MODULE 1: INTRODUCTION TO ANTHROPOLOGY

What is anthropology?

Anthropology is the study of humans –their origins, biological characteristics, and cultural
development, social relationships and more– based in scientific methods.

The term originated from two Greek words:

Anthropos + logos
human + study

Classification:

1. Physical or Biological Anthropology

 Studies the emergence of humans and their later evolution
 Called human paleontology or paleoanthropology
 Primatologists – people (anthropologists, psychologists, and/or biologists) who
specialize in the study of primates
 Biological anthropologists – use principles, concepts, and techniques of at least three
other disciplines: human genetics, population biology, and epidemiology.
2. Cultural Anthropology
 Refers to the customary ways of thinking and behaving of a particular population or
society
 Includes language, religious beliefs, food preferences, music, work habits, gender
roles, how they rear their children, how they construct their houses, and many other
learned behaviors and ideas that have come to be wildly shared or customary among
the group.

Subdivisions:

a. Archaeology – study of past cultures, primarily through their material remains,

mostly prehistorical.
o Historical archaeology deals with the study of the remains of the recent
peoples who left written records.
b. Linguistics – study of languages.
o Historical linguistics study how languages change over time and how they
may be related.
o Structural or descriptive linguistics covers how contemporary languages
differ, especially in their construction.
o Sociolinguistics is the study of how language is used in social context.
c. Ethnology – study of existing and recent cultures, particularly concerned with the
patterns od though and behavior such as marriage customs, kinship organization,
political and economic systems, religion, folk art, and music, and how all these
patterns differ in the contemporary society.
 o Ethnography is the fieldwork or providing a detailed description of people’s
thoughts and behavior recorded by an ethnographer who spent a year or so
living with, talking to, and observing the people’s customs.
o Ethnohistorian tries to reconstruct the recent history by relying on others’
reports and putting it all together to make sense of the history of people who
didn’t leave written records.
o Cross-cultural researcher collects and analyzes the data acquired by the
ethnographer and ethnohistorian.
3. Applied Anthropology – the application of method and theory in anthropology to the
analysis and solution of practical problems.