Information & explanations, latest texts & monographs on
Anthropology (including recent related patents.)
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humankind (see genus Homo). It is holistic in two senses: it is concerned with all humans at all times, and with all dimensions of humanity. Central to anthropology is the concept of culture, and the notion that human nature is culture; that our species has evolved a universal capacity to conceive of the world symbolically, to teach and learn such symbols socially, and to transform the world (and ourselves) based on such symbols.
In the United States, anthropology is traditionally divided into four fields:
- physical anthropology, which studies primate behavior, human evolution, and population genetics;
- linguistics, which studies variation in language across time and space, the social uses of language, and the relationship between language and culture;
- archaeology, which studies the material remains of human societies (and is often treated as a separate field in Great Britain); and
- cultural anthropology, (also called social anthropology or sociocultural anthropology). Areas studied by cultural anthropologists include social networks, social behavior, kinship patterns, politics, beliefs, patterns in production, exchange, and consumption, and other expressions of culture.
More recently, some anthropology programs in the U.S. began dividing the field into two, one emphasizing the humanities and critical theory, the other emphasizing the natural sciences and positivism.
Table of contents showTocToggle("show","hide")
1 Historical and institutional context
2 Anthropological concepts
3 Anthropological fields and subfields
4 See also
Historical and institutional context
The anthropologist Eric Wolf once characterized anthropology as the most scientific of the humanities, and the most humanistic of the social sciences. Understanding how these disciplines developed contributes to understanding how anthropology does and does not fit into other academic disciplines.
Anthropology is one Western response to one of the greatest paradoxes of modernity: as the world is becoming smaller and more integrated, people's experience of the world is increasingly atomized and dispersed. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels observed in the 1840s:
All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations.
Ironically, this universal interdependence, rather than leading to greater human solidarity, has coincided with increasing racial, ethnic, religious, and class divisions, and new – and to some confusing or disturbing – cultural expressions. These are the conditions of life with which people today must contend, but they have their origins in processes that began in the 16th century and accelerated in the 19th century.
In the 19th century numerous scholars grappled with these issues. The "humanities" reflected an attempt to study different national traditions, in the form of history and the arts, as an attempt to provide people in emerging nation-states with a sense of coherence. The "social sciences" emerged at this time as an attempt to develop scientific methods to address social phenomena, in an attempt to provide a universal basis for social knowledge.
Some scholars gave a name to the dimension of human action in which these problems are most evident, and the concept through which they could be solved: society. The new discipline of sociology would study the ties that bind people not only as individuals, but as members of associations, groups, and institutions. Through such studies sociologists could develop "the antidote to social disintegration."
Nevertheless, this new discipline, in the very process of distinguishing "society" from "the individual," "the state" and "the market," and by placing itself among complementary social and behavioral sciences such as psychology, political science, and economics, represented in intellectual form the very social divisions it sought to understand and heal. Moreover, the most obvious place for the study of modernity, and the most convenient place for the application of new scientific, quantitative research methods, was in the sociologists' own societies, at the core of the emerging world system. Consequently, they neglected the study of those societies on or beyond modernity's frontiers.
At the same time that social scientists were defining this new object and method of study, however, a diverse group of scholars – with training in jurisprudence, psychology, geography, physics, mathematics, and other disciplines, and drawing on the methods of the natural sciences as well as developing new techniques involving not only structured interviews but unstructured "participant-observation" – dedicated themselves precisely to the study of those people on Europe's colonial frontiers. Drawing on the new theory of evolution through natural selection, they proposed the scientific study of a new object: "humankind," conceived of as a whole. Crucial to this study is the concept "culture," which anthropologists defined both as a universal capacity and propensity for social learning, thinking, and acting (which they see as a product of human evolution and something that distinguishes Homo sapiens – and perhaps all species of genus Homo – from other species), and as a particular adaptation to local conditions that takes the form of highly variable beliefs and practices. Thus, "culture" not only transcends the opposition between nature and nurture; it transcends and absorbs the peculiarly European distinction between politics, religion, kinship, and the economy as autonomous domains. They consequently organized a new discipline, anthropology, that would transcend the divisions between the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities to explore the biological, linguistic, material, and symbolic dimensions of humankind in all forms.
Anthropological concepts
Anthropological fields and subfields
See also
This article is adapted from from Wikipedia All Wikipedia article text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity by Lawrence Lessig
Why We Buy: The Science Of Shopping by Paco Underhill
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz
The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell
Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son: Abandonment, Adoption, and Orphanage Care in China by Kay Ann Johnson
Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena by JULIA REED
The Corporation : The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by Joel Bakan
Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together In The Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race: A Ps by Beverly Daniel Tatum
Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam
Nine Parts of Desire : The Hidden World of Islamic Women by Geraldine Brooks
Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong: Why We Love France but Not the French by Jean-Benoit Nadeau
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price
Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab/the Body Farm/Where the Dead Do Tell Tales by William M. Bass
Poplorica : A Popular History of the Fads, Mavericks, Inventions, and Lore that Shaped Modern America by Martin J. Smith
Recent Anthropology related patents
From USPTO:
6687523: Fabric or garment with integrated flexible information infrastructure for monitoring vital signs of infants
6657628: Method and apparatus for specification, control and modulation of social primitives in animated characters
6642374: Process for separation of polynucleotide fragments
6630353: High throughput screening assay systems in microscale fluidic devices
6613581: Microfluidic analytic detection assays, devices, and integrated systems
6589734: Detection of HIV
6582909: APM1 biallelic markers and uses thereof
6558960: High throughput screening assay systems in microscale fluidic devices
6556923: Software for high throughput microfluidic systems
6544730: High density polymorphic genetic locus
6513027: Automated category discovery for a terminological knowledge base
6495369: High throughput microfluidic systems and methods
6495326: Method for determining a concentration of target nucleic acid molecules, nucleic acid probes for the method, and method for analyzing data obtained by the method
6492121: Method for determining a concentration of target nucleic acid molecules, nucleic acid probes for the method, and method for analyzing data obtained by the method
6487545: Methods and apparatus for classifying terminology utilizing a knowledge catalog
6479299: Pre-disposed assay components in microfluidic devices and methods
6479238: Polymorphic markers of the LSR gene
6468476: Methods for using-co-regulated genesets to enhance detection and classification of gene expression patterns
6466250: System for electronically-mediated collaboration including eye-contact collaboratory
6460034: Document knowledge base research and retrieval system
D463216: Trainer cup
6429025: High-throughput screening assay systems in microscale fluidic devices
6413782: Methods of manufacturing high-throughput screening systems
6405190: Free format query processing in an information search and retrieval system
6399389: High throughput screening assay systems in microscale fluidic devices
6397761: Computer workstation
6381482: Fabric or garment with integrated flexible information infrastructure
6341372: Universal machine translator of arbitrary languages
D452415: Pinched trainer cup
6331132: Yo-yo having improved tether tension control and adjustable mechanism
D452116: Trainer cup
6329149: Reverse-root-canal method for extracting aDNA
D450535: Trainer cup
6306659: High throughput screening assay systems in microscale fluidic devices
D448976: Pinched trainer cup
6292830: System for optimizing interaction among agents acting on multiple levels
6274337: High throughput screening assay systems in microscale fluidic devices
6267858: High throughput screening assay systems in microscale fluidic devices
6255465: Cross-species chromosome painting
6239904: Forensic microscope, in particular for examination of writing
6233545: Universal machine translator of arbitrary languages utilizing epistemic moments
6205243: System and method for rapid shape digitizing and adaptive mesh generation
6203987: Methods for using co-regulated genesets to enhance detection and classification of gene expression patterns
6199034: Methods and apparatus for determining theme for discourse
6174538: Bait with cucurbitacin
6164456: Method and apparatus for isolation of trace materials from a heterogenous sample
6145551: Full-fashioned weaving process for production of a woven garment with intelligence capability
6136535: Continuous amplification reaction
6132685: High throughput microfluidic systems and methods
|