Читать книгу Anthropology For Dummies - Cameron M. Smith - Страница 13

Anthropology has a complex, colorful, and sometimes checkered history. As you find out in Chapter 2, the field has gone through several transformations, and today there are more ways of doing anthropology than you can shake a stick at.

Now, the study of humanity is a vast undertaking, so anthropologists have divvied up the task into four main subfields:

 Physical anthropology: Humanity as a biological species

 Archaeology: Humanity’s deep past

 Cultural anthropology: Humanity’s current behavioral diversity

 Linguistics: Humanity’s unique mode of communication

As you study anthropology, keep in mind that to really understand humanity, anthropologists need to know at least a little about each of the subfields. For example, an archaeologist studying an ancient civilization needs to know what a physical anthropologist has to say about that people’s bones, because the bones can tell us what people ate or how they practiced medicine. And today, cultural anthropologists can’t know much about a culture unless they have a good knowledge of that culture’s language, requiring some familiarity with linguistic anthropology.