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Anthropology

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Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, and societies, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behaviour, while cultural anthropology studies cultural meaning, including norms and values. Linguistic anthropology studies how language influences social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the biological development of humans. Visual anthropology, which is usually considered to be a part of social anthropology, can mean both ethnographic film (where photography, film, and new media are used for study) as well as the study of "visuals", including art, visual images, cinema etc. Oxford Bibliographies describes visual anthropology as "the anthropological study of the visual and the visual study of the anthropological". Archaeology, which studies human activity through investigation of physical evidence, is considered a branch of anthropology

Origin and development of the term

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The abstract noun anthropology is first attested in reference to history.n Its present use first appeared in Renaissance Germany in the works of Magnus Hundt and Otto Casmann. Their New Latin anthropologia derived from the combining forms of the Greek words ánthrōpos ( ἄνθρωπος , "human") and lógos ( λόγος , "study"). (Its adjectival form appeared in the works of Aristotle.) It began to be used in English, possibly via French Anthropologie , by the early 18th century.n Through the 19th century edit In 1647, the Bartholins, founders of the University of Copenhagen, defined l'anthropologie as follows: Anthropology, that is to say the science that treats of man, is divided ordinarily and with reason into Anatomy, which considers the body and the parts, and Psychology, which speaks of the soul.n Sporadic use of the term for some of the subject matter occurred subsequently, such as the use by Étienne Serres in 1839 to describe the natural history, or paleon

Fields

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Anthropology is a global discipline involving humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. Anthropology builds upon knowledge from natural sciences, including the discoveries about the origin and evolution of Homo sapiens , human physical traits, human behavior, the variations among different groups of humans, how the evolutionary past of Homo sapiens has influenced its social organization and culture, and from social sciences, including the organization of human social and cultural relations, institutions, social conflicts, etc. Early anthropology originated in Classical Greece and Persia and studied and tried to understand observable cultural diversity, such as by Al-Biruni of the Islamic Golden Age. As such, anthropology has been central in the development of several new (late 20th century) interdisciplinary fields such as cognitive science, global studies, and various ethnic studies. According to Clifford Geertz, "anthropology is perhaps the last of the great nineteenth-

Key topics by field: sociocultural

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Art, media, music, dance and film edit Part of a series on the Anthropology of art, media, music, dance and film Basic concepts Color symbolism Visual culture Body culture Material culture New media Case studies Art Art of the Americas Indigenous Australian art Oceanic art Film Nanook of the North The Ax Fight Nǃai, the Story of a ǃKung Woman Incidents of Travel in Chichen Itza The Doon School Quintet Museums National Anthropological Archives Centro Cultural Mexiquense Museum of Anthropology at UBC Museum of Anthropology, Cambridge Museum of Indian Arts and Culture Robert Hull Fleming Museum List of museums Related articles Ethnographic film Video ethnography Ethnocinema List of ethnographic films Margaret Mead Film Festival Cantometrics Museum anthropology Salvage ethnography Tribal art/Folk art Major theorists Tim Asch Gregory Bateson Franz Boas Pierre Bourdieu John Collier Frances Densmore Robert J. Flaherty Robert Gardner Alfred G

Key topics by field: archaeological and biological

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Anthrozoology edit Anthrozoology (also known as "human–animal studies") is the study of interaction between living things. It is an interdisciplinary field that overlaps with a number of other disciplines, including anthropology, ethology, medicine, psychology, veterinary medicine and zoology. A major focus of anthrozoologic research is the quantifying of the positive effects of human-animal relationships on either party and the study of their interactions. It includes scholars from a diverse range of fields, including anthropology, sociology, biology, and philosophy.n Biocultural edit Biocultural anthropology is the scientific exploration of the relationships between human biology and culture. Physical anthropologists throughout the first half of the 20th century viewed this relationship from a racial perspective; that is, from the assumption that typological human biological differences lead to cultural differences. After World War II the emphasis began to shift toward an

Organizations

Contemporary anthropology is an established science with academic departments at most universities and colleges. The single largest organization of anthropologists is the American Anthropological Association (AAA), which was founded in 1903. Its members are anthropologists from around the globe. In 1989, a group of European and American scholars in the field of anthropology established the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) which serves as a major professional organization for anthropologists working in Europe. The EASA seeks to advance the status of anthropology in Europe and to increase visibility of marginalized anthropological traditions and thereby contribute to the project of a global anthropology or world anthropology. Hundreds of other organizations exist in the various sub-fields of anthropology, sometimes divided up by nation or region, and many anthropologists work with collaborators in other disciplines, such as geology, physics, zoology, paleontology, an

Ethics

As the field has matured it has debated and arrived at ethical principles aimed at protecting both the subjects of anthropological research as well as the researchers themselves, and professional societies have generated codes of ethics. Anthropologists, like other researchers (especially historians and scientists engaged in field research), have over time assisted state policies and projects, especially colonialism. Some commentators have contended: That the discipline grew out of colonialism, perhaps was in league with it, and derives some of its key notions from it, consciously or not. (See, for example, Gough, Pels and Salemink, but cf. Lewis 2004). That ethnographic work is often ahistorical, writing about people as if they were "out of time" in an "ethnographic present" (Johannes Fabian, Time and Its Other ). Cultural relativism edit As part of their quest for scientific objectivity, present-day anthropologists typically urge cultural relativism, which has an

Post–World War II developments

Before WWII British 'social anthropology' and American 'cultural anthropology' were still distinct traditions. After the war, enough British and American anthropologists borrowed ideas and methodological approaches from one another that some began to speak of them collectively as 'sociocultural' anthropology. Basic trends edit There are several characteristics that tend to unite anthropological work. One of the central characteristics is that anthropology tends to provide a comparatively more holistic account of phenomena and tends to be highly empirical. The quest for holism leads most anthropologists to study a particular place, problem or phenomenon in detail, using a variety of methods, over a more extensive period than normal in many parts of academia. In the 1990s and 2000s, calls for clarification of what constitutes a culture, of how an observer knows where his or her own culture ends and another begins, and other crucial topics in writing anthropology w