The Study of Anthropology
Anthropology is the holistic "science of humans," a science of the totality of human existence. The discipline deals with the integration of the different aspects of the social sciences, humanities, and human biology. In the twentieth century, academic disciplines have often been institutionally divided into three broad domains. The natural sciences seek to derive general laws through reproducible and verifiable experiments. The humanities generally study local traditions, through their history, literature, music, and arts, with an emphasis on understanding particular individuals, events, or eras. The social sciences have generally attempted to develop scientific methods to understand social phenomena in a generalizable way, though usually with methods distinct from those of the natural sciences.
The goal of anthropology is to provide a holistic account of humans and human nature. This means that, though anthropologists generally specialize in only one sub-field, they always keep in mind the biological, linguistic, history, and cultural aspects of any problem. Since anthropology arose as a study in Western societies that were complex and industrial, a major trend within anthropology has been a methodological drive to study peoples in societies with more simple social organizations, sometimes called "primitive" in anthropological literature, but without any connotation of "inferior."
The quest for holism leads most anthropologists to study a people in detail, using biogenetic, archaeological, and linguistic data alongside direct observation of contemporary customs. In the 1990s and 2000s, calls for clarification of what constitutes culture, of how an observer knows where his own culture ends and another begins, and other crucial topics in writing anthropology were heard. It is possible to view all human cultures as part of one global culture. These dynamic relationships, between what can be observed from the ground, as opposed to what can be observed by compiling many local observations remain fundamental in any kind of anthropology, whether cultural, biological, linguistic, or archaeological.
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Picture from Pixabay.
The goal of anthropology is to provide a holistic account of humans and human nature. This means that, though anthropologists generally specialize in only one sub-field, they always keep in mind the biological, linguistic, history, and cultural aspects of any problem. Since anthropology arose as a study in Western societies that were complex and industrial, a major trend within anthropology has been a methodological drive to study peoples in societies with more simple social organizations, sometimes called "primitive" in anthropological literature, but without any connotation of "inferior."
The quest for holism leads most anthropologists to study a people in detail, using biogenetic, archaeological, and linguistic data alongside direct observation of contemporary customs. In the 1990s and 2000s, calls for clarification of what constitutes culture, of how an observer knows where his own culture ends and another begins, and other crucial topics in writing anthropology were heard. It is possible to view all human cultures as part of one global culture. These dynamic relationships, between what can be observed from the ground, as opposed to what can be observed by compiling many local observations remain fundamental in any kind of anthropology, whether cultural, biological, linguistic, or archaeological.
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Picture from Pixabay.
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