Cultural anthropology

Cultural anthropology studies how people create, share, and change ways of life, including practices, beliefs, institutions, and social relationships.

Participant observation: A research method in which investigators take part in and observe the activities of a community. Long-term participation lets anthropologists study practices in their ordinary settings.
Culture: Shared, learned patterns of meaning and practice through which people organize social life. This broad concept names the central subject of cultural anthropology.
Edward Burnett Tylor: A British anthropologist whose 1871 book defined culture as a complex whole of learned human capacities and habits. His definition helped establish culture as anthropology’s central object of study.
Sociology: The study of social relationships, institutions, and patterns of collective life. It overlaps with cultural anthropology but often emphasizes societies and institutions differently.
Salvage anthropology: A research orientation that sought to document cultures believed to be disappearing under colonial expansion and social change. Its collecting impulse preserved records while often treating living cultures as doomed.
Ethnography: A detailed account of a community or social world, often grounded in extended fieldwork. Ethnography is the principal form through which cultural research is presented.
Enculturation: The process through which people learn the norms, meanings, and practices of a society. It explains how cultural knowledge is acquired across a lifetime.
Franz Boas: A German-born American anthropologist who advanced historical particularism and challenged racial determinism. His approach reshaped American cultural anthropology around historically specific research.
Archaeology: The study of past human life through material remains and their contexts. It investigates culture primarily through artifacts rather than contemporary ethnographic fieldwork.
Writing Culture: A 1986 edited volume that questioned ethnographic authority, representation, and the construction of cultural accounts. It made the politics of anthropological writing a central disciplinary debate.

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