Anthropology (from the Greek word άνθρωπος, "human" or "person") consists of the study of humanity (see genus Homo). It is holistic in two senses: it is concerned with all humans at all times and with all dimensions of humanity. Anthropology is traditionally distinguished from other disciplines by its emphasis on cultural relativity, in-depth examination of context, and cross-cultural comparisons.

Historical and institutional context

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Main Article: History of anthropology

Anthropology has been characterized as "the most scientific of the humanities, and the most humanistic of the sciences." Contemporary anthropologists claim a number of earlier thinkers as their forebears, and the discipline has several sources; Claude Lévi-Strauss, for example, claimed Montaigne and Rousseau as important influences. Anthropology can best be understood as an outgrowth of the Age of Enlightenment, a period when Europeans attempted systematically to study human behavior. The traditions of jurisprudence, history, philology, and sociology then evolved into something more closely resembling the modern views of these disciplines and informed the development of the social sciences, of which anthropology was a part. At the same time, the romantic reaction to the Enlightenment produced thinkers, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and later Wilhelm Dilthey, whose work formed the basis for the "culture concept," which is central to the discipline.

Institutionally, anthropology emerged from the development of natural history (expounded by authors such as Buffon) that occurred during the European colonization of the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Programs of ethnographic study have their origins in this era as the study of the "human primitives" overseen by colonial administrations. There was a tendency in late 18th century Enlightenment thought to understand human society as natural phenomena that behaved in accordance with certain principles and that could be observed empirically.see, for instance, the writing of Auguste Comte In some ways, studying the language, culture, physiology, and artifacts of European colonies was not unlike studying the flora and fauna of those places. Some critics point to the fact that the material culture of "civilized" nations such as China have historically been displayed in fine-art museums alongside European art, while artifacts from African and Native North American cultures were displayed in Natural History Museums, alongside dinosaur bones and nature dioramas. The British Museum or the Parisian Musée de l'Homme are examples of such museums—the Musée de l'Homme held the "Hottentot Venus" remains until the 1970s. Saartje Baartman, a Namaqua woman, was examined by anatomist Georges Cuvier. This being said, curatorial practice has changed dramatically in recent years, and it would be inaccurate to see anthropology as merely an extension of colonial rule and European chauvinism, since its relationship to imperialism was and is complex. Museums weren't the only site of anthropological studies: with the New Imperialism period, starting in the 1870s, zoos became unattended "laboratories," especially the so-called "ethnological exhibitions" or "Negro villages." Thus, "savages" from the colonies were displayed, often nudes, in cages, in what has been called "human zoos." For example, in 1906, anthropologist Madison Grant put a Congolese pygmy named Ota Benga in a cage in the Bronx Zoo, and labelled him "the missing link" between an orangutan and the "white race" (Grant, a renowned eugenicist, was the author of The Passing of the Great Race (1916). Such exhibitions were attempts to illustrate and prove in the same movement the validity of scientific racism, the first formulation of which may be found in Arthur de Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853-55). In 1931, the Colonial Exhibition in Paris still displayed Kanaks from New Caledonia in the "indigenous village"; it received 24 million visitors in six months, thus demonstrating the popularity of such "human zoos."

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Volume 48, number 6: Eventful Archaeology
Beck Jr. et al. Wed, 21 Nov 2007 13:29:26 -0600
Unexpected ruptures in material culture patterning present interpretive challenges for archaeological narratives of social change. The concept of the event, as proposed by William Sewell Jr., offers a robust theoretical vocabulary for understanding the sudden appearance of novel patterning. Sewell defines historical events as sequences of happenings or occurrences that transform social structures by creating durable ruptures between material resources and their associated virtual schemas. Thus conceived, events occur in three phases: (1) a sequence of contingent happenings produces (2) ruptures in the articulation of resources and schemas, creating (3) an opportunity for rearticulation within new frames of reference. This perspective has much to recommend it for archaeology because it explicitly and uniquely grounds the concepts of structure, structural change, and agency in materiality. The implications of this approach are apparent in the cases of Iceland’s conversion to Christianity (AD 1000–1050), barrow construction during Denmark’s Bronze Age (1700–1500 BC), platform construction at Formative Chiripa, Bolivia (450–400 BC), and the planning and layout of Mississippian Cahokia, Illinois (AD 1050–1100).
Volume 48, number 6: Blaming for Columbine
Strauss Wed, 21 Nov 2007 13:29:26 -0600
Modern Westerners are supposed to embrace a notion of unfettered personal agency. An analysis of public commentary (interviews, editorials, and online message boards) in the United States about the Columbine school shootings shows that the voluntarist cultural model of persons as autonomous agents, while certainly very important, is just one of a number of cultural models Americans use to explain human action and has particular political and interpersonal uses. We might think that conceptions as basic as those of personhood and agency would be hegemonic: both singular and internalized as unexamined, taken-for-granted assumptions. In some contexts, voluntarist ideas about agency are taken for granted, but in others they are promoted quite deliberately. A particularly interesting phenomenon in the United States at this time is the presence of a discourse that may be called defensive voluntarism, an explicit, argumentative version of voluntarism invoked to combat other widely circulating views of behavior. The very need for emphatic pronouncement betrays speakers’ awareness that voluntarism needs to be defended. These findings point to the need for a person-and-context-centered approach to social discourses instead of one that assumes discourses to be constitutive.
Volume 48, number 6: In-law Conflict
Leonetti, Nath, and Hemam Wed, 21 Nov 2007 13:29:26 -0600
Human behavioral ecologists have shown that the reproductive lives of women are affected by both their husbands and the grandmothers of their children. Study of the combined effect of the roles of the husbands and mothers of 650 Khasi women aged 16–50 years supports the ideas that the reproductive agendas of husbands may require more than women want to invest and that mothers provide support and protective services to their daughters and grandchildren. In the absence of the woman’s mother, the husband’s agenda appears to have more influence on her reproductive career. In a cooperative vein, women's mothers may contribute to good marital choices. A view of reproductive pursuits that incorporates in-laws enhances behavioral ecology approaches to the evolutionary comprehension of human reproductive behavior. This view also more readily interfaces with the cultural systems that set up the ecologies of reproductive life.

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