Cultural Anthropology

In a strict sense, we could include archeology and anthropological linguistics under cultural anthropology for they are both concerned with culture.

But since these subfields are generally considered separate from the major focus of cultural anthropology, it is better to treat them separately.

Cultural anthropology, as the term is commonly used today. Generally refers to the study of existing peoples.

Further it takes a comparative approach; that is, its aim is to understand and appreciate the diversity on human behavior, and develop a science of human behavior through comparison, of different people throughout the world.

In the United States they often distinguish between two areas of cultural anthropology; ethnology and ethnography.

Ethnology is the comparative study of culture and the investigation theoretical problems using information about –different groups.

Ethnography is simply the description of the one culture; it is not a comparative study.

In other words, an ethnological study is based on two or more ethnographies; the latter provide the raw material for the former.

Thus the word of the cultural anthropologists consists of two main tasks: to describe the culture of other peoples and to compare them.

These tasks are not easy, since putting something from another cultural context into the concepts and works available in the English language is not always possible.

In fact, it might consider an anthropologist’s description of a foreign culture to be cultural translation.
Cultural Anthropology