Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity that crosses biology and sociology,

concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in
both the present and past, including archaic humans.[1] Social anthropology studies
patterns of behaviour, while cultural anthropology studies cultural meaning, including
norms and values.[1] The term sociocultural anthropology is commonly used
today. Linguistic anthropology studies how language influences social life. Biological (or
physical) anthropology studies the biology and evolution of humans and their
close primate relatives.[1]

Archaeology, often referred to as the "anthropology of the past," explores human activity
by examining physical remains. In North America and Asia, it is generally regarded as a
branch of anthropology, whereas in Europe, it is considered either an independent
discipline or classified under related fields like history and palaeontology.

Etymology
The abstract noun anthropology is first attested in reference to history.[2][n 1] Its present
use first appeared in Renaissance Germany in the works of Magnus Hundt and Otto
Casmann.[3] Their Neo-Latin anthropologia derived from the combining forms of
the Greek words ánthrōpos (ἄνθρωπος, "human") and lógos (λόγος, "study").[2] Its
adjectival form appeared in the works of Aristotle.[2] It began to be used in English,
possibly via French Anthropologie, by the early 18th century.[2][n 2]

Origin and development of the term

Main article: History of anthropology
Through the 19th century
 Bernardino de Sahagún is considered to be the founder of modern
anthropology.[4]
In 1647, the Bartholins, early scholars of the University of Copenhagen,
defined l'anthropologie as follows:[5]

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,
including its 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 and focused on
methodically studying human races. After the death of its founder, William Frédéric
Edwards, in 1842, it gradually declined in activity until it eventually dissolved in 1862. [6]

Meanwhile, the Ethnological Society of New York, now 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.[7] These
anthropologists were liberal, anti-slavery, and pro-human rights. 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 diverse fields
such as anatomy, linguistics, and ethnology, started making feature-by-feature
comparisons of their subject matters, and were beginning to suspect that similarities
between animals, languages, and folkways were the result of processes or laws
unknown to them then.[8] 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.[9][n 4] When he read Darwin, he became an immediate convert to Transformisme, as
the French called evolutionism.[10] 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". [11]

Broca, being what today would be called a neurosurgeon, had gained 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. The title was soon translated as
"The Anthropology of Primitive Peoples". The last two volumes were published
posthumously.

Waitz defined anthropology as "the science of the nature of man". Following Broca's
lead, Waitz points out that anthropology is a new field, which would gather material from
other fields, but would differ from them in the use of comparative anatomy, physiology,
and psychology to differentiate man from "the animals nearest to him". He stresses that
the data of comparison must be empirical, gathered by experimentation.[12] The history of
civilization, as well as ethnology, are to be brought into the comparison. It is to be
presumed fundamentally that the species, man, is a unity, and that "the same laws of
thought are applicable to all men".[13]

Waitz was influential among British ethnologists. In 1863, the explorer Richard Francis
Burton and the speech therapist James Hunt broke away from the Ethnological Society
of London to form the Anthropological Society of London, which henceforward would
follow the path of the new anthropology rather than just ethnology. It was the 2nd
society dedicated to general anthropology in existence. Representatives from the
French Société were present, though not Broca. In his keynote address, printed in the
first volume of its new publication, The Anthropological Review, Hunt stressed the work
of Waitz, adopting his definitions as a standard.[14][n 5] Among the first associates were the
young Edward Burnett Tylor, inventor of cultural anthropology, and his brother Alfred
Tylor, a geologist. Previously Edward had referred to himself as an ethnologist;
subsequently, an anthropologist.[citation needed]
Similar organizations in other countries followed: The Anthropological Society of
Madrid (1865), the American Anthropological Association in 1902, the Anthropological
Society of Vienna (1870), the Italian Society of Anthropology and Ethnology (1871), and
many others subsequently. The majority of these were evolutionists. One notable
exception was the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory (1869)
founded by Rudolph Virchow, known for his vituperative attacks on the evolutionists.
Not religious himself, he insisted that Darwin's conclusions lacked empirical foundation.

During the last three decades of the 19th century, a proliferation of anthropological
societies and associations occurred, most independent, most publishing their own
journals, and all international in membership and association. The major theorists
belonged to these organizations. They supported the gradual osmosis of anthropology
curricula into the major institutions of higher learning. By 1898, 48 educational
institutions in 13 countries had some curriculum in anthropology. None of the 75 faculty
members were under a department named anthropology.[15]

Anthropology is considered by some to have become a tool for colonisers studying their
subjects to gain a better understanding and control.[16]: 647

20th and 21st centuries

Anthropology as a specialized field of academic study developed much through the end
of the 19th century. Then it rapidly expanded beginning in the early 20th century to the
point where many of the world's higher educational institutions typically included
anthropology departments. Thousands of anthropology departments have come into
existence, and anthropology has also diversified from a few major subdivisions to
dozens more. Practical anthropology, the use of anthropological knowledge and
technique to solve specific problems, has arrived; for example, the presence of buried
victims might stimulate the use of a forensic archaeologist to recreate the final scene.
The organization has also reached a global level. For example, the World Council of
Anthropological Associations (WCAA), "a network of national, regional and international
associations that aims to promote worldwide communication and cooperation in
anthropology", currently contains members from about three dozen nations.[17]

Since the work of Franz Boas and Bronisław Malinowski in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, social anthropology in Great Britain and cultural anthropology in the US have
been distinguished from other social sciences by their emphasis on cross-cultural
comparisons, long-term in-depth examination of context, and the importance they place
on participant-observation or experiential immersion in the area of research. Cultural
anthropology, in particular, has emphasized cultural relativism, holism, and the use of
findings to frame cultural critiques.[18] This has been particularly prominent in the United
States, from Boas' arguments against 19th-century racial ideology, through Margaret
Mead's advocacy for gender equality and sexual liberation, to current criticisms of post-
colonial oppression and promotion of multiculturalism. Ethnography is one of its
primary research designs as well as the text that is generated from anthropological
fieldwork.[19][20][21]
In Great Britain and the Commonwealth countries, the British tradition of social
anthropology tends to dominate. In the United States, anthropology has traditionally
been divided into the four field approach developed by Franz Boas in the early 20th
century: biological or physical anthropology; social, cultural,
or sociocultural anthropology; archaeological anthropology; and linguistic anthropology.
These fields frequently overlap but tend to use different methodologies and techniques.
[22]

European countries with overseas colonies tended to practice more ethnology (a term
coined and defined by Adam F. Kollár in 1783). It is sometimes referred to as
sociocultural anthropology in the parts of the world that were influenced by the
European tradition.[23]

Fields
Further information: American anthropology
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.[24][25] Early anthropology originated in Classical
Greece and Persia and studied and tried to understand observable cultural diversity.[26]
[27]
As such, anthropology has been central in the development of several new (late 20th
century) interdisciplinary fields such as cognitive science,[28] global studies, and
various ethnic studies.

According to Clifford Geertz,

...anthropology is perhaps the last of the great nineteenth-century conglomerate

disciplines still for the most part organizationally intact. Long after natural history, moral
philosophy, philology, and political economy have dissolved into their specialized
successors, it has remained a diffuse assemblage of ethnology, human biology,
comparative linguistics, and prehistory, held together mainly by the vested interests,
sunk costs, and administrative habits of academia, and by a romantic image of
comprehensive scholarship.[29]
Sociocultural anthropology has been heavily influenced by structuralist and postmodern
theories, as well as a shift toward the analysis of modern societies. During the 1970s
and 1990s, there was an epistemological shift away from the positivist traditions that
had largely informed the discipline.[30][31] During this shift, enduring questions about the
nature and production of knowledge came to occupy a central place in cultural and
social anthropology. In contrast, archaeology and biological anthropology remained
largely positivist.