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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anthropology | 4/10 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropology | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T15:09:55.121817+00:00 | kb-cron |
Biological anthropology and physical anthropology are synonymous terms to describe anthropological research focused on the study of humans and other primates in their biological, evolutionary, and demographic dimensions. It examines the biological and social factors that have affected the evolution of humans and other primates, and that generate, maintain or change contemporary genetic and physiological variation. Subfields include forensic anthropology, paleoanthropology, dental anthropology, primatology, and human biology, among others. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century America and Europe were formative periods for many scientific disciplines, and racism played a significant role in motivating certain avenues of research, including the early development of bioarchaeology. A major driver behind the field’s creation was the effort to “establish the intellectual superiority of the white race.” When scientists determined that the remains they were studying belonged to Indigenous, enslaved, or otherwise socially marginalized people, they often treated those individuals not as human beings but as scientific specimens. This racist foundation shaped attitudes for decades, reinforcing the belief among many anthropologists that they held inherent authority over the human remains and burial sites they encountered. Recognizing this history is crucial, as its effects persist today in the form of damaged evidence, ethical challenges, and harmful professional assumptions.
=== Archaeological ===
Archaeology is the study of the human past through its material remains. Artifacts, faunal remains, and human-altered landscapes are evidence of the cultural and material lives of past societies. Archaeologists examine material remains to deduce patterns of past human behavior and cultural practices. Ethnoarchaeology is a branch of archaeology that studies the practices and material remains of living human groups to understand better the evidence left behind by past human groups presumed to have lived in similar ways.
=== Linguistic ===
Linguistic anthropology (not to be confused with anthropological linguistics) seeks to understand the processes of human communications, verbal and non-verbal, variation in language across time and space, the social uses of language, and the relationship between language and culture. It is the branch of anthropology that brings linguistic methods to bear on anthropological problems, linking the analysis of linguistic forms and processes to the interpretation of sociocultural processes. Linguistic anthropologists often draw on related fields including sociolinguistics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, semiotics, discourse analysis, and narrative analysis.
=== Ethnography ===
Ethnography is a method of analysing social or cultural interaction. It often involves participant observation, though an ethnographer may also draw from texts written by participants in social interactions. Ethnography views first-hand experience and social context as important. Tim Ingold distinguishes ethnography from anthropology, arguing that anthropology seeks to construct general theories of human experience applicable to novel settings, while ethnography concerns itself with fidelity. He argues that the anthropologist must make his writing consistent with their understanding of literature and other theory but notes that ethnography may be of use to the anthropologists and the fields inform one another.
== Key topics by field: sociocultural ==
=== Art, media, music, dance, and film ===
==== Art ====
One of the central problems in the anthropology of art concerns the universality of 'art' as a cultural phenomenon. Several anthropologists have noted that the Western categories of 'painting', 'sculpture', or 'literature', conceived as independent artistic activities, do not exist, or exist in a significantly different form, in most non-Western contexts. To solve this, anthropologists of art have focused on formal features in objects which, without exclusively being 'artistic', have certain evident 'aesthetic' qualities. Boas' Primitive Art, Claude Lévi-Strauss' The Way of the Masks (1982) or Geertz's 'Art as Cultural System' (1983) are examples in this trend of transforming the anthropology of 'art' into an anthropology of culturally specific 'aesthetics'.
==== Media ====
Media anthropology emphasizes ethnographic studies as a means of understanding producers, audiences, and other cultural and social aspects of mass media. The types of ethnographic contexts explored range from media production (e.g., ethnographies of newspaper newsrooms, journalists in the field, and film production) to media reception, following audiences in their everyday responses to media. Other types include cyber anthropology, a relatively new area of internet research, as well as ethnographies of other areas of research that involve media, such as development work, social movements, or health education. This is in addition to many classic ethnographic contexts, where media such as radio, the press, new media, and television have started to make their presences felt since the early 1990s.
==== Music ====
Ethnomusicology is an academic field encompassing various approaches to the study of music (broadly defined) that emphasize its cultural, social, material, cognitive, biological, and other dimensions or contexts, rather than its isolated sound component or any particular repertoire. Ethnomusicology can be applied across a wide range of fields, including teaching, politics, and cultural anthropology. While the origins of ethnomusicology date back to the 18th and 19th centuries, it was formally termed "ethnomusicology" by Dutch scholar Jaap Kunst c. 1950. Later, the influence of study in this area spawned the creation of the periodical Ethnomusicology and the Society of Ethnomusicology.
==== Visual ====
Visual anthropology is concerned, in part, with the study and production of ethnographic photography, film, and, since the mid-1990s, new media. While the term is sometimes used interchangeably with ethnographic film, visual anthropology also encompasses the anthropological study of visual representation, including areas such as performance, museums, art, and the production and reception of mass media. Visual representations from all cultures, such as sandpaintings, tattoos, sculptures and reliefs, cave paintings, scrimshaw, jewelry, hieroglyphs, paintings, and photographs are included in the focus of visual anthropology.
=== Economic, political, economic, applied, and development ===
==== Economic ====