Anthropology, the study of humanity seen from the perspective of social and cultural diversity, was established as an academic discipline in the mid-nineteenth century. At the time, broad, evolutionist perspectives were predominant, but would be eclipsed in the early twentieth century by the cultural relativism introduced by Franz Boas and the fieldwork revolution championed by
As Eric Wolf notes in “Anthropology,” his 1964 essay, anthropology is “the most scientific of the humanities, the most humanist of the sciences.” Anthropologists have commonly taken into consideration the human condition—that which makes us distinctly human. However, maintaining balance between anthropology as a science that is concerned with causation, structure, function, and the predictability
Modern philosophical anthropology originated in the 1920s. During the 1940s it became the representative branch of German philosophy. It arose with, and has absorbed, Lebensphilosophie, existentialism, and phenomenology, although it is not identical with them. It has affinities with pragmatism and the sociology of knowledge. Although it is historically based on certain German traditions, it
Practicing anthropology primarily refers to anthropological work performed outside academia to address issues in areas such as community development, agriculture, health care, environment, resource management, housing, criminal justice, marketing, and technology. Although a majority of practicing anthropologists work in urban or other local settings, some work on international projects, especially in development and health. Practicing
Business and industry are fundamental ways of organizing economic activity to meet basic human needs in modern market societies. Business means the buying and selling of goods and services in the marketplace (also known as commerce or trade), while industry refers to the organized production of goods and services on a large scale. When we
Epistemology is that discipline of philosophy devoted to the nature of knowledge and how we acquire it. It is further divided into prescriptive and descriptive epistemology. Rules of how to proceed to acquire knowledge are called “methods,” and hence a prescriptive epistemology is a “methodism.” Descriptive epistemologies are sometimes referred to as “sociology of knowledge,”
Origins and Evolution of the Concept “Third World” The term Third World ( tiers etat) was coined in 1952 by Alfred Sauvy, a French demographer, to describe the poor, marginalized, and powerless class of prerevolutionary France. Its meaning expanded rapidly to denote areas of the world that were distinct from the industrialized capitalist countries, the
Prior to the advent of the women’s movement, anthropological research tended to focus on men’s lives, rituals, and interactions, but without articulated awareness or remark. The majority of early anthropologists were men; they had more access to men’s than to women’s lives, and gender had not yet emerged as a salient problem within anthropology. Early
This article traces the history of the anthropology of religion from the nineteenth century to the present. It argues that a focus on such questions as rationality and ritual was central to the emergence of the discipline. These themes, along with topics such as witchcraft, belief, language, and the body, have remained of perennial interest.
There are two ways to interpret “the anthropology of women:” One is as the work of women anthropologists, and the other is as anthropology that focuses on women as its subject. This entry deals with the latter, although for many reasons, the two often go hand in hand. Feminist anthropology, the ethnography of women, and