value over against the practical focus on utilitarian analysis of
health, material well-being, and survival. This idealism flourished in
German anthropology in the late 19th century, notably in the work of
Rudolf Virchow and Adolf Bastian, and influenced the German-born Franz
Boas, a longtime professor at Columbia University, who trained most of
the formative generation of 20th-century American anthropologists. The
debate between idealism and materialism in cultural anthropology
continues today.
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American cultural anthropology

The idealism of Boasian cultural anthropology found its first challenge
in 19th-century cultural evolutionism, which had its origins in the early
modern notion of the Great Chain of Being. Stimulated mainly by
Darwinian thought, 19th-century classical evolutionism arranged the
different lifeways of the world on a hierarchical and unilinear ladder
proceeding from savagery to barbarism to civilization, taking as
exemplary of the latter such evolved civilizations as the Euro-American
and the Asiatic. The second tendency in this thought was the
identification of race with culture. One saw the lower races, most
of them with black or brown skin, as having, through biological
incapacity for culture, fallen behind or lost out in the evolutionary
competition for the survival of the fittest.
These unilinear hierarchies and their presumptions were challenged by

the Boasians on a number of fronts. First, their fieldwork, largely
undertaken among American Indians, showed the widespread
influences of diffusion between cultures, stimulating culture change
that rendered any simple picture of unilinear evolution untenable. All
cultures learned from each other throughout their histories. Also, the
discovery that cultural adaptation to particular local physical
environments had an important influence on evolution led to a more
pluralistic and multilineal approach to culture change. The comparison
of cultures that arose in early 20th-century anthropology produced
diverse theoretical and methodological consequences, most notably
the concept of cultural relativism, a theory of culture change or
acculturation, and an emphasis on the study of symbolic meaning.
Perhaps the most important achievement of Boas and his students was
the demonstration that there is no necessary connection between
culture and race, that the capacity for culture of specific groups was
not genetically controlled, and that the freedom to create cultures
independent of biology was one of the great achievements of human
evolution.
French theoretical contributions

French ethnology under the influence of mile Durkheim and Marcel
Mauss and their successors emphasized the study of culture, or society,
as a total system with a definite structure consisting of elements
that functioned both to adapt to changing circumstances and to
reproduce its integral structure. The total system approach influenced
British social anthropology in the form of Malinowski's functionalism
and Radcliffe-Brown's attention to the dynamics of social structure.
British structural-functionalism became influential, even in the United
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States, as a countercurrent to the cultural emphasis of American

anthropology. In part this emphasis is present because, after World
War II, many American anthropologists did ethnographic fieldwork in
Africa, South Asia, and the Pacific, where British-trained social
anthropologists were the pioneers. The emphasis on the study of whole
cultures and on cultures as systems in American cultural anthropology,
often called holism, also showed both French and British influence.
Although it began in the study of social structures, structuralism
aimed at understanding the universals of mental structures. It was
mainly developed by Claude Lvi-Strauss, who was much influenced by
Durkheim and Mauss as well as by structural linguistics. Structuralism
affected American cultural anthropology, harmonizing with idealist
elements and the treatment of culture as first of all patterns of belief
or ideas which eventuated in practical activity. Only later, in the last
several decades of the 20th century, were the strategy and tactics of
practical life given primary emphasis in the work of such sociologically
oriented theorists as Pierre Bourdieu and in the analyses of the social
dynamics of discourse by linguistic anthropologists such as Dell Hymes.
The interaction between ideas on the one hand and social and political
behaviour on the other has long been a contested issue in cultural
anthropology, and it remains so.
The configurational approach

The development of American cultural anthropology between the two
World Wars and into the decade of the 1960s was significantly shaped
by anthropological linguist Edward Sapir, who demonstrated the
determinative effect of language on culture and worldview and who
argued that culture is largely psychological. Since language is central
to the task of the ethnographer, to learning, to the expression of
thought and values, and to the transmission of culture, Sapir's
language-anchored perspectives have had important and continuing
resonance. His psychological emphasis was influential in the
culture-and-personality movement that flourished under other
Boasians, notably Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict.
The Boasian resistance to the sweeping and confining generalizations

of classic evolutionism had two consequences: an emphasis on culture
change at a specific level of analysis and a priority on studying the
patterns or configurations of local cultural beliefs and values. Pattern
and configuration became key concepts for explaining the relation of
culture traits to each other and the study of local patterning of
cultural traits and changes over time. Benedict's popular presentation,
Patterns of Culture (1934), though espousing a cultural psychology, is
an example, as is the austere and massive Configurations of Culture
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Growth (1944) by another of Boas's students, A.L. Kroeber.
This emphasis on the study of internal patterns and configurations of

particular cultures as these are expressed in language led in two
directions: to cultural relativism and to the study of culture
contact, or acculturation. Relativism, which resists universal
judgments of any kind, is usually identified with American cultural
anthropology, mainly through the work of Benedict and Melville
Herskovits. It remains a persistent challenge to the generalizing
impulse in anthropology and in the academy.
Cultural change and adaptation

Ethnographic fieldwork had been undertaken mainly in colonial
situations characterized by contact between conquering and
conquered cultures. This experience produced a theory of cultural
cross-fertilization (acculturation) and culture change. A legacy of
colonialism was the great differential between developed and
underdeveloped parts of the world. The development project
undertaken by the wealthier nations after World War II to relieve
colonial poverty and diminish global inequities has produced various
cultural theories of development based on continuing anthropological
research as well as strong critiques of the discipline's role in
development.
Cultural anthropology has maintained its concern for the history of

change in particular cultures. Kroeber was the most notable cultural
historian among Boas's students, examining change over the long term
on a scale that connected easily with the historical sociology of Max
Weber and the social history of Fernand Braudel. The last two decades
of the 20th century witnessed a striking invigoration of historical
anthropology that took issue with utilitarian and materialist
interpretations of cultural stability and change, emphasizing the
importance of symbols and their meaning for all human action.
Marshall Sahlins was a leading proponent of this school of historical
anthropology.
Cultural ecology also has its roots in an earlier cultural anthropology,

particularly the study of the geographic and environmental context of
culture change. The neo-evolutionist Leslie White reacted to the
idealism of the cultural approach, turning his attention to the progress
of technology in harnessing energy to serve the survival and
subsistence needs of cultures. Cultural ecology has sought to produce a
more quantitative discipline than is characteristic of most cultural
anthropology, which has remained rooted in the humanities.
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Culture and the humanities

The humanistic roots of cultural anthropology produced some of the
major tendencies of the latter half of the 20th century. Cultural
anthropology in America has long studied the folklore, music, art,
worldview, and indigenous philosophies of other cultures. Humanistic
scholarship typically makes qualitative or interpretive statements
about complex patternings or configurations of experience and local
meaning such as can not easily be done by formal scientific
procedures. In the 1950s, Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, two of the
most eminent anthropologists of the period, undertook a major effort
to assay the meaning of culture in anthropology; they concluded
that it was best understood as the knowledge, belief, and habits
embodied in symbolic discourse. The symbolic anthropology that
flourished in cultural anthropology from the 1960s to the '80s was
mainly concerned with the interpretation of the complex meaning of
symbols in local experience.
An important contribution to redefining cultural anthropology in the

1970s was the interpretive movement promoted by Clifford Geertz. He
argued that the main consequence of fieldwork was the
anthropologists' densely interwoven, symbol-laden field texts (field
notes) and that their main products were the texts interpreting these
texts, the ethnographies themselves. Anthropological work should be
thus seen as a text-oriented interpretive task practiced on the rich
complexities of culture and social action. A further step along this
path challenged anthropology with the writing culture movement,
which pointed up the biases implicit in the anthropologist's positioning
in field research, and his or her choice of voices to hear and materials
to write about in the ethnographic text. Geertz thus enabled many
anthropologists of all persuasions to recognize the limits of objectivity
and the inevitable partiality of anthropological practice and
publication. A related critique came from feminists in anthropology
who pressed the case of culturally influenced gender bias in fieldwork
and writing.
These developments were followed in the 1990s by the writing
against culture movement, which expressed misgivings about a
common form of anthropological thought that imposed excessive and
disadvantaging otherness on the cultures and peoples studied. This
movement implicitly reasserted the humanist universalism of
anthropology and pointed up how other cultures were described in
terms that distanced and dehumanized them. This was a very direct
and forceful challenge to customary descriptive and categorizing
practices, and it provoked strong debate in the discipline. The
exchange between the Sri Lankan anthropologist Gananath
Obeyesekere and the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins
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concerning the interpretation of precolonial native thought in the

Hawaiian Islands was a late 20th-century episode in the continuing
debate between cultural universalism and cultural particularism.
Symbolic anthropology has given rise to a new theme, the role of

metaphoror, more broadly, all the tropes, or figures of speechas
symbolic representation of proper conduct. This is an ancient scholarly
interest, dating from Aristotle in Western thought but not unique to
Western civilization. Partaking of both humanistic and scientific
analysis, this approach is fruitful both for insight into the mind and the
organization of experience and for the understanding of the
constraints and creative possibilities the play of tropes contributes
to expressive culture.
The turn of the millennium saw a renewal of the relationship between
anthropology and the humanities, as the concept of culture was
adopted as the centrepiece of cultural studies, with its focal
interest in multiculturalism. The self-identification of many
minorities in American society brought with it a large number of new
areas of study in the humanities. Humanists, to be sure, were, from
the turn of the 19th century, influenced by the anthropological work
of James George Frazer and others. However, these new humanistic
approaches to the study of the relation of changing thought and value
to the changing social, political, and economic circumstances of a
globalizing market, though not grounded in extended fieldwork and
empirical ethnography, pose an important challenge to anthropology's
claim to be the interpreter and arbiter of the culture concept.
Cultural studies pose a challenge of collaboration between
anthropology and the humanities. The recent movement away from
the study of small-scale societies and a new focus on the study of
emergent public cultures in the global arena has been a significant
anthropological response to this new interest in culture in the
humanities.
James W. Fernandez
Social anthropology
The term social anthropology emerged in Britain in the early years of the
20th century and was used to describe a distinctive style of
anthropologycomparative, fieldwork-based, and with strong intellectual
links to the sociological ideas of mile Durkheim and the group of French
scholars associated with the journal L'Anne sociologique. Although it was
at first defined in opposition to then-fashionable evolutionary and
diffusionist schools of anthropology, by the mid-20th century social
anthropology was increasingly contrasted with the more humanistic
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tradition of American cultural anthropology. At this point, the discipline

spread to various parts of what was then the British Empire and also was
established as a distinctive strand of teaching and research in a handful
of American universities. The years after World War II, though, brought a
partial breakdown of the British opposition to American cultural
anthropology, as younger scholars abandoned the tenets of comparative
sociology set out by one of the discipline's founders, A.R.
Radcliffe-Brown. During the same period, however, the term was
increasingly used in Continental Europe: the French anthropologist
Claude Lvi-Strauss accepted a chair in social anthropology in the Collge
de France in 1959, and, when European anthropologists established a
joint professional association in the late 1980s, it took the title European
Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) and called its journal Social
Anthropology.
It has been conventional to begin the story of social anthropology with

James George Frazer's appointment to a chair with that title in Liverpool
in 1908, but the appointment was a short-lived disaster, and Frazer
himself later preferred the description mental anthropology to cover his
vast comparative project. But distinctive teaching in social anthropology
was established in both Oxford and Cambridge in the years immediately
before World War I. After the war, two figures emerged as the dominant
intellectual forces in the new discipline. The Pole Bronisaw Malinowski
was appointed to a readership in social anthropology at the London
School of Economics (and a professorship a few years later); there he
swiftly established an enormously influential research seminar at which
students were initiated into the ideas and methods of the new school of
anthropology. At the same time, Radcliffe-Brown took up a series of
chairsin Cape Town; Sydney, Australia; and Chicagobefore returning to
a chair at Oxford in 1937. The personalities and intellectual styles of the
two men are often contrasted: Malinowski was charismatic and romantic
and is still remembered for his vast fieldwork-based publications on the
Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea; Radcliffe-Brown was drier and
more austere and left as an intellectual legacy a series of short,
systematizing essays on comparison, function, and, above all, kinship.
In the early 1950s the publication of an edited collection on kinship in
Africa occasioned a celebrated critique in the pages of the journal
American Anthropologist. A leading American anthropologist, George P.
Murdock, faintly praised the emerging school of British social
anthropology for its command of deep ethnographic knowledge and its
strong sense of inner theoretical coherence, but he criticized it for its
narrow ambitions: it was too tightly focused on Africa, on kinship, and on
a set of intellectual issues that were, in the end, sociological rather than
anthropological. One of the central points of Murdock's critique was the
indifference of social anthropology to any discussion of culture. In the
strong version of social anthropology, exemplified by Radcliffe-Brown,
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culture was thought to be a vague abstraction of little scientific value;

rather than talking about culture, social anthropologists should
concentrate instead on the supposedly harder, more factual comparison
of different social structures.
Murdock's attack was met by a more measured response from Raymond

Firth, who had been Malinowski's first student at the London School of
Economics, and Firth was especially active in the 1950s and '60s in
bringing together British and American, social and cultural,
anthropologists. At the same time, the younger anthropologists who had
been appointed to the emerging departments of social anthropology in
Britain quickly turned on the ancestors. Malinowski's ethnography
retained its intellectual authority, but his theoretical ideas were swiftly
abandoned by his former students. Radcliffe-Brown's successor in Oxford,
Edward Evans-Pritchard, broke with his former teacher's positing of a
natural science of society, preferring instead a more humanistic vision
of social anthropology. As Lvi-Strauss's work started to become known
outside France in the 1950s, it offered a powerful alternative: more
theoretically sophisticated and intellectually ambitious than
Radcliffe-Brown but less obviously attached to Malinowski's romantic
vocation of the lone field-worker immersed in the minutiae of a single
society. But Lvi-Strauss had grown to intellectual maturity as a wartime
exile in New York, where he had steeped himself in Americanist
ethnography in the Boasian, cultural tradition. His first major publication
was on kinship theory, but he moved on to work on myth and the
interpretation of ritual and symbols, themes that were of growing
importance in American cultural anthropology in the 1960s.
While one strand of British social anthropology was moving closer to the
concerns of American anthropology, a similar shift was occurring in the
United States. Many anthropologists trained in British social anthropology
took positions in American departments in the 1950s and '60s, while
younger American anthropologists such as David Schneider and Marshall
Sahlins, in different ways, engaged with intellectual issues from the
mainstream of European social anthropology. As a mark of this
rapprochement, by the early 1980s some anthropologists in the United
States were using the neologism sociocultural anthropology to describe
their intellectual stance, while in Britain the Oxford Institute of Social
Anthropology renamed itself the Institute of Social and Cultural
Anthropology in 1991.
Yet important differences remain. European anthropologists have, on the

whole, been less overwhelmed by the postmodern shift in social and
cultural theory than their American counterparts, while the canonical
text of American postmodern anthropology, the anthology Writing
Culture (1986), edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, can be
read as an attempt to make a final intellectual break from the hegemony
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of Malinowskian ethnographic authority. The colonial legacy of British

social anthropology, although far more politically and morally complex
than some critics have claimed, was especially troubling for younger
radicals in the United States. In Britain, on the other hand, some of the
most stimulating, and apparently postmodern, work of the 1980s and
'90sthat of Marilyn Strathern, for examplefocused on classic social
anthropological themes such as kinship, property, the utility of notions of
society and culture, and the possibilities and limitations of comparison.
Jonathan Robert Spencer
Linguistic anthropology
Linguistic anthropologists argue that human production of talk and text,
made possible by the unique human capacity for language, is a
fundamental mechanism through which people create culture and social
life. Contemporary scholars in the discipline explore how this creation is
accomplished by using many methods, but they emphasize the analysis of
audio or video recordings of socially occurring discoursethat is, talk
and text that would appear in a community whether or not the
anthropologist was present. This method is preferred because differences
in how different communities understand the meaning of speech acts,
such as questioning, may shape in unpredictable ways the results
derived from investigator-imposed elicitation, such as interviewing.
A central question for linguistic anthropology is whether differences in
cultural and structural usage among diverse languages promote
differences among human communities in how the world is understood.
Local cultures of language may prefer certain forms of expression and
avoid others. For instance, while the vocabulary of English includes an
elaborate set of so-called absolute directionals (words such as north and
southwest), most speakers seldom use these terms for orientation,
preferring vocabulary that is relative to a local context (such as downhill
or left).
Cultures of language may cross linguistic boundaries. Thus Native

American Puebloans, speaking languages of four unrelated families, avoid
using different languages in the same utteranceeven when speakers are
multilingualand do not allow everyday speech to intrude into religious
contexts. By contrast, their Spanish-speaking neighbours often switch
between Spanish and English and value colloquial forms in worship, as is
evident in their folk masses composed in everyday language.
An important line of research explores how cultural modelslocal

understandings of the worldare encoded in talk and text. Students of
language ideologies look at local ideas about how language functions. A
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significant language ideology associated with the formation of modern

nation-states constructs certain ways of speaking as standard
languages; once a standard is defined, it is treated as prestigious and
appropriate, while others languages or dialects are marginalized and
stigmatized.
Linguistic anthropologists explore the question of how linguistic diversity

is related to other kinds of human difference. Franz Boas insisted that
race, language, and culture are quite independent of one another.
For instance, communities of Pygmy hunters in East Africa are biologically
and culturally distinct from neighboring cultivators, but both groups share
the same Bantu languages. Yet, as mentioned above, the Puebloan
peoples of the U.S. Southwest share a common cultural repertoire, but
they speak languages that belong to four different and unrelated
families.
The approximately 6,000 languages spoken in the world today are divided
by historical linguists into genealogical families (languages descended
from a common ancestor). Some subgroupssuch as the African Bantu
languages (within the Niger-Congo language family), which include
hundreds of languages and cover an enormous geographic areaare very
large. Others, such as Keresan in the U.S. Southwest, with two closely
related varieties, are very small. Accounting for this difference is a
significant topic of research. Geographically extensive and numerically
large families may result from major technological innovations, such as
the adoption of cultivation, which permit the community of innovators,
and its language, to expand at the expense of neighbouring groups. An
alternative possibility is that certain types of physical environment, such
as the Eurasian steppes, favour language spread and differentiation,
whereas other types, such as the mountainous zones, favour the
proliferation of small linguistic communities, regardless of technology.
The question of why one language expands and diversifies at the expense
of its neighbours was particularly acute at the beginning of the 21st
century, when a few world languages (notably English, Spanish, and
Chinese) were rapidly acquiring new speakers, while half of the world's
known languages faced extinction. Applications of linguistic anthropology
seek remedies for language extinction and language-based discrimination,
which are often driven by popular ideologies about the relative prestige
and utility of different languages.
Jane H. Hill
Psychological anthropology
Psychological anthropology focuses on the mind, body, and subjectivity of
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the individual in whose life and experience culture and society are
actualized. Within this broad scope there is no unified theoretical or
methodological consensus, but rather there are lively debates about the
relative importance of culture versus individual psychology in shaping
human action and about the universality versus the inherent variability of
human existence. The field unites a number of disparate research
traditions with different intellectual programs, but it also provides an
arena for principled argumentation about the existence of a common
human nature.
Because of its focus on the individual who lives and embodies culture,
psychological anthropological writing is often the study of one or a few
actual people. Such person-centred ethnography augments a schematic
view of cultural and social systems with a description and evocation of
the experience of participating in such a system.
Researchers in the classical culture-and-personality school of
psychological anthropology look for typical child-rearing customs,
situations, patterns, or traumas that might result in characteristic
responses (fantasies, anxieties, or conflicts) that in turn would find
expression or resolution in the rituals, myths, and other features of the
culture under study. Many employ a cross-cultural comparative
methodology, seeking significant correlation between a childhood
experience and adult institutions; for example, they look for a
correlation between father absence and the harsh male initiation rites
thought necessary to counteract strong maternal identification.
Ethnopsychiatry examines not only other cultures' understandings of

mental illness or abnormal states but also methods of treatment other
than standard Western procedures. Such systems as shamanism or spirit
possession and the altered states of consciousness that accompany them
are understood by some in terms of dissociation or schizoid states. For
others these phenomena, often considered pathological in the West, are
treated as normal in cultures that make productive use of methods
excluded from Western folk psychology.
Robert Allen Paul
Archaeology
Archaeology is fundamentally a historical science, one that encompasses

the general objectives of reconstructing, interpreting, and understanding
past human societies. Isaiah Berlin's perceptive comments on the
inherent difficulties in practicing scientific history are particularly
apropos for archaeology. Practitioners of archaeology find themselves
allied (often simultaneously) with practitioners of the natural sciences,
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social sciences, and humanities in the project of writing history. In the

United States archaeology developed within the discipline of
anthropology as a social science, contributing an explicitly historical
dimension to anthropological inquiry. In Europe archaeology is more
closely allied with humanistic pursuits such as classics, philology, and art
history. In the last few decades of the 20th century, this marked
distinction in archaeological training and scholarship began to blur as the
practice of archaeology became increasingly global and continual
communication among archaeologists across national and regional borders
accelerated.
Archaeologists deploy the analytic techniques of many scientific
disciplinesbotany, chemistry, computer science, ecology, evolutionary
biology, genetics, geology, and statistics, among othersto recover and
interpret the material remains of past human activities. But, like
historians, archaeologists attempt to reconstruct the events and
processes that shaped and transformed past societies, and, wherever
possible, to understand how those events and processes were perceived
and affected by humans. Achieving this understanding requires ideas
about how individuals and societies are formed and how they interact,
ideas that archaeologists have frequently drawn from humanistic and
social science disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, sociology, and
cultural anthropology. In this sense, archaeology is a uniquely hybrid
intellectual endeavour that requires knowledge of an eclectic,
wide-ranging set of analytic methods and social theories to write the
history of past societies.
Archaeology differs from the study of history principally in the source of

the information used to reconstruct and interpret the past. Historians
concentrate specifically on the evidence of written texts, while
archaeologists directly examine all aspects of a society's material
cultureits architecture, art, and artifacts, including textsthe material
objects made, used, and discarded by human beings. As a result,
archaeology, unlike history, takes as its subject all past human societies,
whether these were preliterate (prehistoric), nonliterate, or literate.
Knowledge of prehistoric societies is exclusively the domain of
archaeology and the allied natural sciences that, in the absence of
written records, can generate information about the environmental and
cultural contexts of ancient societies. Reconstructing the material world
of past societies as fully as possible is the proximate goal of archaeology;
interpreting the historical significance and cultural meaning of that
material world is archaeology's ultimate objective.
In order to systematically document and interpret the material remains
of past societies, archaeologists have developed a common set of
methods and procedures. These include archaeological survey
(reconnaissance), excavation, and detailed analysis of recovered
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artifacts. Survey, or the discovery and recording of archaeological sites or

other human-created features, such as roads and irrigation systems, is
usually the first phase of archaeological research. Archaeological survey
often employs aerial photographs and satellite images to locate human
settlements and related features visible on the surface. Since the late
20th century, technologies of remote sensing, such as ground-penetrating
radar, have extended archaeologists' capacity to detect subsurface
features. Subsequent ground reconnaissance is designed to map and
describe archaeological sites. It frequently involves the systematic
collection of surface artifacts (such as pottery, stone tools, human and
animal bones, metal, and other durable objects) that can reveal the
chronological placement (dating), spatial relationships, and, often, the
social functions of archaeological sites.
After a thorough archaeological reconnaissance that documents the
environmental context and spatio-temporal relationships of settlements
and other human-created features, archaeologists embark on programs of
excavation to discover and document a site's material culture and the
manner in which this material culture changed over time. The design and
execution of an archaeological excavation is a highly technical dimension
of the archaeologist's craft that frequently requires engagement of an
interdisciplinary team of scientists and technicians: surveyors,
epigraphists, geologists, botanists, physical anthropologists, zoologists,
and other specialists. The documentary record of an excavation includes
detailed maps and architectural plans of excavated structures and other
features, along with large quantities of recovered artifacts, the
stratigraphic locations (that is, the precise horizontal and vertical
position within the buried layers of a site) and depositional context of
which have been meticulously recorded in standardized data forms.
The final procedure of documenting the material remains of past
societies entails careful, and often technically specialized, quantitative
and qualitative analysis of recovered artifacts. This systematic
description and classification of objects by their chronological
placement, material, form, process of production, use-life, and pattern
of deposition depends upon a host of sophisticated analytic techniques
developed to decode the history of these discarded objects, which once
held social significance to the human communities in which they were
made, used, and valued. Principal among these analytic techniques are
various kinds of physical and chemical dating methods, including, most
prominently, radiocarbon dating, which was developed in the 1940s by
Nobel laureate Willard Libby at the University of Chicago.
Once the empirical evidence of past societies has been generated,

archaeologists must make meaningful historical and cultural
interpretations of that evidence. Archaeological evidence is most often a
reflection of long-term history (interpretable mostly in decadal,
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generational, or even longer timescales). This means that, absent

contemporaneous historical and textual evidence, archaeological
interpretations are often restricted to the exploration of deeply
embedded, perduring sociocultural structures and long-term
sociohistorical change rather than to specific events and individual
actions. As a result, archaeological interpretations rarely reach to an
explanation of what events and processes meant in social or psychological
terms to human actors. Nevertheless, archaeology, as a form of historical
anthropology, offers keen insight into the human condition.
Alan L. Kolata
Physical anthropology
Physical anthropology is concerned with the origin, evolution, and
diversity of people. Physical anthropologists work broadly on three major
sets of problems: human and nonhuman primate evolution, human
variation and its significance , and the biological bases of human
behaviour. The course that human evolution has taken and the processes
that have brought it about are of equal concern. In order to explain the
diversity within and between human populations, physical anthropologists
must study past populations of fossil hominins as well as the nonhuman
primates. Much light has been thrown upon the relation to other primates
and upon the nature of the transformation to human anatomy and
behaviour in the course of evolution from early hominins to modern
peoplea span of at least four million years.
The processes responsible for the differentiation of people into
geographic populations and for the overall unity of Homo sapiens include
natural selection, mutation, genetic drift, migration, and genetic
recombination. Objective methods of isolating various kinds of traits and
dealing mathematically with their frequencies, as well as their functional
or phylogenetic significance, make it possible to understand the
composition of human populations and to formulate hypotheses
concerning their future. The genetic and anthropometric information
that physical anthropologists collect provides facts about not only the
groups who inhabit the globe but also the individuals who compose those
groups. Estimates of the probabilities that children will inherit certain
genes can help to counsel families about some medical conditions.
Paleoanthropology
The study of human evolution is multidisciplinary, requiring not only
physical anthropologists but also earth scientists, archaeologists,
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molecular biologists, primatologists, and cultural anthropologists. The

essential problems are not only to describe fossil forms but also to
evaluate the significance of their traits. Concepts such as orthogenesis
have been replaced by adaptive radiation (radiant evolution) and
parallel evolution. Fossil hominins of considerable antiquity have been
found in Africa, Asia, Australia, and Europe, and few areas lack
interesting human skeletal remains. Two problems requiring additional
research are (1) the place, time, and nature of the emergence of
hominins from preceding hominoids and (2) the precise relationship of
fully anatomically modern Homo sapiens to other species of Homo of
the Pleistocene Epoch (i.e., about 2,600,000 to 11,700 years ago), such
as the Neanderthal. (See also human evolution.)
Primatology
Nonhuman primates provide a broad comparative framework within
which physical anthropologists can study aspects of the human career
and condition. Comparative morphological studies, particularly those
that are complemented by biomechanical analyses, provide major
clues to the functional significance and evolution of the skeletal and
muscular complexes that underpin our bipedalism, dextrous hands,
bulbous heads, outstanding noses, and puny jaws. The wide variety of
adaptations that primates have made to life in trees and on the ground
are reflected in their limb proportions and relative development of
muscles.
Free-ranging primates exhibit a trove of physical and behavioral
adaptations to fundamentally different ways of life, some of which
may resemble those of our late Mioceneearly Pleistocene
predecessors (i.e., those from about 11 to 2 million years ago).
Laboratory and field observations, particularly of great apes, indicate
that earlier researchers grossly underestimated the intelligence,
cognitive abilities, and sensibilities of nonhuman primates and perhaps
also those of Plioceneearly Pleistocene hominins (i.e., those from
about 5.3 to 2 million years ago), who left few archaeological clues to
their behaviour.
Genetics
The study of inherited traits in individuals and the actions of the genes
responsible for them in populations is vital to understanding human
variability. Although blood groups initially constituted the bulk of
data, many other molecular traits, particularly DNA sequences, have
been analyzed. At the turn of the 21st century, geographic populations
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were described in terms of gene frequencies, which were in turn used

to model the history of population movements. This information,
combined with linguistic and archaeological evidence, helps to resolve
puzzles on the peopling of continents and archipelagoes. Traits that
were used for racial classifications do not group neatly in patterns that
would allow boundaries to be drawn among geographic populations,
and none endows any population with more humanity than others. The
concept of biological races (subspecies) of Homo sapiens is invalid;
biologically meaningful racial types are nonexistent; and all humans
are mongrels.
Human ecology
Problems of population composition, size, and stability are important
in many ways. An immediate aspect is the varying rate of change that
may occur in populations of different sizes. Theoretically, small
populations are more susceptible to chance fluctuations than large
populations. Both the natural environment and the economy of a
particular society affect population size. Studies of human
physiological adaptations to high-altitude, arid, frigid, and other
environments, of nutrition, and of epidemiology have revealed just
how versatile and vulnerable humans are.
Bioarchaeology
Bioarchaeologists test hypotheses about relative mortality, population
movements, wars, social status, political organization, and other
demographic, epidemiological, and social phenomena in past societies
by combining detailed knowledge of cultural features and artifacts,
such as those related to mortuary practice, with an understanding of
paleonutrition, paleopathology, and the discrete traits that can be
detected from skeletons.
Growth and development

Methods to assess rates of growth, skeletal age compared with
chronological age, and the genetic, endocrinologic, and nutritional
factors that affect growth in humans and other primates are foci of
research by physical anthropologists in medical and dental schools,
clinics, primate centres, and universities. The relation between
growth and socioeconomic status and other cultural factors receives
considerable attention. The sequential emergence of teeth provides an
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index of development. Growth studies have tracked children through

morphological and biochemical changes to discern why they grow.
Physical anthropologists are also involved in studies of aging,
particularly with regard to skeletal changes such as osteoporosis.
Anthropometry
Bodily measurements are a mainstay of anthropological research.
Digital calipers and other sophisticated instruments that load data
directly into computers expedite data collection and analysis. The
judicious selection of measurements and informed weighting of traits
during analyses are essential. Statistical considerations are especially
important in genetic and anthropometric research.
The provision of clothing for masses of people depends on
anthropometry. Substantial sums have been saved because physical
anthropologists measured a small sample of the population in a
particular area and adjusted the clothing tariffs to the predicted
distribution of bodily sizes and shapes. The components of body
buildthe different tissues and dimensionshave been studied by
means of factor analysis and comparisons of siblings and twins. Their
modes of inheritance and responses to environmental conditions are
somewhat better understood today than they were when the science
began.
Forensics
Via expert knowledge of the human skeleton, fingerprints, blood
genetics, DNA sequencing, and archaeological methods, physical
anthropologists provide invaluable assistance in the identification of
victims and perpetrators of crimes and casualties of accidents and
wars.
Because of the wide spectrum of problems, methods, and practical

applications, physical anthropologists specialize in one or a few
subareas. Many research puzzles require cooperation not only among
physical anthropologists but also with other natural and social
scientists. Further, professions such as dental anthropology, as
conceived by Albert A. Dahlberg (190893), cut across all subareas of
physical anthropology. Modern multidisciplinary projects have greatly
accelerated the acquisition of knowledge about Homo sapiens, and
they have enhanced the quality of life for many people through
practical applications.
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Russell Howard Tuttle
World anthropology
Anthropology in Africa
Anthropologists working in Africa and with African materials have made
signal contributions to the theory and practice of anthropology. Early
anthropology in Africa includes work by missionaries and colonial
officials. During the high colonial period, anthropology in Africa was
based at Western-style universities and research centres, notably in
Senegal, Ghana, Morocco, Egypt, Uganda, Zambia (then Northern
Rhodesia), and South Africa, which were in turn usually linked to
metropolitan universities in Europe. Structural-functionalists, during the
colonial period from the 1930s through the 1950s, unraveled African
social structures and identified the links between values and social
structures. Anthropological analysis of oral tradition on one hand and
archaeology on the other have contributed to the reconstruction of
African cultural history. Physical anthropologists revealed the early
history of the human race on the African continent.
After much of Africa became independent about 1960, the nature of

anthropology in the continent shifted. Despite the fact that many
anthropologists saw themselves as opponents of colonial rule, African
intellectuals were suspicious of anthropology, which they believed had
been supportive of colonialism. This shift from structural-functionalism to
Marxism in Africa coincided with a turn in world anthropology toward a
Marxist-derived interest in political economy. Many key texts in the
Marxist anthropology of the 1960s and '70s used African data. African
anthropology found in this a way to reinvent itself.
Anthropologists in Africa remain interested in the evolution of African
society, from colonial situations to radical independence to
neoliberalism, though the approaches are eclectic. Those interested in
development have largely switched standing from critics to participants.
Anthropologists are often recruited to work on development projects.
One current development issue that attracts much attention is medical
anthropology, particularly AIDS research. The distinctiveness of the
lifestyles of men and women in Africa also has fostered good work on
issues of gender.
A trend toward interpretation and meaning, a form of cultural analysis,

emerged in the 1980s and '90s. This entailed work on various forms of
African religion, including witchcraft, and on popular culture and art and
linked up with an interest in folklore and cultural heritage.
An enduring issue in African anthropology is the question of the unit of
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analysis. Earlier anthropologists sometimes assumed or argued that the

African ethnic map consists of discrete groups with distinctive cultures
and social organizations, a concept known as culturalism. In South Africa
this culturalism supported the ideology of separate development, or
apartheid, while in southern Sudan (now the independent country of
South Sudan) it was an ingredient in the general breakdown of order.
Everywhere it overlooked the multicultural reality of Africa, where
situations of mixed ethnicity are more common than sharp distinctions.
Contemporary anthropology in Africa is more likely to focus on systems of
social relations or on the role of agency rather than a particular unit.
Anthropology is not well established as a discipline in Africa. It

contributes little to internal debates in African countries, except where a
concern for preserving or retrieving older social and cultural patterns
exists. The evolution of anthropology in Africa is also hampered by
political unrest and the general poverty of much of Africa, which impedes
the creation of rapport and interpersonal links and complicates sustained
research.
Practitioners of anthropology in Africa rely on regional research institutes
for funding, and they sometimes work within fields such as development,
demography, sociology, psychology, or history. The Organization for
Social Science Research in Eastern and Southern Africa (OSSREA), based
in Ethiopia, and the Council for the Development of Social Science
Research in Africa (CODESRIA), based in Senegal, both sponsor research
by local anthropologists and others. The Pan-African Anthropology
Association is based in Cameroon. Some individual countriesincluding
Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Sudan, and South Africahave a tradition of
anthropology, sometimes linked with other disciplines.
By the turn of the 21st century, interest in African social structure had
given way to concern for development, applied anthropology, gender and
medical issues, and popular culture. The setting for anthropology had
moved into Africa's growing cities, and detailed studies of local settings
had given way to multisite research on cultural issues. The field of
anthropology in Africa, though fragile, was gaining ground, and Africa
continues to inspire anthropology.
Nicholas S. Hopkins
Anthropology in Asia
Anthropology in Asia was a product of the colonial era, but it was not
simply transplanted from Europe. In all Asian countries anthropology has
developed distinctive characteristics that reflect the different
intellectual traditions of Asia.
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Of all the Asian anthropologies, anthropology in Japan has been the most
independent of Western institutions. The anthropologists who founded
the Japanese Anthropological Association in 1884 were influenced by
Western theories of race. But even physical anthropology, including
primatology, which has remained an important strand in Japanese
anthropology to the present day, has been shaped primarily by research
agendas of Japanese scholars. The same is also true of archaeology, a
field that has never been considered a component of anthropology in
Japan.
Since the early part of the 20th century, ethnologists have dominated
anthropology in Japan. Before World War II, Japanese ethnologists
carried out fieldwork primarily in Japan's colonial empire in the Ryukyu
Islands, Taiwan, Korea, and parts of China. By the late 1930s they had
produced an impressive body of work based on research not only in
Japan's colonial domains but also in parts of Oceania and Southeast Asia.
Although some Japanese anthropologists were very familiar with Western
ethnological research, the work of Japanese anthropologists would
remain all but unknown to Western anthropologists until after World War
II.
In China the diverse peoples living under the emperor had long been the
subject of scholarly reflection. However, a systematic and scientific
approach to diversity was not undertaken until after the revolution of
1911. The first development of ethnology in China resulted from
influences from Japan. Although much anthropological vocabulary still in
use in China is derived from Japanese, Japanese influence was rendered
deeply problematic as Japan aggressively pursued military expansion in
China. Chinese scholars then turned to the West. In the 1920s some
Chinese scholars began to introduce Soviet theories of nationality, but
these theories would remain relatively unimportant until after the
Communist revolution in 1949. More significant in the period when
ethnology was first being established in China were the roles played by a
number of scholars who were trained in the United States and,
especially, the United Kingdom. Fei Xiaotong and Lin Yaohua, who would
become well known respectively for their Peasant Life in China (1939;
reissued 1980) and The Golden Wing: A Family Chronicle (1944; reissued
in 1998 as The Golden Wing: A Sociological Study of Chinese Familism),
both took Ph.D.'s in Britain. In the mid- and late 1930s British social
anthropology was also introduced directly in China when A.R.
Radcliffe-Brown from Oxford served as a visiting professor at Yenching
University in Beijing and Reo Fortune from Cambridge University taught
at Lingnan University in Guangzhou (Canton).
While Fei and Lin and some others trained in anthropology in Britain or
the United States continued in academic positions after 1949, the
theories that became dominant were those based on the works of Karl
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Marx, Friedrich Engels, Joseph Stalin, and Vladimir Lenin. In the period
after the Cultural Revolution, links between Chinese ethnology and
anthropology in the United States and Western Europe were
reestablished. Nonetheless, the influence of late 19th- and early
20th-century Marxist approaches remained dominant.
The most dramatic event in the development of anthropology in China

before World War II was the discovery in 1927 of fossil remains at
Zhoukoudian cave near Beijing. Although credit for the discovery of what
became known as Peking man was given to Davidson Black, a Canadian
physician and physical anthropologist, Chinese paleoanthropology looks to
Pei Wenzhong, who worked with Black, as the true discoverer of these
famous remains. Pei subsequently took a Ph.D. in France in 1937 and then
returned to China, where, even after the communist revolution, he
continued to provide leadership for paleoanthropological research.
Although such research was significantly retarded during the Cultural
Revolution (196676), the field has subsequently reemerged with many
new Chinese scholars following in Pei's footsteps.
Japan had a much more direct role in the development of anthropology
on Taiwan and in Korea than in China. Indeed, while there was significant
ethnological work carried out in both of these places while they were
under Japanese colonial rule, almost all of it was by Japanese
ethnologists. After World War II, Taiwanese and particularly Korean
anthropologists disassociated themselves from their colonial legacy by
seeking training in the West, mainly in the United States. Only since the
1990s have some Korean and Taiwanese anthropologists begun to reflect
critically on the Japanese ethnological work of the colonial period.
The anthropology of India has its origin in British colonialism. There was a
particularly close relationship between colonial administration and
ethnographic research, and many of the observations of India's
administrator-ethnographers provided data to the comparative studies of
Edward Burnett Tylor and James George Frazer. Henry Maine, after a
distinguished career in academic jurisprudence, served in India as legal
member of the Viceroy's Council (186269). His subsequent writing was
marked by his study of Indian institutions; in particular,
Village-Communities in the East and West (1871) had a major influence
on the development of the anthropological analysis of social systems. The
appearance of formal anthropology studies at the universities of Bombay
(Mumbai) and Calcutta (Kolkata) is directly traceable to the teaching of
Indian students by W.H.R. Rivers during his years at Cambridge after the
1898 Torres Strait Expedition until his death in 1922. G.S. Ghurye, who
taught sociology in Bombay, and K.P. Chattopadhyay, who taught
anthropology in Calcutta, both studied with Rivers. D.N. Majumdar, who
in 1950 established the anthropology department at Lucknow University,
also studied at Cambridge, but after Rivers's death. An exception to the
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link to Britain was Irawati Karve of the University of Pune; her nationalist
father sent her to Germany rather than colonial Britain for advanced
study in anthropology. N.K. Bosewho, after India gained independence
in 1947, became director of the Anthropological Survey of
Indiasacrificed foreign study for India's freedom movement, serving for
a time as secretary to Mahatma Gandhi. This first generation of academic
anthropologists carried on its work across the fields of anthropology as it
was then defined at Cambridge: cultural anthropology, archaeology, and
physical anthropology. These fields are still unified in the departments of
anthropology at the universities of Calcutta and Delhi, while the sociology
department of the University of Delhi, created after 1947, has become a
leading centre of social anthropology. In the older departments, cultural
anthropology has been regarded as the science of tribal cultures and
societies.
The colonial domains of the Netherlands East Indies, French Indochina,
British Ceylon, Burma, Malaya and North Borneo, and U.S. Philippines
were rich areas for anthropological research carried out by
Euro-American scholars, scholar-officials, and missionary-scholars.
Although these researchers typically worked together with Asian
assistants, very few of these assistants were given the opportunity to
acquire the educational credentials to become recognized as
anthropologists in their own right. For example, the research in Java that
led to the discovery in 1891 of Java mana find that both equaled in
significance and antedated the discovery of Peking manand subsequent
paleoanthropological research in Java in the 1930s did not lead to the
development of an Indonesian paleoanthropology comparable to that of
China.
Archaeological excavations between World Wars I and II that resulted in
the discovery of sites such as those in Hoa Binh and Dong Son in northern
Vietnam (both of which gave their names to prehistoric eras) and other
important excavations did, however, foster the emergence of
archaeology among the Vietnamese. There were also a few Asian
scholars, such as Phya Anuman Rajadhon in Thailand and Nguyen Van
Huyen in Vietnam, who had not trained as anthropologists but
nonetheless brokered linkages between indigenous traditions of
scholarship and Western anthropology.
World War II was a major watershed in the development of anthropology

in Asia. The extension of Japanese authority over most of Southeast Asia
during the war initially spurred new ethnological research by Japanese in
Southeast Asia, but Japan's defeat abruptly ended Japanese ethnological
research in colonial contexts. The resurrection of Japanese scholarly
institutions after the war, carried out under American aegis, led to the
reestablishment of links between Japanese anthropology and
anthropology in the United States and Europe. Two Japanese
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anthropologists were particularly significant in laying the groundwork for

promoting these linkages. One was Mabuchi Tichi, who started making
researches among Taiwanese aboriginals, peoples of the Ryukyu Islands,
and peoples of insular Southeast Asia accessible to Western scholars
through English translation. Mabuchi was also instrumental in organizing
the 11th Pacific Science Congress, held in Tokyo in 1966, at which
Japanese ethnological work became known for the first time to many
outside Japan.
Nakane Chie of the University of Tokyo, trained after the war, has long
been the best-known Japanese anthropologist outside Japan. Noteworthy
in part as one of very few women of her generation in Japan to become a
professor at a major Japanese university, Nakane was exceptional among
Japanese anthropologists in carrying out fieldwork in India, an area
previously outside the domain of Japanese ethnological interest. Even
though her work on Japanese society is probably better known to Western
scholars than her work in India, her work outside Japan has made her an
exemplar for a subsequent generation of Japanese anthropologists who
have sought to be fully participating members of an international
community of anthropologists.
The Indian scholar who in the immediate postwar period played a critical
role in linking Western anthropological theory with locally grounded
knowledge was M.N. Srinivas. He had studied with Ghurye in Bombay
before seeking admission in 1945 for the D.Phil. in social anthropology at
Oxford. At Oxford Srinivas first studied with A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and
then completed his doctorate under the supervision of Edward
Evans-Pritchard. Srinivas adapted the structural-functionalism of his
mentors to his own work in India. In his well-known published
dissertation, Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India
(1952), Srinivas demonstrated how it was possible to discern patterns that
had widespread significance in India even among a people like the
Coorgs, who considered themselves a distinct ethnic group. After a brief
period at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Srinivas would become
in 1959 the first professor of sociology at the University of Delhi. This
departmentembracing concerns that might, in a British or American
university, have occupied sociologists and political scientists as well as
social anthropologistsbecame the preeminent training ground for an
Indian school of social science of broad scope, great theoretical
originality, and high international visibility.
The communist revolutions in China and Vietnam repositioned
anthropology in these countries within a Marxist-Leninist framework.
(Anthropology scarcely can be said to exist in North Korea, and Laos has a
very weakly developed academic structure.) Ethnology and archaeology
were linked to the policy objective of classifying all the diverse ethnic
groups of these countries in accord with an evolutionary scheme that has
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its roots in the work of Lewis Henry Morgan, the 19th-century American
anthropologist whose work strongly influenced Friedrich Engels and Karl
Marx. In China the project was suspended during the Cultural Revolution,
and many ethnologists were sent to the countryside to work in
nonacademic pursuits. The project was resurrected in the 1970s.
Vietnamese anthropology after 1954 also was organized around a similar
evolutionary ethnological project, but with no hiatus such as occurred in
China during the Cultural Revolution. Since the 1980s in China and the
1990s in Vietnam, an increasing number of Chinese and Vietnamese
ethnologists have either worked in collaborative projects with Western
anthropologists or received training in Western universities. As a
consequence of these new relationships, ethnology in both countries had
by the turn of the 21st century begun to be reshaped with reference to
contemporary Western sociocultural anthropology theories. Nonetheless,
ethnology in both countries remains distinctive because of a strong local
tradition of research among minority groups.
The new anthropologists of China and Vietnam join with the substantial
number of anthropologists from Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Philippines,
Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Korea who have studied in Europe, the
United States, and Australia since the 1950s and the growing number of
homegrown anthropologists especially in Japan and India. At the
beginning of the 21st century, the number of anthropologists in Asia was
growing much faster than the number in Western countries.
Charles F. Keyes
Ralph W. Nicholas
Anthropology in Europe
Disciplinary boundaries within the anthropological field differ. European
institutions, for example, rarely use the four-field approach of
American anthropology. Moreover, what in North America and Great
Britain would be considered social or cultural anthropology has long been
divided into two disciplines in much of central, eastern, and northern
Europe. In German, the distinction has been made between Volkskunde
and Vlkerkunde, and, although these terms may now be somewhat
outdated, they express the traditional divide clearly. One discipline was
devoted to the people; it centred on national cultural traditions,
particularly those of the peasantry, and could be seen, in its origins, as a
scholarly wing of 19th-century Romantic nationalism. The other dealt
with peoples, in the pluralparticularly exotic, non-European
peoplesand had its linkages to European global expansion and
colonialism. Both studies were usually distinct from sociology. The
discipline dealing with distant peoples and cultures usually was more
closely related to the field of geography, with which it sometimes shared
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scholarly associations.
By the beginning of the 21st century, both disciplines had gone through
important changes, although in academic organization they tended to
remain separate. In places where the more nationally oriented discipline
had borne the heavy burden of ideology linked to totalitarian regimes
between the World Wars, even a term such as Volk had come to seem
suspect. Moreover, there was increasingly less of a peasantry to study.
This discipline, then, tended to redefine itself as concerned with
everyday life and took on other names, such as European ethnology.
In roughly the first half of the 20th century, the discipline that focused
on non-European peoples had developed more strongly in the countries
that had colonies, and the regional specializations had much to do with
colonial connections: French anthropology was strong on West Africa and
Oceania, Dutch anthropology on insular Southeast Asia and Suriname,
Belgian anthropology on Central Africa; and what there was of a
Portuguese anthropology predictably focused on Lusophone Africa. In
much of Europe this discipline was labeled ethnography until the latter
part of the century, when, under British and American influence, it often
became anthropology, whether social or cultural. By then, in the
early postcolonial period, it was increasingly associated with key
concepts such as the Third World or development, and the discipline
also grew significantly in European countries without much of a colonial
past, such as those of Scandinavia. Yet there, as in the Anglophone
countries, the emphasis on non-European societies gradually weakened as
an increasing number of anthropologists began to practice what was
described, sometimes quite loosely, as anthropology at home. With this
change, the difference between what had been Volkskunde and
Vlkerkunde would seem to have less significance, but, to a degree,
research traditions remain distinct and disciplinary professional identities
strong.
Of the European anthropologies, apart from British anthropology, French
anthropology has had the greatest long-term international influence. The
work of Marcel Mauss, extending the work of the more generally
sociological Durkheimian tradition into the mainstream of anthropology,
was multifaceted but is especially remembered for his Essai sur le don
(1925; The Gift), an analysis of the gift, including an examination of
the concepts of reciprocity and exchange. The long-term work on West
African worldviews (Dieu d'eau: entretiens avec Ogotemmli [1948]) by
the group around Marcel Griaule has perhaps been more admired than
really influential. For several decades in the second half of the 20th
century, Claude Lvi-Strauss's structuralism (as detailed in such works as
La Pense sauvage, 1962) had a wide intellectual impact far outside the
discipline of anthropology, and the work of Louis Dumont (Homo
Hierarchicus, 1966) on hierarchy and inequality, especially in the South
Asian context, also ranks among the classics of the discipline. In the
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1970s the work of such structural Marxists as Maurice Godelier on

modes of production and related concepts drew considerable attention.
In the later decades of the 20th century, French influence on
international anthropology was mostly associated with thinkers outside
the discipline itself, such as the philosopher Michel Foucault and the
sociologist Pierre Bourdieu; but it may be noted that much of Bourdieu's
influence dates to his earlier anthropological period, drawing on work
in Algeria.
Anthropology in the German-speaking countries had a high international

profile in the early part of the 20th century, when it centred on culture
history, culture areas, and cultural diffusion. Such interests became
increasingly marginal in the discipline elsewhere, and German
anthropology went into a period of stagnation in the interwar years,
although some individuals remained in the forefront; Richard Thurnwald,
for example, is sometimes mentioned as one of the progenitors of
functionalism in anthropology. After World War II, as the discipline
reconstructed itself, German anthropologists tended to be more
preoccupied with detailed ethnography than with more general
theoretical concerns, and they increasingly followed the lines of
intellectual development emerging elsewhere in the discipline. The fact
that German anthropologists write mostly in Germanin a period when
that language is no longer widely used in the academyhas undoubtedly
had a part in making them less noticeable in international intellectual
exchange.
Anthropologists in eastern and central Europe during the communist

period were unable to communicate easily with colleagues on the other
side of the Iron Curtain. For historical reasons, the Volkskunde variant of
the discipline tended to be stronger than the Vlkerkunde variant, and,
in order to survive, it fairly mechanically absorbed a sufficient amount of
Marxist-Leninist vocabulary. In the Soviet Union the discipline of
ethnography was in large part devoted to the study of the non-Russian
peoples of the national periphery. An approach to the study of
ethno-national groups was developed that was congruous with Soviet
nationality policy as introduced by Stalin, combining a somewhat
superficial recognition of cultural identities with integration into the
communist state. In the years after the disintegration of the Soviet
Union, anthropologists in Russia and other countries formerly under its
domination increasingly oriented themselves toward the contemporary
currents of anthropology in western Europe and North America, although,
on the whole, the concomitant economic upheavals made academic work
very difficult.
Generally speaking, sociocultural anthropology in most European
countries is no longer characterized by distinctive national traditions.
Outside the old colonial powers, it grew considerably only in roughly the
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latter third of the 20th century. To a degree it is marked by the

centre-periphery relationships of international academic life, insofar as
some of the pioneers in various countries had their training in the United
States, Great Britain, and France; one can sometimes discern a stronger
French influence in southern Europe and a stronger Anglophone influence
in northern Europe. Yet scholarly interactions within European
anthropology are now no longer so dependent on old centres. The
formation of a European Association of Social Anthropologists in 1989
encouraged more crosscutting linkages, and from its beginnings this
association included researchers from all parts of a continent no longer
divided by an Iron Curtain.
Ulf Hannerz
Anthropology in Latin America

The Latin American anthropological tradition is eccentric, but it is not
separate from that of western Europe and the United States. Indeed,
Latin American anthropology developed in tandem with European
scientific thought, in terms of both the level of training and intellectual
exchange, with figures such as Franz Boas and Claude Lvi-Strauss
contributing directly to the establishment of local research and teaching
institutions. The major difference between the Latin American and the
western EuropeanU.S. field is that Latin American anthropology
developed principally for the study and transformation of the researchers'
own national societies. While most of the broad comparative points and
encompassing theoretical approaches were articulated in Europe and the
United States, Latin American anthropologists have had a much more
immediate impact on society. Latin American anthropologists had a
significant influence on the modernization of their countries, and they
were among the first to explore the failings of both unilineal evolutionary
models and of apolitical forms of celebrating cultural difference.
The Ibero-American territories were among the first sites of early modern
ethnography in the 16th century. A number of the principal questions
regarding human nature, human rights, and international rights were first
raised in the context of Spanish colonization. Great figures of the early
contact period, such as Bernardino de Sahagn, Bartolom de Las Casas,
and Francisco de Vitoria, and early mestizo writers such as Felipe
Guamn Poma de Ayala have been regarded by modern anthropologists as
the founders of Latin American ethnography, of the anthropological
defense of native peoples, and of the philosophical, juridical, and
anthropological criticism of colonialism.
After the early wave of ethnographic interest and philosophical
discussions regarding the nature of indigenous peoples and the legitimacy
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and suitable forms of Spanish rule, 17th-century Creole intellectual elites

began to exhibit an antiquarian interest in the pre-Columbian world. Yet
ethnography remained of interest because of growing religious concerns
with the persistence of idolatry among the Indians and, indeed, with its
potential influence on nonindigenous Americans. The passion for
antiquities was tied to the emergence of Creole patriotism, but concerns
with idolatry were an aspect of colonial governance. These two
dimensions of anthropological inquiry, the study of the cultural patrimony
of a nation and the study and modification of the culture and habits of
indigenous peoples, would be central to the development of modern
Latin American anthropology.
The independence of Latin America came earlier than that of the rest of
the postcolonial world, and this had a distinctive effect on its
anthropology, since the concern with shaping modern nations existed
alongside a keen awareness of relative backwardness. The evolutionist
ideas imported in the 19th century were generally tied to the notion of
racial degeneration. So, for example, critical political treatises such as
those of the Argentine Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1845), the Brazilian
Euclides da Cunha (1902), and the Mexican Andrs Molina Enrquez (1909)
drew on anthropological works to posit connections between racial
degeneration, civilization, modernization and social justice.
In the 1920s and '30s, Latin American anthropologists such as Manuel
Gamio in Mexico and Gilberto Freyre in Brazil used cultural relativism to
shape their nations on the ideal of racial mixture. Gamio's Teotihuacn
project (1922) was notable not only for its accomplishments in the fields
of archaeology and ethnography but also because it guided the
revolutionary state's intervention in land distribution, education, credit,
and public works in the region. The combination of the study,
preservation, and glorification of indigenous cultures with
recommendations for the material improvement and modernization of
Indians came to be known as indigenismo, and it was the dominant
framework for Latin American anthropological investigation and
institutional growth until the 1960s.
Since that time, influenced principally by neo-Marxist, structuralist, and

post-structuralist approaches, Latin American anthropology has often
been critical of modernization projects. The late 20th-century
anthropological study of peasantries, of cities and city dwellers, of social
movements, of social networks, of national culture, of internal and
transnational migration, of ethnic relations, and of political mediation
received some of their earliest explorations in Latin America.
Claudio Lomnitz
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Special fields of anthropology
The anthropological study of religion

The anthropology of religion is the comparative study of religions in their
cultural, social, historical, and material contexts.
The English term religion has no exact equivalent in most other

languages. For example, burial practices are more likely to be called
customs and not sharply differentiated from other ways of doing things.
Early Homo sapiens (for example, the Neanderthals at Krapina [now in
Croatia]) began burying their dead at least 130,000 years ago. To what
end? And how and why have such practices changed over time? What
might they have in common with the multitude of burial customsknown
to be associated with differing conceptions of death and lifeamong
people in the world today; for example, what might embalming practices
in ancient Egypt and 19th-century Bolivia have in common with each
other and with 21st-century embalming practices in North America? How
do these relate to secondary burials, involving the exhumation and
reburial of the corpse or its bones, as in Madagascar and Siberia, or
rituals of cremation, as in Japan, India, or France? Paradoxically,
anthropologists' documentation of the enormous diversity of human
customs, past and present, puts into question the very existence of
religion as a single coherent system of practices, values, or beliefs.
Indeed, what constitutes religion may be hotly debated even among
coreligionists. The study of religion in anthropology requires
consideration of all these matters, including anthropologists' own terms
of analysis.
Scholars of religion throughout the world have long recognized what the
American philosopher and psychologist William James (1902) called the
varieties of religious experience. Since the mid-19th century, one of the
first and most important contributions of anthropologists has been to
extend the study of those varieties beyond the formal doctrines and
liturgies of established religious institutions to include related customs,
regardless of when, where, and by whom they are practiced and whether
they are celebrated, suppressed, or taken for granted. The anthropology
of religion is the study of, in the words of the English anthropologist
Edward Evans-Pritchard (Theories of Primitive Religion [1965]), how
religious beliefs and practices affect in any society the minds, the
feelings, the lives, and the interrelations of its membersreligion is what
religion does. Although Edward Burnett Tylor's classic Primitive Culture
(1871) documented the wide-ranging doings of his fellow Europeans, most
anthropologists in the 19th and early 20th centuries focused on so-called
primitive peoples living outside Europe and North America, on the
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grounds that religion, increasingly defined by contrast to reason, was a

historically primitive form of behaviour that was already giving way to
science. Subsequent research has proved these assumptions to be wrong.
As anthropology has grown to include the study of all humans on an equal
footing and the field of anthropology is practiced throughout the world,
anthropologists continue to confront their parochial biases.
So, what is religion from a comparative perspective? Tylor's famous
minimum definition of Religion, the belief in Spiritual Beings betrays
the origins of the anthropological study of religion in 19th-century
debates over religion and science as alternative conceptions of
reality. The very notion of religion as distinct from other human doings
most likely originated in historical separations of church and state
thatfar from being universalwere specific to Europe and North
America. Yet Tylor's definition prompted ongoing efforts by
anthropologists to achieve a more neutral vocabulary, to move from such
particular terms as soul, spirit, belief, sin, god, priest, and so on (or in
German die Seele or French l'me, etc.) to other vernacular languages,
and to the multilingual, multisensory interactions through which
competing understandings of the phenomena in question are presented
and debated.
Contrary to their earlier expectations, anthropologists have documented

the increasing role of religion in public life throughout the world. Rituals,
socially prescribed acts once thought to be the hallmark of religious
behaviour, are now recognized as shaping human relations in many social
contexts. Thus, the work of scholars like Arnold van Gennep, Victor
Turner, Caroline Humphrey, and James Laidlaw on rites of passage and
ritualization may apply much more widely. Anthropologists now
characterize religion in more open-ended terms, stressing family
resemblances rather than categorical identities. They often focus on
worlds, powers, forces, agents or beings that stretch or defy what is
taken to be human, or humanly verifiable, and they emphasize
imagination and speculation. Yet Tylor's approach to religion as a mode of
explanation and understanding (and his implicit comparison with science)
persists to the present day, undoubtedly because the earlier questions
about illusion and ultimate reality, and the ethical issues with which they
are associated, remain open to debate.
The basic analytical premise of anthropological research on religion,
articulated in the classic works on religion of 19th-century scholars like
Karl Marx, mile Durkheim, and Max Weber is that human modes of
understanding, explaining, feeling, and relating are not simply derived
from human anatomy or induced by patterns of external stimuli. They
also originate in social formsthe division of labour, patterns of political
hierarchy or equality, gender relations, and the like. Thus, whatever the
ultimate reality of human suffering and death, anthropologists argue that
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moral insight and action derive from the efforts of human beings to
understand their immediate reality in the shifting, ambiguous,
contradictory, and conflictive patterns of the relationships in which they
are involved and the larger order, or cosmos, in which these relations are
set. The anthropology of religion thus entails a holistic approach,
including attention to social-cultural, psychological, material, historical,
and evolutionary dimensions of religious experience. Anthropologists'
early and enduring emphasis on the social reality of religion may have
grown historically out of long-standing concerns, particular to the heirs of
the Abrahamic religions of the Bible and the Qur'n, over incarnations of
the divine in human (or humanly apprehensible) forms as modes of
revelation. Yet, as refined through decades of cross-cultural research,
anthropologists' studies of such phenomena as divinity, incarnation,
immanence or embodiment, transcendence, sacrifice, prayer, preaching,
prophecy, myth, prohibition or taboo, possession, divination, initiation,
transgression and inversion, missionization, conversion, and mystification
have made major contributions to the comparative study of religion. At
the turn of the 21st century, topics at the forefront of anthropological
research on religion included moral imagination, cognition, subjectivity,
secularization, the changing relations of church and state, religion and
science, religious pluralism, migration and pilgrimage, religion and
ecology, ethics, and social justice.
Gillian Feeley-Harnik
Museum-based study
Museumsdefined as places for the organized collection, study, and
display of objectsbegan long before anthropology developed as an
academic discipline. Since the 6th century BC at Ur, the 3rd century BC in
Alexandria, and the 13th century AD in China, museums have collected
objects illustrating daily life in diverse cultures, past and present. Today
many of these broadly based collections are associated with the
discipline of anthropology, especially those that include osteological
specimens (human and prehuman remains) providing evidence of human
evolution and diversity, archaeological artifacts providing evidence of
past cultures, and ethnographic artifacts illustrating the lifeways of living
people.
The collecting of artifacts from distant lands and possibly disappearing
cultures began about the 15th century, during the age of exploration,
with the travels of Western explorers, missionaries, colonial
administrators, soldiers, scholars, traders, and tourists. Anthropological
collections grew significantly in the 19th century as European and North
American museums acquired artifacts from colonized peoples around the
world. In the United Kingdom, the British Museum (1753), the University
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of Cambridge's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (1884), the

University of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum (1884), and the Victoria and
Albert Museum (founded 1852), among others, acquired vast numbers of
artifacts from colonies in Africa, Oceania, and Asia. Museums in virtually
every European country, including the Ethnological Museum (1829;
formerly the Museum fr Vlkerkunde) in Berlin, the Museum of Man
(1878; formerly the Trocadro Museum of Ethnography) in Paris, and
museums of ethnography in Leiden (Netherlands), Stockholm, Rome, and
elsewhere, were formed to preserve utilitarian and exotic objects that
were not considered to be part of the history of Western civilization
itself.
In the United States most ethnographic artifacts were incorporated into

natural history museums. Once the idea of natural selection validated
ideas of evolution, in the mid-19th century, a theoretical justification
developed for grouping the artifacts of anthropology with extinct animals
and other natural history specimens. Ethnographic objects were seen as
evidence of the gradual progression of human beings from savagery to
civilization. Along with displays of living people at World's Fairs and
colonial expositions, they confirmed anthropology's status as an empirical
science and validated distinctions between Westerners and others. The
Smithsonian Institution (1846) acquired the vast American Indian
collections of the Bureau of Ethnology. Institutions such as the Milwaukee
Public Museum (1882), the Peabody Museum of Natural History (1866) at
Yale University, the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture (1885)
at the University of Washington, and the University of Pennsylvania
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (1887) in Philadelphia all
included artifacts considered anthropological from their beginnings. The
country's first museum devoted entirely to anthropology was the Peabody
Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (1866) at Harvard University,
followed in 1901 by the Lowie Museum of Anthropology (now the Phoebe
Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology) at the University of California.
The Field Museum in Chicago (1893) was established (as the Columbian
Museum of Chicago) to house the collections assembled for the World's
Columbian Exposition by Frederic W. Putnam, Harvard Peabody's first
director, and his assistant, Franz Boas.
With Putnam's sponsorship, Boas joined the American Museum of Natural
History (1869) in 1895. Before he began to devote all his time to work at
Columbia University in 1905, Boas managed to shift the paradigm of
museum anthropology from an evolutionary approach, in which objects
from many cultures were grouped according to the evolution of specific
technologies, to a culture area approach that focused on local histories
and environments. While at the American Museum, Boas established a
broad research agenda for museum anthropology, linking the study of
artifacts to texts, photographs, musical recordings, and other
nonmaterial aspects of culture.
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Over the next century, as museums with anthropological collections

continued to develop as research institutions, many of the
anthropologists who worked there turned away from collection-based
work. Archaeologists and physical anthropologists continued to use
collections for study, but, until a late 20th-century revival of interest in
the history of anthropology and museums and in studies of material
culture and the anthropology of art, few cultural anthropologists worked
actively with collections. Exhibits developed in the mid-20th century
continued to reflect the culture area approach of Boas or the
structural-functional model that had developed in Britain, focusing on
social institutions and using objects to illustrate abstract points.
The last quarter of the 20th century witnessed great change in the
practice of anthropology in museums. The civil rights and decolonization
movements of the 1960s increased awareness of the politics of collecting
and representation. Ethical issues that had been ignored in the past
began to influence museum practices. By the turn of the 21st century,
most anthropologists working in museums had understood the need to
incorporate diverse points of view in exhibitions and collections care and
to rely on the expertise of people from the cultures represented as well
as museum professionals. At the same time, many new museumssuch as
the U'mista Cultural Centre (1980) in Alert Bay, British Columbia,
Canadawere established within the communities that created the
objects on display. Anthropologists in museums also were concerned with
issues such as the ethics of collecting, access to collections and
associated data, and ownership and repatriation.
Starting in the 1930s, Western artists drew attention to the masks and
carvings of non-Western cultures. These were admired not for their
cultural meaning but for their form and aesthetic qualities. While
museum anthropologists remain primarily concerned with the cultural
context of artifacts, the boundary between art and artifact has begun to
erode. Anthropology collections include the work of non-Western artists
as well as artifacts from Western cultures. Artifacts representing the
interaction of cultures throughout the worldincluding things made of
recycled industrial materials or objects made for sale to touristsare also
part of the legitimate subject of museum anthropologists.
Enid Schildkrout
The anthropological study of education

From its inception, anthropology has been concerned with the processes
that transform an infant with indefinite potential into an adult with a
particular role in a particular group (family, society, class, nation). To
achieve adulthood, an infant must learn, and much of that learning
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depends on how the adults around them organize themselves. A child's

education takes place not only in schools and other formalized
institutions but also through the unfocused processes that inform family
and community life. Thus, anthropologists investigate the psychological
processes of enculturation and the social processes involved in ensuring
that the various human roles that form the web of a complex society are
reproduced over the generations.
Learning is at the root of most definitions of culture. From the cultural

perspective, learning activates human possibilities and shapes them to fit
a particular human environment or culture. This process has many
facets, including, for example, who attends to a child (mother, older
children, other caregivers), when (at various times in the day and over
the years), and with what consequences (some organizations are better in
allowing children to achieve particular possibilitiesfailure at school,
romantic genius, sensitive husband and fatheras these might be
mentioned in a eulogy). Without extensive and long-term interaction with
adults, human infants cannot develop fully. Human reproduction is not
solely a genetic or psychological process; it is also a sociocultural one
that produces people with particular abilities specialized for particular
positions (and often exhibiting particular disabilities when assuming
positions to which they are not suited).
Interest in what is known as the distribution of knowledge has
transformed enculturation studies and is beginning to converge with work
in settings where education is formalized, particularly schools. Through
these institutions complex societies reproduce their social organization.
There are two vital issues in the field. The first is the need to clarify the
processes through which children are placed in particular positionswho
and what is involved in making some people janitors and others heads of
corporations. The second concerns how to understand how certain
processesparticularly those grounded in school examinations and
psychological testinghave become the main legitimate means through
which people are placed in positions. The democratic ideal that, through
testing and examinations, personal merit can be identified and rewarded
has seldom worked as hoped. Educational anthropologists point to the
continuity between the education the children of the most prosperous
receive at home and in their communities, the organization of schooling,
and the pedagogical styles used in school. Thus, the children of poor or
immigrant families are more likely to failwhatever their individual
meritsbecause of cultural discontinuities, the great dissimilarities
between the cultures of their homes and neighborhoods and that of the
school. Other studies focus on the structuring of schooling to show how
the very concern with measuring merit continually reproduces failure on
an ever-expanding scale, thereby devaluing the contributions each
individual makes to the welfare of society.
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These debates continue, producing ever more careful descriptions of

everyday lives in classrooms and schools that reveal hidden
processesincluding processes of resistance, appropriation, and
co-option. Each new description confirms the usefulness of the core
methodological choices of the field: induction from ethnographic
observation.
Herv Varenne
The study of ethnicity, minority groups, and identity

Ethnicity refers to the identification of a group based on a perceived
cultural distinctiveness that makes the group into a people. This
distinctiveness is believed to be expressed in language, music, values,
art, styles, literature, family life, religion, ritual, food, naming, public
life, and material culture. This cultural comprehensivenessa unique set
of cultural characteristics perceived as expressing themselves in
commonly unique ways across the sociocultural life of a
populationcharacterizes the concept of ethnicity. It revolves around not
just a population, a numerical entity, but a people, a
comprehensively unique cultural entity.
The concept of ethnicity contrasts with that of race, which refers to the
perceived unique common physical and biogenetic characteristics of a
population. The criteria used to characterize a groupwhether
comprehensive unique cultural characteristics or biogenetic
onesdetermine whether the group is regarded as an ethnic or a racial
group. In the late 20th century and at the turn of the 21st century,
Irish was considered an ethnic label, while white was a racial one.
A minority group is a group whose unique cultural characteristics are

perceived to be different from those characterizing the dominant groups
in society. In anthropology the term may refer to groups categorized by
ethnicity, race, gender, or sexual orientation. The term is not without
controversy: Many regard it as contradictory, for the relative population
growth rate of subordinated ethnic groups in the United States, if
continued, is such that after 2050 the minority could well be the
numerical majority. Others regard the term as patronizing; by
emphasizing the purely numerical dimension, it evades issues of group
powerlessness as well as the substantive values and interests that
minority groups may uphold.
Anthropologists regard ethnicity, race, and minority groups as social and

cultural constructs and not biological ones. In all cases the formation and
perception of identities are to be explained as a result of the operation
of specific social, cultural, political, and economic relationships over a
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long period of historical time.
Identity refers to both group self-awareness of common unique

characteristics and individual self-awareness of inclusion in such a group.
Self-awareness may be formulated in comprehensive cultural terms
(ethnic identity), in biogenetic terms (racial identity), in terms of sexual
orientation, and in terms of gender. Persons and groups often adhere to
multiple and fluid identities, features of which may be selectively
relevant in specific social situations.
Some anthropologists go further and call attention to the growth of
hybriditythe dissolution of rigid cultural boundaries between groups
hitherto perceived as separate, the intermixture of various identities, in
effect the dissolution of identities themselves. Much anthropology in this
field demonstrates how identities have been and are invented and
reinvented for political and other purposes, out of disparate historical
and cultural experiences. Other studies have repeatedly shown
thatcontrary to a group's self-representation and assertion of an
identityidentities are riven with contradictions and are not to be
understood as seamlessly unified comprehensive cultural entities.
Identity in terms of ethnicity, race, minority group status, gender, and

sexual orientation is often contrasted with class consciousnessgroup
self-awareness in terms of belonging to the same socioeconomic group.
Some anthropologists write of the emergence of a new identity politics
as distinct from an older class politicsthe growth of what are called
new social movements. The term new social movements refers to gay
and lesbian, feminist, and civil rights and environmental movements and
is used to distinguish these from trade union and other class-based
movements. These distinctions sometimes suggest that persons have to
choose between uniting for social and political action primarily on the
grounds of common membership in perceived ethnic, racial, minority,
gender, sexual orientation, or environmental groups rather than on the
grounds of membership in a similar socioeconomic group.
Identities owe their formation and position in society to the operation of
social, economic, cultural, and political forces that are inseparable from
the forces that create and maintain socioeconomic groups. In this view,
rather than being opposed, identity politics and class politics, while
distinct, have the potential to be allied actors in a common political
process.
Donald Keith Robotham
Urban anthropology
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Urban anthropology is the study of cultural systems and identities in

cities as well as the various political, social, economic, and cultural
forces that shape urban forms and processes. Although anthropologists
have studied the city since the 1930s, the label urban anthropology
became common only in the early 1960s. Interest in urban issues was
originally an extension of the anthropological interest in peasants and
rural areas. Using research methods developed for and through studies of
small tribes and primitive societies, anthropologists studied spatially
bounded communities such as ghettos, ethnic neighbourhoods, and
urban villages. Social problems (especially poverty) were the focus of
most urban anthropological research. In the 1960s and early '70s, Oscar
Lewis's controversial culture of poverty thesis generated intense
debates on the meaning of culture, the need for historical
contextualization, and the structural factors that produce urban
inequalities. Anthropologists also debated the meanings of city and
urban, which were initially informed by Western-biased knowledge. To
avoid this ethnocentrism, urban anthropologists used ethnographic
methods, historical analysis, and cross-cultural comparisons to explore
the social mechanisms and cultural institutions that differentiate cities
from primitive societies and peasant communities as well as Western
from non-Western cities. Unlike earlier views, which depicted the city as
the site of fragmentation, alienation, and impersonal relationships, urban
ethnography has been powerful in showing the strong friendships, kinship
relations, and ethnic solidarities that may structure interactions in urban
centres.
During the 1970s, urban anthropologists also shifted attention from
studies in the city (i.e., viewing the city as merely a site for research) to
studies of the city (i.e., making the urban dimension central to the
analysis of relationships and symbols). Some argued that only the latter
should be considered urban anthropology. Typologies continued to be
formulated to map diverse urban forms. One common typology was based
on a distinction between industrial and preindustrial cities. Within these
two categories, other classifications were presented. Focusing on
historical articulations between economic and political structures,
Richard Fox, for example, distinguished among regal-ritual,
administrative, mercantile, colonial, and industrial cities. Others have
added types such as postcolonial, modernist, and postmodern cities.
Research in cities posed several methodological and conceptual

challenges to anthropology. In particular, urban anthropologists were
pioneers in questioning emphasis on holism and synchronic analysis.
Political economy became useful in analyzing historical and contemporary
forces that produce inequalities within and between cities. In addition,
urban anthropologists tried to find other methods (such as network
analysis and extended case studies) to research the city. By the early
1980s they also drew on methods and theoretical insights from other
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fields to grasp the complexity of urban life and to account for the
multiple actors that shape the city and its spaces. Current studies are
careful not to homogenize urban types and are sensitive to diversity
between and within cities. Since the early 1990s, urban anthropologists
have been studying a broad range of practical and theoretical issues such
as homelessness, spatial practices, popular culture, social movements
and citizenship, gender and racial inequalities, global processes, and
transnational connections.
Farha Ghannam
National and transnational studies

With anthropology's historical orientation toward non-European societies,
after the end of World War II many anthropologists were confronted with
successful national movements, as the old colonial empires of Asia and
Africa gave way to newly independent states.
The new states gave rise to new questions in anthropology: What are the
cultural dimensions of political movements in general? Do national
movements, does nationalism, have particular cultural dimensions? Are
national movements constituted culturally? To answer these questions,
anthropologists borrowed the idea of modernization from political
science and linked it to familiar anthropological objects, such as family
and kin groups. In the 1960s the University of Chicago's Committee on the
Comparative Study of New Nations, which was composed of sociologists,
anthropologists, and political scientists, published Old Societies, New
States, a collection of essays examining case studies of old cultural forms
blending with new political institutions.
Modernization theory, however, was an intellectual project that
developed in the shadow of the Cold War, and it was often more
prescriptive of what might be than analytically descriptive of what was.
Debates in later years focused on the shortcomings of the theory, and
then the study of nationalism moved to the discipline of history, where
the 19th-century roots of national movements were examined.
In the early 1980s Benedict Anderson, a political scientist, made the

extremely influential move of analyzing nations as imagined
communities. His argument that nations, like religions, are based on the
relation of this world to the next allowed anthropologists to relate ideas
of meaning and solidarity or culture and community to political
movements. The 1980s then become a very productive time for the
anthropological studies of nations. Yet these studies were formulated
around ideas of a national culture, and this concept, other scholars
argued, needed to be questioned. Ranajith Guha and the anticolonial
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historiographers of the subaltern studies collective argued on the one

hand that nonelite groups share neither the political space nor the
cultural world of national elites, and other anthropologists argued on the
other hand that the idea that culture could be tied to a place such as a
country was conceptually flawed.
Arjun Appadurai, a pioneer in the latter argument, went on to develop in

a series of influential essays the anthropological field of transnational
studies, which is based on an idea of culture not tied to a place but
rather in flow. By thinking of these flows as making up scapes such as
mediascapes, these works allow anthropologists to understand the
relationshipbetween, say, between, say, satellite TV or the World Wide
Web and a country's national development. This approach also enables
new anthropological inquiries into a rather old phenomenon, that of
diasporas. Interconnections in the 21st century work in new ways
radically different from the old, and the study of diasporic groups and the
countries they call home highlights for anthropologists another
fascinating 21st-century question: What are the boundaries of the nation?
Pradeep Jeganathan
The study of gender

Gender has always been a topic of anthropological investigation, but the
1970s brought about a critical rethinking of assumptions about gender,
spurred in part by the women's movement and in part by the entrance of
large numbers of women into academic careers. During the next quarter
century, this rethinking opened up new conceptual pathways for
considering not only the relationships between sex and gender, kinship
and procreation, men's work and women's work, and public and private
spheres but also the significance of gender to language, primatology,
archaeology, religion, and cosmology. At first many studies of gender
focused primarily on women since they had been underrepresented in the
anthropological record, but the result was that gender came to stand for
women. A primary question in these early studies was how and why
women were subordinated in patriarchal social systems. Soon, however,
the awareness that men, too, have gender sparked a much deeper
analysis of the ways in which definitions of gender were mutually
constructed. Rather than assuming that gender is a natural given,
therefore universal, based on an extension of animal mating behaviour,
new studies demonstrated that, just as different societies produce a
variety of religious, kinship, and economic systems, they also vary in
terms of gender systems. While it was often assumed that sex was the
natural given and gender the cultural definition built upon that natural
base, some studies have raised questions about the relation between sex
and sexual orientation and, thus, whether there might be more than two
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genders and whether sex itself may, to a large extent, be culturally

constructed. Studies of primates, long thought to hold the key to human
behaviour, have shown that results depend to a significant extent on the
theoretical lens through which scientists view their behaviour as well as
on which primates are the object of study; this discovery has destabilized
the ground on which many assumptions about gender were based. When
the critical gender lens has been focused on the archaeological record,
old biases and assumptionsfor example, about man the hunter, woman
the gathererhave been overturned or significantly modified, new
approaches to the study of the past and material culture have emerged,
and origin stories have been changed.
Another area creatively affected by the focus on gender is that of

linguistic anthropology: these researchers now note not just the gendered
aspects of linguistic structurepronouns, for examplebut also the
different ways in which women and men use language, asking to what
extent gender is culturally constituted through linguistic practice over
the life cycle. Other researchers have studied the way in which language
lends connotations of gender to conceptual fields, for example, soft
versus hard sciences, and how these labels may affect the women and
men working in those fields.
Still others have raised questions about gender in topics that seem to
have little connection to gender, such as colonialism and Orientalism,
and in much broader systems including worldviews, theology, and
cosmology; these researchers ask, for example, about the consequences
for men and women when the deity is symbolically male and the earth is
symbolically female. And some have even asked about the notions of
gender implicit in the idea of the anthropologist and the anthropological
endeavour itself. In short, the proliferation of anthropological studies of
gender during the last quarter of the 20th century opened up new paths
to yet unexplored areas in the 21st.
Carol L. Delaney
Political and legal anthropology

While the intellectual and methodological roots of political anthropology
can be traced to Montesquieu and Alexis de Tocqueville, who viewed
politics and governance as cultural constructs, Elizabeth Colson dated the
modern field of political anthropology to 1940 and the publication of
African Political Systems (1940), edited by Meyer Fortes and Edward
Evans-Pritchard. Edmund R. Leach's Political Systems of Highland Burma
(1954) and Michael G. Smith's Government in Zazzau (1960) were
landmark studies that contributed significantly to more refined
conceptual approaches. Max Gluckman made a singular contribution to
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the development of the field both as the founder of the influential

Manchester school and through his focus on the role of conflict, which
provided an explanation for political change within the dominant
functionalist paradigm then prevailing in anthropology. (The functionalist
approach conceptualized societies as existing in a state of equilibrium.)
From the traditional study of stateless societies to the contemporary
analysis of complex state-society relations in an age of globalization, the
central theoretical focus of political anthropology, as identified by Abner
Cohen in Two-Dimensional Man (1974), has been the dialectical relations
between symbolic action and power relationships.
Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) and Negara: The

Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (1980) were two major works
employing a semiotic/hermeneutic approach. In Stratagems and Spoils
(1969), F.G. Bailey illustrated an alternate approach, which applied game
theory to the analysis of actor-driven politics. Problems of legitimacy are
a central concern of political anthropology. This concern is seen in such
works as David Kertzer's Ritual, Politics, and Power (1988), which
analyzes the role of ritual in maintaining and undermining regimes. In
addition, the political role of symbols, myths, and rhetorical strategies
are central foci of analysis. The essays in The Frailty of Authority (1986),
a central volume of the Political Anthropology series edited by Myron J.
Aronoff in the 1980s and '90s, deal with attempts to transform power into
authority and to challenge the legitimacy of established authority in a
wide variety of cultural contexts. If mile Durkheim's functionalism
dominated the early stages of the development of political anthropology,
the intellectual influences of Max Weber and Karl Marx were more
apparent during this phase of the field's development. Contemporary
political anthropologists, having abandoned their predecessors' emphasis
on cohesion and consensus, tend to focus more on political and cultural
contestation.
Self-reflexive critical analyses of traditional fieldwork methods and the

concept of culture and theoretical influences from feminist, postmodern,
critical legal, and cultural studies (among others) have had a
considerable impact on the development of the field. These trends are
exemplified by PoLAR (Political and Legal Anthropology Review;
published by the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, a unit
of the American Anthropological Association) and in several series
focusing on the field that have been published by several major university
presses. Informing much contemporary analysis are the intellectual
influence of Benedict Anderson's formulation of imagined community;
Pierre Bourdieu's notions of habitus, doxa, and cultural capital, which
reveal how power is inscribed in the scripts of everyday life; Michel
Foucault's discourse analysis and concern with the multiple ways in which
power is implicated in the constitution of all areas of social life; Antonio
Gramsci's notion of hegemony; and Jrgen Habermas's concept of the
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public sphere and emphasis on aspects of gender in politics and culture.
Among the many areas of interest to contemporary political

anthropologists are the politics of collective identity (class, gender, race,
sexual orientation, ethnicity, and nationalism), collective memory
(invention of tradition, commemoration, and memorialization), civil
society, collective action (particularly political protest), democracy (and
democratization), globalization and localization, and legal studies (among
others). The blurring of disciplinary boundaries has resulted in a fruitful
cross-fertilization of scholarship from anthropology, cultural studies,
history, political science, sociology, and women's studies to produce a
richly diverse field of study.
Myron J. Aronoff
Medical anthropology
Medical anthropology emerged as a special field of research and training
after World War II, when senior American anthropologists were brought in
as consultants on health care projects in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.
In the Cold War rhetoric of the time, aid to friendly Third World
countries would strengthen their governments and forestall
revolutionary discontent. In these countriesin stark contrast to
countries with advanced economiesinfectious diseases were the main
cause of illness and death, and in many regions 50 percent or more of the
infants born every year died before their fifth birthday. From 1945
through the 1960s, antibiotics were transforming the treatment of
infectious diseases. Their use, combined with immunization of children,
sanitation, and improved nutrition, was in the forefront of large-scale
foreign aid programs.
The physicians who planned and directed health care projects at that
time were almost immediately confronted with failure when townspeople
underutilized their clinics, ignored instructions to boil water, or in other
ways failed to comply with professional advice. Project workers were
convinced that local cultural traditions formed a superstitious barrier to
the rational behaviour that they advocated. In this early period the
anthropologists they consulted usually accepted their formulation of the
problem, but they encouraged a degree of cultural relativism by
suggesting ways that programs could acknowledge local customs and use
traditional concepts to explain desirable new practices. This approach
was illustrated in Health, Culture, and Community (1955; edited by
Benjamin D. Paul), a collection of case studies first presented at the
Harvard School of Public Health. The volume became a basic text among
teachers who in the 1960s were encouraged, by private foundations and
by the availability of research funding through the rapidly expanding
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National Institutes of Health, to initiate graduate programs in medical

anthropology.
Shamanism and other forms of ritual curing had been a major topic in
anthropology from the beginning of the discipline, but the first studies of
the whole repertoire of illness concepts and therapeutic practices
available to members of a community began in the 1960s and '70s. These
years were a time of political turmoil in which anthropology was
criticized as an artifact of European and American colonialism. Thus,
students were alert to historical conflicts and injustice in the
communities they studied, many of which were undergoing processes of
decolonization. In addition, the tradition-modernity dichotomy, which
then dominated research on cultural change, seemed to have little
analytic value for understanding folk practitioners who were adding
antibiotic injections to their repertoire of ritual curing and herbal
remedies. Indeed, in their own society the rationality of modern Western
medicine was challenged by scholars who faulted its epistemologyin
particular, its positivist separation of mind and body, its dehumanizing
focus on body parts, malfunctions, and lesions, and its treatment of
pregnancy, birthing, and homosexuality as pathological rather than
normal conditions.
The consulting work that originally focused anthropological attention on
issues of health care was often ad hoc, but it did draw upon previous
functionalist studies of acculturation. The second generation of scholars,
who brought medical anthropology to maturity as a special field of
research, considered functionalism to be a tautological and politically
conservative set of theories. Their work, which began to be published in
the 1970s, was inspired by socialist thought, French structuralism,
dynamic theories in psychological anthropology, and interpretive studies
of cultural symbolism.
Americans took the lead in developing medical anthropology as a

distinctive field of scholarship and practical work, but European scholars
and practitioners have also founded specialist societies, journals, and
monograph series. As the field expanded, subspecialties focused on issues
such as infectious diseases, aging, and nutrition emerged.
The label critical medical anthropology was created by Marxist scholars
who faulted much work in the field for neglecting inequities in the
political economy. A textbook by Hans A. Baer, Merrill Singer, and Ida
Susser, Medical Anthropology and the World System: A Critical
Perspective (1997), presents the Marxist critique. This approach has been
assimilated in an ecumenical and philosophically complex approach set
forth in Byron Good's Medicine, Rationality, and Experience: An
Anthropological Perspective (1994). Paul Farmer's Pathologies of Power:
Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (2003) is a major
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work of this kind.

Charles Miller Leslie
The anthropology of food, nutrition, and agriculture

Examinations of the topics of food, nutrition, and agriculture illustrate
the intersection of different subfields of anthropology, particularly
physical anthropology, archaeology, and social and cultural anthropology.
Anthropologists have contributed to the specialized fields of nutrition and
agriculture a more holistic perspective based on the use of history, direct
observation, and documentary accounts; the examination of nutrition and
agriculture within households and communities; and the interconnections
between different parts of the food systemincluding markets, cuisine,
farming systems, international regulations, and trade, for example.
Distinct theoretical perspectives such as the materialist, evolutionary,
symbolic, and ecological are reflected in anthropological work in these
areas (including, for example, symbolic theories of Claude Lvi-Strauss
and Mary Douglas, as well as materialist theories of Marvin Harris and
Sidney Mintz).
The specialized field of nutritional anthropology was defined in North
America in the mid-1970s, although anthropologists have been interested
in food since the late 19th century. Food is the foundation of every
economy and plays a key part of the ethnographic description of every
people, their society and culture.
Both anthropologists and archaeologists have researched the evolution of

subsistence systems and how farming emerged (with many attendant
changes in technology) from food gathering about 10,000 years ago.
Concern with the time and place of the first appearance of domesticated
plants and animals has given way to questions about how domestication
occurred under a variety of ecological conditions at different times and
places. Hunting and gathering, horticulture, pastoralism, and the
development of agriculture demonstrate different ways in which people
have adapted to their environment to feed themselves. The past hundred
years have seen the rapid development of industrial agriculture and
industrial food systems. Anthropologists have documented how processes
such as colonialism, industrial capitalism, and agribusiness have radically
changed food production and people's diets, often through the favouring
of cash crops over food crops. Detailed ethnographic fieldwork exposes
the health consequences of dietary change, including increased or
decreased rates of malnutrition and nutritional deficiencies.
Some anthropologists have concentrated on food's ability to convey
meaning. Food is a marker of ethnicity, gender, and class.
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Anthropologists have shown how different social groups create and

maintain relationships through the sharing of food. Food figures
prominently in studies of religion where the symbolic importance of
bread, corn, or rice, for example, is emphasized through ritual.
Women's special relation to food is highlighted in studies of food

production and provisioning and is also reflected in the prevalence of
eating disorders among women (anorexia nervosa, bulimia, obesity,
addiction to dieting, etc.). Women, as gatekeepers of household food
provisioning, are not always able to control their own dietary intake.
Access to food is perhaps the most basic human right, bringing together
work on food, nutrition, and agriculture from an applied anthropology
perspective. Anthropologists regularly enter into policy debates on food
security, exploring how nutrition and agricultural interventions in
developing countries may result in increased food insecurity. They
critique government officials, development workers, and local elites who
try to rationalize peasant farming systems based on Western farming
systems. Research at the turn of the 21st century explored how farmers
in different parts of the world maintain genetic diversity as a strategy to
ensure food security; anthropologists and others examined how
biotechnology and genetically modified food may influence food diversity
and food security in the future.
Penny Van Esterik
Environmental and ecological studies in anthropology

Analysis of the relations between human societies and their environments
is much older than the discipline of anthropology, but from the start
anthropologists have had an abiding interest in the topic. A view known
as environmental determinism, which holds that environmental features
directly determine aspects of human behaviour and society, was
propounded by many Enlightenment philosophers, who argued that
differences among peoples were not innate but were due to climate,
landscape, and other environmental factors. By the early 20th century,
however, environmental determinism was under attack by influential
anthropologists such as A.L. Kroeber. These critics argued that the
environment might limit the spread of certain sociocultural features
(making agriculture impossible in the Arctic, for example) but that it
cannot explain why features such as agriculture originated and spread in
other areas.
This latter view, known as possibilism, is still dominant in anthropology
and many other social sciences and humanities, but possibilism itself has
limitations. First, historical, archaeological, and ethnographic evidence
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indicates that the patterned associations between environmental

features and sociocultural ones cannot be viewed in possibilist terms; for
example, agriculture was not practiced by Native Americans in California,
even though it was environmentally possible, while in North America's
arid Southwest, other Indian peoples transformed the environment
through irrigation agriculture.
In reaction to the determinist-possibilist debate, Julian Steward in 1955
developed an approach he termed cultural ecology. Steward proposed
that cultures interact with their environmental settings by adapting
features of technology, economic organization, and even kinship or
religion to allow people to best pursue their livelihoods. Thus, cultural
ecology views the environment as presenting problems and opportunities,
not just limits or simple determinants, while recognizing that the
resulting cultural adaptations depend as much on the sociocultural
features at hand as on the environment. For example, a population with
stone tools and relying on wild foods will adapt to the Australian bush in
very different ways than one with domesticated sheep, metal, and fossil
fuels.
Steward developed cultural ecology in influential studies of Great Basin

American Indians and other hunter-gatherers and of the rise of complex
societies in arid valleys scattered around the globe. Prominent studies
that followed in Steward's footsteps include Richard Lee's work on the
!Kung San of Africa's Kalahari desert and Robert Netting's work on
household agricultural production. The cultural ecology approach has also
been very influential within archaeology.
One of the most famous works in ecological anthropology is Roy

Rappaport's study of the Tsembaga Maring of highland New Guinea. In it
he argued that Tsembaga ritual regulated pig husbandry and the
incidence of warfare and thereby responded to environmental
feedback by adjusting human population densities, work effort, food
production, and a host of other factors. Rappaport's study exemplifies the
very popular notion that premodern human-environment systems are
closely regulated to maintain a balance or equilibrium through complex,
often unrecognized feedback mechanisms that maintain population below
environmental carrying capacity.
This equilibrium-centred view was widely challenged within anthropology

beginning in the 1970s, however. The approach known as political ecology
criticizes it for portraying premodern societies as timeless and outside of
history. Other anthropologists, working under the label historical ecology,
reject not only the equilibrium approach but also the notion of static
nonhuman environments, stressing that all environments inhabited by
human societies in the past 50,000 years are anthropogenic (that is,
modified or engineered by activities such as controlled burning,
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irrigation, terracing, etc.). Taking another approach, behavioral

ecologists guided by modern evolutionary theory argue that humans, like
all species, are designed to efficiently convert resources into offspring
and that any group-level phenomenon such as population equilibrium is a
by-product of individual adaptation. Increasingly, research guided by
these three approaches is replacing or at least transforming the legacy of
Stewardian cultural ecology.
The field of ethno-ecology focuses on the ways people conceptualize

elements of the natural environment and human activity within it and
investigates how these concepts vary culturally as well as reveal universal
aspects of human cognition. Another trend in contemporary
environmental studies at the turn of the 21st century was the growing
importance of applied research, focused on such issues as environmental
justice and sustainable development (see below).
Eric A. Smith
Development anthropology
The final quarter of the 20th century saw an increasing involvement of
social anthropologists with the process of accelerated incorporation of
formerly colonial countries into the world economic system. Referred to
as development, the process of incorporation involves the transfer to
poor countries of technology, funding, and expertise from countries of
the industrial north through multinational, governmental, and
nongovernmental organizations and increasingly by private-sector
corporations. Although some anthropologists were involved in the
immediate post-World War II period of decolonization, the emergence of
development anthropology as an academically acceptable subfield dates
only from the 1980s. At the turn of the 21st century, most graduate
departments of anthropology in the United States, Great Britain, and
France included at least one specialist in the application of
anthropological theory and methods, particularly those of political
ecology, to the achievement of an economic development that is also
equitable, environmentally sustainable, culturally pluralistic, and socially
just. A perhaps larger number of development anthropologists are
employed outside of academia, by government aid agencies, the World
Bank, United Nations agencies, and various nongovernmental
organizations such as OXFAM, World Union for the Conservation of
Nature, and CARE. Over time, anthropologists have moved from being
peripheral members of the teams to being team leaders, responsible for
assuring that the work of all technical specialists is socially sound.
The legitimacy of a specifically development-oriented anthropology has
been challenged by persons fundamentally wedded to cultural relativism,
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who argue that anthropologists might describe social change but should
never participate in causing it. Increasingly, though, the profession has
acknowledged the moral necessity of rejecting those who hold to an
inviolability of local culture, even when this position results in poverty,
infant mortality, child labour, gender hierarchies, and the general
exclusion of the poor from democratic participation in government. This
commitment to improving the well-being and the political power of the
poor has been challenged also by some other development specialists,
particularly neoliberal economists, for whom the prime measure of
national development is not increasing equity but growth in gross
national product (GNP) per capita.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of development anthropologists has

been the demonstration to economists and technical specialists that the
beneficiaries of development, the low-income majorities in poor
countries, must be active participants at all levels of the process if it is
to be successful. This means that their expertise as resource managers
must be acknowledged and fully incorporated in the identification,
design, implementation, and evaluation of development projects.
Anthropologists have also demonstrated the internal complexity and
socioeconomic differentiation (by class, age, gender, ethnicity,
education, etc.) of local communities that were assumed by outside
experts to be homogeneous. Development anthropologists have
repeatedly demonstrated that projects assumed to be broadly beneficial
have too often created more losers than winners.
Among the areas where anthropologists have had a substantial impact on

development thinking are river basin interventions, especially involving
population resettlement upstream and downstream from large
hydropower dams; pastoral production systems on semiarid rangelands;
community environmental management and social forestry; the gender
dimensions of development; ethno-medicine and the incorporation of
indigenous practitioners within health delivery systems; and indigenous
knowledge and biodiversity.
Michael M Horowitz
Applied anthropology
Applied anthropology is the aspect of anthropology that serves practical
community or organizational needs. In Europe this subfield started in the
19th and early 20th centuries, when ethnographic information was
collected and used by colonial Belgian, French, British, Dutch, and
Russian administrators. In North America the Mexican government in 1917
was the first to officially recognize its usefulness.
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All branches of anthropology have applied aspects. Physical

anthropologists work in forensics and industrial design. Archaeologists
support historic preservation. Anthropological linguists have designed
educational programs and whole writing systems. Some degree of
identification with other disciplines, especially sociology, is frequent.
Practitioners may have supplementary credentials in fields such as public
health or law.
Among the many professional groups associated with applied

anthropology are Anthropology in Action (in Britain), the Society for
Applied Anthropology (SfAA) and the National Association for the Practice
of Anthropology (in the United States), and the Society of Applied
Anthropology (in Canada). France, Russia, and India have government
departments devoted to anthropological research, some of which has
applied value. Since the 1980s anthropologists working outside of
research institutions at times have been called practicing
anthropologists. Applied or practicing anthropologists are almost never
licensed or certified. They may, however, perform legally mandated
studies, such as environmental impact assessments or gender analyses,
for governments or international agencies.
The support of policy-related decision making is common to much of

applied social or cultural anthropology. The typical approach is holistic
and gives attention to context. Flexible research methodologies often
combine statistical techniques with participatory, qualitative methods
such as participant observation, case studies, focus groups, key informant
interviews, or rapid appraisal. The work may entail service as a culture
broker or even conflict mediation. Some practitioners become advocates
promoting specific groups' interests. Action anthropologists work as
insiders to help manage change and build self-sufficiency. Applied
activities are rarely documented in widely accessible publications.
Applied anthropology has made positive contributions to public life.
Industrial research in the 1930s and '40s influenced modern business
administration and management techniques and theories. In many
countries, including Australia, Canada, India, Mexico, Russia, and the
United States, anthropologists have helped to negotiate or implement
policies strengthening indigenous peoples' rights. On a global scale, Franz
Boas deserves credit for stimulating the research that proved, as a 1963
United Nations declaration states, that any doctrine of racial
differentiation or superiority is scientifically false.
Present-day employment of applied anthropologists by industries such as

mining (e.g., in Western Australia) shows, on the other hand, that
practitioners may work against indigenous peoples' interests rather than
for them. Anthropologists working on behalf of governments (e.g., Mexico
or China) have at times promoted an approach to acculturation that
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disregards indigenous peoples' social needs and values.
Applied anthropology tends to be a controversial pursuit. Early

anthropologists' claims of ethical neutrality vis--vis colonial policies
were challenged in France and Great Britain. Conflicts about involvement
in the Vietnam War and other Cold War projects created deep rifts in
American anthropology during the 1960s and '70s. In the 1980s American,
British, and Canadian professional associations responded to such
conflicts by writing codes of ethics establishing minimum (but
nonenforceable) standards for professional conduct. Ongoing debates
sustain a wholesome concern about moral and political dilemmas posed
by some applied projects. Some of the most vigorous critiques are written
by applied anthropologists themselves.
Suzanne L. Hanchett
Visual anthropology
Visual anthropology is both the practice of anthropology through a visual
medium and the study of visual phenomena in culture and society.
Therein lie the promise and dilemma of the field. Associated with
anthropology since the mid-to-late 19th century, it has not attained the
status of a subdiscipline with a distinct set of theories and methods.
Historically, it has been a collection of diverse interests and practices,
most notably in the use of visual data for analysis, the application of film
and photography as tools in field research, and, to a lesser extent, the
dissemination of anthropological ideas through visual media, pedagogical
and other public interest applications in education, museums, and
commercial and public media. More specifically, there have been two
recent developments: the study of all manner of visual representation
and communication and, most promising though less widely pursued, the
attempt to realize an entire anthropological project through visual media
(especially film) alone.
Film and photography have been the longest-standing concerns, but

ethnographic film has come closest to achieving genre status and
received the most attention and blame. There is still no agreement about
the status of ethnographic film in anthropology or in film studies. This
ambivalence is due to the 19th-century heritage of anthropology,
representing science and positivism on the one hand and humanities,
romanticism, and hermeneutics on the other. Add to this the dual
components of filmmaking, documentation and aesthetics. Initially
wedded to functional theory in anthropology and realist aesthetics in art
and literature, film seemed easily adaptable to a scientific visual
project. Though largely ignored by anthropologists, the aesthetic aspects
of film were also present from the beginning, a circumstance that led to
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100 years of misunderstanding. Filmmaking and ethnographic

requirements are often at odds, compounded by the different
competencies demanded by the two disciplinesexpertise in both is
rarely brought together in one person.
Nevertheless, over the past 100 years, a large body of visual work that is
loosely identified as ethnographic has grown up around the world. Films
so designated either are made by anthropologists or have significant
anthropological components in their production or substance. North
American, Australian, and western European varieties of ethnographic
film are better known and more available than the significant though less
accessible traditions of central and eastern European, Indian, Chinese,
and Japanese filmmaking. In the West, even stylistically different bodies
of work have been recognized: from the classic films of Robert Flaherty
(Nanook of the North) to the contemporary films of Robert Gardner, Jean
Rouch, John Marshall, David and Judith MacDougall, and Tim Asch and
Napoleon Chagnon, TV series such as Disappearing World, Odyssey, and
the longest-running Japanese TV series, Our Wonderful World.
Today visual anthropology is home to a wide array of approaches and

concerns, ranging from cultural studies (with their textual orientation) to
new digital media technologiesvideo (fast replacing film), CD-ROM (with
its encyclopaedic and storage capabilities), DVD (delivering high-quality
video and audio signals), the Internet (with its worldwide reach)and
indigenous or intercultural media (film or video produced by members of
First Nations [native peoples of North America], non-Western societies, or
those outside the dominant cultures in Western societies). Some of these
new departures rely on visual-aural media as the sole and autonomous
means of creating and delivering anthropological knowledge and
understanding.
Film is still central to visual anthropology, but photography and other
media, especially new digital technologies, are fast catching up. Despite
many production problems, ethnographic films are being made in
ever-increasing numbers throughout the world, festivals showcasing these
films have multiplied, and new centres and associations of visual
anthropology have been set up in many places. With the decreasing cost
of new technologies, access to visual communication is being
democratized. And, with the gradual liberation of visual expression from
dependence on written materials, the stage is set for the flowering of
diverse approaches in the garden of visual anthropology, fulfilling the
promise of an anthropology entirely through visual means.
kos str
Ethnomusicology
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Music can be described as humanly organized, meaningful sounds that

have physical properties and physiological, psychological, social, and
cultural attributes (to the extent these can or should be distinguished in
practice). Ethnomusicology, literally the study of the music of
communities (ethnos), has been defined as the study of music in its social
and cultural context. In this sense it is a combination of anthropology and
musicology, and it shares many of its formative influences with
anthropology, sociology, psychology, and folklore on the one hand and
musicology, music theory, art history, and literary criticism on the other.
Although the field of study can be traced to the late 19th century, the
term ethnomusicology entered common usage only in the 1950s.
Some of the important questions in ethnomusicology can be traced to
ancient Greek philosophers, Muslim scholars, and Enlightenment
philosophers, but the invention of the wax cylinder recorder by Thomas
Edison in 1877 had a definitive impact on the formation and development
of the field. The audio recorder enabled travelers to collect sounds in
distant locations and bring them to specialists who analyzed and
preserved them in museum-like settings using specialized equipment in
ways that resembled the data and artifact collections of anthropologists.
The Berlin Phonogrammarchiv, founded in 1900 and staffed by active
scientists, became one of the centres of research and theoretical
diffusion in the first third of the 20th century. Colonialism, nationalism,
and folklore influenced the collection and analysis of regional and
national traditions and their use by scholars, composers, and the general
public.
In the United States the anthropological study of music, like so many
facets of American anthropology, was strongly influenced by Franz Boas.
His students trained several influential scholars, among them Bruno Nettl
(author of Encyclopdia Britannica's article on folk music) and Alan
Merriam, whose influential Anthropology of Music (1964) is still widely
read. Other anthropologically trained figures who have had a strong
impact on the development of ethnomusicology include John Blacking,
Steven Feld, and Hugo Zemp.
Ethnomusicological approaches to musical performance have generally
paralleled the rest of anthropologyvirtually every theoretical
development in anthropology has its counterpart in ethnomusicological
publications, from evolutionism and diffusionism to functionalism,
structuralism, ethnoscience, literary criticism, and beyond.
Ethnomusicology has also generated its own internal debates specifically
related to the analysis of sound and the field's relationship to the other
humanities and social sciences.
At the start of the 21st century, ethnomusicologists were found in many
countries; research and teaching programs had emerged on every
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continent; and national, regional, and international professional

associations were quite activethe largest of these being the
International Council for Traditional Music, a nongovernmental
organization affiliated with UNESCO, and the U.S.-based Society for
Ethnomusicology, both of which publish excellent journals. Again
paralleling anthropology, increasing numbers of ethnomusicologists since
1980 have studied music within their own societies; distinctive schools
have arisen in certain countries and regions, and increasing attention has
been given to popular music and the globalization of the recorded
audiovisual industry. In addition to their involvement in ethnomusicology
as an academic field of research and teaching, many ethnomusicologists
are active in public- and private-sector cultural programsworking in
ministries of culture and education, festival production, radio stations,
software development companies, and other culture industries. They
publish songbooks and audio recordings, compose or perform music of
researched communities, and create music curricula for schools.
Increasingly, professorships in ethnomusicology were housed in schools of
music, rather than anthropology departments, at least in part because of
a general decline in the anthropological interest in the arts in the late
20th century.
Anthony Seeger
Additional Reading
History of anthropology
Histories of anthropology include J.W. BURROW, Evolution and Society: A
Study in Victorian Social Theory (1966); L.R. HIATT, Arguments about
Aborigines: Australia and the Evolution of Social Anthropology (1996);
ADAM KUPER, The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an
Illusion (1988), Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British
School, 3rd ed. (1996), and Culture: The Anthropologists' Account (1999);
GEORGE W. STOCKING, JR., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History
of Anthropology (1968, reprinted 1982), Victorian Anthropology (1987),
and After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 18881951 (1995); and HAN F.
VERMEULEN and ARTURO ALVAREZ ROLDN (eds.), Fieldwork and Footnotes: Studies
in the History of European Anthropology (1995).
Key texts include M. FORTES and E.E. EVANS-PRITCHARD (eds.), African Political
Systems (1940, reissued 1970); CLAUDE LVI-STRAUSS, The Elementary
Structures of Kinship (1969; originally published in French, 1949);
BRONISAW MALINOWSKI, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922, reissued
1961), and Coral Gardens and their Magic (1935); and CLIFFORD GEERTZ, The
Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (1973).
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The major branches of anthropology

Cultural anthropology
Two classical statements from the origins of cultural anthropology are
EDWARD B. TYLOR, Primitive Culture, 7th ed. (1924, reissued 1970); and
FRANZ BOAS, The Mind of Primitive Man, rev. ed. (1963, reprinted 1983).
A.L. KROEBER and CLYDE KLUCKHOHN, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts
and Definitions (1952, reprinted 1985), is a compilation of diverse
views on culture by two of its most eminent practitioners of the
mid-20th century. Two different approaches to understanding the play
of culture in everyday life are as strategy and tactics for the
accumulation of power and privilege, in PIERRE BOURDIEU, Outline of the
Theory of Practice, trans. from French by RICHARD NICE (1977, reissued
1995); and as the social communication of meaning, in DELL H. HYMES, In
Vain I Tried to Tell You: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics
(1981, reissued 2004). Studies of the presence of subjectivity in the
ethnographic study of culture include JOHANNES FABIAN, Time and the
Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (1983, reissued 2003), and
JAMES CLIFFORD and GEORGE E. MARCUS (eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics
and Politics of Ethnography (1986). A now-classic statement about the
ethnography of culture as interpretation is CLIFFORD GEERTZ, The
Interpretation of Cultures, new ed. (2000). Contesting views of how to
interpret and how to write a historical ethnography of events in the
time of first culture contact between Europeans and Hawaiians are
GANANATH OBEYESEKERE, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European
Mythmaking in the Pacific (1992, reissued 1997); and MARSHALL SAHLINS,
How Natives Think: About Captain Cook, for Example (1995).
Social anthropology
Among the histories, HENRIKA KUKLICK, The Savage Within: The Social
History of British Social Anthropology, 18851945 (1991), concentrates
on the institutional constraints of the colonial period; ADAM KUPER,
Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School, 3rd ed.
(1996), emphasizes personalities and intellectual history; and JONATHAN
SPENCER, British Social Anthropology: A Retrospective, Annual Review
of Anthropology, 29:1-24 (2000), brings the story up to the mid-1990s.
GEORGE W. STOCKING, JR., After Tylor: British Social Anthropology,
18881951 (1995), is the most comprehensive and authoritative history
of the emergence of social anthropology in Britain.
Key texts of social anthropology apart from those listed above include
A.R. RADCLIFFE-BROWN, Structure and Function in Primitive Society (1952,
reissued 1968), a characteristic selection of Radcliffe-Brown's essays
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and addresses; E.E. EVANS-PRITCHARD, The Nuer: A Description of the

Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People
(1940, reissued 1974), a classic study that anticipates the shift from
more concrete to more abstract ideas of structure; and E.R. LEACH,
Rethinking Anthropology (1961, reissued 1971), iconoclastic essays
that in part attack Radcliffe-Brown's intellectual legacy. MARILYN
STRATHERN, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems
with Society in Melanesia (1988), is an extremely imaginative critique
of, among many other things, social anthropology's concern with
society. ALFRED GELL, The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams,
ed. by ERIC HIRSCH (1999), is a posthumous collection of shorter pieces by
the most creative social anthropologist of the 1980s and '90s.
Discussions of social anthropology outside Britain include FREDRICK BARTH
(ed.), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of
Cultural Difference (1969, reissued 1998), a pathbreaking collection
edited by the doyen of Norwegian social anthropology; FRED EGGAN (ed.),
Social Anthropology of North American Tribes (1937), a collection
from the end of Radcliffe-Brown's period in Chicago; HSAIO-TUNG FEI,
Peasant Life in China: A Field Study in the Yangtze Valley (1939,
reprinted 1976), an important early Chinese field study by a former
member of Malinowski's London seminar; CLAUDE LVI-STRAUSS, The Scope
of Anthropology, in Structural Anthropology 2 (1976; originally
published in French, 1973), the text of Lvi-Strauss's inaugural lecture
at the Collge de France, in which he sketches an alternative
intellectual lineage for social anthropology in France; MARSHALL SAHLINS,
Stone Age Economics (1972), an influential study of precapitalist
economics by an anthropologist whose work has been equally
important for social and cultural anthropologists; and M.N. SRINIVAS, The
Remembered Village (1976), a partly autobiographical memoir of
fieldwork in the 1940s.
Linguistic anthropology
Three textbooks on linguistic anthropology intended for advanced
undergraduate audiences provide the best introduction to theory and
method: ALESSANDRO DURANTI, Linguistic Anthropology (1997); WILLIAM A.
FOLEY, Anthropological Linguistics: An Introduction (1997); and WILLIAM F.
HANKS, Language and Communicative Practice (1996).
Methods in linguistic anthropology are the subject of CHARLES L. BRIGGS,
Learning How to Ask: A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the
Interview in Social Science Research (1986).
Linguistic diversity in relation to human history and biology is

discussed in several works: LUIGI LUCA CAVALLI-SFORZA, Genes, Peoples, and
Languages, trans. by MARK SEIELSTAD (2000), summarizes recent proposals
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about the relationship between linguistic, biological, and cultural

diversity at the global level; R.M.W. DIXON, The Rise and Fall of
Languages (1997), argues that different types of historical processes
shape the diversity of languages in different times and places; and
JOHANNA NICHOLS, Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time (1992), highlights
distinctive regional patterns suggestive of historical associations
among human groups.
JOHN J. GUMPERZ and STEPHEN C. LEVINSON (eds.), Rethinking Linguistic
Relativity (1996), examines cases in which locally distinctive behaviour

and forms of thought may be associated with distinctive ways of
speaking and grammatical patterns. The collection of papers in PAUL V.
KROSKRITY (ed.), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and
Identities (2000), explores language ideologies across time and space.
Psychological anthropology
Books introducing this subject include PHILIP K. BOCK (ed.), Handbook of
Psychological Anthropology (1994); JOHN M. INGHAM, Psychological
Anthropology Reconsidered (1996); THEODORE SCHWARTZ, GEOFFREY M. WHITE,
and CATHERINE A. LUTZ (eds.), New Directions in Psychological
Anthropology (1992); and JAMES W. STIGLER, RICHARD A. SHWEDER, and GILBERT
HERDT (eds.), Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human
Development (1990).
Archaeology
General texts on archaeology include WENDY ASHMORE and ROBERT J. SHARER,
Discovering Our Past: A Brief Introduction to Archaeology, 3rd ed.
(2000); COLIN RENFREW and PAUL BAHN, Archaeology: Theories, Methods and
Practice, 3rd ed. (2000); BRIAN M. FAGAN, People of the Earth: An
Introduction to World Prehistory, 10th ed. (2001); ALICE BECK KEHOE, The
Land of Prehistory: A Critical History of American Archaeology (1998);
BRUCE G. TRIGGER, A History of Archaeological Thought (1989); ROBERT J.
WENKE, Patterns in Prehistory: Humankind's First Three Million Years,
4th ed. (1999); and GORDON R. WILLEY and JEREMY A. SABLOFF, A History of
American Archaeology, 3rd ed. (1993).
Physical anthropology
FRANK SPENCER (ed.), A History of American Physical Anthropology,
19301980 (1982), contains essays by practicing American physical

anthropologists on the history of their respective subareas.
WILLIAM C. MCGREW, LINDA F. MARCHANT, and TOSHISADA NSHIDA (eds.), Great Ape
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Societies (1996), summarizes contemporary field and cognitive

research on chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans. RUSSELL H.
TUTTLE, Apes of the World: Their Social Behavior, Communication,
Mentality, and Ecology (1986), presents a comprehensive synthesis of
findings from ecological, naturalistic behavioral, comparative
psychological, and humanoid language research on chimpanzees,
gorillas, bonobos, orangutans, and gibbons. DONALD C. JOHANSON and BLAKE
EDGAR, From Lucy to Language (1996), is a large-format picture book
containing superb colour photographs of the major fossil hominid
specimens. BARBARA B. SMUTS (ed.), Primate Societies (1986), includes 40
papers that systematically describe and analyze the social behaviour of
all nonhuman primates.
RICHARD L. CIOCHON and JOHN G. FLEAGLE (eds.), The Human Evolution Source
Book (1993), presents 60 classic papers on aspects of

paleoanthropology and concepts of race. RICHARD G. KLEIN, The Human
Career, 2nd ed. (1999), presents a comprehensive overview of human
evolutionary studies, summarizing state-of-the-art
paleoanthropological and archaeological research and perspectives.
LUIGI LUCA CAVALLI-SFORZA, PAULO MENOZZI, and ALBERTO PIAZZA, The History and
Geography of Human Genes (1994), a herculean project that models
the origins of human populations and the routes that they took as they
occupied the world, is premised on voluminous data from molecular
genetics, archaeology, linguistics, physical anthropology, ecology, and
geography.
MICHAEL A. LITTLE and JERE D. HAAS, Human Population Biology (1989),
includes essays on human demography, genetics, epidemiology,

physiological adaptability, and growth and other bodily changes over
the life cycle. DONALD J. ORTNER and ARTHUR C. AUFDERHEIDE (eds.), Human
Paleopathology (1991), discusses the pathological conditions that
affect the human skeleton, organs, and tissues and what they reveal to
the bioarchaeologist about people in the past. ALEX F. ROCHE, Growth,
Maturation, and Body Composition (1992), offers an extensive
longitudinal study of human growth and changes in bodily composition.
TED A. RATHBUN and JANE E. BUIKSTRA, Human Identification: Case Studies in
Forensic Anthropology (1984), demonstrates the scope and range of
physical anthropologists and archaeologists who tackle forensic
problems. ALBERT A. DAHLBERG (ed.), Dental Morphology and Evolution
(1971), provides a sampler of the wide scope of research and problem
sets that constitute dental anthropology.
World anthropology
Anthropology in Africa
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Texts that discuss anthropology as it is practiced in Africa include W.D.

HAMMOND-TOOKE, Imperfect Interpreters: South Africa's Anthropologists
19201990 (1997); ADAM KUPER, Anthropology and Anthropologists: The
Modern British School, 3rd ed. (1996); SALLY FALK MOORE, Anthropology
and Africa: Changing Perspectives on a Changing Scene (1994); V.Y.
MUDIMBE, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of
Knowledge (1988); and HUSSEIN FAHIM, Field Research in a Nubian
Village: The Experience of an Egyptian Anthropologist, pp. 255273 in
GEORGE FOSTER (ed.), Long-Term Field Research in Social Anthropology
(1979). Material on Morocco and Arab Africa in general is available in
DALE F. EICKELMAN, The Middle East and Central Asia: An Anthropological
Approach (1998).
Anthropology in Asia
Among the works that discuss aspects of anthropology in Asia are K.P.
CHATTOPADHYAY, Essays in Social Anthropology (1994); GREGORY ELIYU GULDIN
(ed.), Anthropology in China: Defining the Discipline (1990); SUENARI
MICHIO, J.S. EADES, and CHRISTIAN DANIELS (eds.), Perspectives on Chinese
Society: Anthropological Views from Japan (1995); CHIE NAKANE and CHIEN
CHIAO (eds.), Home Bound: Studies in East Asian Society: Papers
Presented at the Symposium in Honor of the Eightieth Birthday of
Professor Fei Xiaotong (1992); and M.N. Srinivas, Practicing Social
Anthropology in India, Annual Review of Anthropology (1997), vol. 26,
pp. 124.
Anthropology in Europe
Classics of French anthropology include MARCEL MAUSS, The Gift, trans. by
W.D. HALLS (1954, reissued 2000); MARCEL GRIAULE, Conversations with
Ogotemmli (1965, reissued 1988; originally published in French,
1948); CLAUDE LVI-STRAUSS, The Savage Mind, new ed. (1972, reissued
1974; originally published in French, 1962); LOUIS DUMONT, Homo
Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, trans. by MARK
SAINSBURY and BASIA GULATI, complete rev. ed. (1988, reissued 1998); and
MAURICE GODELIER, Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology, trans. by ROBERT
BRAIN (1977). Y.V. BROMLEY (IULIAN VLADIMIROVICH BROMLEI), Soviet Ethnography:
Main Trends (1977), offers a view of Russian anthropology in the Soviet
era. DORLE DRACKL, IAIN R. EDGAR, and THOMAS K. SCHIPPERS (eds.), Educational
Histories of European Social Anthropology (2002), offers historical
perspectives of anthropology in different national contexts.
Anthropology in Latin America

There is no authoritative history of Latin American anthropology.
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Studies are broken down by national tradition. An exception to this

approach is MANUEL MARZAL, Historia de la antropologa indigenista
(1996), a comparative study of indigenismo. The greatest
concentration of studies is on Mexican anthropology, though these
studies often focus on specific aspects; for example, CYNTHIA HEWITT DE
ALCNTARA, Anthropological Perspectives on Rural Mexico (1984). CARLOS
GARCA MORA, ENRIQUE FLORESCANO, and STEFAN KROTZ, La antropologa en
Mxico: panorama histrico, a 16-volume compilation, provides the
greatest wealth of information on Mexico. Brazilian anthropology is
treated in MARISA CORREIA, Histria da antropologia no Brasil (19301960):
testemunhos (1987); Argentine anthropology, in MONICA QUIJADA, CARMEN
BERNAND, and ARND SCHNEIDER, Homogeneidad y nacin: Argentina siglos XIX
y XX (2000); and Colombian anthropology, in JAIME AROCHA and NINA S. DE
FRIEDEMANN, Un siglo de investigacin social: Antropologa en Colombia
(1984).
Special fields of anthropology
The anthropological study of religion

STEPHEN D. GLAZIER (ed.), Anthropology of Religion: A Handbook (1997,
reissued 1999), contains articles on ritual, world religions, and

shamanism. Current articles on theoretical and methodological issues
are the focus of STEPHEN D. GLAZIER and CHARLES A. FLOWERDAY (eds.),
Selected Readings in the Anthropology of Religion (2003). JOHN R.
BOWEN, Religions in Practice: An Approach to the Anthropology of
Religion, 3rd ed. (2004), is a textbook covering social-cultural,
psychological, historical, and material approaches to religion and
features profiles of some current scholars in anthropology. A
comprehensive textbook on classic and current work, covering
definitions of religion, embodiment, boundaries, sexuality and gender,
cosmology, ritual, shamanism, witchcraft, spirit possession, and
pilgrimage is FIONA BOWIE, The Anthropology of Religion (2000). MORTON
KLASS and MAXINE WEISGRAU (eds.), Across the Boundaries of Belief:
Contemporary Issues in the Anthropology of Religion (1999), contains
essays on colonial and postcolonial legacies, gender and sexuality,
religious healing, altered states of consciousness, religion and the
state, and historical analysis. MICHAEL K. LAMBEK (ed.), A Reader in the
Anthropology of Religion (2002), covers analytical approaches, the
composition of religious worlds, religious action, historical dynamics,
and research tools, and provides a guide to literature on these topics.
BRIAN MORRIS, Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introductory Text
(1987), is a scholarly study that has become a classic. BENSON SALER,
Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent
Natives, and Unbounded Categories (1993, reissued, 2000), analyzes
ways of conceptualizing religion from a comparative perspective.
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Museum-based study
CURTIS M. HINSLEY, The Smithsonian and the American Indian: Making a
Moral Anthropology in Victorian America (1994; originally published as

Savages and Scientists 1981), provides a historical account of the
founding of the Smithsonian's American Indian collection and the
museum's influence in shaping views of American Indians. A collection
of essays on late 20th-century exhibitions relating to various cultures is
IVAN KARP and STEVEN D. LAVINE (eds.), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and
Politics of Museum Display (1991). GEORGE W. STOCKING, JR. (ed.), Objects
and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture (1985), discusses
anthropology museums in Europe and North America and their
intellectual underpinnings. Also of interest are ANNE-MARIE CANTWELL, JAMES
B. GRIFFIN, and NAN A. ROTHSCHILD (eds.), The Research Potential of
Anthropological Museum Collections (1981), in the Annals of the New
York Academy of Sciences, vol. 376, a group of articles by
archaeologists, biological anthropologists, and cultural
anthropologists; STEPHEN CONN, Museums and American Intellectual Life,
18761926 (1998), which traces the history of museums in the United
States, Great Britain, and France during the period when most
anthropological collections and museums were founded; and PETER VERGO
(ed.), The New Museology (1989), which frames current issues in
museum ideologies. MICHAEL M. AMES, Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes:
The Anthropology of Museums (1992), is a readable history of
anthropology in museums.
The anthropological study of education

PIERRE BOURDIEU and JEAN-CLAUDE PASSERON, Reproduction in Education,
Society, and Culture, trans. from French by RICHARD NICE, rev. ed.
(1990), is a powerful and classic statement identifying educational

processes, including pedagogy and schooling, as the central
mechanisms through which class and power differentiations are
reproduced in modern societies. MICHEL FOUCAULT, Discipline and Punish:
The Birth of the Prison, trans. from French by ALAN SHERIDAN (1977,
reissued 1995), is another classic statement, in which the author
models schools as types of modern prisons where children and teachers
are watched, examined, and disciplined. The classic ethnography
about differences in early language and literacy acquisition and the
problems they can lead to is SHIRLEY BRICE HEATH, Ways with Words:
Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms (1983,
reprinted 1996). BRADLEY LEVINSON, DOUGLAS E. FOLEY, and DOROTHY C. HOLLAND,
eds., The Cultural Production of the Educated Person: Critical
Ethnographies of Schooling and Local Practice (1996), is a set of
papers illustrating how later anthropologists continued to build on
Bourdieu's theories. HUGH MEHAN, Learning Lessons: Social Organization
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in the Classroom (1979, reissued 1990), is influential among those who

think it essential to investigate educational interactions at the most
minute levels. JOHN U. OGBU, Minority Education and Caste: The
American System in Cross-Cultural Perspective (1978), is a famous,
though controversial, attempt at making the argument that
differences in performance in school result from attitudes about
schooling among those who do badly there. REBA NEUKOM PAGE,
Lower-Track Classrooms: A Curricular and Cultural Perspective (1991),
is a careful comparative ethnography of two high schools showing how
children of different backgrounds are actually taught very differently,
thereby suggesting that differentiated success has as much to do with
teaching as with learning. GEORGE SPINDLER (ed.) and LOUISE SPINDLER, Fifty
Years of Anthropology and Education: 19502000 (2000), summarizes
the authors' work as the primary movers in the elaboration of
anthropology of education as a full-fledged subdiscipline. HERV VARENNE
and RAY MCDERMOTT, Successful Failure (1998), makes the case for an
alternative theory of maintenance of cultural distinctions.
The study of ethnicity, minority groups, and identity

Studies include TIENNE BALIBAR and IMMANUEL MAURICE WALLERSTEIN, Race,
Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (1991); MICHAEL BANTON, The Idea of
Race (1977); FREDRIK BARTH (ed.), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The
Social Organization of Culture Difference (1969, reissued 1998);
CHRISTINE BOLT, Victorian Attitudes to Race (1971); FRANK DIKTTER (ed.),
The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan: Historical
and Contemporary Perspectives (1997); RUTH FRANKENBERG (ed.),
Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism (1997);
GEORGE M. FREDRICKSON, Racism: A Short History (2002); JOHN HUTCHINSON and
ANTHONY D. SMITH (eds.), Ethnicity (1996); HANSPETER KRIESI et al., New
Social Movements in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis (1995);
ANTHONY W. MARX, Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of South
Africa, the United States, and Brazil (1998); PNINA WERBNER and TARIQ
MODOOD (eds.), Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities
and the Politics of Anti-Racism (1997); JOHN REX, Race and Ethnicity
(1986).
Urban anthropology
The literature of urban anthropology in the 1990s is reviewed in SETHA
M. LOW (ed.), Theorizing the City: The New Urban Anthropology Reader
(1999), which also provides a collection of studies that show the
diversity and richness of urban anthropology. Historical perspectives
on the subfield can be found in EDWIN EAMES and JUDITH GRANICH GOODE,
Anthropology of the City: An Introduction to Urban Anthropology
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(1977), which maps the history of urban anthropology and the debates
that shaped it until the mid-1970s.
National and transnational studies

The classic works on nationalism are BENEDICT ANDERSON, Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism,
rev. ed. (1991); and ARJUN APPADURAI, Modernity at Large: Cultural
Dimensions of Globalization (1996).
The study of gender

The classic account is FRIEDRICH ENGELS, Origin of the Family, Private
Property, and the State (1884, reprinted 1972, reissued 1986).
Overviews of the history of and contemporary developments in the
treatment of gender in the discipline are provided in MICAELA DI LEONARDO
(ed.), Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology
in the Postmodern Era (1991), and Exotics at Home: Anthropologies,
Others, American Modernity (1998). Important early second-wave
collections are MONA ETIENNE and ELEANOR LEACOCK (eds.), Women and
Colonization: Anthropological Perspectives (1980); JUNE NASH and MARIA
PATRICIA FERNANDEZ-KELLY (eds.), Women, Men, and the International
Division of Labor (1983); SHERRY B. ORTNER and HARRIET WHITEHEAD (eds.),
Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality
(1981); RAYNA R. REITER (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women (1975);
MICHELLE ZIMBALIST ROSALDO and LOUISE LAMPHERE (eds.), Woman, Culture, and
Society (1974); KATE YOUNG et al., Of Marriage and the Market: Women's
Subordination Internationally and Its Lessons, 2nd ed. (1984, reissued
1988); CAROL P. MACCORMACK and MARILYN STRATHERN (eds.), Nature, Culture,
and Gender (1980); ANN SNITOW et al., Powers of Desire: The Politics of
Sexuality (1983); and CAROL S. VANCE (ed.), Pleasure and Danger:
Exploring Female Sexuality (1984, reissued 1992).
Later work on gender, sexuality, kinship, and reproduction includes
JANET CARSTEN (ed.), Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the
Study of Kinship (2000); JANE FISHBURNE COLLIER and SYLVIA JUNKO YANAGISAKO
(eds.), Gender and Kinship: Essays Toward a Unified Analysis (1987);
FAYE D. GINSBURG and RAYNA RAPP (eds.), Conceiving the New World Order:
The Global Politics of Reproduction (1995); DONNA HARAWAY, Primate
Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science
(1989); and ROGER LANCASTER and MICAELA DI LEONARDO (eds.), The
Gender/Sexuality Reader (1997).
Political and legal anthropology
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TED C. LEWELLEN, Political Anthropology: An Introduction, 3rd ed. (2003);

JOAN VINCENT, Anthropology and Politics: Visions, Traditions, and Trends
(1990); and DONALD V. KURTZ, Political Anthropology: Paradigms and
Power (2001), are critical evaluations of the development of the field,

analyzing the relationship between methodology, competing
paradigms, schools, and individual scholars as shaped by the wider
intellectual, social, economic, and political contexts in which the field
developed. JOAN VINCENT (ed.), The Anthropology of Politics: A Reader in
Ethnography, Theory, and Critique (2002), is a useful collection of
essays of early intellectual precursors of the Enlightenment, classic
ethnographic texts and their critics, critiques of colonialism, and an
array of contemporary essays under the heading Cosmopolitics:
Confronting a New Millennium.
Medical anthropology
ARTHUR KLEINMAN, Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology
and Medicine (1995), is a book of wide-ranging essays by a scholar

whose research and teaching have greatly influenced the development
of medical anthropology. Two collections of essaysSTEVEN FEIERMAN and
JOHN M. JANZEN (eds.), The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa
(1992); and CHARLES LESLIE and ALLAN YOUNG (eds.), Paths to Asian Medical
Knowledge (1992)provide an entry to anthropological research on
health care in large areas of Asia and Africa. Exemplary studies of
particular cultures and health care issues include LAWRENCE COHEN, No
Aging in India: Alzheimer's, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things
(1998); ELISABETH HSU, The Transmission of Chinese Medicine (1999);
MARGARET LOCK, Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Menopause in
Japan and North America (1993); NANCY SCHEPER-HUGHES, Death Without
Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (1992); and ALLAN
YOUNG, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder (1995).
The anthropology of food, nutrition, and agriculture

An introduction to the subject and classic papers are found in CAROLE
COUNIHAN and PENNY VAN ESTERIK (eds.), Food and Culture: A Reader (1997).
MARVIN HARRIS and ERIC B. ROSS (eds.), Food and Evolution: Toward a
Theory of Human Food Habits (1987), is a reader that reflects
materialist theories. AUDREY RICHARDS, Land, Labour, and Diet in Northern
Rhodesia, 2nd ed. (1961, reissued 1995), is a classic study; and JACK
GOODY, Cooking, Cuisine, and Class (1982), gives the classic British
historical-ethnographic approach. SIDNEY W. MINTZ, Tasting Food, Tasting
Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture and the Past (1996), is a
popular book on the political economy of food.
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Environmental and ecological studies in anthropology

WILLIAM BALE (ed.), Advances in Historical Ecology (1998), contains
essays (some more technical than others) on various aspects of the

historical ecology approach. MARVIN HARRIS, The Rise of Anthropological
Theory, updated ed. (2001), a survey of the history of anthropology
from the Enlightenment to the mid-20th century, is overly opinionated
at times but provides a compelling account of the origins of ecological
and economic approaches in anthropology. RICHARD BORSHAY LEE, The
!Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society (1979), is a
classic example of cultural ecology, with rich information on various
aspects of this well-studied African hunter-gatherer society. VIRGINIA D.
NAZAREA (ed.), Ethnoecology: Situated Knowledge/Located Lives (1999),
is a survey of approaches to the subject. A thoughtful review of the
cultural ecology approach applied to subsistence agriculture is ROBERT
M. NETTING, Smallholders, Householders: Farm Families and the Ecology
of Intensive, Sustainable Agriculture (1993). ROY A. RAPPAPORT, Pigs for
the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People (1984), an
account of warfare, pig-raising, and ritual in an isolated New Guinea
area, is the most thorough and influential development of the view
that human social behaviour is designed to maintain ecological systems
in equilibrium. A fairly technical summary of the more Darwinian end
of ecological anthropology is ERIC ALDEN SMITH and BRUCE WINTERHALDER
(eds.), Evolutionary Ecology and Human Behavior (1992). JULIAN H.
STEWARD, The Theory of Culture Change (1955), particularly the account
of the Great Basin Shoshone Indians, by the founder of the field of
ecological anthropology and the coiner of the term cultural ecology,
offers a clear illustration of the insights offered by cultural ecology.
ERIC R. WOLF, Europe and the People Without History (1982), argues that
the tendency to view small-scale non-Western societies as unchanging
and isolated masks the pervasive effects of global political and
economic interaction extending back for many centuries.
Development anthropology
Studies include DAVID BROKENSHA, D.M. WARREN, and OSWALD WERNER (eds.),
Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Development (1980); MICHAEL M.
CERNEA (ed.), Putting People First: Sociological Variables in Rural
Development, 2nd ed. (1991); R.D. GRILLO and R.L. STIRRAT (eds.),
Discourses of Development: Anthropological Perspectives (1997); PETER
D. LITTLE and MICHAEL M HOROWITZ (eds.), Lands at Risk in the Third World:
Local-Level Perspectives (1987); and HARI MOHAN MATHUR (ed.), The
Human Dimension of Development: Perspectives from Anthropology
(1990).
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Applied anthropology
Overviews of applied anthropology and some subspecialties are
provided by JOHN VAN WILLIGEN, Applied Anthropology: An Introduction,
3rd ed. (2002); ALEXANDER M. ERVIN, Applied Anthropology: Tools and
Perspectives for Contemporary Practice (2000); RALPH GRILLO and ALAN
REW, Social Anthropology and Development Policy (1985); ERVE CHAMBERS,
Applied Anthropology: A Practical Guide (1985, reissued 1989); MARIETTA
L. BABA, Business and Industrial Anthropology: An Overview (1986); and
JOHN W. BENNETT, Applied and Action Anthropology: Ideological and
Conceptual Aspects, Current Anthropology, supplement,
37(1):S23S53.
A widely read work comparing Marxist and non-Marxist approaches is
ROGER BASTIDE, Applied Anthropology, trans. from French by ALICE L.
MORTON (1973). The history of the field and international variations are
reviewed by ANTHONY F.C. WALLACE et al. (eds.), Perspectives on
Anthropology 1976 (1977); WALTER GOLDSCHMIDT (ed.), The Uses of
Anthropology (1979); LUCY MAIR, Applied Anthropology, in DAVID L. SILLS
(ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 1 (1968);
and A. [ALFRED] MTRAUX, Applied Anthropology in Government: United
Nations, in A.L. KROEBER (ed.), Anthropology Today: An Encyclopedic
Inventory (1953). MARIETTA L. BABA and CAROLE E. HILL (eds.), The Global
Practice of Anthropology (1997), discusses Australia, Canada, Costa
Rica and Central America, France, Great Britain, India, Israel, Japan,
Mexico, Nigeria, Russia, the United States, and the United Nations.
Critical studies of specific issues, projects, and approaches are
presented in AKBAR S. AHMED and CRIS N. SHORE (eds.), The Future of
Anthropology: Its Relevance to the Contemporary World (1995); DELL
HYMES (ed.), Reinventing Anthropology (1972, reissued with a new
introduction, 1999); THOMAS WEAVER, To See Ourselves: Anthropology and
Modern Social Issues (1973); BARBARA ROSE JOHNSTON (ed.), Who Pays the
Price? The Sociocultural Context of Environmental Crisis (1994); and
JIM YONG KIM et al., Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health
of the Poor (2000).
Visual anthropology
Pioneering approaches to visual anthropology are found in KARL G.
HEIDER, Ethnographic Film (1976); JAY RUBY (ed.), A Crack in the Mirror:
Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology (1982); JOHN COLLIER, JR., and
MALCOLM COLLIER, Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research
Method, expanded ed. (1986). An influential sourcebook, PAUL HOCKINGS
(ed.), Principles of Visual Anthropology, 2nd ed. (1995), was reprinted
with eight additional articles. Several late 20th-century critical
collections made clear theoretical advances in the field. Among these
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are PETER IAN CRAWFORD and DAVID TURTON (eds.), Film as Ethnography
(1992); PAUL HOCKINGS and YASUHIRO OMORI (eds.), Cinematographic Theory
and New Dimensions in Ethnographic Film (1988); LUCIEN TAYLOR (ed.),
Visualizing Theory (1994), selections from the journal Visual
Anthropology Review; MARCUS BANKS and HOWARD MORPHY, Rethinking Visual
Anthropology (1997); and LESLIE DEVEREAUX and ROGER HILLMAN (eds.), Fields
of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and
Photography (1995). Aesthetic aspects of film and photography are
emphasized in recent monographs, including PETER LOIZOS, Innovation in
Ethnographic Film: From Innocence to Self-Consciousness, 19551985
(1993); CHRISTOPHER PINNEY, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian
Photographers (1997); and ELIZABETH EDWARDS (ed.), Anthropology and
Photography, 18601920 (1992). DAVID MACDOUGALL, Transcultural Cinema
(1998), a collection of essays by the main advocate, theorist, and
practitioner of anthropological filmmaking independent of written
ethnographies, breaks new ground in almost every article. ILISE BARGASH
and LUCIEN TAYLOR, Cross-Cultural Filmmaking (1997), is a unique and
welcome combination of several aspects of filmmaking as it discusses
how to make films, provides a clear explanation of technical terms and
processes, and reveals aesthetic and ethnographic concerns in
production; it also includes a section on video. Also noteworthy are JAY
RUBY, Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film & Anthropology (2000);
and ANNA GRIMSHAW, The Ethnographer's Eye: Ways of Seeing in
Anthropology (2001).
Ethnomusicology
Studies include JOHN BLACKING, How Musical Is Man? (1973, reissued
1995); STEVEN FELD, Sound and Sentiment, 2nd ed. (1990); INTERNATIONAL
COUNCIL FOR TRADITIONAL MUSIC, Yearbook for Traditional Music (1981 ); ALAN
P. MERRIAM, The Anthropology of Music (1964); BRUNO NETTL, Theory and
Method in Ethnomusicology (1964), and The Study of Ethnomusicology:
Twenty-Nine Issues and Concepts (1983); and SOCIETY FOR ETHNOMUSICOLOGY,
Ethnomusicology (January 1958 ).
To cite this page:
MLA Style: "anthropology." Encyclopdia Britannica. Encyclopdia

Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite. Chicago: Encyclopdia Britannica,
2015.
APA Style: anthropology. (2015). Encyclopdia Britannica. Encyclopdia

Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite. Chicago: Encyclopdia Britannica.
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Encyclopdia Britannica Article

the unique human capacity to communicate through articulate speech and

Beginning in the 1930s, and especially in the post-World War II period,

Darwin's arguments were drawn upon to underwrite the universal history of

rational, primitive superstitions were gradually refined and would

periods alone in the field, on a single island or in a particular tribal

These new field studies reflected and accelerated a change of theoretical

Social and cultural anthropology

American anthropology since the 1950s

interdisciplinary social science.

In the 1950s and '60s, evolutionist ideas gained fresh currency in

American anthropology divided between two intellectual tendencies. One

traditional alliance between cultural anthropology and biological

Clifford Geertz was the most influential proponent of an interpretive

European anthropology since the 1950s

communities, and other groups in the United States. In the formerly

The liveliest intellectual developments were perhaps to be found beyond

The major branches of anthropology

Cultural anthropology is that major division of anthropology that explains

Three things of enduring relevance are to be remarked in this definition.

In respect to culture and civilization, Tylor collapses the distinction

Tylor's definition is taken as the inception of the awareness of culture in

American cultural anthropology

These unilinear hierarchies and their presumptions were challenged by

French theoretical contributions

States, as a countercurrent to the cultural emphasis of American

The configurational approach

The Boasian resistance to the sweeping and confining generalizations

Growth (1944) by another of Boas's students, A.L. Kroeber.

This emphasis on the study of internal patterns and configurations of

Cultural change and adaptation

Cultural anthropology has maintained its concern for the history of

Cultural ecology also has its roots in an earlier cultural anthropology,

Culture and the humanities

An important contribution to redefining cultural anthropology in the

concerning the interpretation of precolonial native thought in the

Symbolic anthropology has given rise to a new theme, the role of

tradition of American cultural anthropology. At this point, the discipline

It has been conventional to begin the story of social anthropology with

culture was thought to be a vague abstraction of little scientific value;

Murdock's attack was met by a more measured response from Raymond

Yet important differences remain. European anthropologists have, on the

of Malinowskian ethnographic authority. The colonial legacy of British

Cultures of language may cross linguistic boundaries. Thus Native

An important line of research explores how cultural modelslocal

significant language ideology associated with the formation of modern

Linguistic anthropologists explore the question of how linguistic diversity

Ethnopsychiatry examines not only other cultures' understandings of

Archaeology is fundamentally a historical science, one that encompasses

social sciences, and humanities in the project of writing history. In the

Archaeology differs from the study of history principally in the source of

artifacts. Survey, or the discovery and recording of archaeological sites or

Once the empirical evidence of past societies has been generated,

generational, or even longer timescales). This means that, absent

molecular biologists, primatologists, and cultural anthropologists. The

were described in terms of gene frequencies, which were in turn used

Growth and development

index of development. Growth studies have tracked children through

Because of the wide spectrum of problems, methods, and practical

Russell Howard Tuttle

After much of Africa became independent about 1960, the nature of

A trend toward interpretation and meaning, a form of cultural analysis,

analysis. Earlier anthropologists sometimes assumed or argued that the