Cultural Anthropology: Source of Knowledge

Cultural Anthropology had very different origins from those of other subfields of anthropology, but it was almost a foregone conclusion that they would eventually come together. Cultural anthropology studies the similarities and differences in the behavior of various groups of people. It grew out of people’s natural curiosity about the ways of observed in groups other than their own. The farther wary these groups are, the more different they are likely to be.

Early accounts of their cultures came form a limited number of sources – soldiers who conquered the peoples of other continents, traders who brought home the riches of other lands, and missionaries who set out to convert the “heathen” to Christianity. But as Europe gained greater control over other societies, the way was opened for scholars interested in learning about societies and studying them in a more scientific way.

Increased knowledge about human cultural diversity led to attempts to systematize these differences. The outcome was a theory of cultural revolution that paralleled the theory of biological evolution. Evolutionary theory proved to be link that tied the four subfields of anthropology together in the early days of the discipline. Cultural anthropology applied an evolutionary model to contemporary societies in an attempt to set up a scale on which to rank all known cultures. From this scale they reconstructed the evolutionary history of human society, from its earliest and most primitive stages up to the preset level of civilization.
Cultural Anthropology: Source of Knowledge