What is Anthropology?
The word itself tells the basic story – from the Greek anthropos (human being) and logia (science), it is nothing less than the scientific study of humankind, from its beginnings, millions of years ago, to the present day. Nothing human is alien to anthropology and of the many sciences that study certain aspects of our species, only Anthropology attempts to understand the whole panorama, in time and space, of the human condition. Anthropology is, at once, both easy to define and difficult to describe; its subject matter is both exotic (marriage practices among Australian aborigines) and commonplace (the structure of the human hand); its focus both sweeping and microscopic. Anthropologists may study the language of a tribe of Brazilian Native Americans, the social life of apes in an African rain forest, or the remains of a long-vanished civilization in their own backyard – but there is always a common thread linking these vastly different projects, and always the common goal of advancin
