Anthropology (the “logos,”--or knowledge--about “anthropos,” human being) is a broad discipline that has its intellectual roots in philosophy, the natural sciences, and history.  The purposes of anthropological inquiry are diverse, but in general it may be said that the discipline provides a holistic approach to human existence, one that pursues the philosophical question “What does it mean to be human?” from an integrated, systemic perspective that sees biological, cultural, social, political, economic, linguistic, material, environmental, and global phenomena as inseparable.  Anthropologists may concentrate on the minutiae of human existence as embodied in the meanings of cave drawings or body art, or they may concentrate on sweeping social movements such as migrations and international conflicts.  Whatever the focus, anthropologists inevitably link the personal to the political, the local to the global, and the past to the present and future.   While all anthropologists tend to cast a broad net in situating the immediate to the systemic, they do focus their studies somewhere in one of the four main subfields of the discipline:

• BIOLOGICAL or PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY (the study of human evolution and biological variation; this area has affinities with the disciplines of biology, human anatomy, primatology, exercise science, chemistry, medicine, epidemiology, and paleontology)
• LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY (the study of communication via linguistic and symbolic systems; linguistic anthropology is informed by the disciplines of linguistics, folklore, political science, ethnoscience, communications, and even neuroscience.)
• ARCHAEOLOGY (the study of material culture, particularly that of past societies; archaeology benefits from research conducted in geography, geology, geographic information systems, Native American studies, history, agriculture, ecology, engineering, and material science).
• SOCIOCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY (or ETHNOLOGY; the comparative study of contemporary human societies; sociocultural anthropologists may draw inspiration from economics, history, literary criticism, education,  women‘s studies, political science, musicology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, religious studies, and any other arena of inquiry touching human existence that one can imagine!)

  •  APPLIED ANTHROPOLOGY  is considered by some to be a fifth subfield of anthropology.  Applied anthropology takes place any time anthropological knowledge and practice are used towards understanding, addressing, and solving human problems. 

2008  Anthropology: What Does it Mean to be Human? Oxford University Press, New York.

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