Skip to main content Skip to Search Box

Definition: anthropology from The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology

Lit., the study of mankind. Depending upon who is doing the defining, anthropology may include archaeology, linguistics, psychology, sociology and smatterings of biology, anatomy, genetics and comparative literature. Most practitioners tend to segment the discipline into CULTURAL *ANTHROPOLOGY and PHYSICAL *ANTHROPOLOGY.


Anthropology

From The Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology and Behavioral Science
Anthropology is an outgrowth of the sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century European discoveries of the remains of ancient civilizations and fossil ancestors, as well as European encounters with contemporary cultures that differed greatly from those of Europe. The need to explain, understand, and deal with these discoveries as a means of better understanding their own cultures gave rise to anthropology as an academic and museum discipline. It was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, that a coherent intellectual structure emerged for the discipline. In the United States Franz Boas, of Columbia University, helped combine four subfields into what we now see in most major United States university departments of anthropology: cultural anthropology, archaeology, anthropological linguistics, and physical (biological) anthropology. Together, research in these four subfields has achieved a broad coverage of human biological and cultural evolution in its…
10,721 results

Full text Article Anthropology

From The Concise Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology and Behavioral Science
Anthropology is an outgrowth of the sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century European discoveries of the remains of ancient civilizations and fossil ancestors as well as Europeans’ encounters with contemporary cultures that differed greatly from those of Europe. The need to explain, …
| 1,157 words
Key concepts:

Full text Article anthropology

From Philip's Encyclopedia
Scientific study of human development and how different societies are interrelated. It is concerned with the chronological and geographical range of human societies. Modern anthropology stems from the first half of the 19th century. Public interest in cultural evolution followed the publication of…
| 101 words
Key concepts:

Full text Article ANTHROPOLOGY

From The Edinburgh International Encyclopaedia of Psychoanalysis
The relationship between psychoanalysis and anthropology has usually taken the form of applying psychoanalytic ideas to societies ordinarily studied by anthropologists. The situation calls for some two-way traffic but the ground for a useful dialogue remains to be established. In what follows I have…
| 1,506 words
Key concepts:

Full text Article anthropology

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
classification and analysis of humans and their society, descriptively, culturally, historically, and physically. Its unique contribution to studying the bonds of human social relations has been the distinctive concept of culture . It has also differed from other sciences concerned with human social…
| 378 words
Key concepts:

Full text Article ANTHROPOLOGY

From Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations
Unfortunately, the vast majority of artists’ conceptions are based more on imagination, than evidence…. Much of the reconstruction, however, is guesswork. Bones say nothing about the fleshy parts of the nose, lips, or ears. Artists must create something between an ape and a human being: the older a…
| 1,319 words
Key concepts:

Full text Article Anthropology

From The Oxford Encyclopedia of the History of American Science, Medicine, and Technology
American anthropology has been integral to the emergence of American national identity, particularly through its study of the American Indian. This essay traces its emergence in colonial times through government support to academic anthropology under the leadership of Franz Boas and his students. It…
| 2,983 words
Key concepts:

Full text Article anthropology

From Collins Dictionary of Medicine
The science of humankind, and of human cultural differences, from the earliest times to the present. Anthropology is thus a very wide subject, concerned not simply with the less familiar human groups but with every aspect of humankind in a social context. Increasingly, anthropology overlaps the…
| 153 words
Key concepts:

Full text Article anthropology

From Collins Dictionary of Sociology
broadly, ‘the study of humanity’, but more narrowly consisting of: physical anthropology; SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY (in Britain) and CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY (in the USA). Physical anthropology concerns itself with the genesis and variation of hominoid species and draws on evolutionary biology DEMOGRAPHY and…
| 209 words
Key concepts:
Anthropology studies human development and material culture from prehistoric times up to the present, whether in the relative seclusion of non-industrial societies of indigenous people or in the shared backyard of the most industrially advanced societies. Thus the specific anthropological study of…
| 282 words
Key concepts:

Full text Article anthropology

From Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought
The science of man, which has divided into several distinct but related studies, and developed an emphasis upon societies considered to be either prehistorical or in some way removed from too much interaction with the modern world. Anthropology has tended to concentrate on such primitive societies, …
| 400 words
Key concepts:
Mind Map

Stack overflow
More Library Resources