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Anthropology

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Peoples

   Anthropology (from the Greek word ἄνθρωπος, "human" or "person")
   consists of the study of humanity (see genus Homo). It is holistic in
   two senses: it is concerned with all humans at all times and with all
   dimensions of humanity. In principle, it is concerned with all
   institutions of all societies. Anthropology is distinguished from other
   social-science disciplines by its emphasis on cultural relativity,
   in-depth examination of context, and cross-cultural comparisons. Some
   anthropologists have utilized anthropological knowledge to frame
   cultural critiques. This has been particularly prominent in America,
   from the popular attacks on Victorianism by Margaret Mead and Ruth
   Benedict through contemporary attacks on post-colonialism under the
   heading of postmodernism. Anthropology is methodologically diverse
   using both qualitative methods and quantitative methods.
   Ethnographies—intensive case studies based on field research—have
   historically had a central place in the literature of the discipline.
   Initiation rite of the Yao people of Malawi
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   Initiation rite of the Yao people of Malawi

Historical and institutional context

   The anthropologist Eric Wolf once described anthropology as "the most
   scientific of the humanities, and the most humanistic of the sciences."
   Contemporary anthropologists claim a number of earlier thinkers as
   their forebears, and the discipline has several sources; Claude
   Lévi-Strauss, for example, claimed Montaigne and Rousseau as important
   influences. Anthropology can best be understood as an outgrowth of the
   Age of Enlightenment, a period when Europeans attempted systematically
   to study human behaviour. The traditions of jurisprudence, history,
   philology, and sociology then evolved into something more closely
   resembling the modern views of these disciplines and informed the
   development of the social sciences, of which anthropology was a part.
   At the same time, the romantic reaction to the Enlightenment produced
   thinkers, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and later Wilhelm Dilthey,
   whose work formed the basis for the "culture concept," which is central
   to the discipline.
   Table of natural history, 1728 Cyclopaedia
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   Table of natural history, 1728 Cyclopaedia

   Institutionally, anthropology emerged from the development of natural
   history (expounded by authors such as Buffon) that occurred during the
   European colonization of the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.
   Programs of ethnographic study have their origins in this era as the
   study of the "human primitives" overseen by colonial administrations.
   There was a tendency in late 18th century Enlightenment thought to
   understand human society as natural phenomena that behaved in
   accordance with certain principles and that could be observed
   empirically. In some ways, studying the language, culture, physiology,
   and artifacts of European colonies was not unlike studying the flora
   and fauna of those places. Some critics point to the fact that the
   material culture of "civilized" nations such as China have historically
   been displayed in fine-art museums alongside European art, while
   artifacts from African and Native North American cultures were
   displayed in Natural History Museums, alongside dinosaur bones and
   nature dioramas. The British Museum or the Parisian Musée de l'Homme
   are examples of such museums—the Musée de l'Homme held the " Hottentot
   Venus" remains until the 1970s. Saartje Baartman, a Namaqua woman, was
   examined by anatomist Georges Cuvier. This being said, curatorial
   practice has changed dramatically in recent years, and it would be
   inaccurate to see anthropology as merely an extension of colonial rule
   and European chauvinism, since its relationship to imperialism was and
   is complex.

   Anthropology grew increasingly distinct from natural history, and by
   the end of the nineteenth century, it had begun to crystallize into its
   modern form; by 1935, for example, it was possible for T. K. Penniman
   to write a history of the discipline entitled "A Hundred Years of
   Anthropology." Early anthropology was dominated by proponents of
   unilinealism, who argued that all societies passed through a single
   evolutionary process, from the most primitive to the most advanced.
   Non-European societies were thus seen as evolutionary "living fossils,"
   which could be studied in order to understand the European past.
   Scholars wrote histories of prehistoric migrations that were sometimes
   valuable but often also fanciful. It was during this time that
   Europeans, such as Paul Rivet, first accurately traced Polynesian
   migrations across the Pacific Ocean—though some of them believed those
   emigrations had originated in Egypt. Finally, concepts of race were
   developed with a view to better understanding the nature of the
   biological variation within the Human species, and tools such as
   Anthropometry were devised as a means of measuring and categorizing
   this variation, not just within the genus Homo, but in fossil Hominids
   and primates as well. Racialistic concepts were advocated by a few and
   gave rise to theories of Scientific racism.

   Anténor Firmin wrote De l'égalité des races humaines (1885) as a direct
   rebuttal to Count Arthur de Gobineau’s polemical four-volume work Essai
   sur l'inegalite des Races Humaines (1853–1855), which asserted the
   superiority of the Aryan race and the inferiority of blacks and other
   people of color. Firmin’s work argued the opposite, that "all men are
   endowed with the same qualities and the same faults, without
   distinction of colour or anatomical form. The races are equal" (pp.
   450). Firmin grew up in Haiti, and was admitted to the Societé d’
   Anthropologie de Paris in 1884 while serving as a diplomat. His
   persuasive critique and rigorous analysis of many of that society’s
   leading scholars made him an early pioneer in the so-called
   vindicationist struggle in anthropology. Many scholars also associate
   his work with the very first ideas of Pan-Africanism. Many modern
   anthropologists no longer refer to races as biological realities and
   may instead refer to the idea of clines.

   In the twentieth century, academic disciplines began to organize around
   three main domains. The domain of the sciences seeks to derive natural
   laws through reproducible and falsifiable experiments; that of the
   humanities reflects an attempt to study different national traditions,
   in the form of history and the arts, as an attempt to provide people in
   emerging nation-states with a sense of coherence; the social sciences
   emerged at this time as an attempt to develop scientific methods to
   address social phenomena and provide a universal basis for social
   knowledge. Anthropology does not easily fit into one of these
   categories, and different branches of anthropology draw on one or more
   of these domains.

   Drawing on the methods of the natural sciences and developing new
   techniques involving not only structured interviews, but unstructured
   participant observation, and drawing on the new theory of evolution
   through natural selection, the branches of anthropology proposed the
   scientific study of a new object: humankind, conceived of as a whole.
   Crucial to this study is the concept of culture, which anthropologists
   defined both as a universal capacity and a propensity for social
   learning, thinking, and acting (which they saw as a product of human
   evolution and something that distinguishes Homo sapiens—and perhaps all
   species of genus Homo—from other species), and as a particular
   adaptation to local conditions, which takes the form of highly variable
   beliefs and practices. Thus, culture not only transcends the opposition
   between nature and nurture, but absorbs the peculiarly European
   distinction among politics, religion, kinship, and the economy as
   autonomous domains. Anthropology thus transcends the divisions between
   the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities to explore the
   biological, linguistic, material, and symbolic dimensions of humankind
   in all forms.

Anthropology in the United States

Jacksonian America and polygenism

   Late eighteenth century ethnology established the scientific foundation
   for the field, which began to mature when Andrew Jackson was President
   of the United States (1829-1837). Jackson was responsible for
   implementing the Indian Removal Act, the coerced and forced removal of
   an estimated 100,000 American Indians during the 1830s to Indian
   Territory in present-day Oklahoma; for insuring that the franchise was
   extended to all white men, irrespective of financial means while
   denying virtually all black men the right to vote; and, for suppressing
   abolitionists’ efforts to end slavery while vigorously defending that
   institution. Finally, he was responsible for appointing Chief Justice
   Roger B. Taney who would decide, in Scott v. Sandford (1857), that
   Negroes were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to
   associate with the white race. . . and so far inferior that they had no
   rights which the white man was bound to respect.” As a result of this
   decision, black people, whether free or enslaved, could never become
   citizens of the United States.

   It was in this context that the so-called American School of
   Anthropology thrived as the champion of polygenism or the doctrine of
   multiple origins—sparking a debate between those influenced by the
   Bible who believed in the unity of humanity and those who argued from a
   scientific standpoint for the plurality of origins and the antiquity of
   distinct types. Like the monogenists, these theories were not
   monolithic and often used words like races, species, hybrid, and
   mongrel interchangeably. A scientific consensus began to emerge during
   this period “that there exists a Genus Homo, embracing many primordial
   types of ‘species.’” Charles Caldwell, Samuel George Morton, Samuel A.
   Cartwright, George Gliddon, Josiah C. Nott, and Louis Agassiz, and even
   South Carolina Governor James Henry Hammond were all influential
   proponents of this school. While some were disinterested scientists,
   others were passionate advocates who used science to promote slavery in
   a period of increasing sectional strife. All were complicit in
   establishing the putative science that justified slavery, informed the
   Dred Scott decision, underpinned miscegenation laws, and eventually
   fueled Jim Crow. Samuel G. Morton, for example, claimed to be just a
   scientist but he did not hesitate to provide evidence of Negro
   inferiority to John C. Calhoun, the prominent pro-slavery Secretary of
   State to help him negotiate the annexation of Texas as a slave state.

Types of Mankind, 1854

   The high-water mark of polygenitic theories was Josiah Nott and
   Gliddon’s voluminous eight-hundred page tome entitled Types of Mankind,
   published in 1854. Reproducing the work of Louis Agassiz and Samuel
   Morton, the authors spread the virulent and explicitly racist views to
   a wider, more popular audience. The first printing sold out quickly and
   by the end of the century it had undergone nine editions. Although many
   Southerners felt that all the justification for slavery they needed was
   found in the Bible, others used the new science to defend slavery and
   the repression of American Indians. Abolitionists, however, felt they
   had to take this science on on its own terms. And for the first time,
   African American intellectuals waded into the contentious debate. In
   the immediate wake of Types of Mankind and during the pitched political
   battles that led to Civil War, Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), the
   statesman and persuasive abolitionist, directly attacked the leading
   theorists of the American School of Anthropology. In an 1854 address,
   entitled “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered,” Douglass
   argued that "by making the enslaved a character fit only for slavery,
   [slaveowners] excuse themselves for refusing to make the slave a
   freeman.... For let it be once granted that the human race are of
   multitudinous origin, naturally different in their moral, physical, and
   intellectual capacities... a chance is left for slavery, as a necessary
   institution.... There is no doubt that Messrs. Nott, Glidden, Morton,
   Smith and Agassiz were duly consulted by our slavery propagating
   statesmen" (p. 287).

Boasian anthropology

   Franz Boas, one of the pioneers of modern anthropology, often called
   the "Father of American Anthropology"
   Enlarge
   Franz Boas, one of the pioneers of modern anthropology, often called
   the "Father of American Anthropology"

   Cultural anthropology in the United States was influenced greatly by
   the ready availability of Native American societies as ethnographic
   subjects. The field was pioneered by staff of the Bureau of Indian
   Affairs and the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology,
   men such as John Wesley Powell and Frank Hamilton Cushing. Lewis Henry
   Morgan (1818-1881), a lawyer from Rochester, New York, became an
   advocate for and ethnological scholar of the Iroquois. His comparative
   analyses of religion, government, material culture, and especially
   kinship patterns proved to be influential contributions to the field of
   anthropology. Like other scholars of his day (such as Edward Tylor),
   Morgan argued that human societies could be classified into categories
   of cultural evolution on a scale of progression that ranged from
   savagery, to barbarism, to civilization. Generally, Morgan used
   technology (such as bowmaking or pottery) as an indicator of position
   on this scale.

   Franz Boas established academic anthropology in the United States in
   opposition to this sort of evolutionary perspective. Boasian
   anthropology was politically active and suspicious of research dictated
   by the U.S. government and wealthy patrons. It was rigorously empirical
   and skeptical of overgeneralizations and attempts to establish
   universal laws. Boas studied immigrant children to demonstrate that
   biological race was not immutable, and that human conduct and behaviour
   resulted from nurture, rather than nature.

   Influenced by the German tradition, Boas argued that the world was full
   of distinct cultures, rather than societies whose evolution could be
   measured by how much or how little "civilization" they had. He believed
   that each culture has to be studied in its particularity, and argued
   that cross-cultural generalizations, like those made in the natural
   sciences, were not possible. In doing so, he fought discrimination
   against immigrants, African Americans, and Native North Americans. Many
   American anthropologists adopted his agenda for social reform, and
   theories of race continue to be popular targets for anthropologists
   today. The so-called "Four Field Approach" has its origins in Boasian
   Anthropology, dividing the discipline in the four crucial and
   interrelated fields of sociocultural, biological, linguistic, and
   prehistoric anthropology.

   Boas used his positions at Columbia University and the American Museum
   of Natural History to train and develop multiple generations of
   students. His first generation of students included Alfred Kroeber,
   Robert Lowie, Edward Sapir and Ruth Benedict, all of whom produced
   richly detailed studies of indigenous North American cultures. They
   provided a wealth of details used to attack the theory of a single
   evolutionary process. Kroeber and Sapir's focus on Native American
   languages helped establish linguistics as a truly general science and
   free it from its historical focus on Indo-European languages.

   The publication of Alfred Kroeber's textbook, Anthropology, marked a
   turning point in American anthropology. After three decades of amassing
   material, Boasians felt a growing urge to generalize. This was most
   obvious in the 'Culture and Personality' studies carried out by younger
   Boasians such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. Influenced by
   psychoanalytic psychologists such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, these
   authors sought to understand the way that individual personalities were
   shaped by the wider cultural and social forces in which they grew up.
   Though such works as Coming of Age in Samoa and The Chrysanthemum and
   the Sword remain popular with the American public, Mead and Benedict
   never had the impact on the discipline of anthropology that some
   expected. Boas had planned for Ruth Benedict to succeed him as chair of
   Columbia's anthropology department, but she was sidelined by Ralph
   Linton, and Mead was limited to her offices at the AMNH.

Anthropology in Britain

   Whereas Boas picked his opponents to pieces through attention to
   detail, modern anthropology in Britain was formed by rejecting
   historical reconstruction in the name of a science of society that
   focused on analyzing how societies held together in the present.

   The two most important scholars in this tradition were Alfred Reginald
   Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski, both of whom released seminal
   works in 1922. Radcliffe-Brown's initial fieldwork, in the Andaman
   Islands, was carried out in the old style of historical reconstruction.
   After reading the work of French sociologists Émile Durkheim and Marcel
   Mauss, Radcliffe-Brown published an account of his research (entitled
   simply The Andaman Islanders) that paid close attention to the meaning
   and purpose of rituals and myths. Over time, he developed an approach
   known as structural-functionalism, which focused on how institutions in
   societies worked to balance out or create an equilibrium in the social
   system to keep it functioning harmoniously. Malinowski, in contrast,
   advocated an unhyphenated functionalism, which examined how society
   functioned to meet individual needs. He is better known, however, for
   his detailed ethnography and advances in methodology. His classic
   ethnography, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, advocated getting "the
   native's point of view" and an approach to fieldwork that became
   standard in the field.

   Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown's influence stemmed from the fact that
   they, like Boas, actively trained students and aggressively built up
   institutions that furthered their programmatic ambitions. This was
   particularly the case with Radcliffe-Brown, who spread his agenda for
   "Social Anthropology" by teaching at universities across the
   Commonwealth. From the late 1930s until the postwar period appeared a
   string of monographs and edited volumes that cemented the paradigm of
   British Social Anthropology. Famous ethnographies include The Nuer, by
   Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, and The Dynamics of Clanship Among the
   Tallensi, by Meyer Fortes; well-known edited volumes include African
   Systems of Kinship and Marriage and African Political Systems.
   Contemporary social anthropology is international and has branched in
   many directions.

Anthropology in France

   Anthropology in France has a less clear genealogy than the British and
   American traditions. Most commentators consider Marcel Mauss to be the
   founder of the French anthropological tradition. Mauss was a member of
   Durkheim's Année Sociologique group, and while Durkheim and others
   examined the state of modern societies, Mauss and his collaborators
   (such as Henri Hubert and Robert Hertz) drew on ethnography and
   philology to analyze societies which were not as 'differentiated' as
   European nation states. In particular, Mauss's Essay on the Gift was to
   prove of enduring relevance in anthropological studies of exchange and
   reciprocity.

   Throughout the interwar years, French interest in anthropology often
   dovetailed with wider cultural movements such as surrealism and
   primitivism which drew on ethnography for inspiration. Marcel Griaule
   and Michel Leiris are examples of people who combined anthropology with
   the French avant-garde. During this time most of what is known as
   ethnologie was restricted to museums, such as the Musée de l'Homme
   founded by Paul Rivet, and anthropology had a close relationship with
   studies of folklore.

   Above all, however, it was Claude Lévi-Strauss who helped
   institutionalize anthropology in France. In addition to the enormous
   influence his structuralism exerted across multiple disciplines,
   Lévi-Strauss established ties with American and British
   anthropologists. At the same time he established centers and
   laboratories within France to provide an institutional context within
   anthropology while training influential students such as Maurice
   Godelier and Françoise Héritier who would prove influential in the
   world of French anthropology. Much of the distinct character of
   France's anthropology today is a result of the fact that most
   anthropology is carried out in nationally funded research laboratories
   ( CNRS) rather than academic departments in universities.

   Other influential writers in the 1970s include Pierre Clastres, who
   explains in his books on the Guayaki tribe in Paraguay that "primitive
   societies" actively oppose the institution of the state. Therefore,
   these stateless societies are not less evolved than societies with
   states, but took the active choice of conjuring the institution of
   authority as a separate function from society. The leader is only a
   spokeperson for the group when it has to deal with other groups
   ("international relations") but has no inside authority, and may be
   violently removed if he attempts to abuse this position.

Anthropology after World War II

   Before WWII British 'social anthropology' and American 'cultural
   anthropology' were still distinct traditions. It was after the war that
   the two would blend to create a 'sociocultural' anthropology.

   In the 1950s and mid-1960s anthropology tended increasingly to model
   itself after the natural sciences. Some anthropologists, such as Lloyd
   Fallers and Clifford Geertz, focused on processes of modernization by
   which newly independent states could develop. Others, such as Julian
   Steward and Leslie White, focused on how societies evolve and fit their
   ecological niche —— an approach popularized by Marvin Harris. Economic
   anthropology as influenced by Karl Polanyi and practiced by Marshall
   Sahlins and George Dalton focused on how traditional economics ignored
   cultural and social factors. In England, British Social Anthropology's
   paradigm began to fragment as Max Gluckman and Peter Worsley
   experimented with Marxism and authors such as Rodney Needham and Edmund
   Leach incorporated Lévi-Strauss's structuralism into their work.

   Structuralism also influenced a number of developments in 1960s and
   1970s, including cognitive anthropology and componential analysis.
   Authors such as David Schneider, Clifford Geertz, and Marshall Sahlins
   developed a more fleshed-out concept of culture as a web of meaning or
   signification, which proved very popular within and beyond the
   discipline. In keeping with the times, much of anthropology became
   politicized through the Algerian War of Independence and opposition to
   the Vietnam War; Marxism became a more and more popular theoretical
   approach in the discipline. By the 1970s the authors of volumes such as
   Reinventing Anthropology worried about anthropology's relevance.

   In the 1980s issues of power, such as those examined in Eric Wolf's
   Europe and the People Without History, were central to the discipline.
   Books like Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter pondered
   anthropology's ties to colonial inequality, while the immense
   popularity of theorists such as Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault
   moved issues of power and hegemony into the spotlight. Gender and
   sexuality became a popular topic, as did the relationship between
   history and anthropology, influenced by Marshall Sahlins (again), who
   drew on Lévi-Strauss and Fernand Braudel to examine the relationship
   between social structure and individual agency.

   In the late 1980s and 1990s authors such as George Marcus and James
   Clifford pondered ethnographic authority, particularly how and why
   anthropological knowledge was possible and authoritative. Ethnographies
   became more reflexive, explicitly addressing the author's methodology
   and cultural positioning, and their influence on his or her
   ethnographic analysis. This was part of a more general trend of
   postmodernism that was popular contemporaneously. Currently
   anthropologists have begun to pay attention to globalization, medicine
   and biotechnology, indigenous rights, and the anthropology of
   industrialized societies.

Politics of anthropology

   American cultural anthropology developed during the first four decades
   of the 20th century under the powerful influence of Franz Boas and his
   students and their struggle against racial determinism and the
   ethnocentrism of 19th century cultural evolutionism. With the
   additional impact of the Great Depression and World War II, American
   anthropology developed a pronounced liberal-left tone by the 1950s.
   However, the discipline's deep involvement with nonwestern cultures put
   it in a vulnerable position during the campus upheavals of the late
   1960s and in the subsequent "culture wars." The "politics of
   anthropology" has become a pervasive concern since then. Whatever the
   realities, the notion of anthropology as somehow complicit in morally
   unacceptable projects has become a significant topic both within the
   discipline and in "cultural studies" and "post-colonialism," etc. A few
   of the central elements in this discourse are the following:
     * The claim that the discipline grew out of colonialism, perhaps was
       in league with it, and derived some of its key notions from it,
       consciously or not. (See, for example, Gough, Pels and Salemink,
       but cf. Lewis 2004). It is often assumed that an example of this
       exploitative relationship can be seen in the relationship between
       British anthropologists and colonial forces in Africa, yet this
       assumption has not been supported by much evidence. (See Asad et
       al; cf. Desai.)

     * The idea that social and political problems must arise because
       anthropologists usually have more power than the people they study;
       it is a form of colonialist theft in which the anthropologist gains
       power at the expense of subjects (Rabinow, Dwyer, McGrane).
       Anthropologists, they argue, can gain yet more power by exploiting
       knowledge and artifacts of the people they study while the people
       they study gain nothing, or even lose, in the exchange (for
       example, Deloria). Little critical writing has been published in
       response to these wide-ranging claims, themselves the product of
       the political concerns and atmosphere of their own times. (See
       Trencher for a critique.)

     * It is claimed the discipline was ahistorical, and dealt with its
       "objects" (sic) "out of time," to their detriment (Fabian). It is
       often claimed that anthropologists regularly "exoticized 'the
       Other,'" or, with equal assurance, that they inappropriately
       universalized "Others" and "human nature." (For references and a
       response see Lewis 1998.)

     * Other more explicitly political concerns have to do with
       anthropologists’ entanglements with government intelligence
       agencies, on the one hand, and anti-war politics on the other.
       Franz Boas publicly objected to US participation in World War I,
       and after the war he published a brief expose and condemnation of
       the participation of several American archeologists in espionage in
       Mexico under their cover as scientists. But by the 1940s, many of
       Boas' anthropologist contemporaries were active in the allied war
       effort against the "Axis" (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and
       Imperial Japan). Many served in the armed forces but others worked
       in intelligence (for example, Office of Strategic Services [OSS}
       and the Office of War Information). David H. Price's work on
       American anthropology during the Cold War provides detailed
       accounts of the pursuit and dismissal of several anthropologists
       for their vocal left-wing sympathies. On the other hand, attempts
       to accuse anthropologists of complicity with the CIA and government
       intelligence activities during the Vietnam War years have turned up
       surprisingly little. (Anthropologists did not participate in the
       stillborn Project Camelot, for example. See Lewis 2005) On the
       contrary, many anthropologists (students and teachers) were active
       in the antiwar movement and a great many resolutions condemning the
       war in all its aspects were passed overwhelmingly at the annual
       meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). In the
       decades since the Vietnam war the tone of cultural and social
       anthropology, at least, has been increasingly politicized, with the
       dominant liberal tone of earlier generations replaced with one more
       radical, a mix of, and varying degrees of, Marxist, feminist,
       post-colonial, post-modern, Saidian, Foucaultian, identity-based,
       and more.

   Professional anthropological bodies often object to the use of
   anthropology for the benefit of the state. Their codes of ethics or
   statements may proscribe anthropologists from giving secret briefings.
   The British Association for Social Anthropology has called certain
   scholarships ethically dangerous. The AAA's current 'Statement of
   Professional Responsibility' clearly states that "in relation with
   their own government and with host governments... no secret research,
   no secret reports or debriefings of any kind should be agreed to or
   given."

   More recently, there have been concerns expressed about bioprospecting,
   along with struggles for self-representation for native peoples and the
   repatriation of indigenous remains and material culture, with
   anthropologists often in the lead on these issues.

   Other political controversies come from the emphasis in American
   anthropology on cultural relativism and its long-standing antipathy to
   the concept of race. The development of sociobiology in the late 1960s
   was opposed by cultural anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins, who
   argued that these positions were reductive. While authors such John
   Randal Baker continued to develop the biological concept of race into
   the 1970s, the rise of genetics has proven to be central to
   developments on this front. As genetics continues to advance as a
   science some anthropologists such as Luca Cavalli-Sforza have continued
   to transform and advance notions of race through the use of recent
   developments in genetics, such as tracing past migrations of peoples
   through their mitochondrial and Y-chromosomal DNA, and
   ancestry-informative markers.

Branches of anthropology

   In North America, anthropology is traditionally divided into four
   sub-disciplines:
     * Physical anthropology, or biological anthropology, which studies
       primate behaviour, human evolution, osteology, forensics, and
       population genetics;
     * Cultural anthropology (called social anthropology and now often
       known as socio-cultural anthropology in the United Kingdom, and
       both terms are used in Canada with limited distinction), which
       studies social networks, diffusion, social behaviour, kinship
       patterns, law, politics, ideology, religion, beliefs, patterns in
       production and consumption, exchange, socialization, gender, and
       other expressions of culture, with strong emphasis on the
       importance of fieldwork or participant observation (that is, living
       among the social group being studied for an extended period of
       time);
     * Linguistic anthropology, which studies variation in language across
       time and space, the social uses of language, and the relationship
       between language and culture, and
     * Archaeology, which studies the material remains of human societies.
       Archaeology itself is normally treated as a separate (but related)
       field in the rest of the world, although closely related to the
       anthropological field of material culture, which deals with
       physical objects created or used within a living or past group as a
       means of understanding its cultural values.

   More recently, some anthropology programs began dividing the field into
   two, one emphasizing the humanities and critical theory, the other
   emphasizing the natural sciences and empirical observation.

Anthropological fields and subfields

     * Biological anthropology (also physical anthropology)
          + Forensic anthropology
          + Paleoethnobotany
          + Paleopathology
          + Medical anthropology
          + Primatology
          + Paleoanthropology
          + Osteology
     * Cultural anthropology (also social anthropology)
          + Anthropology of art
          + Anthropology of law
          + Anthropology of media
          + Anthropology of religion
          + Applied anthropology
          + Cross-cultural studies
          + Cyber anthropology
          + Development anthropology
          + Dual inheritance theory
          + Environmental anthropology
          + Economic anthropology
          + Ecological anthropology
          + Ethnography
          + Ethnomusicology
          + Feminist anthropology
          + Gender
          + Human behavioural ecology
          + Medical anthropology
          + Psychological anthropology
          + Political anthropology
          + Public anthropology
          + Symbolic anthropology
          + Urban anthropology
          + Visual anthropology
     * Linguistic anthropology
          + Synchronic linguistics (or descriptive linguistics)
          + Diachronic linguistics (or historical linguistics)
          + Ethnolinguistics
          + Sociolinguistics
     * Archaeology
          + Historical archaeology
          + Zooarchaeology

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   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
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