Anthropology

The Four Subfields

• Cultural anthropology — the study of human societies, beliefs, practices, and symbolic systems; relies primarily on ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation.
• Biological (physical) anthropology — the study of human evolution, genetics, primatology, and biological variation across populations.
• Archaeology — the study of past human societies through material remains: artifacts, ecofacts, structures, and landscapes.
• Linguistic anthropology — the study of language in its social and cultural contexts; encompasses language structure, language change, and how language shapes thought.

Cross-cutting concepts

• Holism — the principle that human life must be understood as an integrated whole; all subfields are connected.
• Cultural relativism — the principle, associated with Franz Boas, that cultures should be understood on their own terms, not judged by the standards of another.
• Ethnocentrism — judging other cultures by the standards of one’s own; considered a methodological and ethical error in anthropology.
• Fieldwork — extended immersion in a community; the methodological cornerstone of cultural anthropology.
• Fieldwork ethics — informed consent is an ongoing relationship, not simply a signed form. Anthropologists should avoid harm, explain their aims honestly, protect confidential information and records, and consider obligations to participants and affected communities when sharing results. Collaboration does not remove the need to negotiate who may access sensitive knowledge.¹
• Emic / etic — emic = insider’s perspective; etic = outside analytical framework applied by the researcher.

Human Evolution

• Hominins — the taxonomic tribe that includes modern humans, extinct species in the human lineage, and all ancestors after the split from chimpanzees (~6-7 million BP, approximate).
• Sahelanthropus tchadensis — one of the oldest known potential hominins (~7 Ma, approximate); found in Chad; bipedality debated.
• Ardipithecus ramidus (“Ardi”) — ~4.4 Ma (approximate); earlier than the australopithecines; partial skeleton nicknamed “Ardi” found in the Afar region of Ethiopia; more primitive hand and foot anatomy than Lucy; suggests early hominins were not knuckle-walkers.
• Australopithecus anamensis — ~4.2–3.8 Ma (approximate); oldest well-documented australopithecine; found at Kanapoi and Allia Bay, Kenya; some researchers treat it as the direct ancestor of A. afarensis or even an anagenetic continuum with it.
• Australopithecus afarensis — ~3.9–2.9 Ma (approximate); the species of Lucy, a partial female skeleton found in Ethiopia in 1974 by Donald Johanson’s team; strong evidence for bipedality; brain size still ape-like.
• Australopithecus africanus — ~3–2 Ma (approximate); South African species; the Taung Child skull, described by Raymond Dart in 1924, was the first australopithecine identified; Taung Child was a juvenile whose endocast showed a human-like organization.
• Hadar — site in the Afar Depression, Ethiopia; where Lucy (A. afarensis) and the “First Family” assemblage of ~13 individuals were found; one of the richest Pliocene hominin sites.
• Paranthropus (robust australopithecines) — ~2.7–1.2 Ma (approximate); heavily built jaws and teeth for tough plant foods; includes P. boisei (“Nutcracker Man,” found by Mary and Louis Leakey at Olduvai) and P. robustus.
• Homo habilis — ~2.4–1.4 Ma (approximate); name means “handy man”; associated with Oldowan stone tools; status as distinct species sometimes debated.
• Homo erectus — ~1.9 Ma–143,000 BP (approximate); first hominin to spread out of Africa into Asia; associated with Acheulean hand axes; possibly controlled fire; includes specimens known as Peking Man and Java Man.
• Homo heidelbergensis — ~700,000–200,000 BP (approximate); a transitional species in Europe and Africa; likely ancestral to Neanderthals and possibly modern humans; associated with the Aterian and Mousterian tool traditions in Africa and Europe respectively.
• Homo antecessor — ~1.2–0.8 Ma (approximate); found at Atapuerca, Spain; some researchers consider it the common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans; others fold it into H. heidelbergensis.
• Homo neanderthalensis — ~400,000–40,000 BP (approximate); inhabited Europe and western Asia; larger brained than H. sapiens on average; buried their dead; interbred with modern humans (non-African H. sapiens carry ~1–4% Neanderthal DNA); went extinct after contact with modern humans.
• Denisovans — a sister group to Neanderthals known primarily from DNA extracted from fragmentary fossils in Siberia’s Denisova Cave; also interbred with modern humans; highest Denisovan ancestry found in Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians (~4–6%).
• Homo floresiensis — ~100,000–50,000 BP (approximate); very small-bodied hominin found on the island of Flores, Indonesia; sometimes called “the Hobbit”; exact phylogenetic position contested.
• Homo naledi — found in South Africa’s Rising Star Cave (announced 2015); a mosaic of primitive and modern features; surprisingly young dates (~235,000–335,000 BP, approximate) overlap with early modern humans; possible deliberate body disposal.

• Homo sapiens (anatomically modern) — ~300,000 BP (approximate, based on Jebel Irhoud, Morocco); behaviorally modern humans (symbolic art, complex tools) appear in the fossil record by ~100,000–50,000 BP.

• Mousterian tradition — a Middle Paleolithic stone-tool industry (~300,000–30,000 BP) associated with Neanderthals and early modern humans; characterized by prepared-core (Levallois) technique.
• Levallois technique — a prepared-core knapping method that produces standardized flakes of predictable shape; hallmark of Middle Paleolithic technology; appears across Africa, Europe, and western Asia.

Evolutionary concepts

• Bipedalism — upright walking on two legs; among the earliest derived hominin traits, preceding large brain expansion.
• Encephalization — the tendency toward larger brain size relative to body size across the hominin lineage; especially rapid in the genus Homo.
• Out of Africa model — the consensus model that anatomically modern H. sapiens originated in Africa and dispersed to replace (with some admixture) archaic populations elsewhere; supported by genetic and fossil evidence.
• Multiregional hypothesis — the now-minority view that modern humans evolved in parallel across multiple continents from earlier Homo populations; mostly supplanted by Out of Africa evidence.
• Mitochondrial Eve — the most recent common matrilineal ancestor of all living humans, estimated to have lived ~150,000–200,000 BP (approximate); not the only woman alive at the time.
• Y-chromosomal Adam — the most recent common patrilineal ancestor; lived roughly ~200,000–340,000 BP (approximate estimates vary widely by study).
• Oldowan tradition — the oldest known stone-tool industry (~3.3–1.5 Ma), involving simple flaked pebbles; associated with early Homo and possibly late Australopithecus.
• Acheulean tradition — a stone-tool industry (~1.76 Ma–100,000 BP) characterized by bifacial hand axes; associated with H. erectus and H. heidelbergensis.
• Laetoli footprints — preserved footprints (~3.6 Ma) in volcanic ash at Laetoli, Tanzania, discovered by Mary Leakey’s team in 1978; provide direct evidence of upright bipedal walking in A. afarensis or a close relative.

• Behavioral modernity — a suite of capacities including symbolic art, long-distance trade, complex language, and personal ornaments; debated whether these arose suddenly (~50,000 BP “Upper Paleolithic Revolution”) or gradually over hundreds of thousands of years.

• Chauvet Cave — cave art site in southern France (~36,000 BP); older than Lascaux; charcoal-dated paintings of rhinoceroses, lions, and mammoths; subject of Werner Herzog’s documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

Primatology and Biological Variation

• Primatology — the study of non-human primates; a subfield of biological anthropology that illuminates human behavioral evolution.
• Jane Goodall — conducted decades of field research on chimpanzees at Gombe, Tanzania; documented tool use, complex social behavior, and warfare.
• Dian Fossey — long-term study of mountain gorillas in Rwanda; wrote Gorillas in the Mist; murdered 1985.
• Biruté Galdikas — long-term study of orangutans in Borneo; one of Leakey’s “Trimates” along with Goodall and Fossey.
• ABO and other blood groups — examples of human polymorphisms that vary in frequency across populations; differ from race as a biological category.
• Race (biological) — modern anthropological consensus holds that biological race is not a valid taxonomic classification for humans; human genetic variation is clinal and does not cluster discretely. Social race is a real and studied phenomenon.
• Forensic anthropology — application of biological anthropology methods to legal and law-enforcement contexts; includes skeletal analysis for identification.
• Paleoanthropology — the subfield combining paleontology and biological anthropology to study human evolution through fossil and geological evidence.
• Dermatoglyphics — the study of fingerprint and skin-ridge patterns; used in biological anthropology and forensic identification.
• Sexual dimorphism — differences in size, shape, or features between males and females of a species; marked in gorillas, moderate in chimps and early hominins, reduced in modern humans relative to great apes.

Archaeology

• Material culture — physical objects made, modified, or used by humans; the primary data of archaeology.
• Stratigraphy — the principle that older deposits lie below younger ones; used to establish relative chronology.
• Radiocarbon dating (¹⁴C) — radiometric dating method effective for organic materials up to ~50,000 years old; calibrated using tree rings.
• Potassium-argon (K-Ar) dating — used for volcanic rock; extends dating range to millions of years; useful for placing hominin fossils in stratigraphic context.
• Lithics — stone tools and their debris (debitage); core types include flakes, blades, and formal tools.
• Seriation — a relative dating technique based on the changing frequency of artifact styles over time.
• Processual archaeology (New Archaeology) — movement from the 1960s associated with Lewis Binford; emphasized scientific method, hypothesis testing, and ecological explanation.
• Post-processual archaeology — reaction against processual archaeology; associated with Ian Hodder; emphasized interpretation, agency, and the role of ideology in material culture.

Major sites and transitions

• Olduvai Gorge — site in Tanzania central to 20th-century paleoanthropology; excavated by Louis and Mary Leakey; yielded H. habilis and Paranthropus boisei remains.
• Lascaux — Paleolithic cave site in France (~17,000–20,000 BP); famous for elaborate polychrome animal paintings; a UNESCO site closed to public to prevent deterioration.
• Altamira — cave art site in northern Spain; age similar to Lascaux; the first Paleolithic cave art recognized as ancient (1880); discovered by Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola; initially dismissed as forgery.
• Catalhoyuk — large Neolithic settlement in Anatolia (modern Turkey), ~9,500–7,700 BP; one of the earliest known proto-urban communities; excavated by James Mellaart and later Ian Hodder.
• Stonehenge — megalithic monument in southern England; construction phases ~3000–1500 BCE; astronomical alignments; exact social function debated.
• Göbekli Tepe — site in southeastern Turkey (~11,600–8,200 BP); monumental stone pillars predate ceramics and agriculture; challenges the view that sedentism preceded monumentality.
• Jericho (Tell es-Sultan) — one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited settlements (Natufian through Neolithic); earliest stone tower (~8,300 BCE) at the Neolithic site predates most monumental architecture; excavated by Kathleen Kenyon.
• Indus Valley Civilization (Harappan) — Bronze Age urban civilization (~3300–1300 BCE) centered on the Indus and Ghaggar-Hakra river systems; major cities include Mohenjo-daro and Harappa; known for grid-planned streets, standardized weights, and undeciphered script.
• Mohenjo-daro — one of the two largest cities of the Indus Valley Civilization; in modern Pakistan; famous for its Great Bath and sophisticated drainage system; excavated by John Marshall and Ernest Mackay in the 1920s.
• Neolithic Revolution — the gradual, uneven transition from foraging toward cultivation and animal husbandry. Food production developed independently in several regions; Southwest Asian transitions began roughly 12,000 years ago, while evidence for maize cultivation in southwestern Mexico extends to about 8,700 years ago. Cultivation, domestication, and permanent settlement need not begin simultaneously. Farming changed population and social organization without producing one universal sequence.²
• Fertile Crescent — the arc from the Levant through Mesopotamia; an early center of agricultural origins; crops included wheat, barley, lentils; animals included sheep, goat, cattle, pig.
• Three-Age System — the classification of prehistory into Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age; proposed by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen in the early 19th century for the National Museum of Denmark; a foundational framework for European archaeology.
• Clovis culture — the earliest well-documented widespread cultural tradition in the Americas (~13,000–12,800 BP); identified by distinctive fluted projectile points first found near Clovis, New Mexico; long considered the earliest peopling of the Americas but challenged by pre-Clovis sites.
• Kennewick Man (The Ancient One) — ~8,500-year-old skeletal remains found in Washington State; subject of legal dispute between scientists and Native American tribes over repatriation; repatriated to Colville tribes in 2017.
• NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, 1990) — US law governing protection and repatriation of Native American human remains and specified cultural items. Federal agencies and museums receiving federal funds must inventory or summarize holdings, consult lineal descendants, Indian Tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations, and evaluate repatriation requests. Its obligations extend beyond federally operated institutions.³
• Dendrochronology — tree-ring dating; used to calibrate radiocarbon dates and to date wooden structures and environmental changes precisely; technique pioneered by A.E. Douglass.
• Archaeomagnetism — dating method using the fact that fired clay and hearths preserve the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field at the time of firing; useful for kilns and hearths.

Cultural Anthropology

• Culture — the shared system of beliefs, values, symbols, practices, and material objects that characterizes a group; learned and transmitted across generations (not genetically inherited).
• Ethnography — the systematic description of a culture, produced through extended fieldwork; both a method and a genre of writing.
• Participant observation — the defining fieldwork method, in which the researcher lives within a community and participates in daily life while observing.
• Thick description — Clifford Geertz’s term for interpretive ethnography that goes beyond surface behavior to capture meaning; introduced in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973); contrasted with “thin description,” which records only observable behavior without context.
• Kula ring — a system of ceremonial exchange practiced among Trobriand Islanders and neighboring peoples; armshells (mwali) travel counterclockwise and necklaces (soulava) travel clockwise among islands; analyzed by Malinowski as a total social fact integrating trade, prestige, and politics.
• Kinship — the social organization of descent and relatedness; a central concern of cultural anthropology.
• Descent systems — patrilineal (traced through fathers), matrilineal (through mothers), bilateral (both sides equally recognized, as in most Western societies), double descent (both simultaneously).
• Lineage / clan — a lineage is a unilineal descent group whose members can trace explicit genealogical links to a common ancestor; a clan is a larger unilineal group whose members claim descent from a common ancestor but cannot always trace all links.
• Kinship terminology systems — named systems for classifying relatives: Eskimo (isolates lineal from collateral kin; characteristic of bilateral societies), Hawaiian (merges all cousins with siblings), Iroquois (distinguishes cross from parallel cousins; associated with matrilineal/patrilineal systems), Crow (matrilineal skewing), Omaha (patrilineal skewing), Sudanese (descriptive; distinguishes every relative separately).
• Incest taboo — the near-universal prohibition on sexual relations or marriage between close kin; theorized via Westermarck effect (childhood cohabitation reduces attraction), Lévi-Strauss’s alliance theory (exchange forces social ties), and inbreeding-avoidance genetics.
• Alliance theory — Lévi-Strauss’s view that kinship systems are primarily organized around the exchange of women between groups, creating alliances; the incest taboo functions to force outward exchange.
• Affinal / consanguineal — consanguineal kin are “blood” relatives (shared descent); affinal kin are relatives by marriage.
• Exogamy / endogamy — rules requiring marriage outside (exogamy) or inside (endogamy) a defined social group.
• Moiety — a social group in which a society is divided into two complementary halves, often with reciprocal obligations.
• Totem — a plant, animal, or object serving as the emblem of a clan or group; central to Émile Durkheim’s and Lévi-Strauss’s analyses of religion and myth.
• Taboo (tabu) — a Polynesian-derived term for a prohibition enforced by social and ritual sanction.
• Mana — Polynesian concept of a diffuse supernatural power or force; introduced into anthropological theory by early ethnographers.
• Potlatch — a ceremonial feast practiced by Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest (e.g., Kwakwaka’wakw); involves competitive redistribution or destruction of wealth; studied by Boas.
• Rite of passage — ritual marking a transition from one social status to another; van Gennep’s three phases: separation, liminality, incorporation.
• Liminality — Victor Turner’s elaboration of van Gennep’s middle phase; a threshold state of ambiguity and transformation.
• Cargo cults — millenarian movements in Melanesia in the 19th–20th centuries, involving ritual practices aimed at obtaining Western manufactured goods; studied as responses to colonialism.
• Transhumance — seasonal movement of people and livestock between different altitudes or regions; a form of pastoralism.
• Bride price / bridewealth — goods transferred from the groom’s family to the bride’s family at marriage (common in sub-Saharan Africa).
• Dowry — goods transferred from the bride’s family to the groom’s family or couple (common in South Asia and historically in Europe).
• Parallel / cross cousins — parallel cousins are children of same-sex siblings (e.g., father’s brother’s children); cross cousins are children of opposite-sex siblings. Many societies prescribe marriage with cross cousins.
• Levitate / sororate — levirate: a widow marries her deceased husband’s brother; sororate: a widower marries his deceased wife’s sister; mechanisms for maintaining alliances between kin groups.
• Band, tribe, chiefdom, state — Elman Service’s evolutionary typology of sociopolitical organization (now used cautiously as an approximate heuristic rather than a strict evolutionary ladder).
• Big Man / Big Woman — a type of informal political leader in Melanesian societies who accumulates prestige and followers through generosity and exchange rather than inherited authority; contrasted with chief.
• Acephalous society — a society without centralized political authority or a chief; governance achieved through kinship, age grades, or councils.
• Age grades / age sets — groups of people of similar age who move through life stages together as a social category; prominent in East African pastoralist societies (e.g., Maasai, Nuer).
• Segmentary lineage system — a political organization (analyzed by E.E. Evans-Pritchard among the Nuer) in which lineage segments unite against common enemies and divide against each other; no permanent central authority.
• E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1902–1973) — British structural functionalist; The Nuer (1940); Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (1937); influential for showing the internal rationality of African belief systems.
• Unilinear cultural evolution — 19th-century view (Morgan, Tylor, Spencer) that all societies progress through fixed stages (savagery → barbarism → civilization); rejected by Boas and later anthropologists as ethnocentric and empirically unfounded.
• Cultural materialism — Marvin Harris’s theoretical framework arguing that the primary determinants of culture are material (techno-environmental and economic) factors; infrastructure determines superstructure; explained Hindu sacred cattle and other “irrational” practices in adaptive cost-benefit terms.
• Cultural ecology — Julian Steward’s approach linking culture to the environment through a “culture core” of subsistence technologies and related behaviors; an empirical alternative to unilinear evolution.
• Structural functionalism — the view (associated with Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski) that cultural institutions serve functions maintaining social equilibrium.
• Structuralism — Lévi-Strauss’s approach: underlying universal mental structures expressed in myth, kinship, and culture as binary oppositions (raw/cooked, nature/culture).
• Interpretive anthropology — Geertz’s approach: culture as a text to be interpreted, not a mechanism to be explained causally.
• Practice theory — Pierre Bourdieu’s framework; habitus (internalized dispositions), field, and capital explain how social structures are reproduced through everyday practice.
• World systems theory — Immanuel Wallerstein’s framework analyzing economic and political relations between core, semi-periphery, and periphery nations; applied in anthropology to understand how local societies are shaped by global capitalist dynamics.
• Globalization and anthropology — the study of how global flows of capital, people, media, and ideas reshape local cultures; Arjun Appadurai’s concept of “scapes” (ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, ideoscapes) is a key framework.
• Cosmology — in cultural anthropology, the beliefs a society holds about the nature of the universe, humanity’s place in it, and the relations between natural and supernatural realms.
• Habitus — Bourdieu’s concept for the durable dispositions, tastes, and skills acquired through socialization that shape perception and action without conscious deliberation.
• Symbolic anthropology — associated with Geertz, David Schneider, and Mary Douglas; focuses on the meaning of symbols, ritual, and classification.
• Liminality and communitas — Victor Turner’s concepts: liminality is the threshold state; communitas is the egalitarian social bond formed among those in a liminal state.
• Reflexivity — awareness of the researcher’s own position and impact on the material studied; heightened by postmodern critiques of ethnographic authority.
• Writing Culture debate — a 1980s critique (associated with James Clifford, George Marcus) of ethnographic authority, objectivity, and representation.
• Purity and Danger — Mary Douglas’s 1966 work arguing that pollution and taboo beliefs reflect systems of classification: matter is “dirty” when it is “out of place” relative to a culture’s categorical schema; applied to dietary rules (Leviticus) and bodily boundaries.
• Mary Douglas (1921–2007) — British anthropologist; Purity and Danger (1966) and Natural Symbols (1970); analyzed how symbolic boundaries and bodily metaphors encode social structures.
• The Gift (Essai sur le don) — Marcel Mauss’s 1925 essay arguing that gift exchange is a “total social phenomenon” binding giver, receiver, and the spirit of the object; the gift creates obligation (to give, to receive, to reciprocate); influenced Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu, and economic anthropology broadly.
• Animism — the belief that natural objects, phenomena, and the universe itself possess souls or spiritual essence; Edward Tylor defined it as the “minimum definition of religion.”
• Totemism — the ritual and social identification of a clan or group with a natural species or object; Durkheim argued totemism was the original form of religion and that the totem symbolizes society itself.
• Shamanism — a complex of religious practices involving a specialist (shaman) who enters altered states to communicate with spirits for healing, divination, or protection; found across Siberia, the Americas, and elsewhere.
• Syncretism — the blending of elements from different religious or cultural traditions; common in colonial and postcolonial contexts.
• Revitalization movements — Wallace’s term for organized efforts to create a more satisfying culture by constructing a new ideology; includes cargo cults, the Ghost Dance, and other movements under conditions of cultural stress.
• Nuer — Nilotic pastoralist people of South Sudan; studied extensively by Evans-Pritchard; famous for the segmentary lineage system, age-grade organization, and cattle-centric cosmology.
• Trobriand Islanders — Melanesian people studied by Malinowski; central to the development of fieldwork methods; known for the kula ring, yam exchanges, and the matrilineal system Malinowski documented.
• Yanomami (Yanomamö) — Indigenous people of the Amazon and Orinoco basins on the Brazil-Venezuela border; the subject of Napoleon Chagnon’s controversial Yanomamö: The Fierce People (1968), which portrayed them as uniquely violent and sparked decades of debate about anthropological ethics, representation, and the sociobiology of aggression; later ethnographers and critics challenged Chagnon’s characterizations; a touchstone for discussions of advocacy, objectivity, and the ethics of fieldwork.
• Zuni — a Pueblo people of the American Southwest (western New Mexico); studied by Ruth Benedict, who used them as a key example of the “Apollonian” cultural type (restrained, orderly, non-individualistic) in Patterns of Culture (1934); also studied by Frank Hamilton Cushing (1879–1884) in an early example of immersive fieldwork; known for elaborate ceremonial life and the Shalako ceremony.

Linguistic Anthropology

• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (linguistic relativity) — the proposition that the language one speaks influences how one thinks and perceives the world; the strong version (linguistic determinism) is largely rejected; the weak version (language influences thought) has empirical support in limited domains.
• Edward Sapir — student of Boas; contributed foundational work on language, culture, and personality.
• Benjamin Lee Whorf — student of Sapir; argued that Hopi grammar encoded a fundamentally different concept of time than Indo-European languages (the specific Hopi claim has been challenged).
• Ethnolinguistics — study of the relationship between language and culture.
• Sociolinguistics — study of language variation by social factors (class, ethnicity, gender, region).
• Language families — languages grouped by shared ancestry; e.g., Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Afroasiatic, Niger-Congo.
• Proto-language — the reconstructed ancestor of a language family (e.g., Proto-Indo-European).
• Language endangerment — the worldwide loss of linguistic diversity; roughly half of ~7,000 living languages are threatened with extinction.
• Pidgin / creole — a pidgin is a simplified contact language with no native speakers; a creole is a fully developed language that emerged from a pidgin and is acquired as a first language.
• Code-switching — the practice of alternating between two or more languages within a single conversation or utterance, studied as a social and identity practice.

Major Theorists

• Franz Boas (1858–1942) — founder of American anthropology; championed four-field anthropology, cultural relativism, and the critique of scientific racism; trained Mead, Benedict, Hurston, and others; his concept of historical particularism held that each culture must be understood through its own unique historical development, rejecting grand comparative schemes.
• Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942) — pioneered extended participant observation in the Trobriand Islands (Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 1922); developed functionalism; showed that magic, myth, and ritual serve social functions; also wrote Coral Gardens and Their Magic and The Sexual Life of Savages; his posthumously published diary revealed more ambivalent feelings about fieldwork.
• A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955) — developed structural functionalism; emphasized that social structures maintain social order; influenced British social anthropology.
• Margaret Mead (1901–1978) — student of Boas; Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) argued adolescent development was culturally variable; her fieldwork was later criticized by Derek Freeman, sparking an ongoing methodological debate.
• Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) — student of Boas; Patterns of Culture (1934); characterized cultures as having coherent personalities (Apollonian/Dionysian); also wrote The Chrysanthemum and the Sword on Japanese culture.
• Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) — French structuralist; analyzed kinship systems, myth, and cuisine as expressions of universal binary mental structures; The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949); Mythologiques (4 vols.).
• Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) — interpretive anthropologist; The Interpretation of Cultures (1973); thick description; fieldwork in Indonesia and Morocco.
• Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) — sociologist-anthropologist; Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972); habitus, field, capital; studied Algeria and France.
• Victor Turner (1920–1983) — symbolic anthropologist; developed concepts of liminality and communitas from Van Gennep; The Ritual Process (1969); fieldwork among the Ndembu of Zambia.
• Arnold van Gennep (1873–1957) — French folklorist; Rites of Passage (1909); three-stage model of rituals marking social transitions.
• Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) — nephew of Durkheim; The Gift (1925); analysis of exchange as a total social fact binding donor, recipient, and object.
• Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) — sociologist foundational to anthropology; The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912); concepts of sacred/profane, totem, collective effervescence.
• James George Frazer (1854–1941) — author of The Golden Bough (1890; expanded edition 1915); comparative mythology and religion; distinguished sympathetic and contagious magic; largely armchair theorist, criticized for evolutionary assumptions.
• Edward Tylor (1832–1917) — coined the term “animism” for the belief that natural objects possess souls; one of the founders of cultural anthropology; proposed the concept of cultural survivals (practices retained from an earlier cultural stage); offered the first rigorous definition of culture in Primitive Culture (1871): “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”
• Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) — early American anthropologist; studied Iroquois kinship; Ancient Society (1877) proposed evolutionary stages (savagery, barbarism, civilization); later critiqued as unilinear and ethnocentric.
• Raymond Dart (1893–1988) — identified the Taung Child skull (1924) as a new genus, Australopithecus; initially dismissed, later vindicated.
• Louis and Mary Leakey — husband and wife team; decades of excavation at Olduvai Gorge; Mary Leakey discovered Zinjanthropus (Paranthropus boisei) in 1959 and the Laetoli footprints (1978).
• Donald Johanson — discovered Lucy (A. afarensis) in Ethiopia in 1974 with Tom Gray; later co-founded the Institute of Human Origins.
• Lewis Binford (1931–2011) — chief architect of processual (New) Archaeology; emphasized middle-range theory to link material remains to past behavior.
• Marvin Harris (1927–2001) — founder of cultural materialism; Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches (1974) and Cannibals and Kings (1977); argued that seemingly bizarre cultural practices have rational material/ecological explanations.
• Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) — African-American author and anthropologist; student of Boas; Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938); studied African-American folklore and Caribbean Vodou; bridged anthropology and literary fiction; also wrote the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
• Julian Steward (1902–1972) — developed cultural ecology and multilinear evolution; rejected both unilinear schemes and pure historical particularism; Theory of Culture Change (1955).
• Leslie White (1900–1975) — neo-evolutionist; argued culture advances by harnessing increasing amounts of energy per capita; revived evolutionary thinking in American anthropology.
• David Graeber (1961–2020) — anarchist anthropologist; Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) traced the history of debt and challenged standard narratives about barter; also contributed to theorizing bureaucracy and value.
• Marshall Sahlins (1930–2021) — cultural anthropologist; Stone Age Economics (1972) argued hunter-gatherers lived in the “original affluent society”; later work on structure and history and critique of sociobiology.
• Mythologiques — Lévi-Strauss’s four-volume comparative analysis of hundreds of Native American myths (The Raw and the Cooked, 1964; From Honey to Ashes; The Origin of Table Manners; The Naked Man); argued myths across the Americas are systematic transformations of a small set of structural oppositions.
• Nancy Scheper-Hughes (b. 1944) — medical anthropologist; Death Without Weeping (1992) on infant mortality and maternal emotion in Brazil; advocate for an “engaged anthropology.”
• Paul Farmer (1959–2022) — physician-anthropologist; co-founder of Partners in Health; Infections and Inequalities (1999); applied structural violence framework to global health disparities.
• Structural violence — a concept developed by Johan Galtung (1969) and later applied to health by Paul Farmer; describes harm done to people by economic and political structures that deny them resources; used to explain differential disease burden across social groups.⁴