Anthropology

Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species.^[1] Social anthropology studies patterns of behavior, while cultural anthropology studies cultural meaning, including norms and values.^[1] A portmanteau term sociocultural anthropology is commonly used today. Linguistic anthropology studies how language influences social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the biological development of humans.^[1]

This article is about the study of humans. For the study of human origins, see Anthropogeny. For other uses, see Anthropology (disambiguation).

Archaeology, often termed as "anthropology of the past," studies human activity through investigation of physical evidence. It is considered a branch of anthropology in North America and Asia, while in Europe, archaeology is viewed as a discipline in its own right or grouped under other related disciplines, such as history and palaeontology.

Etymology[edit]

The abstract noun anthropology is first attested in reference to history.^[2]^{[n 1]} Its present use first appeared in Renaissance Germany in the works of Magnus Hundt and Otto Casmann.^[3] Their Neo-Latin anthropologia derived from the combining forms of the Greek words ánthrōpos (ἄνθρωπος, "human") and lógos (λόγος, "study").^[2] Its adjectival form appeared in the works of Aristotle.^[2] It began to be used in English, possibly via French Anthropologie, by the early 18th century.^[2]^{[n 2]}

The development of systems of medical knowledge and medical care

The patient-physician relationship

The integration of alternative medical systems in culturally diverse environments

The interaction of social, environmental and biological factors which influence health and illness both in the individual and the community as a whole

The critical analysis of interaction between psychiatric services and migrant populations ("critical ethnopsychiatry": Beneduce 2004, 2007)

The impact of biomedicine and biomedical technologies in non-Western settings

That the discipline grew out of colonialism, perhaps was in league with it, and derives some of its key notions from it, consciously or not. (See, for example, Gough, Pels and Salemink, but cf. Lewis 2004).

[92]

That ethnographic work is often ahistorical, writing about people as if they were "out of time" in an "ethnographic present" (Johannes Fabian, Time and Its Other).

In his article "The Misrepresentation of Anthropology and Its Consequence", critiqued older anthropological works that presented other cultures as if they were strange and unusual. While the findings of those researchers should not be discarded, the field should learn from its mistakes.^[93]

Herbert S. Lewis

Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology.

Haller, Dieter. . Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Retrieved 22 March 2015.

"Interviews with German Anthropologists: Video Portal for the History of German Anthropology post 1945"

(AIO)