OLOGY AND ITS BRANCHES.

             Anthropology, "the science of humanity," which studies human beings in aspects ranging from the biology, and evolutionary history, of Homo sapiens to the features of society and culture that decisively distinguish humans from other animal species. Because of the diverse subject matter it encompasses, anthropology has become, especially since the middle of the 20th century, a collection of more specialized fields. Physical anthropology is the branch that concentrates on the biology and evolution of humanity. The branches that study the social and cultural constructions of human groups are variously recognized as belonging to cultural anthropology, or ethnology, social anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and psychological anthropology. Archaeology as the method of investigation of prehistoric cultures has been an integral part of anthropology since it became a self-conscious discipline in the latter half of the 19th century.

           Throughout its existence as an academic discipline, anthropology has been located at an intersection of natural science and humanities. The biological evolution of Homo sapiens and the evolution of the capacity for cultural that distinguishes humans from all other species are indistinguishable from one another. While the evolution of the human species is a biological development like the processes that give rise to the other species, the historical appearances of the capacity for culture initiates a qualitative departure from other forms of adaptation, based on an extraordinary variable creativity not directly linked to survival and ecological adaptation. The historical patterns and processes associated with culture as a medium of growth and change and the diversification and convergence of cultures through history, are thus major foci of anthropological research. ( Charles Howard Candler)

         In the middle of the 20th century, the distinct fields of research that separated anthropologist into specialties were physical anthropology, emphasizing the biological process and endowment that distinguishes homo sapiens from other species, and secondly the archaeology that is based on the physical remnants of past cultures and former conditions of contemporary cultures, usually found buried in the earth, linguistic anthropology, emphasizing the unique human capacity to communicate through articulation of speech and the diverse languages of human kind, and  fourthly, social and/or cultural anthropology, emphasizing the cultural systems that distinguish human societies from one another and the patterns of social organization associated with these systems. By the middle of the 20th century, many American universities also included psychological anthropology, emphasizing the relationships among culture, social structure, and the human being as a person. (Eric A. Smith)

       Linguistic anthropology which studies the human communication process, focuses on understanding such phenomena as the physiology of speech, the structure and functions 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. Biological anthropology carry out systematic studies of the non-cultural aspects of humans and near humans. Non-cultural refers to all of those biological characteristics that are genetically inherited in contrast to learned. Near humans is a category that includes monkeys, apes, and other primates as well as our fossil ancestors. The primary interest of biological anthropologist today is human evolution- they want to learn how our ancestors changed through time to become what we are today. Biological anthropologist are also interested in understanding the mechanisms of evolution and genetic inheritance as well as human variation and adaptation to various environmental stresses, such as those found at high attitudes and in environments that have temperature extremes.

             Cultural anthropology is mainly concerned with cultural aspects of human societies all over the world. it focuses on social and political organizations, marriage patterns and kinship systems, subsistence and economic patterns, and the relious beliefs of different societies. Most cultural anthropologist study contemporary societies rather than ancient ones. Through the 19th and 20th century, the peoples who primarily interested in cultural anthropologists were those who lived in small scale, isolated societies with cultures that were very different from those of Europeans and Europeans Americans.(louis Leakey)

           Anthropology in 1960 was for historical and economic reasons instituted as a discipline mainly found in Western Europe and North America. Field research was established as the hallmark of all the branches of anthropology. While some anthropologist studied the "folk" traditions in Europe and America, most were concerned with documenting how people lived in non-industrial settings outside these areas. These finally detailed studies of everyday life of people in a broad range of social, cultural, historical, and material circumstances were among the major accomplishments of anthropologist in the second half of 20th century.

         The modern discourse of anthropology crystalized in the 1860s, fired by advances in biology, philology, and prehistoric archaeology. In the origin of species (1859), Charles Darwin affirmed that all forms of life share a common ancestry. Fossils began to be reliably associated with particular geologic strata, and fossils of recent human ancestors were discovered, most famously the first Neanderthal spacemen, unearthed in 1856. In 1871, Darwin published the descent of man, which argued that human beings shared a recent common ancestor with the great African apes. He identified the defining characteristics of the human species as their relatively large brain size and deduced that the human species was intelligence, which yielded language and technology.

        The pioneering anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor concluded that as intelligence increased, so civilization advanced. All past and present societies could be arranged in an evolutionary sequence. Archaeological findings were organized in a single universal series(stone age, iron age, bronze age, etc.) thought to correspond to stages of economic organization from hunting and gathering to pastoralism, agriculture, and industry. Some contemporary peoples (hunter-gatherers, such as the Australian aboriginals and the Kalahari san or pastoralist such as the Bedouin) were regarded as primitive, laggards in evolutionary terms, representing stages of evolution through which all other societies had passed. They bore witnesses to early stages of human development, while the industrial societies of northern Europe and the united states represented the pinnacle of human achievement.(bronslaw Malinowski)

        While the evolution of human species is biological development like the processes that gave rise to the other species, the historical appearance of the capacity for culture initiates a qualitative departure from other forms of adaptation, based on an extraordinary variable creativity not directly linked to survival and ecological adaptation. The historical patterns and processes associated with culture as a medium for growth and change, and the diversification and convergence of cultures through history, are thus major foci of anthropology research.  

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