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The Scope of Anthropology

The breadth of the field of anthropology is primarily the product of its historical development. Anthropologists first studied those portions of the world's cultures outside western Europe. When a man worked in a society away from his own culture, he had to be a jack-of-all-trades, or at least he attempted to be. He was usually alone in the field, and he made his study of such diverse cultural material as art, music, literature and economics without the assistance of specialists in these areas.

An anthropologist who studied the Eskimo, for example, was expected to know enough about physical anthropology to measure the living people or at least to describe their physical characteristics. He also had to be able to recognize archaeological remains and to try to trace their relationship to the living culture. He learned to speak the language and write down native texts, here specializing in linguistics. He them moved into political science to describe how village was controlled. When he observed how hunting and food gathering were carried out and how food items were distributed and furs traded and sold at the trading post, he was concerned with economics. He might then map the village and record the social interaction of people within the village, here practicing social anthropology or, in more complex societies, sociology. To collect songs, chants and myths, he would need some knowledge of literature, folklore, and music. When he observed midwinter ceremonials and shamanic practices, he had turned to the study of religion. If he collected life stories and charted genealogical connections of individuals and recorded their disease theories and curative practices, the anthropologist was working in the areas of clinical and social psychology and medicine.

Divisions of anthropology

The modern anthropologist is less a jack-of-all-trades and more a specialist. Nevertheless, the scope of the field remains broad, particularly as the discipline is defined in the United States. In graduate schools in the United States a student of anthropology is expected to acquire an understanding of physical anthropology and of cultural anthropology.

Broadly defined, cultural anthropology includes linguistics and archaeology. But because of the growing size and complexity of anthropological studies, there is a tendency for modern American anthropologists to specialize in one division. Interconnections among the divisions, however, remain essential to the meaning of anthropology as an integrating science of man.

In Europe, anthropology is defined differently. The term “anthropology” usually means physical anthropology. The other studies that make up the comprehensive field in the United States are separated from one another and from physical anthropology. Thus in Europe a man would specialize in anthropology (that is, the biological branch), in archaeology, in linguistics, or in ethnography (the study of individual cultures). The present article deals with the anthropology in the broad sense, embracing the physical and cultural study of man.

Cultural Anthropology

There is considerable variation in the way which scholars divide the field of cultural anthropology. Historically its major divisions were archaeology and ethnology, linguistics and social anthropology. Ethnography is the study of the way of life within a single tribe or group, while ethnology is the comparative study of two or more cultures or parts of cultures. Archaeology may be viewed as the ethnography and ethnology of extinct cultures.

Ethnography

Ethnography – the study of the culture of single groups – is at the heart of anthropology. Fieldwork is the basis to the training of a cultural anthropologist, and the written accounts of fieldwork form the central focus of cultural anthropology. Native cultures may be viewed as the living laboratory in which the cultural anthropologist finds his experiments always in the progress when he arrives. In his reports he must construct a model of the native culture in order to understand its working parts, and he must also translate this model into the common language of other anthropological theorists. Thus in anthropology the study of any tribal culture that focuses on experimental premise requires both observation and hypothesis. This alternation between the deductive and the empirical gives cultural anthropology a special character as a study of man.

Physical Anthropology

Physical anthropology is concerned with the study of man as a biological species. This study began in Europe long before there was any hypothesis that man was a species that had evolved from an earlier animal form. Much of the earliest work in this field was based on the assumption that human varieties were inherent and unchanging, just as species of plants and animals were thought to be immutable. The first physical anthropologists tried to describe the varieties of human species in anatomical terms.

History of Anthropology

Herodotus had the eye of a cultural anthropologist as well as that of a historian when he reported on the peoples bordering the Greek world. His ethnological interests, however, were exceptional in the ancient world. The Roman historian Tacit described the Germans, and Caesar the Gauls, but there was no continuity of anthropological research. Sustained interest in anthropological subjects began with capitalist expansion in the early days of the Renaissance. Intensive exploration and trade in the 14^th and 15^th centuries made Europeans notice peoples of other lands and stimulated speculations on the origin and relations of newly discovered societies. The attempt to fit them into the western European view of the world produced the first ethnological theories.

In the 18^th century, private collections of artifacts brought back by world travelers were arranged in curio cabinets by their proud owners. As these collections outgrew their private housings, they were often donated to governments and became the basis of the great national natural history and anthropological museums of today. The British Museum, founded on the collection of Sir Hans Sloane, is an example of a collection of all manner of objects – animal, vegetable and mineral, as well as books and manuscripts. Throughout the history of modern anthropology the major training institutions for anthropologists have been associated with natural history museums. The field approach that characterizes anthropology is basically derived from the work of naturalists. The anthropologist applies to the study of the human species and its cultures techniques that were originally devised for the study of animal and plant world.

Origins of Cultural Anthropology

In the 19^th century, Darwin's theory of evolution provided the focus for the founding of the field of cultural anthropology. If biological life had developed from the simple to the complex, it was possible to apply the same developmental hypothesis to human culture. The early anthropologists were largely amateurs in the study of man; many of them were active in such profession as law. They started with inquiries into the history of particular human institutions, such as religion, art, or marriage. These were “armchair anthropologists” who did not go out to study natives. They concerned themselves with the evolution of all human culture, not with particular cultures. They looked into travelers' and missionaries' accounts for evidence to support the general theory of cultural revolution.

In Sir Edward Tylor's view, non-Western cultures were survivals. Isolated peoples were thought to retain earlier patterns just as zoologists saw Australian continent as a refuge area for archaic fauna. Archaic survivals within Western culture became the foundation for reconstruction of the cultural history of mankind. The early anthropologists tried to unravel the growth and development of all human culture from the simple to the complex, and they believed that the growth of culture had proceeded in uniform stages. These beliefs were most carefully detailed in Lewis H.Morgan's Ancient Society (1877), which summarized his view of the inevitable onward and upward sweep of human culture and institutions as they were correlated with developments in technology. The field experience of 20^th century anthropologists, both ethnologists and archaeologists, destroyed the grand revolutionary scheme of the 19^th century cultural anthropology. The modern discipline, however, owes many of its concepts and much of its working vocabulary to these 19^th century theories.

Modern Anthropology

During the closing decades of the 19^th century the emphasis in all disciplines shifted away from the building of grand systems and reasoning from the general to the particular. The shirt was to empiricism – the pursuit of knowledge by observation and experimentation. The new direction in all fields of scientific endeavor was toward exact laboratory yield data, not theory. The shift in anthropology was particularly marked because America's leading professor, Franz Boas, had come to anthropology after training in physics. Boas and his students stressed fieldwork in depth, with emphasis on understanding the native language. Their first aim was to capture the ethnographic evidence vanished. These investigators were interested in limited historical reconstructions and cultural processes; for example, they studied the spread of such culture elements as folktales to contiguous groups and their incorporation into existing patterns of folklore.