SUBMITTED TO

MS. TEHSEEN REHMAN

SUBMITTED BY
- ABIHA HASAN
- AYESHA IRFAN
ANTHROPOLOGY, ITS -
-
AZRA QADIR
MOEEZ IQBAL
- MUHAMMAD USAMA KALAM
SUBFIELDS AND ITS
RELATION WITH OTHER
SCIENCES
INTRODUCTION
A student who seeks to understand how mankind came to be as they are, and to live as they do,
ought first to know clearly whether men are new-comers on Earth or old inhabitants. Did they
appear with their various races and ways of life ready-made or were these shaped by the long and
slow growth of ages? To understand these aspects of human and their development, one must
study anthropology.
Generally, ‘anthropology’ can be defined as the study of human (every aspect or phenomenon
related to humans). Etymologically, anthropology comes from the word anthropos meaning man
and logos meaning knowledge i.e. knowledge of man. Name any aspect of human life, all of it
comes under this course.
It is the study of the human experience. This broad field of study covers the past and present to
understand how humans evolve in our biology, social interactions, beliefs and cultural traditions. From
cultures, to languages, to material remains and human evolution, anthropologists examine every
dimension of humanity by asking compelling questions like: How did we come to be human and who
are our ancestors? Why do people look and act so differently throughout the world? What do we all have
in common? How have we changed culturally and biologically over time? What factors influence
diverse human beliefs and behaviors throughout the world?
Thus, Anthropology can be defined as:
“The study of human populations where we holistically explore the biological, socio-cultural,
archaeological and linguistic aspects of human existence.”
Anthropologists take a broad approach to understanding the many different aspects of the human
experience, which is called holism. The term holistic is an important feature of the discipline which
means that while studying any population, all the characteristics of the population are studied in
connection with each other.
BRIEF HISTORY
Anthropology traces its roots to ancient Greek historical and philosophical writings about human nature
and the organization of human society. Anthropologists generally regard Herodotus, a Greek historian
who lived in the 400s bc, as the first thinker to write widely on concepts that would later become central
to anthropology. In the book History, Herodotus described the cultures of various peoples of the Persian
Empire, which the Greeks conquered during the first half of the 400s bc. He referred to Greece as the
dominant culture of the West and Persia as the dominant culture of the East. This type of division,
between white people of European descent and other peoples, established the mode that most
anthropological writing would later adopt.
The Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, who lived in the 14th century ad, was another early writer of ideas
relevant to anthropology. Khaldun examined the environmental, sociological, psychological, and
economic factors that affected the development and the rise and fall of civilizations. Both Khaldun and
Herodotus produced remarkably objective, analytic, ethnographic descriptions of the diverse cultures in
the Mediterranean world, but they also often used secondhand information.
During the Middle Ages (5th to 15th centuries ad) biblical scholars dominated European thinking on
questions of human origins and cultural development. They treated these questions as issues of religious
belief and promoted the idea that human existence and all of human diversity were the creations of God.
Beginning in the 15th century, European explorers looking for wealth in new lands provided vivid
descriptions of the exotic cultures they encountered on their journeys in Asia, Africa, and what are now
the Americas.
The European Age of Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries marked the rise of scientific and
rational philosophical thought. Enlightenment thinkers, such as John Locke of England, and Jean-
Jacques Rousseau of France, wrote a number of humanistic works on the nature of humankind. They
based their work on philosophical reason rather than religious authority and asked important
anthropological questions.
The increasing dominance of global commerce, capitalist economies, and industrialization in late-18th-
century Europe led to vast cultural changes and social upheavals throughout the world.
Europeans suddenly had a flood of new information about the foreign peoples encountered in colonial
frontiers. The colonizing nations of Europe also wanted scientific explanations and justifications for their
global dominance. In response to these developments, and out of an interest in new and strange cultures,
the first amateur anthropologists formed societies in many Western European countries in the early 19th
century. These societies eventually spawned professional anthropology.
Anthropological societies devoted themselves to scientifically studying the cultures of colonized and
unexplored territories. Researchers filled ethnological and archaeological museums with collections
obtained from the new empires of Europe by explorers, missionaries, and colonial administrators.
Physicians and zoologists, acting as novice physical anthropologists, measured the skulls of people from
various cultures and wrote detailed descriptions of the people’s physical features.
Toward the end of the 19th century anthropologists began to take academic positions in colleges and
universities. Anthropological associations also became advocates for anthropologists to work in
professional positions. They promoted anthropological knowledge for its political, commercial, and
humanitarian value.
In the 1920s and 1930s anthropology assumed its present form as a four-field academic profession in the
United States under the influence of German-born American anthropologist Franz Boas. Boas wanted
anthropology to be a well-respected science. He was interested in all areas of anthropological research
and had done highly regarded fieldwork in all areas except archaeology.
During the first half of the 20th century, many anthropologists conducted functionalist ethnographic
studies in the service of colonial governments. This research allowed colonial administrators to predict
what would happen to an entire society in response to particular colonial policies.
In the 1950s French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss developed an anthropological theory and
analytic method known as structuralism. He was influenced by the theories of Durkheim. Lévi-Strauss
proposed that many common cultural patterns—such as those found in myth, ritual, and language—are
rooted in basic structures of the mind. He wrote, for instance, about the universal tendency of the human
mind to sort things into sets of opposing concepts, such as day and night, black and white, or male and
female. In the 1960s, American anthropologists such as Julian Steward, Roy Rappaport, and Marvin
Harris began to study how culture and social institutions relate to a people’s technology, economy, and
natural environment. All of these factors together define a people’s patterns of subsistence—how they
feed, clothe, shelter, and otherwise provide for themselves. In the 1970s many anthropologists moved
away from ecological and economic explanations of people’s cultures. Instead, these anthropologists
looked for the meanings of particular cultural symbols and rituals within cultures themselves, an
approach known as symbolic anthropology. By the early 1990s anthropology had become a very diverse
field with numerous areas of specialization.
Since the 1960s, anthropologists have increasingly applied their special research skills and cross-cultural
insights to try to solve important world problems. Applied anthropology involves helping cultural
groups, organizations, businesses, and governments solve a wide range of problems.
SUBFIELDS IN ANTHROPOLOGY
American anthropology is generally divided into four subfields. Each of the subfields teaches distinctive
skills. However, the subfields also have a number of similarities.
Archaeology
Archaeologists are interested in recovering the prehistory and early history of societies and their
cultures.  They systematically uncover the evidence by excavating, dating, and analyzing the material
remains left by people in the past.  Archaeologists are essentially detectives who search through many
thousands of pieces of fragmentary pots and other artifacts as well as environmental data in order to
reconstruct ancient life ways.  In a sense, this makes archaeology the cultural anthropology of the past. 
Archaeology is also related to biological anthropology in its use of the same methods in excavating and
analyzing human skeletal remains found in archaeological sites.
Archaeologists are in a unique position to understand the development of human societies and cultures
from those of our distant hunter gatherer ancestors through the ancient civilizations on up to the present. 
There have been humans for at least 2.5 million years.  Only the last 5,500 of these years have been
even partly recorded by scribes and historians.  As a consequence, well over 99% of the human story
lies in the prehistoric past and has been out of reach of historians.  Only archaeology can recover it.
No archaeologist is an expert on the antiquity of all regions of the world and all time periods.  Classical
archaeologists concentrate on the ancient civilizations of the Middle East and the Mediterranean world
(Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, and related peoples).  Historical archaeologists work on
recovering the unrecorded aspects of life in historically more modern societies such as colonial
America.  Prehistoric archaeologists focus their attention on the more ancient pre-literate societies
around the world including those of most early North American Indians.  Underwater
archaeologists discover and excavate ancient shipwrecks and submerged cities.  Zoo-
archaeologists analyze and interpret the animal remains found in archaeological sites.   The training
required for each of these and other archeological specialties varies significantly, but they all share an
interest in illuminating the lost past.

Linguistic Anthropologist

Linguistic anthropologists   study the human communication process.  They focus their research on
understanding such phenomena as the physiology of speech, the structure and function of languages,
social and cultural influences on speech and writing, nonverbal communication, how languages
developed over time, and how they differ from each other.  This is very different from what goes on in
an English or a foreign language class.   Linguists are not language teachers or professional translators. 
Most anthropological linguistic research has been focused on unwritten, non-European languages. 
Linguists usually begin their study of such a language by learning first hand from native speakers what
its rules are for making sounds and meaning from those sounds, including the rules for sentence
construction.  Linguists also learn about different regional and social dialects as well as the social
conventions of speaking the language in different situations.
Cultural Anthropologist
Cultural anthropology studies human culture by researching behaviors, beliefs and traditions of societies
around the world, including:
 Social groups
 Political organizations
 Concepts of marriage and relationships
 Religious beliefs
 Economic and living patterns
Also called socio-cultural anthropology, this branch focuses on present-day societal behaviors by
looking at a variety of cultures, from small, isolated groups of people like Pacific Islanders to large
modern groups of people like specific minority communities in Southern California. The goal of cultural
anthropology is to learn about the similarities and differences between societies to understand human
diversity and determine how the current global patterns of poverty, disease and overpopulation may
impact the longevity of these traditions.
Biological Anthropologist
Biological anthropologists seek to understand how humans adapt to different environments, what causes
disease and early death, and how humans evolved from other animals. To do this, they study humans
(living and dead), other primates such as monkeys and apes, and human ancestors (fossils). They are
also interested in how biology and culture work together to shape our lives. They are interested in
explaining the similarities and differences that are found among humans across the world. Through this
work, biological anthropologists have shown that, while humans do vary in their biology and behavior,
they are more similar to one another than different.
Biological anthropologists are usually involved in one of three different areas of research: human
biology, primatology, or paleoanthropology.  Human biology is concerned with learning about human
diversity, genetic inheritance patterns, non-cultural adaptations to environmental stresses, and other
biological characteristics of our species, Homo sapiens.  Primatologists carry out non-human primate
studies.  This is usually done in a natural setting among wild apes, monkeys, and related animals.  They
are principally interested in learning about the capabilities and behavior patterns of primates--our closest
living relatives.  It is likely that the great apes in particular can give us important clues to understanding
the lives of our earliest human ancestors over 2 million years ago.  Paleoanthropologists recover the
fossil record of early humans and their primate ancestors in order to understand the path of our
evolution.  In doing this, they often work with geologists, paleozoologists, and scientists with other
specialties who help them reconstruct ancient environments.

Anthropology as a discipline started with the works of the armchair anthropologists, over the years it has
developed its unique all-embracing research methodology called ethnography which is extensive and
rigorous in nature. Anthropologists of the different parts of the world have shown keen interest in
studying different islanders and tribes. They studied diverse topics like social institution, gender, race,
social and cultural change, economy, politics, religion, kinship, myths etc.
In this way, the scope of anthropology was broadened over time. Anthropologists were also influenced by
the philosophical developments of their times. From the tradition of short field trips by boas,
anthropologists started to conduct extensive prolonged field studies. From a one-person observer method,
postmodernists suggested for multiple observer methods. Each of these changes created new
controversies and opened new avenues and dimensions for anthropological research.
ANTHROPOLOGY AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
Public Administration is a multidisciplinary field of study. This means that as a public administrator you
will use concepts and insight from other various other disciplines. The most important of these are law,
economics, sociology, philosophy and political science.
Public administration, in other words, is the bureaucratic cadre of the country. It has been a proof that to
aid in bureaucracy has been an important aspect. As anthropology is the study of man and their
developments in every aspect, it can be helpful in making bureaucratic systems, public policies, policy
formation and legalities accordingly.
To support the argument, a study was done in Tanzania by Julia Bailey. She spend five months with
civil servants working in water departments. Through analysis of the everyday functioning of
officialdom, anthropologists study organizational culture, associated power dynamics, how civil servants
interpret and apply policy, and how well bureaucrats know and understand their citizens when
developing policies. All these factors contribute to the success or failure of government initiatives.
Adopting an anthropological lens when trying to understand public administration can deeply enrich
perspectives as well as provide clearer solutions to the systematic glitches.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY

Psychology is the science of human behavior. Even anthropology encompasses in its scope the
understanding and analysis of human behavior. Both anthropology and psychology are closely
related. Psychology studies man's behavior in relation to the environment. Anthropology is also a
comparative and analytic study of human behavior and experiences. Both try to understand man
in the context of social behavior. In this way psychology arid anthropology are complementary
to each other. Whereas on one side psychological knowledge helps an anthropologist in
understanding the root causes of human behavior in different cultures, on the other side
anthropological studies help the psychologist in calculating the influence of cultural environment
of human behavior.
The closest relationship between psychology and anthropology is seen between the main
branches, social psychology and cultural anthropology. Social psychology studies the individual
behavior under social environments. Social anthropology also studies human society, social
institutions and groups. Explaining their relationship, Hoebel writes, the anthropologist
concentrates chiefly on the society of the primitive people and the sociologist concentrates on
our contemporary civilization. The social psychologist roams happily between them
manipulating his tests and measurements.
In spite of their close relation, the difference between anthropology and psychology should not
be neglected. In brief, the chief differences between them are as follows.
1. Psychology studies individual behavior in social environments whereas anthropology
studies not an individual but the whole of the mankind.
 2. Psychology studies individual behavior in social environments whereas social
anthropology studies groups of individuals.
3. Both psychology and anthropology study man but with different viewpoints.
4. Whereas some methods of observation are commonly employed in both of these sciences,
some methods of psychology, like the introspection method, are not used in
anthropology.
Both psychology and anthropology, however, can contribute enormously to our understanding of
man.
Anthropology and psychology both are social sciences. By studying anthropology and
psychology we establish a relation between why something exists the way it is among the human
race.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY

Anthropology is the study of humans and the ways they live. Sociology studies the ways groups of
people interact with each other and how their behavior is influenced by social structures, categories (age,
gender, sexuality), and institutions.
Anthropology studies human behavior more at the individual level, while sociology focuses more on
group behavior and relations with social structures and institutions. Anthropologists conduct research
using ethnography (a qualitative research method), while sociologists use both qualitative and
quantitative methods. The primary goal of anthropology is to understand human diversity and cultural
difference, while sociology is more solution-oriented with the goal of fixing social problems through
policy.
Sociology and anthropology involve the systematic study of social life and culture in order to understand
the causes and consequences of human action.
Sociologists have to depend upon anthropologists to understand the present-day social
phenomena from our knowledge of the past which is often provided by anthropology. The
studies made by famous anthropologists like Radcliffe Brown, B. Malinowski, Ralph Linton,
Lowie, Raymond Firth, Margaret Mead, Evans Pritchard and others, have been proved to be
valuable in sociology.
Sociological topics such as the origin of family, the beginning of marriage, private property,
the genesis of religion, etc., can better be understood in the light of anthropological knowledge.
The anthropological studies have shown that there is no correlation between anatomical
characteristics and mental superiority. The notion of racial superiority has been disproved by
anthropology.
Further, sociology has borrowed many concepts like cultural area, culture traits, interdependent
traits, cultural lag, culture patterns, culture configuration etc., from socio-cultural anthropology.
The knowledge of anthropology, physical as well as socio-cultural, is necessary for a sociologist.
An understanding of society can be gained by comparing various cultures, particularly, the
modern with the primitive.
The conclusions drawn by sociologists have also helped the anthropologists in their studies. For
example, anthropologists like Morgan and his followers have come to the conclusion regarding
the existence of primitive communism from the conception of private property in our modern
society.
Anthropologist Kroeber pointed out that these two sciences are twin sisters.