Anthropology
Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human
biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species.[1][2][3] Social
anthropology studies patterns of behavior, while cultural anthropology studies cultural meaning, including norms and
values.[1][2][3] A portmanteau term sociocultural anthropology is commonly used today.[4] Linguistic
anthropology studies how language influences social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the biological
development of humans.[1][2][3]
Archaeological anthropology, often termed as 'anthropology of the past', studies human activity through investigation
of physical evidence.[5][6] It is considered a branch of anthropology in North America and Asia, while
in Europe archaeology is viewed as a discipline in its own right or grouped under other related disciplines, such
as history and palaeontology.
Etymology
The abstract noun anthropology is first attested in reference to history.[8][n 1] Its present use first appeared
in Renaissance Germany in the works of Magnus Hundt and Otto Casmann.[9] Their New Latin anthropologia derived
from the combining forms of the Greek words ánthrōpos (ἄνθρωπος, "human") and lógos (λόγος, "study").[8] (Its
adjectival form appeared in the works of Aristotle.)[8] It began to be used in English, possibly
via French Anthropologie, by the early 18th century.
Through the 19th century
In 1647, the Bartholins, founders of the University of Copenhagen, defined l'anthropologie as follows:[11]
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 3]
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 paleontology, of man, based on comparative anatomy, and the
creation of a chair in anthropology and ethnography in 1850 at the French National Museum of Natural
History by Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau. Various short-lived organizations of anthropologists had
already been formed. The Société Ethnologique de Paris, the first to use the term ethnology, was formed in 1839.
Its members were primarily anti-slavery activists. When slavery was abolished in France in 1848, the Société was
abandoned.
Meanwhile, the Ethnological Society of New York, currently the American Ethnological Society, was founded on its
model in 1842, as well as the Ethnological Society of London in 1843, a break-away group of the Aborigines'
Protection Society.[12] These anthropologists of the times were liberal, anti-slavery, and pro-human-rights
activists. They maintained international connections.[citation needed]
Anthropology and many other current fields are the intellectual results of the comparative methods developed in the
earlier 19th century. Theorists in such diverse fields as anatomy, linguistics, and ethnology, making feature-by-
feature comparisons of their subject matters, were beginning to suspect that similarities between animals,
languages, and folkways were the result of processes or laws unknown to them then.[13] For them, the publication
of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was the epiphany of everything they had begun to suspect. Darwin
himself arrived at his conclusions through comparison of species he had seen in agronomy and in the wild.
Darwin and Wallace unveiled evolution in the late 1850s. There was an immediate rush to bring it into the social
sciences. Paul Broca in Paris was in the process of breaking away from the Société de biologie to form the first of
the explicitly anthropological societies, the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris, meeting for the first time in Paris in
1859.[14][n 4] When he read Darwin, he became an immediate convert to Transformisme, as the French
called evolutionism.[15] His definition now became "the study of the human group, considered as a whole, in its
details, and in relation to the rest of nature".[16]
Broca, being what today would be called a neurosurgeon, had taken an interest in the pathology of speech. He
wanted to localize the difference between man and the other animals, which appeared to reside in speech. He
discovered the speech center of the human brain, today called Broca's area after him. His interest was mainly
in Biological anthropology, but a German philosopher specializing in psychology, Theodor Waitz, took up the theme
of general and social anthropology in his six-volume work, entitled Die Anthropologie der Naturvölker, 1859–1864.
