Wikibooks: IB Cultural Anthropology/The Nature of Anthropology/Fields of Anthropology

• Format: Book
• Language: English
• Subjects: eskimo*; Netsilik
• Online Access: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/IB_Cultural_Anthropology/The_Nature_of_Anthropology/Fields_of_Anthropology

Anthropology is the study of humans. There are four major subdivisions of this discipline physical anthropology linguistic anthropology archaeology and cultural anthropology. This course will concentrate on cultural anthropology. =Physical Anthropology= Physical Anthropology is the study of the connection between human physiology and culture. It seeks to explain human variation and evolution in biological terms. For example why do the Netsilik Eskimos tend to be short and stout whereas the Nuer and Afar of Ethiopia are generally tall and slim? Within physical anthropology are several subfields such as forensic anthropology paleoanthropology and primate anthropology. Forensic anthropology is concerned with studying the remains of humans for legal purposes. Paleoanthropology is the study of human evolution. Primatology is the study of non human primates in order to find connections between these species and humans that help understand the evolution of Homo sapiens . Behaviors and physical features found in both human and non human primates sometimes point to ancient traits held by a shared ancestor more than six million years ago. =Linguistic Anthropology= This is the study of the connection between human language and culture. It seeks to explain why a culture communicates the way it does. For example why do the Yanomamo not have a word for “thank you” in their language? Linguistic anthropology also has several subfields some of which being sociolinguistics and historical linguistics. =Archaeology= This is the study of extinct human cultures by excavating their remains. Certain subfields of archaeology cross over with other disciplines. For example paleoanthropology is both a subfield of archaeology and physical anthropology. It is actually a part of a more general subfield of archaeology prehistoric archaeology. Other subfields of archaeology include classical archaeology and modern archaeology. Classical archaeology is the study of past cultures with a written history (the Greeks for example). Modern ...