Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including archaic humans. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavior, while cultural anthropology studies cultural meaning, including norms and values. The 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.
Linguistic anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life. It is a branch of anthropology that originated from the endeavor to document endangered languages and has grown over the past century to encompass most aspects of language structure and use.
Medical anthropology studies "human health and disease, health care systems, and biocultural adaptation". It views humans from multidimensional and ecological perspectives. It is one of the most highly developed areas of anthropology and applied anthropology, and is a subfield of social and cultural anthropology that examines the ways in which culture and society are organized around or influenced by issues of health, health care and related issues.
The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is an organization of scholars and practitioners in the field of anthropology. With 10,000 members, the association, based in Arlington, Virginia, includes archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, biological anthropologists, linguistic anthropologists, linguists, medical anthropologists and applied anthropologists in universities and colleges, research institutions, government agencies, museums, corporations and non-profits throughout the world. The AAA publishes more than 20 peer-reviewed scholarly journals, available in print and online through AnthroSource. The AAA was founded in 1902.
Ethnolinguistics is an area of anthropological linguistics that studies the relationship between a language or group of languages and the cultural behavior of the people who speak those languages.
Cultural history records and interprets past events involving human beings through the social, cultural, and political milieu of or relating to the arts and manners that a group favors. Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) helped found cultural history as a discipline. Cultural history studies and interprets the record of human societies by denoting the various distinctive ways of living built up by a group of people under consideration. Cultural history involves the aggregate of past cultural activity, such as ceremony, class in practices, and the interaction with locales. It combines the approaches of anthropology and history to examine popular cultural traditions and cultural interpretations of historical experience.
Political anthropology is the comparative study of politics in a broad range of historical, social, and cultural settings.
History of anthropology in this article refers primarily to the 18th- and 19th-century precursors of modern anthropology. The term anthropology itself, innovated as a Neo-Latin scientific word during the Renaissance, has always meant "the study of man". The topics to be included and the terminology have varied historically. At present they are more elaborate than they were during the development of anthropology. For a presentation of modern social and cultural anthropology as they have developed in Britain, France, and North America since approximately 1900, see the relevant sections under Anthropology.
Ethnoecology is the scientific study of how different groups of people living in different locations understand the ecosystems around them, and their relationships with surrounding environments.
Frederick Russell Eggan was an American anthropologist best known for his innovative application of the principles of British social anthropology to the study of Native American tribes. He was the favorite student of the British social anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown during Radcliffe-Brown's years at the University of Chicago. His fieldwork was among Pueblo peoples in the southwestern U.S. Eggan later taught at Chicago himself. His students there included Sol Tax.
Anthropology of media is an area of study within social or cultural anthropology that emphasizes ethnographic studies as a means of understanding producers, audiences, and other cultural and social aspects of mass media.
Public anthropology, according to Robert Borofsky, a professor at Hawaii Pacific University, "demonstrates the ability of anthropology and anthropologists to effectively address problems beyond the discipline—illuminating larger social issues of our times as well as encouraging broad, public conversations about them with the explicit goal of fostering social change". The work of Partners In Health is one illustration of using anthropological methods to solve big or complicated problems.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes is an anthropologist, educator, and author. She is the Chancellor's Professor Emerita of Anthropology and the director and co-founder of the PhD program in Critical Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her writing on the anthropology of the body, hunger, illness, medicine, motherhood, psychiatry, psychosis, social suffering, violence and genocide, death squads, and human trafficking.
The Human Terrain System (HTS) was a United States Army, Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) support program employing personnel from the social science disciplines – such as archaeology, anthropology, sociology, political science, historians, regional studies, and linguistics – to provide military commanders and staff with an understanding of the local population in the regions in which they are deployed.
Culture is a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups. Culture is often originated from or attributed to a specific region or location.
Environmental anthropology is a sub-discipline of anthropology that examines the complex relationships between humans and the environments which they inhabit. This takes many shapes and forms, whether it be examining the hunting/gathering patterns of humans tens of thousands of years ago, archaeological investigations of early agriculturalists and their impact on deforestation or soil erosion, or how modern human societies are adapting to climate change and other anthropogenic environmental issues. This sub-field of anthropology developed in the 1960s from cultural ecology as anthropologists borrowed methods and terminology from growing developments in ecology and applied them to understand human cultures.
Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behaviour in human societies and cultures. It is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and much of Europe, where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In the United States, social anthropology is commonly subsumed within cultural anthropology or sociocultural anthropology.
William Abel Caudill was an American applied medical anthropologist. His work centered on psychiatry, and the influence of culture on personality. Caudill was especially interested in diagnosis and treatment of mental issues in Japan. Caudill was the first to identify the field of medical anthropology, and was active in organizing it during its formative years.
