Anthropology in Nineteenth Century

It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that anthropology began to take shape as a separate field of study. It came together from many different directions, with roots in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and even humanistic disciplines like history and folklore. By end of the nineteenth century, anthropology had clearly narrowed its focus to four main areas:

1. Studies of physical aspects of the human species, including human biology and evolution.

2. Studies of language, mainly the diversity of the world’s spoken and written languages

3. Archaeologists studies of past civilizations

4. Studies of the cultural similarities and differences among existing societies, particularly those of non western world.

These four fields are still at the core of anthropology, and today every anthropologist is expected to be acquainted with them.

But it is interesting to look at the way these seemly diverse approaches were brought together as anthropology develop into a formal discipline and defined its boundaries its regards to other social sciences.

In the nineteenth century physical anthropology was perhaps most directly concerned with the concept of race, especially in the United States, where the tensions that led to Civil War fostered scientific investigating of racial differences.

The root of physical anthropology can be found in the natural sciences of that period, including biology, botany, and zoology.

These fields had a long tradition of recording all the diverse species of animals and plants discovered in different parts of the world and trying to figure out the relationship among them , as well as they had grown apart, and changed – other words, their evolution.
Anthropology in Nineteenth Century