Anthropology is the study of human differences, cultural and biological, against a background of the nature all humans share. Most anthropologists study human social life and \Tculture\t. Some, in the highly technical subfield of physical anthropology, study human evolutionary biology. Nature and Scope of Anthropology Historically, anthropologists have looked primarily at non-Western peoples. This study of "exotic" people and places, particularly of so-called primitive peoples (a term usually avoided now), has distinguished anthropology from other academic disciplines. Anthropology began as a kind of natural history, a study of the peoples encountered along the frontiers of European expansion, and anthropologists have continued to use this approach. They record customs and collect artifacts in order to reconstruct the history of cultures. Since the 1930s, however, anthropology has been considered more directly related to the social sciences. Anthropologists analyze and compare societies and their ways of life in search of theoretical generalizations, regularities of process, and patterns of causal connection and covariation. Thus, an anthropologist might look for connections between a people's political organization and the kinds of supernatural beings they posit; he or she might examine beliefs in sorcery and particular kinds of family structure to see if they are correlated; the anthropologist might also try to determine whether the status of women in a society is related to the part they play in a subsistence economy. Such searches for regularities and connections in turn shed light on human differences and, through them, on human nature and universals that underlie diversity. Anthropology differs from sociology, psychology, and the other social sciences in certain key respects. Until World War II anthropologists mainly studied tribal peoples--American Indians, Africans, Pacific Islanders, and Australian Aborigines. By living among such peoples and by studying and participating in their ways of life, anthropologists developed their particular concepts, theories, and methods. By contrast, the theories and methods of the other social sciences were primarily developed in Western societies. Since World War II, anthropologists have increasingly studied peasant communities, in Latin America, Asia, and Europe; and many now study urban settings in the Third World and in Western countries. During the same period, many sociologists, political scientists, economists, and psychologists have made studies in the Third World. Despite this convergence of interest, anthropological perspectives remain at least partly distinctive in their continuing concern with cultural differences and local ties of \Tkinship\t and community and in their style and method of research. Cultural Anthropology The comparative study of social and cultural systems is commonly (especially in the United States) referred to as cultural anthropology. This branch of anthropology is sometimes also called ethnology. In anthropology the term culture denotes a people's heritage of custom and belief. A culture is a system of ideas that have been transmitted down through the generations--assumptions about the world, rules and ways to act, goals and ways of achieving them. The cultural heritage of a people--their ideas about ways to live--shapes the ways they actually do live: for example, the ways they garden, herd, or hunt and the ways they organize their communities. The way in which cultural ideas are worked out in practice is also governed by the nature of the ecosystem in which people live, their diseases and diet, and the populations around them. The organization of a people's communities--kinship and marriage networks, family structures, systems of property rights and political order--constitutes their \Tsocial structure\t. Many anthropologists, particularly those trained in the British tradition, are concerned primarily with the comparative study of social structure; they consider themselves social anthropologists (see \Tsocial anthropology\t). Subfields Cultural anthropology is a broad category that sometimes includes anthropological \Tlinguistics\t, or the study of language in non-Western cultural settings, and prehistoric \Tarchaeology\t, the study of the human past before written records. The narrow core of cultural anthropology, however, includes a number of subfields. These include human ecology, the comparative study of human adaptation to ecosystems; political anthropology, the comparative study of political institutions and processes; economic anthropology, the comparative study of systems of production and exchange; structural-symbolist anthropology, the study of the ways the mind imposes order on experience and organizes knowledge, particularly as expressed in ritual and myth; psychological anthropology, the study of psychological experience (especially in childhood) and thought in non-Western societies; legal anthropology, the comparative study of social control, dispute settlement, and legal processes; \Turban anthropology\t, the study of human experience and social relations in urban settings; and applied anthropology, the applications of anthropology to practical problems (for example, the promotion of community reorganization and of bilingual and bicultural education). As new interests crystallize, other subfields emerge in and outside anthropology. In recent years an anthropology of women, a comparative study of women's experience and status, has become prominent, as has medical anthropology--the comparative study of health, disease, and medicine. Methodology The core of the anthropological method is fieldwork: long residence in a community and close participation in its daily life. The observer usually records detailed information on kinship, marriage, social organization, and subsistence activities, even though the main focus may be on legal processes or religious ritual. Such analysis and documentation through fieldwork is called \Tethnography\t. Where possible and appropriate, anthropologists use the methods of the other social sciences--surveys, interviews, and computer analyses of data to discover statistical patterns. Often, however, methods (such as questionnaires) that work in Western settings are unfeasible or inappropriate in the communities that anthropologists study. Relationship to Other Disciplines Cultural anthropology has been a synthesizing discipline rather than a highly specialized one. This results partly from the nature of what anthropologists study: in small-scale societies, religion, politics, and economics are intertwined and cannot be studied in isolation from one another. It also results from the broad perspectives of the discipline: anthropology is concerned with human origins, the growth and development of cultures, and wide ranges of contemporary variation. In addition, because anthropology is grounded in both the social sciences and the biological sciences, one of its major focuses has been the interplay of biological and sociocultural influences. Historically, anthropologists have taken a somewhat negative stance in relation to the social sciences, generally pointing out that a proposed theory of human nature, society, economy, or psychology did not hold true in a particular tribe. In recent decades, however, traditional boundaries between disciplines have been breaking down, and anthropologists have attempted to play a more positive role. Problems of ecological crisis, population explosion, underdevelopment, urban disintegration, poverty, and disease call for a range of expertise and a breadth of understanding no single discipline commands. Anthropological understanding of the fabric of social life in communities and the nature of cultural tradition contributes to the needed perspective. Cultural anthropology has close ties with the humanities as well as with the social sciences. Anthropological studies of symbolism, art, myth and ritual, and religion not only require ethnographic research by trained scientists but also often demand the skills of a literary critic, an art historian, and a philosopher. A culture incorporates a distinctive philosophy of life, a view of the world, and a system of values; the findings of anthropology are therefore an important resource both for philosophy and for the social sciences. Physical Anthropology Physical anthropology is the specialized study of the evolutionary biology of our species, Homo sapiens. A central task in physical anthropology has been to document the sequence whereby the human line (the hominids) evolved from early primate ancestors. The detective work that led to the discovery of the \TNeanderthalers\t in Ice Age Europe, then to the \THomo erectus\t fossils in Java and China, and finally to the much older \TAustralopithecus\t finds of Africa--pushing human origins successively back in time--is one of the exciting scientific adventure stories. (See \Tman, early\t.) Reconstructing the evolution of the human lineage is an ongoing process of discovery; important new finds are made almost every year. Evidence from mineralized bones (fossils) is augmented by atomic age technology to establish the age of ancient deposits and to compare the biochemistry of the \Lprimate\ls, which include humans, apes, and monkeys. A more recent concern is the study of nonhuman primates--their behavior in the wild and in laboratories, their ability to learn and use communication systems taught by humans, and the organization of their social groups. Physical anthropology is also concerned with the more recent evolutionary diversification of modern humans. The \Tgenetics\t of human populations and their adaptations to environmental pressures have been a main focus of modern studies. Traditional physical anthropology relied heavily on \Tanthropometry\t, the measuring of skull shape, stature, and other physical characteristics. In the 1950s, emphasis shifted to genetic characteristics--blood groups, abnormal hemoglobin types, and other markers that have known genetic bases. By studying the genetics of human populations, anthropologists can gain information about their local histories of movement, intermarriage, and diversification. Hopes that a comparison of genetic markers of the world's populations would demonstrate ancient origins and connections have not been borne out; the picture that has emerged is complicated, and it is obscured by the rapid change in gene frequencies in a population that sometimes takes place through \Tnatural selection\t. Some physical anthropologists have returned to the use of body measurement to study relationships between populations, but this time armed with computers and sophisticated statistical methods. In their studies of modern populations, they attempt to chart physical adaptations to environmental pressures--altitude, solar radiation, heat, cold, disease--through natural selection. Populations of the same animal species that have diverged through adaptation to different local environments are called races. Physical anthropologists use the term \Trace\t cautiously, if at all, in referring to humans. Sometimes populations that are very different genetically and have complex local evolutionary histories have been classed together as a race on the basis of external characteristics such as skin color or hair type. Modern evolutionary biologists are more concerned with process than with typology; some anthropologists believe that classing humans into races not only invites oversimplified typologies but encourages unfounded assertions about human inequality. History of Anthropology Anthropology of a kind probably goes back to the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India, and Central America, where peoples living on the periphery, often farmers or nomadic groups, were subdued and administered by the empire. By the time of the Greeks and Romans, serious observations of "primitive" peoples at the margins of civilization had been recorded. The history of Western anthropology goes back more directly to the European thought of the Enlightenment and to philosopher-scholars, notably Jean Jacques \TRousseau\t, who used fragmentary reports of exotic peoples to reflect on human nature, civilization, and society. European expansion into the New World produced more substantial reports, which remain anthropological classics. The Spanish conquest of Mexico produced, amid destruction, superb ethnographic accounts of Aztec culture. Early Jesuits in North America recorded rich and often sympathetic accounts of Indian cultures. As European penetration of the hitherto unknown world accelerated, reports of alien peoples and customs--produced by explorers, but more often by missionary scholars--gradually accumulated. Development of Anthropological Theory In the second half of the 19th century, the growing body of information on so-called primitive peoples became increasingly incorporated into comparative theoretical schemes, partly because of sweeping theories in social philosophy and biology. The major theme was \Tevolution\t: reconstructing the development of human cultures from the earliest "savage" state of primitive promiscuity, through the progressive evolution of "barbarism," and finally to "civilization." Highly speculative schemes were advanced to explain reported customs of marriage and descent and to organize them into a single developmental sequence. Amid the speculation, profound scholarship emerged, notably in the brilliant interpretations of E. B. \TTylor\t, in the comparative studies of the English jurist Sir Henry Maine (1822-88), and in the penetrating analyses of ancient Greece and Rome by N. D. Fustel de Coulanges. In the United States, Lewis Henry \TMorgan\t laid the foundations for a century of comparative study of kinship and the family. By the turn of the century three developments--in England, in the United States, and on the Continent--had shaped the direction of things to come. In England W. H. R. \TRivers\t' published research on the South Pacific pioneered field study of systems of kinship, descent, and marriage. His work was a kind of comparative sociology. In the United States, the work of Franz \TBoas\t among the Eskimo had established a pattern of painstaking research on culture, language, and biology that dampened the quest for sweeping theories. In France, Emile \TDurkheim\t, Marcel \TMauss\t, and their colleagues had used the reports from the tribal frontier to interpret the interrelationships between the structure of society and the thought-worlds humans create in religion and ritual. Social Anthropology in Britain In Britain, A. R. \TRadcliffe-Brown\t brought together the insights of Rivers on kinship and marriage and those of Durkheim on ritual. His important synthesis emphasized the systematic integration of society and the functions of ritual in reinforcing this cohesion. His vision of a scientific comparative sociology and his brilliance as a teacher stimulated a generation of theoretically minded researchers. A second force in British anthropology was the influence of Bronislaw \TMalinowski\t, a Polish scholar whose field studies of the Trobriand Islands (in Papua New Guinea), magnetic manner, and forceful writing inspired a tradition of superb field studies. The so-called functionalism of Malinowski, which stressed the needs of individuals, and that of Radcliffe-Brown, which stressed the integration of groups, were brought together by a generation of anthropologists (notably E. E. \TEvans-Pritchard\t and Meyer \TFortes\t) who documented African tribal societies with meticulous fieldwork and sociological insight. American Traditions In the United States, Boas founded the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University and trained or inspired the pioneers of American anthropology, including Ruth \TBenedict\t, A. L. \TKroeber\t, Ralph LINTON, Robert LOWIE, Margaret \Tmead\t, and Edward \TSapir\t. The cultural anthropology they developed in different ways stressed the overwhelming importance of culture in shaping human behavior and explored disciplinary borders with psychology and linguistics. It dominated the American scene through the 1950s. During the 1940s and '50s, American anthropology was influenced by psychoanalytic theory. Anthropologists began to look for relationships among culturally patterned childhood experience, adult personality, and cultural beliefs and customs. Another distinctly American contribution to anthropology has been the compiling of data on hundreds of peoples worldwide. This information has been used to test statistical associations between forms of social organization, modes of subsistence, religious beliefs and practices, and other customs. This so-called comparative method had first been envisioned by the English anthropologist E. B. Tylor. New Developments The gap between the British tradition of social anthropology and the American tradition of cultural anthropology has been partly bridged since World War II. An international anthropological community has emerged, greatly expanded in numbers and moving freely around the world for field research and study. A concern with meaning and symbolism has been a unifying theme in modern anthropology, with the work of Edmund \TLeach\t, Victor Turner (1920- ), and Mary Douglas (1921- ) in the British tradition and Clifford \TGeertz\t and David Schneider (1918- ) in the American being widely influential. The French anthropologist Claude \TLevi-Strauss\t, intellectual heir to Mauss, has advanced brilliant theories of how the structures of mind are spun out in the designs of culture. Anthropology has also become more genuinely international as the discipline has developed in the Third World. Japanese, Indian, Nigerian, Mexican, Brazilian, and Indonesian anthropologists--to mention a few--have made important contributions. The strands of modern anthropological theory are too numerous and diverse to characterize easily. Some of them have been stimulated by the changes in the tribal world studied by earlier anthropologists--the decolonization of the Third World; the transformation of tribal peoples into peasants, wage laborers, and urbanites; and the processes of development. Evolutionary views of culture have reemerged in more sophisticated form in the studies of cultural adaptations to ecosystems, of the interplay of biology and culture, and of human social organization in the light of new findings on nonhuman primates. In the tradition of Boas, Americans have continued to explore the relationship between language and culture, particularly with the emergence in the 1960s of a cognitive anthropology that has sought to map the structure of cultures as systems of knowledge. Anthropologists have become increasingly involved with other social science disciplines and with classic issues in social theory in recent decades. For instance, a serious application of Marxist ideas about "precapitalist modes of production" tied anthropology into the running controversies of social theory. Another development is a searching reexamination of the impact anthropologists have upon the groups that they study, and of the historic links between anthropology and colonialism. This development has been accompanied by a critical reassessment of the relationships between Western scholars and the societies of the Third World. \TRoger\t M. KEESING Bibliography: Alland, A., Jr., To Be Human: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (1981); Ember, C. R. and M., Anthropology, 5th ed. (1988); Evans-Pritchard, E., A History of Anthropological Thought (1981); Geertz, C., Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988); Harris, M., Culture, People, Nature: An Introduction to General Anthropology, 5th ed. (1988); Hatch, J., Theories of Man and Culture (1973); Keesing, R. M., Cultural Anthropology: A Contemporary Perspective (1976); Kluckhohn, C., Mirror for Man: The Relation of Anthropology to Modern Life (1949; repr; 1985); Lewis, I. M., Social Anthropology in Perspective, 2d ed. (1986); Mair, L., An Introduction to Social Anthropology, 2d ed. (1972); Montagu, A., Frontiers of Anthropology (1974); Penniman, T. K., A Hundred Years of Anthropology, 3d ed. (1965; repr. 1974); Pfieffer, J., The Emergence of Man (1972). See also: \Tprehistoric humans\t.