What exactly IS Anthropolgy?

Question

What exactly IS Anthropolgy?

Answer 1

Anthropolgy is the study of places that don't have room service.

Luv jak

PS: (continued) Sociology is journalism without news, and psychology is peeking in your sister's diary after your parents have shipped her off to rehab.

Answer 2

Th first poster is confusing the word anthropology with the word anthology. Anthropology is the study of humanity.

Answer 3

the study of humans and their culture

Answer 4

Like John H said, it is the study of humanity.  The word comes from the Greek "anthropo" (man) and "logy" (study of).

It's usually broken down into two fields, cultural anthropology and physical anthropology.  

Cultural anthropology concentrates on mankind's artifacts (including things like language and culture) while physical anthropology focuses on physiological differences between ethnic groups and also the evolutionary path that led to modern humans.

Answer 5

It is literally the study of humans, but is more about humanity.  By this I mean that it isn't straight biology or anatomy.  To understand this more completely, I am including a short description of its main subfields.

Cultural anthropology is the study of people's cultures.  What are the norms, taboos, phrases, etc.  Basically, it is everything about society that effects the individuals as a group.

Physical anthropology deals with the physical part of people.  This is where anthropologists study the origins of man and even how we evolve on a micro scale to adjust to our environments.  Forensics is also a part of this subfield.

Linguistic anthropology would be the study of people's languages in more depth.

Archeology is the study of people's cultures in the past.

So, as you see, anthropology is the study of humans as whole beings.  That is why I made the distinction between the words human and humanity.

Answer 6

Im pretty sure that anthropology has something to do with poetry. For example, in school we had to do an anthropology and it had a bunch of poems put into a small book. We had to find poems that had certain factors like metaphors and similies. Folowing that, we had to have a bibliography.