Anthropology

The Four Subfields

• Cultural anthropology — the study of human societies, beliefs, practices, and symbolic systems; relies primarily on ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation.
• Biological (physical) anthropology — the study of human evolution, genetics, primatology, and biological variation across populations.
• Archaeology — the study of past human societies through material remains: artifacts, ecofacts, structures, and landscapes.
• Linguistic anthropology — the study of language in its social and cultural contexts; encompasses language structure, language change, and how language shapes thought.

Cross-cutting concepts

• Holism — the principle that human life must be understood as an integrated whole; all subfields are connected.
• Cultural relativism — the principle, associated with Franz Boas, that cultures should be understood on their own terms, not judged by the standards of another.
• Ethnocentrism — judging other cultures by the standards of one’s own; considered a methodological and ethical error in anthropology.
• Fieldwork — extended immersion in a community; the methodological cornerstone of cultural anthropology.
• Emic / etic — emic = insider’s perspective; etic = outside analytical framework applied by the researcher.

Human Evolution

• Hominins — the taxonomic tribe that includes modern humans, extinct species in the human lineage, and all ancestors after the split from chimpanzees (~6-7 million BP, approximate).
• Sahelanthropus tchadensis — one of the oldest known potential hominins (~7 Ma, approximate); found in Chad; bipedality debated.
• Ardipithecus ramidus (“Ardi”) — ~4.4 Ma (approximate); earlier than the australopithecines; partial skeleton nicknamed “Ardi” found in the Afar region of Ethiopia; more primitive hand and foot anatomy than Lucy; suggests early hominins were not knuckle-walkers.
• Australopithecus anamensis — ~4.2–3.8 Ma (approximate); oldest well-documented australopithecine; found at Kanapoi and Allia Bay, Kenya; some researchers treat it as the direct ancestor of A. afarensis or even an anagenetic continuum with it.
• Australopithecus afarensis — ~3.9–2.9 Ma (approximate); the species of Lucy, a partial female skeleton found in Ethiopia in 1974 by Donald Johanson’s team; strong evidence for bipedality; brain size still ape-like.
• Australopithecus africanus — ~3–2 Ma (approximate); South African species; the Taung Child skull, described by Raymond Dart in 1924, was the first australopithecine identified; Taung Child was a juvenile whose endocast showed a human-like organization.
• Hadar — site in the Afar Depression, Ethiopia; where Lucy (A. afarensis) and the “First Family” assemblage of ~13 individuals were found; one of the richest Pliocene hominin sites.
• Paranthropus (robust australopithecines) — ~2.7–1.2 Ma (approximate); heavily built jaws and teeth for tough plant foods; includes P. boisei (“Nutcracker Man,” found by Mary and Louis Leakey at Olduvai) and P. robustus.
• Homo habilis — ~2.4–1.4 Ma (approximate); name means “handy man”; associated with Oldowan stone tools; status as distinct species sometimes debated.
• Homo erectus — ~1.9 Ma–143,000 BP (approximate); first hominin to spread out of Africa into Asia; associated with Acheulean hand axes; possibly controlled fire; includes specimens known as Peking Man and Java Man.
• Homo heidelbergensis — ~700,000–200,000 BP (approximate); a transitional species in Europe and Africa; likely ancestral to Neanderthals and possibly modern humans; associated with the Aterian and Mousterian tool traditions in Africa and Europe respectively.
• Homo antecessor — ~1.2–0.8 Ma (approximate); found at Atapuerca, Spain; some researchers consider it the common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans; others fold it into H. heidelbergensis.
• Homo neanderthalensis — ~400,000–40,000 BP (approximate); inhabited Europe and western Asia; larger brained than H. sapiens on average; buried their dead; interbred with modern humans (non-African H. sapiens carry ~1–4% Neanderthal DNA); went extinct after contact with modern humans.
• Denisovans — a sister group to Neanderthals known primarily from DNA extracted from fragmentary fossils in Siberia’s Denisova Cave; also interbred with modern humans; highest Denisovan ancestry found in Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians (~4–6%).
• Homo floresiensis — ~100,000–50,000 BP (approximate); very small-bodied hominin found on the island of Flores, Indonesia; sometimes called “the Hobbit”; exact phylogenetic position contested.
• Homo naledi — found in South Africa’s Rising Star Cave (announced 2015); a mosaic of primitive and modern features; surprisingly young dates (~235,000–335,000 BP, approximate) overlap with early modern humans; possible deliberate body disposal.

• Homo sapiens (anatomically modern) — ~300,000 BP (approximate, based on Jebel Irhoud, Morocco); behaviorally modern humans (symbolic art, complex tools) appear in the fossil record by ~100,000–50,000 BP.

• Mousterian tradition — a Middle Paleolithic stone-tool industry (~300,000–30,000 BP) associated with Neanderthals and early modern humans; characterized by prepared-core (Levallois) technique.
• Levallois technique — a prepared-core knapping method that produces standardized flakes of predictable shape; hallmark of Middle Paleolithic technology; appears across Africa, Europe, and western Asia.

Evolutionary concepts

• Bipedalism — upright walking on two legs; among the earliest derived hominin traits, preceding large brain expansion.
• Encephalization — the tendency toward larger brain size relative to body size across the hominin lineage; especially rapid in the genus Homo.
• Out of Africa model — the consensus model that anatomically modern H. sapiens originated in Africa and dispersed to replace (with some admixture) archaic populations elsewhere; supported by genetic and fossil evidence.
• Multiregional hypothesis — the now-minority view that modern humans evolved in parallel across multiple continents from earlier Homo populations; mostly supplanted by Out of Africa evidence.
• Mitochondrial Eve — the most recent common matrilineal ancestor of all living humans, estimated to have lived ~150,000–200,000 BP (approximate); not the only woman alive at the time.
• Y-chromosomal Adam — the most recent common patrilineal ancestor; lived roughly ~200,000–340,000 BP (approximate estimates vary widely by study).
• Oldowan tradition — the oldest known stone-tool industry (~3.3–1.5 Ma), involving simple flaked pebbles; associated with early Homo and possibly late Australopithecus.
• Acheulean tradition — a stone-tool industry (~1.76 Ma–100,000 BP) characterized by bifacial hand axes; associated with H. erectus and H. heidelbergensis.
• Laetoli footprints — preserved footprints (~3.6 Ma) in volcanic ash at Laetoli, Tanzania, discovered by Mary Leakey’s team in 1978; provide direct evidence of upright bipedal walking in A. afarensis or a close relative.

• Behavioral modernity — a suite of capacities including symbolic art, long-distance trade, complex language, and personal ornaments; debated whether these arose suddenly (~50,000 BP “Upper Paleolithic Revolution”) or gradually over hundreds of thousands of years.

• Chauvet Cave — cave art site in southern France (~36,000 BP); older than Lascaux; charcoal-dated paintings of rhinoceroses, lions, and mammoths; subject of Werner Herzog’s documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

Primatology and Biological Variation

• Primatology — the study of non-human primates; a subfield of biological anthropology that illuminates human behavioral evolution.
• Jane Goodall — conducted decades of field research on chimpanzees at Gombe, Tanzania; documented tool use, complex social behavior, and warfare.
• Dian Fossey — long-term study of mountain gorillas in Rwanda; wrote Gorillas in the Mist; murdered 1985.
• Biruté Galdikas — long-term study of orangutans in Borneo; one of Leakey’s “Trimates” along with Goodall and Fossey.
• ABO and other blood groups — examples of human polymorphisms that vary in frequency across populations; differ from race as a biological category.
• Race (biological) — modern anthropological consensus holds that biological race is not a valid taxonomic classification for humans; human genetic variation is clinal and does not cluster discretely. Social race is a real and studied phenomenon.
• Forensic anthropology — application of biological anthropology methods to legal and law-enforcement contexts; includes skeletal analysis for identification.
• Paleoanthropology — the subfield combining paleontology and biological anthropology to study human evolution through fossil and geological evidence.
• Dermatoglyphics — the study of fingerprint and skin-ridge patterns; used in biological anthropology and forensic identification.
• Sexual dimorphism — differences in size, shape, or features between males and females of a species; marked in gorillas, moderate in chimps and early hominins, reduced in modern humans relative to great apes.

Archaeology

• Material culture — physical objects made, modified, or used by humans; the primary data of archaeology.
• Stratigraphy — the principle that older deposits lie below younger ones; used to establish relative chronology.
• Radiocarbon dating (¹⁴C) — radiometric dating method effective for organic materials up to ~50,000 years old; calibrated using tree rings.
• Potassium-argon (K-Ar) dating — used for volcanic rock; extends dating range to millions of years; useful for placing hominin fossils in stratigraphic context.
• Lithics — stone tools and their debris (debitage); core types include flakes, blades, and formal tools.
• Seriation — a relative dating technique based on the changing frequency of artifact styles over time.
• Processual archaeology (New Archaeology) — movement from the 1960s associated with Lewis Binford; emphasized scientific method, hypothesis testing, and ecological explanation.
• Post-processual archaeology — reaction against processual archaeology; associated with Ian Hodder; emphasized interpretation, agency, and the role of ideology in material culture.

Major sites and transitions

• Olduvai Gorge — site in Tanzania central to 20th-century paleoanthropology; excavated by Louis and Mary Leakey; yielded H. habilis and Paranthropus boisei remains.
• Lascaux — Paleolithic cave site in France (~17,000–20,000 BP); famous for elaborate polychrome animal paintings; a UNESCO site closed to public to prevent deterioration.
• Altamira — cave art site in northern Spain; age similar to Lascaux; the first Paleolithic cave art recognized as ancient (1880); discovered by Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola; initially dismissed as forgery.
• Catalhoyuk — large Neolithic settlement in Anatolia (modern Turkey), ~9,500–7,700 BP; one of the earliest known proto-urban communities; excavated by James Mellaart and later Ian Hodder.
• Stonehenge — megalithic monument in southern England; construction phases ~3000–1500 BCE; astronomical alignments; exact social function debated.
• Göbekli Tepe — site in southeastern Turkey (~11,600–8,200 BP); monumental stone pillars predate ceramics and agriculture; challenges the view that sedentism preceded monumentality.
• Jericho (Tell es-Sultan) — one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited settlements (Natufian through Neolithic); earliest stone tower (~8,300 BCE) at the Neolithic site predates most monumental architecture; excavated by Kathleen Kenyon.
• Indus Valley Civilization (Harappan) — Bronze Age urban civilization (~3300–1300 BCE) centered on the Indus and Ghaggar-Hakra river systems; major cities include Mohenjo-daro and Harappa; known for grid-planned streets, standardized weights, and undeciphered script.
• Mohenjo-daro — one of the two largest cities of the Indus Valley Civilization; in modern Pakistan; famous for its Great Bath and sophisticated drainage system; excavated by John Marshall and Ernest Mackay in the 1920s.
• Neolithic Revolution — the gradual transition from foraging to food production (domestication of plants and animals); began independently in multiple regions (~10,000–8,000 BP in the Fertile Crescent, somewhat later in China, Mesoamerica, and sub-Saharan Africa); associated with sedentism, population growth, and social complexity.
• Fertile Crescent — the arc from the Levant through Mesopotamia; an early center of agricultural origins; crops included wheat, barley, lentils; animals included sheep, goat, cattle, pig.
• Three-Age System — the classification of prehistory into Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age; proposed by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen in the early 19th century for the National Museum of Denmark; a foundational framework for European archaeology.
• Clovis culture — the earliest well-documented widespread cultural tradition in the Americas (~13,000–12,800 BP); identified by distinctive fluted projectile points first found near Clovis, New Mexico; long considered the earliest peopling of the Americas but challenged by pre-Clovis sites.
• Kennewick Man (The Ancient One) — ~8,500-year-old skeletal remains found in Washington State; subject of legal dispute between scientists and Native American tribes over repatriation; repatriated to Colville tribes in 2017.
• NAGPRA — Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990, U.S.); requires federal institutions to return Native American human remains and sacred objects.
• Dendrochronology — tree-ring dating; used to calibrate radiocarbon dates and to date wooden structures and environmental changes precisely; technique pioneered by A.E. Douglass.
• Archaeomagnetism — dating method using the fact that fired clay and hearths preserve the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field at the time of firing; useful for kilns and hearths.

Cultural Anthropology

• Culture — the shared system of beliefs, values, symbols, practices, and material objects that characterizes a group; learned and transmitted across generations (not genetically inherited).
• Ethnography — the systematic description of a culture, produced through extended fieldwork; both a method and a genre of writing.
• Participant observation — the defining fieldwork method, in which the researcher lives within a community and participates in daily life while observing.
• Thick description — Clifford Geertz’s term for interpretive ethnography that goes beyond surface behavior to capture meaning; introduced in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973); contrasted with “thin description,” which records only observable behavior without context.
• Kula ring — a system of ceremonial exchange practiced among Trobriand Islanders and neighboring peoples; armshells (mwali) travel counterclockwise and necklaces (soulava) travel clockwise among islands; analyzed by Malinowski as a total social fact integrating trade, prestige, and politics.
• Kinship — the social organization of descent and relatedness; a central concern of cultural anthropology.
• Descent systems — patrilineal (traced through fathers), matrilineal (through mothers), bilateral (both sides equally recognized, as in most Western societies), double descent (both simultaneously).
• Lineage / clan — a lineage is a unilineal descent group whose members can trace explicit genealogical links to a common ancestor; a clan is a larger unilineal group whose members claim descent from a common ancestor but cannot always trace all links.
• Kinship terminology systems — named systems for classifying relatives: Eskimo (isolates lineal from collateral kin; characteristic of bilateral societies), Hawaiian (merges all cousins with siblings), Iroquois (distinguishes cross from parallel cousins; associated with matrilineal/patrilineal systems), Crow (matrilineal skewing), Omaha (patrilineal skewing), Sudanese (descriptive; distinguishes every relative separately).
• Incest taboo — the near-universal prohibition on sexual relations or marriage between close kin; theorized via Westermarck effect (childhood cohabitation reduces attraction), Lévi-Strauss’s alliance theory (exchange forces social ties), and inbreeding-avoidance genetics.
• Alliance theory — Lévi-Strauss’s view that kinship systems are primarily organized around the exchange of women between groups, creating alliances; the incest taboo functions to force outward exchange.
• Affinal / consanguineal — consanguineal kin are “blood” relatives (shared descent); affinal kin are relatives by marriage.
• Exogamy / endogamy — rules requiring marriage outside (exogamy) or inside (endogamy) a defined social group.
• Moiety — a social group in which a society is divided into two complementary halves, often with reciprocal obligations.
• Totem — a plant, animal, or object serving as the emblem of a clan or group; central to Émile Durkheim’s and Lévi-Strauss’s analyses of religion and myth.
• Taboo (tabu) — a Polynesian-derived term for a prohibition enforced by social and ritual sanction.
• Mana — Polynesian concept of a diffuse supernatural power or force; introduced into anthropological theory by early ethnographers.
• Potlatch — a ceremonial feast practiced by Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest (e.g., Kwakwaka’wakw); involves competitive redistribution or destruction of wealth; studied by Boas.
• Rite of passage — ritual marking a transition from one social status to another; van Gennep’s three phases: separation, liminality, incorporation.
• Liminality — Victor Turner’s elaboration of van Gennep’s middle phase; a threshold state of ambiguity and transformation.
• Cargo cults — millenarian movements in Melanesia in the 19th–20th centuries, involving ritual practices aimed at obtaining Western manufactured goods; studied as responses to colonialism.
• Transhumance — seasonal movement of people and livestock between different altitudes or regions; a form of pastoralism.
• Bride price / bridewealth — goods transferred from the groom’s family to the bride’s family at marriage (common in sub-Saharan Africa).
• Dowry — goods transferred from the bride’s family to the groom’s family or couple (common in South Asia and historically in Europe).
• Parallel / cross cousins — parallel cousins are children of same-sex siblings (e.g., father’s brother’s children); cross cousins are children of opposite-sex siblings. Many societies prescribe marriage with cross cousins.
• Levitate / sororate — levirate: a widow marries her deceased husband’s brother; sororate: a widower marries his deceased wife’s sister; mechanisms for maintaining alliances between kin groups.
• Band, tribe, chiefdom, state — Elman Service’s evolutionary typology of sociopolitical organization (now used cautiously as an approximate heuristic rather than a strict evolutionary ladder).
• Big Man / Big Woman — a type of informal political leader in Melanesian societies who accumulates prestige and followers through generosity and exchange rather than inherited authority; contrasted with chief.
• Acephalous society — a society without centralized political authority or a chief; governance achieved through kinship, age grades, or councils.
• Age grades / age sets — groups of people of similar age who move through life stages together as a social category; prominent in East African pastoralist societies (e.g., Maasai, Nuer).
• Segmentary lineage system — a political organization (analyzed by E.E. Evans-Pritchard among the Nuer) in which lineage segments unite against common enemies and divide against each other; no permanent central authority.
• E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1902–1973) — British structural functionalist; The Nuer (1940); Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (1937); influential for showing the internal rationality of African belief systems.
• Unilinear cultural evolution — 19th-century view (Morgan, Tylor, Spencer) that all societies progress through fixed stages (savagery → barbarism → civilization); rejected by Boas and later anthropologists as ethnocentric and empirically unfounded.
• Cultural materialism — Marvin Harris’s theoretical framework arguing that the primary determinants of culture are material (techno-environmental and economic) factors; infrastructure determines superstructure; explained Hindu sacred cattle and other “irrational” practices in adaptive cost-benefit terms.
• Cultural ecology — Julian Steward’s approach linking culture to the environment through a “culture core” of subsistence technologies and related behaviors; an empirical alternative to unilinear evolution.
• Structural functionalism — the view (associated with Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski) that cultural institutions serve functions maintaining social equilibrium.
• Structuralism — Lévi-Strauss’s approach: underlying universal mental structures expressed in myth, kinship, and culture as binary oppositions (raw/cooked, nature/culture).
• Interpretive anthropology — Geertz’s approach: culture as a text to be interpreted, not a mechanism to be explained causally.
• Practice theory — Pierre Bourdieu’s framework; habitus (internalized dispositions), field, and capital explain how social structures are reproduced through everyday practice.
• World systems theory — Immanuel Wallerstein’s framework analyzing economic and political relations between core, semi-periphery, and periphery nations; applied in anthropology to understand how local societies are shaped by global capitalist dynamics.
• Globalization and anthropology — the study of how global flows of capital, people, media, and ideas reshape local cultures; Arjun Appadurai’s concept of “scapes” (ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, ideoscapes) is a key framework.
• Cosmology — in cultural anthropology, the beliefs a society holds about the nature of the universe, humanity’s place in it, and the relations between natural and supernatural realms.
• Habitus — Bourdieu’s concept for the durable dispositions, tastes, and skills acquired through socialization that shape perception and action without conscious deliberation.
• Symbolic anthropology — associated with Geertz, David Schneider, and Mary Douglas; focuses on the meaning of symbols, ritual, and classification.
• Liminality and communitas — Victor Turner’s concepts: liminality is the threshold state; communitas is the egalitarian social bond formed among those in a liminal state.
• Reflexivity — awareness of the researcher’s own position and impact on the material studied; heightened by postmodern critiques of ethnographic authority.
• Writing Culture debate — a 1980s critique (associated with James Clifford, George Marcus) of ethnographic authority, objectivity, and representation.
• Purity and Danger — Mary Douglas’s 1966 work arguing that pollution and taboo beliefs reflect systems of classification: matter is “dirty” when it is “out of place” relative to a culture’s categorical schema; applied to dietary rules (Leviticus) and bodily boundaries.
• Mary Douglas (1921–2007) — British anthropologist; Purity and Danger (1966) and Natural Symbols (1970); analyzed how symbolic boundaries and bodily metaphors encode social structures.
• The Gift (Essai sur le don) — Marcel Mauss’s 1925 essay arguing that gift exchange is a “total social phenomenon” binding giver, receiver, and the spirit of the object; the gift creates obligation (to give, to receive, to reciprocate); influenced Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu, and economic anthropology broadly.
• Animism — the belief that natural objects, phenomena, and the universe itself possess souls or spiritual essence; Edward Tylor defined it as the “minimum definition of religion.”
• Totemism — the ritual and social identification of a clan or group with a natural species or object; Durkheim argued totemism was the original form of religion and that the totem symbolizes society itself.
• Shamanism — a complex of religious practices involving a specialist (shaman) who enters altered states to communicate with spirits for healing, divination, or protection; found across Siberia, the Americas, and elsewhere.
• Syncretism — the blending of elements from different religious or cultural traditions; common in colonial and postcolonial contexts.
• Revitalization movements — Wallace’s term for organized efforts to create a more satisfying culture by constructing a new ideology; includes cargo cults, the Ghost Dance, and other movements under conditions of cultural stress.
• Nuer — Nilotic pastoralist people of South Sudan; studied extensively by Evans-Pritchard; famous for the segmentary lineage system, age-grade organization, and cattle-centric cosmology.
• Trobriand Islanders — Melanesian people studied by Malinowski; central to the development of fieldwork methods; known for the kula ring, yam exchanges, and the matrilineal system Malinowski documented.
• Yanomami (Yanomamö) — Indigenous people of the Amazon and Orinoco basins on the Brazil-Venezuela border; the subject of Napoleon Chagnon’s controversial Yanomamö: The Fierce People (1968), which portrayed them as uniquely violent and sparked decades of debate about anthropological ethics, representation, and the sociobiology of aggression; later ethnographers and critics challenged Chagnon’s characterizations; a touchstone for discussions of advocacy, objectivity, and the ethics of fieldwork.
• Zuni — a Pueblo people of the American Southwest (western New Mexico); studied by Ruth Benedict, who used them as a key example of the “Apollonian” cultural type (restrained, orderly, non-individualistic) in Patterns of Culture (1934); also studied by Frank Hamilton Cushing (1879–1884) in an early example of immersive fieldwork; known for elaborate ceremonial life and the Shalako ceremony.

Linguistic Anthropology

• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (linguistic relativity) — the proposition that the language one speaks influences how one thinks and perceives the world; the strong version (linguistic determinism) is largely rejected; the weak version (language influences thought) has empirical support in limited domains.
• Edward Sapir — student of Boas; contributed foundational work on language, culture, and personality.
• Benjamin Lee Whorf — student of Sapir; argued that Hopi grammar encoded a fundamentally different concept of time than Indo-European languages (the specific Hopi claim has been challenged).
• Ethnolinguistics — study of the relationship between language and culture.
• Sociolinguistics — study of language variation by social factors (class, ethnicity, gender, region).
• Language families — languages grouped by shared ancestry; e.g., Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Afroasiatic, Niger-Congo.
• Proto-language — the reconstructed ancestor of a language family (e.g., Proto-Indo-European).
• Language endangerment — the worldwide loss of linguistic diversity; roughly half of ~7,000 living languages are threatened with extinction.
• Pidgin / creole — a pidgin is a simplified contact language with no native speakers; a creole is a fully developed language that emerged from a pidgin and is acquired as a first language.
• Code-switching — the practice of alternating between two or more languages within a single conversation or utterance, studied as a social and identity practice.

Major Theorists

• Franz Boas (1858–1942) — founder of American anthropology; championed four-field anthropology, cultural relativism, and the critique of scientific racism; trained Mead, Benedict, Hurston, and others; his concept of historical particularism held that each culture must be understood through its own unique historical development, rejecting grand comparative schemes.
• Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942) — pioneered extended participant observation in the Trobriand Islands (Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 1922); developed functionalism; showed that magic, myth, and ritual serve social functions; also wrote Coral Gardens and Their Magic and The Sexual Life of Savages; his posthumously published diary revealed more ambivalent feelings about fieldwork.
• A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955) — developed structural functionalism; emphasized that social structures maintain social order; influenced British social anthropology.
• Margaret Mead (1901–1978) — student of Boas; Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) argued adolescent development was culturally variable; her fieldwork was later criticized by Derek Freeman, sparking an ongoing methodological debate.
• Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) — student of Boas; Patterns of Culture (1934); characterized cultures as having coherent personalities (Apollonian/Dionysian); also wrote The Chrysanthemum and the Sword on Japanese culture.
• Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) — French structuralist; analyzed kinship systems, myth, and cuisine as expressions of universal binary mental structures; The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949); Mythologiques (4 vols.).
• Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) — interpretive anthropologist; The Interpretation of Cultures (1973); thick description; fieldwork in Indonesia and Morocco.
• Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) — sociologist-anthropologist; Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972); habitus, field, capital; studied Algeria and France.
• Victor Turner (1920–1983) — symbolic anthropologist; developed concepts of liminality and communitas from Van Gennep; The Ritual Process (1969); fieldwork among the Ndembu of Zambia.
• Arnold van Gennep (1873–1957) — French folklorist; Rites of Passage (1909); three-stage model of rituals marking social transitions.
• Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) — nephew of Durkheim; The Gift (1925); analysis of exchange as a total social fact binding donor, recipient, and object.
• Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) — sociologist foundational to anthropology; The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912); concepts of sacred/profane, totem, collective effervescence.
• James George Frazer (1854–1941) — author of The Golden Bough (1890; expanded edition 1915); comparative mythology and religion; distinguished sympathetic and contagious magic; largely armchair theorist, criticized for evolutionary assumptions.
• Edward Tylor (1832–1917) — coined the term “animism” for the belief that natural objects possess souls; one of the founders of cultural anthropology; proposed the concept of cultural survivals (practices retained from an earlier cultural stage); offered the first rigorous definition of culture in Primitive Culture (1871): “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”
• Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) — early American anthropologist; studied Iroquois kinship; Ancient Society (1877) proposed evolutionary stages (savagery, barbarism, civilization); later critiqued as unilinear and ethnocentric.
• Raymond Dart (1893–1988) — identified the Taung Child skull (1924) as a new genus, Australopithecus; initially dismissed, later vindicated.
• Louis and Mary Leakey — husband and wife team; decades of excavation at Olduvai Gorge; Mary Leakey discovered Zinjanthropus (Paranthropus boisei) in 1959 and the Laetoli footprints (1978).
• Donald Johanson — discovered Lucy (A. afarensis) in Ethiopia in 1974 with Tom Gray; later co-founded the Institute of Human Origins.
• Lewis Binford (1931–2011) — chief architect of processual (New) Archaeology; emphasized middle-range theory to link material remains to past behavior.
• Marvin Harris (1927–2001) — founder of cultural materialism; Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches (1974) and Cannibals and Kings (1977); argued that seemingly bizarre cultural practices have rational material/ecological explanations.
• Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) — African-American author and anthropologist; student of Boas; Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938); studied African-American folklore and Caribbean Vodou; bridged anthropology and literary fiction; also wrote the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
• Julian Steward (1902–1972) — developed cultural ecology and multilinear evolution; rejected both unilinear schemes and pure historical particularism; Theory of Culture Change (1955).
• Leslie White (1900–1975) — neo-evolutionist; argued culture advances by harnessing increasing amounts of energy per capita; revived evolutionary thinking in American anthropology.
• David Graeber (1961–2020) — anarchist anthropologist; Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) traced the history of debt and challenged standard narratives about barter; also contributed to theorizing bureaucracy and value.
• Marshall Sahlins (1930–2021) — cultural anthropologist; Stone Age Economics (1972) argued hunter-gatherers lived in the “original affluent society”; later work on structure and history and critique of sociobiology.
• Mythologiques — Lévi-Strauss’s four-volume comparative analysis of hundreds of Native American myths (The Raw and the Cooked, 1964; From Honey to Ashes; The Origin of Table Manners; The Naked Man); argued myths across the Americas are systematic transformations of a small set of structural oppositions.
• Nancy Scheper-Hughes (b. 1944) — medical anthropologist; Death Without Weeping (1992) on infant mortality and maternal emotion in Brazil; advocate for an “engaged anthropology.”
• Paul Farmer (1959–2022) — physician-anthropologist; co-founder of Partners in Health; Infections and Inequalities (1999); applied structural violence framework to global health disparities.
• Structural violence — Paul Farmer’s term for harm done to people by economic and political structures that deny them resources; used to explain differential disease burden across social groups.