Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavior, while cultural anthropology studies cultural meaning, including norms and values. A portmanteau term sociocultural anthropology is commonly used today. Linguistic anthropology studies how language influences social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the biological development of humans.
Ethnography is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study. Ethnography is also a type of social research that involves examining the behavior of the participants in a given social situation and understanding the group members' own interpretation of such behavior.
Sociocultural anthropology is a term used to refer to social anthropology and cultural anthropology together. It is one of the four main branches of anthropology. Sociocultural anthropologists focus on the study of society and culture, while often interested in cultural diversity and universalism.
Arjun Appadurai is an Indian-American anthropologist recognized as a major theorist in globalization studies. In his anthropological work, he discusses the importance of the modernity of nation-states and globalization. He is the former University of Chicago professor of anthropology and South Asian Languages and Civilizations, Humanities Dean of the University of Chicago, director of the city center and globalization at Yale University, and the Education and Human Development Studies professor at NYU Steinhardt School of Culture.
Cultural heritage tourism is a form of non-business travel whereby tourists engage with the heritage, tangible and intangible, moveable and immovable, of a region through activities, experiences, and purchases which facilitate a connection to the people, objects, and places of the past associated with the locations being visited. As opposed to natural heritage tourism, which focuses on visitors' interaction with the unimproved environment of the area being visited, including outdoor sports and recreation, hiking, diving, fishing, and naturalism, and pleasure tourism without any heritage interest, such as indoor recreation, gastronomy, and hospitality without any significant precedent in the history and heritage of the region, cultural heritage tourism can include activities such as tours of immovable cultural sites, such as historic house museums, historic fortifications, human history museums, and library documentary heritage collections, opportunities for purchases of moveable cultural property, such as antiques, antiquarian books, and other works and ephemera associated with the locations being visited, and opportunities for admission to or purchase of intangible heritage experiences associated with the tourism region, including gastronomic heritage and admissions to performances such as theatre, opera, ballet, indigenous dances, and storytelling.
The imaginary is the set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols through which people imagine their social whole. It is common to the members of a particular social group and the corresponding society. The concept of the imaginary has attracted attention in anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and media studies.
A tour guide (U.S.) or a tourist guide (European) is a person who provides assistance, and information on cultural, historical and contemporary heritage to people on organized sightseeing and individual clients at educational establishments, religious and historical sites such as; museums, and at various venues of tourist attraction resorts. Tour guides also take clients on outdoor guided trips. These trips include hiking, whitewater rafting, mountaineering, alpine climbing, rock climbing, ski and snowboarding in the backcountry, fishing, and biking.
The Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity is located in Göttingen, Germany. It is one of 83 institutes in the Max Planck Society (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft).
Edward M. Bruner was professor emeritus of anthropology and criticism and interpretive theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was an American anthropologist known for his contributions to the anthropology of tourism, particularly his constructivist, processual approach that centers on experience and narrative in and beyond tourist settings. His book Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel is perhaps his best-known book. He has written numerous articles on tourism and has edited or coedited four volumes, including International Tourism: Identity and Change. His early field research was on acculturation and culture chance in Native North American communities in the 1950s. Subsequently, he studied Toba Batak migrants in Indonesia in the 1960s, then turned his attention to performance, narrative, and tourism in the 1980s through the present.
Helena Wulff is professor of social anthropology at Stockholm University. Her research is in the anthropology of communication and aesthetics based on a wide range of studies of the social worlds of literary production, dance, and the visual arts.
Urban anthropology is a subset of anthropology concerned with issues of urbanization, poverty, urban space, social relations, and neoliberalism. The field has become consolidated in the 1960s and 1970s.
Marcia Claire Inhorn is a medical anthropologist and William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at Yale University where she serves as Chair of the Council on Middle East Studies. A specialist on Middle Eastern gender and health issues, Inhorn conducts research on the social impact of infertility and assisted reproductive technologies in Egypt, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, and Arab America. She has also completed a major study of egg freezing in the United States, featured in her latest book, Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs. Inhorn has published 22 books, as well as more than 150 articles and book chapters.
Heritage commodification is the process by which cultural themes and expressions come to be evaluated primarily in terms of their exchange value, specifically within the context of cultural tourism. These cultural expressions and aspects of heritage become "cultural goods," transformed into commodities to be bought, sold and profited from in the heritage tourism industry. In the context of modern globalization, complex and often contradictory layers of meaning are produced in local societies, and the marketing of one's cultural expressions can degrade a particular culture while simultaneously assisting in its integration into the global economy. The repatriation of profits, or "leakage", that occurs with the influx of tourist capital into a heritage tourist site is a crucial part of any sustainable development that can be considered beneficial to local communities. Modern heritage tourism reproduces an economic dynamic that is dependent upon capital from tourists and corporations in creating sustained viability. Tourism is often directly tied to economic development, so many populations see globalization as providing increased access to vital medical services and important commodities.
Nasir Uddin is a cultural anthropologist, post-colonial theorist and prolific writer on topics ranging from human rights, Adivasi issues, rights of non-citizens, refugees, and stateless people, common forms of discrimination, government in everyday life, media, democracy, and the state-society relations in Bangladesh and South Asia. Uddin is a professor of anthropology at the University of Chittagong.
Iain Edgar was a social anthropologist at Durham University. He was an expert in the field of dreams and dreaming, and a specialist in altered states of consciousness and mental health. Starting his career in social work, Edgar received a PhD from the University of Keele, where he studied under Ronnie Frankenberg. His thesis Dreamwork, Anthropology and the Caring Professions: A Cultural Approach to Dreamwork discusses a wide range of psychodynamic possibilities and develops a method to work with dreams within a professional care environment.
Mobilities is a contemporary paradigm in the social sciences that explores the movement of people, ideas and things (transport), as well as the broader social implications of those movements. Mobility can also be thought as the movement of people through social classes, social mobility or income, income mobility.
Kathleen M. Adams is a cultural anthropologist, Professorial Research Associate at SOAS, University of London, Professor Emerita at Loyola University Chicago, and an Adjunct Curator at the Field Museum of Natural History. Adams is known for her research on cultural transformations in island Southeast Asia,, and her contributions to critical tourism studies, heritage studies, and museum studies. Her award-winning books include Art as Politics: Re-crafting Identities, Tourism and Power in Tana Toraja, Indonesia and The Ethnography of Tourism: Edward Bruner and Beyond. Additional books include Intersections of Tourism, Migration, and Exile, Everyday Life in Southeast Asia, Indonesia: History, Heritage, Culture, and Home and Hegemony: Domestic Service and Identity Politics in South and Southeast Asia.
Peter Hervik is a Danish anthropologist and former professor in Media and Migration. He focuses on the media's representation and popular consciousness in the context of identities and everyday lives of ethnic minorities, immigrants and refugees in Denmark. while taking special interest in the historical evolvement of Danish neo-nationalism, neo-racism and populism
Anthropology of food is a sub-discipline of anthropology that connects an ethnographic and historical perspective with contemporary social issues in food production and consumption systems.
