Anthropology

Introduction

The anthropologist Eric Wolf once described anthropology as "the most scientific of the humanities, and the most humanistic of the sciences." Contemporary anthropologists claim a number of earlier thinkers as their forebears, and the discipline has numerous sources; Claude Lévi-Strauss, for example, claimed Montaigne and Rousseau as important influences. Anthropology can best be understood as an outgrowth of the Age of Enlightenment, a period when Europeans attempted systematically to study human behavior, the known varieties of which had been increasing since the 15th century as a result of the first European colonization wave. The traditions of jurisprudence, history, philology, and sociology then evolved into something more closely resembling the modern views of these disciplines and informed the development of the societal sciences, of which anthropology was a part.

Discussion

Institutionally, anthropology emerged from the development of natural history (Dirks 1997) that occurred during the European colonization of the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Programs of ethnographic study originated in this era as the study of the "human primitives" overseen by colonial administrations. There was an inclination in late 18th years Enlightenment thought to realize human humanity as natural phenomena that acted in accordance with certain values and that could be observed empirically. In some ways, studying the language, culture, physiology, and artifacts of European colonies was not unlike studying the flora and fauna of those places.

Early anthropology was divided among proponents of unilateralism, who argued that all communities passed through a single evolutionary process, from the most primitive to the most advanced, and various forms of non-lineal theorists, who tended to subscribe to ideas such as diffusions. Most 19th-century societal theorists, comprising of anthropologists, (Bourdieu 2003) viewed non-European communities as windows onto the pre-industrial human past. As learned disciplines began to differentiate over the course of the 19th years, anthropology grew increasingly distinct from natural history, on the one hand, and from purely historical or literary areas such as Classics, on the other. A common criticism has been that other fields focus disproportionately on the Westerns however anthropology focuses disproportionately on the "other".

In the twentieth century, academic disciplines have frequently been institutionally divided into three broad domains. The natural and biological sciences search to derive general laws through reproducible and verifiable experiments. The humanities generally study localized customs, through their annals, literature, music, and creative pursuits, with an emphasis on comprehending particular individuals, events, or eras. The societal sciences have generally attempted to develop scientific methods to understand societal phenomena in a generalizable way, (Appiah 2001) though usually with methods distinct from those of the natural sciences. In particular, societal sciences frequently develop statistical descriptions rather than the general laws derived in physics or chemistry, or they might explain individual cases through more general principles, as in many fields of psychology. Anthropology (like some fields of history) does not effortlessly fit into one of these categories, and different parts of anthropology draw on one or more of these domains.

Neither Tylor nor Frazer, however, were especially involved in fieldwork, nor were they ...