Introducing Cultural
Anthropology
Roberta Edwards Lenkeit
©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Anthropology: What Are Its
Subfields and Perspectives?
©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
What Do Anthropologists Study?

The Subfields of Anthropology
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–
–
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Cultural Anthropology
Archaeology
Linguistics
Biological Anthropology
©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
The four fields of Anthropology
©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Cultural Anthropology

Ethnography: The descriptive study of one
culture, subculture, or microculture based on
fieldwork.

Ethnology: The comparative study of cultures; it
presents analytical generalizations about human
culture.
©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Archaeology

Archaeology is the systematic study of the
remains of previous cultures as a means of
reconstructing the lifeways of people who
lived in the past.
©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Archaeology
The areas of focus in archaeology include:

Prehistoric Archaeology
– Artifacts
– Ecofacts



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Historical Archaeology
Cultural Resource Management
Experimental Archaeology
Applied Archaeology
©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Linguistics
Linguistics is the study of language; research
areas include:
Descriptive Linguistics
 Historical Linguistics
 Ethnolinguistics
 Sociolinguistics

©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Biological Anthropology

Biological anthropology, also called Physical
anthropology, studies Homo sapiens as
biological beings both in the present and in the
past.

Paleoanthropology
Primatology
Contemporary Human Variation
Forensic Anthropology


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©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
How Anthropology Is Unique
Anthropology is Holistic
 Anthropologists Do Fieldwork
 Anthropologists Focus on the Comparative
Method
 The Perspective of Cultural Relativism

– Cultural Ethnocentrism

Should There Be Any Universal Values?
©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Anthropology is Holistic

Holistic
– Biological Perspective
– Cultural Perspective
– Broad Time Frame
©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Anthropologists Do Fieldwork
Cultural Anthropology in the Field
 Archaeology in the Field
 Linguistics in the Field
 Biological Anthropology in the Field

©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Anthropologists Focus on the
Comparative Method

The Comparative Method is Used in all
Fields of Anthropology
©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Perspective of Cultural
Relativism
Cultural Relativism
 Ethnocentrism

©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Should There Be Any Universal
Values?
Arguments FOR
 Arguments AGAINST

©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Scientific Approach in
Anthropology
Scientific Method
 Postmodernism in Anthropology—A
Humanistic View

©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Summary

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Anthropology is the study of humans throughout
the world spanning the last 4 million years.
It is a holistic discipline.
Anthropologists seek to explain human cultural
behavior using the scientific method.
Anthropologists include a humanistic perspective.
©2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.