Anthropological categories of peoples

Edward Burnett Tylor was born into a wealthy liberal Quaker English home in 1832. Tylor 's family owned a successful London brass factory. Edward always had an interest in society and culture. In 1855 when Tylor was 23, he decided to move to Central America after being diagnosed with tuberculosis. This is where he sparked his interest in unfamiliar cultures. His studies of the peoples of Central America led him to publish, Anahuac: Or Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern (1861). Along his travels Tylor met Archaeologist Henry Christy, a fellow Quaker, who influenced him to pursue prehistoric studies and research primitive culture. This new research led to the publishing of his second book, Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization (1865). After many more years of study and research Tylor would publish, Primitive Culture (1871), his most important book to be published. Primitive Culture (1871) would be a tremendous addition to the study of human civilization and would create an obsession over “Mr. Tylor’s science” (Pals 16), anthropology, the scientific study of mankind. Tylor was made Oxford University’s first reader and first professor in Anthropology. Many think of Tylor…

In “Anthropology and Religion”, Robert L. Winzeler discusses religion and what it is in terms of the vast ranges of societies known to anthropology (1). He first discusses that terms for religion really do not exist in other places and are not necessarily the same within all of them (Winzeler, 2). For example, Winzeler says, “Neither the Chinese nor the Japanese have a single traditional term that is the simple equivalent of the Western notion of religion”, meaning that in both Japanese and…

Truth be told, I have an anthropological methods/theories crush on Franz Boas. Born into a liberal German family, Boas was allowed to explore a variety of topics in fields that caught his attention, including: the natural sciences, geography, history and culture. After earning a Ph.D. in physics and a brief stint in the military Boas began a yearlong scientific expedition to Baffin Island in northern Canada to collect ethnographic data on Inuit culture. This expedition rooted Boas into the…

Although Aboriginal peoples inhabited in Australia continuously for over forty thousands years, Australian Indigenous Studies or “the study of and about the Indigenous peoples” (Nakata, 2006) is a relatively new discipline in the country’s academy. Since the introduction of the subject considered the first one relating to this matter at tertiary level in 1968 (Bourke and Bourke, 2006, p. 101), Indigenous Studies has entered into mainstream education and has now become “an expansive field of…

During the 1960s and 1970s two schools of thought took prominence in sociocultural anthropology: development and underdevelopment theory, as well as, the world-systems theory; which, in combination with the key tenets of Marxism laid the foundation of a new critical perspective called anthropological political economy. A precursor to the modern form of “political economy”, referred to now as “classical” political economics, has been dated to the eighteenth century, this later divided into the…

towards improvement of anthropological study, anthropology’s colonialist foundations still disseminated into contemporary work. Yet, in the late 20th century, numerous anthropologists made direct efforts to reject racialized methodologies, and, into 21st century anthropology, entire forms of perception began to considerably shift. According to Stephan Feuchtwang, early British social anthropology sought “knowledge of total systems or structures from small-scale social units…

perpetrator, or both. The culture of a certain group of people emphasizes and explains these violent actions in different ways. Violence can be defined from an anthropological perspective too, but this definition often varies from the one held by the general public. While violence is sometimes perceived as an uncommon occurrence, it is actually much more persistent within society. Through a series of interviews with university students, I found that their definitions of violence varied somewhat…

Anthropology appeared as a distinct field of study during the nineteenth century. Europe’s successful efforts in geographical exploration, and the colonization of the America facilitated public intrigue regarding the relationship between human evolution, nature and culture. Early anthropological theory was highly concerned with the classification of cultures and peoples along a static, evolutionary timeline, ascending from savagery to barbarism, and finally to civilization, typified by European…

The study of female sexuality, youth, and behavior is a vastly influential study in the anthropological world. However, it wasn’t until recently that it became a widely accepted study and a phenomenon. Margaret Mead, a cultural anthropologist, helped spur the emergence of cultural studies of females. Mead focuses on many various aspects of culture and how it connects to psychology. More specifically, she fixates upon the cultural conditioning of sexual behavior, culture change, and the…

currently thriving all over the world. Archaeology is the study of artifacts and material remains of past cultures, so that we can understand how those who came before us lived. Linguistic anthropology is the study of human communication throughout the ages, including how it orignated and how it has changed. Many anthropologists argue that there needs to be a fifth category, applied anthropology, or the use of anthropological studies to build policies or solve…