Anthropology and Fields of anthropology

1. Anthropologyand its types

2. What is Anthropology? • Anthropology is the study of scientific study of human behavior, societies, habits and cultures in present and past. It is also a study about the biological changes in the humans.

3. Fields of Anthropology • There are four fields of anthropology that deals with different fields of researches and uses different research techniques. The methods range from the commonly used social sciences to biology and geology. Biology and archaeology are the closest to physical sciences to understand and analyze the human experience.

4. The fields of anthropology are: • Biological anthropology • Cultural anthropology • Linguistic anthropology • Archaeology

5. Biological Anthropology • It deals with the systematic study of non-cultural aspects of humans. It deals all non-cultural characteristics that are genetically inherited in human and near-human. Near human category includes the monkeys, apes and even the fossil ancestors. The primary interest of most biological anthropologists is human evolution, how the changes occur in humans from before to now.

6. Biological Anthropologists have three areas of researches: human biology, primatology, or paleoanthropology. Human biology is the learning about the human diversity, genetic inheritance and other biological characteristics. Primatologists carry out non-human primate studies. It’s done in natural setting in wild species, monkeys and other related animals. Paleoanthropologists deals with the fossil record of the early humans to understand the way of our evolution.

7. Cultural Anthropology • It deals with the cultural aspects of humans all over the world. They focus on the research on things like social and political organizations, their marriage patterns. Economics factors and religious beliefs of different communities of the world. African, American Indian, and Pacific Island societies were often the subject of their research.

8. We are living with a lot of changing cultures in our society that’s maybe because of the increasing population of the world and growth in technologies. There are consequences that ¾ of the spoken languages of today world will extinct as spoken languages at the end of 21st century. Many of the traditions will also lost.

9. Linguistic Anthropology • It deals with the study of human communication process and spoken languages. The research on the phenomena of structure of language, functions of language, physiology of speech, social effects on speech and writing. They also deals with the nonverbal communications and how languages are different from each other.

10. Linguists start their research on languages from the native speakers what are the rules and meaning of making any sound and the rules for the construction of sentence. They learn about different regional and social dialects as well as the social conventions of speaking language in different situation.

11. Archaeology • Archaeologist deals with the study of earlier societies and their cultures. They basically discover and uncover the evidence of excavating and analyze and evaluate the material left by the people of past. Archaeologist are those detectives who do research on the thousands pieces of Pots in order to reconstruct the ways of living by the ancient people. It is also related to biological anthropology as its use the same methods to analyze and evaluate human skeletal remains found in archaeological sites.