Anthropology: Scope of the Discipline

Abstract

The modern project of anthropology took shape in the 1860s. A protean field, responsive to the politics of empire and postimperialism and susceptible to the seduction of intellectual fashions, anthropology has adopted a variety of research programs. There are also marked differences between national traditions of anthropology. Yet, for much of the history of the discipline, anthropologists never quite gave up on a great, shared ambition: to identify the common features of the human species and to chart and explain the range of variation in human biology, social organization, language, beliefs, and values. Anthropology is the only academic field that addresses the whole range of human variation, but in practice it developed specialist tracks, the "four fields" as they were often termed-cultural and social anthropology, biological anthropology, "prehistoric" archaeology, and linguistics. In Europe the subdisciplines separated in the early twentieth century, while American anthropology departments tried to sustain a conversation between the four fields but with diminishing success. Each track developed distinctive research programs and turned for inspiration to other disciplines. Biological anthropologists were natural scientists. Social anthropologists were social scientists. Cultural anthropologists felt more at home in the humanities and tended to borrow ideas from philosophy, literary theory, and history. Linguistics and, though less completely, archaeology , became autonomous disciplines. For the most part, specialists in these different fields ignored each other, more or less politely, but in the late twentieth century a biological party and a cultural party engaged in rancorous competition for control of the intellectual agenda. Origins The word "anthropology" has been traced back to the sixteenth century. Ethnologie and Völkerkunde were eighteenth-century German coinages (Vermeulen 2015). These terms were sometimes treated as synonyms, but by the middle of the nineteenth century "anthropology" usually referred to racial studies. Indeed, the definition of human "races" was a foundational move of the emergent field of inquiry. Ethnology was associated rather with studies of Kultur (another eighteenth-century German neologism).