Definition of cultural anthropology

Cultural anthropology is the academic discipline that investigates the cultural diversity of current and historically recent human societies.

As its name suggests, the main focus of this subfield is culture.

The Englishman E.B Tylor was one of the founders of the field that was later to become cultural anthropology.

In 1871, he wrote that culture is ‘that complex whole which include knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and any other, capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member do society’.

Culture is the core concept in cultural anthropology and is an important concept in sociology. Cultural anthropology studies human behavior that is learned, shared and typical of a particular human group, known as culture.

Cultural anthropologists attempt to understand culture as the major way in which human beings adopt to their environment.
Definition of cultural anthropology

Cultural anthropology is a field work

Cultural anthropology is the field study of living human beings. Cultural anthropology’s principal method is field work, the way we do natural history.

The field refer to the areas in space in which cultural anthropologists find a living population to study.

It is the “interacting field” for various forces propelled by human activities.

The field need not have a hard boundary, it may not even be a single geographical area, but all told, a particular ethnographic filed is usually some form of community.

The natural history method distinguishes cultural anthropology from the other social sciences.

This method is founded on meticulous observation. The observation interact over natural time cycles (days, seasons, years, generations, a lifetime).

This observation to be controlled and cross checked by repeating them and questioning – interviewing – the subjects for information about past activities.

By this way, repetitive charting and cross checking of human events we can distinguish pattern and processes. These in turn enable, to arrive at conclusions that are theories – statements of order, limits, probability and natural law – derived from the field itself, seen as part of nature.

Theories may descriptive, relational, prescriptive or predictive. Natural history theories are above all descriptive and relational.

They are sometimes prescriptive, especially in applied anthropology: they can indicate a recommended area of conduct.

But anthropologist seldom make predictions on the basis of their theories. It is important to realize that prediction is not the only test of a theory.
Cultural anthropology is a field work

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