Anthropology and its Subfields: Working Definitions
Anthropology
is the comparative study of humankind in all times and places.
Although anthropologists normally specialize in some aspect of the four subfields below,
they traditionally have been expected to have some training in all four.
Archeology
is the branch of anthropology that studies that past through its
physical remains.
Physical anthropology
is the branch of anthropology that studies human
physical variation across time (human evolution) and across geographical space
(human races).
Linguistic Anthropology
is the branch of anthropology that studies and
compares human languages (especially the nonwritten languages that are not
formally studied by other disciplines), including the evolution of language, and
the relation of language to universal or local patterns of thought and behavior.
Cultural Anthropology
(sometimes called “Social Anthropology”) includes
two closely related facets:
Ethnography is
the study of living cultures, usually through extended
fieldwork and “participant observation.”
Ethnology
is the comparative analysis of ethnographic data (in
practice, ethnography and ethnology are often so closely related as to be
almost indistinguishable)
Anthropology and related disciplines.
Traditionally, anthropologists were
distinguished by the special attention they gave to ancient, nonliterate, and
geographically remote peoples who received little attention from historians, sociologists,
psychologists, and other social scientists and humanists. The closely related discipline
of sociology, by contrast, has traditionally focused on the complex industrial societies of
the West. While these distinctions are rapidly breaking down in a changing world,
anthropologists still tend to be characterized by a special interest in peoples who are
different from those of Western industrialized nations. They tend to take a more broadly
comparative perspective, and to favor a “holistic” approach that takes into account the
interrelationship of all aspects of a people’s existence, rather than focusing exclusively
on economics, or art, or religion, etc. Today historians, sociologists, anthropologists, art
historians, literary critics and others are increasingly aware of one another’s work, and
are becoming increasingly similar and holistic in their approaches.