Anthropology

We shall outline the four major subfields of anthropology that have emerged in the twentieth century: physical anthropology, archaeology, linguistics and cultural anthropology.

Physical anthropology deals with human biology across space and time. It is divided into two areas: paleontology, the study of the fossil evidence of the primate (including human) evolution, and neontology, the comparative biology of living primates, including population and molecular genetics, body shapes (morphology), and the extent to which behavior is biologically programmed.

Archeology is the systematic retrieval and analysis of the physical remains left behind by human beings, including both their skeletal and cultural remains. Both the classical civilizations and prehistoric groups, including our prehuman ancestors, are investigated.

Linguistics is the study of language across space and time. Historical linguistics attempts to trace the tree of linguistic evolution and to reconstruct ancestral language forms. Comparative (or structural) linguistics attempts to describe formally the basic elements of languages and the rules by which they are ordered into intelligible speech.

Cultural anthropology includes many different perspectives and specialized subdisciplines but is concerned primarily with describing the forms of social organization and the cultural systems of human groups. In technical usage, ethnography is the description of the social and cultural systems of one particular group, whereas ethnology is the comparison of such descriptions for the purpose of generalizing about the nature of all human groups.

(From D.E. Hunt and P. Whitten: The Study of Anthropology (Harper and Row, 1976)