Anthropology is the study of the origin and development of the human species. Molecular anthropology uses the tools and techniques of molecular genetics to answer anthropological questions, especially those concerning the origins and spread of humans...

Before 1900 anthropology was in one way a racist science. The nineteenth-century idea of evolution gave some European peoples (including those in North America) a reason to believe they had a superior culture because they had "evolved"...

“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...

The central issue in anthropology is human variation. In the nineteenth century the guiding idea was that there were significant biological differences between human populations, and that these biological differences—notably in the development of...

Anthropology has always involved men talking to men about men. Until recently, however, very few within the discipline of the ‘study of man’ had truly examined men as men. Although in the past three decades the study of gender and sexuality...

The period of European intellectual history known as the Enlightenment (roughly corresponding to the eighteenth century) has been frequently acknowledged as central to the emergence of social and cultural anthropology. †Durkheim included...

The term ‘Indian anthropology’ may be used to refer either to the study of society and culture in India by anthropologists irrespective of their nationality, or to the study by Indian anthropologists of society and culture in and outside...

Anthropology (‘the study of humankind’), like so many terms of contemporary social-scientific art, is borrowed appropriately enough from ancient Greek. For although the Greeks themselves did not actually use the term, brilliantly original...

The key text is understood retrospectively to have been the volume edited by Talal Asad, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1974), a book that has often been cited as though it charged the discipline with playing a collaborative role in colonial...

The definition of psychological anthropology and its proper concerns have been more closely associated with *American anthropology than with anthropologists elsewhere in the world, who appear to be less inclined to define their interests in...

Understanding the history of structural linguistics is therefore essential to understanding the origins of structuralism in anthropology. The history of structural linguistics is the coming together of two distinct traditions, one European and the...

If much of the anthropology of complex societies has been devoted to the shape of social relationships, there has naturally also been an ethnographic concern with culture. To a considerable extent this has been a matter of detailing the meanings and...

At the end of the nineteenth century most anthropologists carried out field research in imperial and quasi-imperial settings. Europeans consolidated their colonial territories throughout Africa, the Middle East and Oceania. The United States acquired...

If anthropology is (somewhat anachronistically) understood to have developed as ‘the study of simple and stable societies that are radically different from the complex and changing West’ (Carrier 1995:1), then it has a long prehistory, and...

The modern social science era of political anthropology came to an end in the late 1960s when new concerns and new voices entered the discipline. By this time six paradigms had emerged and co-existed successfully within the subfield: neo-evolutionism,...

The modern tradition of French anthropology, which dates from the beginning of this century, has always been stretched between the two poles of grand theory, on the one hand, and the minute and exacting study of data on the other. In the history of the...

In anthropology, one might usefully isolate three broad variants of traditional approach. ‘Community’ is to be characterized in terms of: (i) common interests between people; or (ii) a common ecology and locality; or (iii) a common social...

Anthropology is among the disciplines credited with the final dismantling of the doctrinal tradition of law—the long-standing *Enlightenment discourse that defined law as the unfolding of reason. Thereafter it passed through three phases. By the...

While increased emphasis upon human-environment relations earned wide acceptance in anthropology, the particular models to be employed fell quickly into dispute, not least in regard to causal explanation. †‘Structural Marxist’...

The “study of humanity.” Anthropologists study 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....

Anthropology (from Greek: á¼"νθρωπος, anthropos, "human being"; and λÏγος, logos, "speech" lit. to talk about human beings) is the study of humanity. Anthropology has origins in the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social...