The Discipline I: History, Development, Aim and Scope of Anthropology, Its Relationship with Other Sciences, Its Branches including Linguistic Anthropology, and Epistemology, Ontology, Theoretical Perspectives, Types of Research, Research Design and Hypothesis

Anthropology, from the Greek anthropos (human) and logos (reasoned account), is the study of humankind in all places and all times, in its biological and its cultural dimensions together. Immanuel Kant used the word for a course of lectures published in 1798, but the modern discipline took shape in the second half of the nineteenth century, after Darwin, when learned societies in London and Paris began collecting skulls, tools, customs and vocabularies under one name. Its aim is a general account of what is universal in humans and what varies, and why. Its scope is therefore unusually wide: the evolution of the human body and of the primates before it, the material remains of past societies, the world's languages, and the living institutions of family, economy, law, politics and religion. Three commitments hold the field together. It is holistic, treating biology, environment, economy, kinship and belief as connected parts of one way of life; it is comparative, refusing to generalise from one society; and it is fieldwork-based, insisting on prolonged first-hand study of the people written about.

Curiosity about other peoples is old — Herodotus described Egyptian and Scythian customs in the fifth century BCE, Ibn Khaldun theorised nomadic and settled life in the fourteenth century, and the Enlightenment writers Montesquieu and Rousseau compared societies to argue about law and human nature — but a discipline needs a society, a chair and a method. The Ethnological Society of London was founded in 1843, Paul Broca's Société d'Anthropologie de Paris in 1859 (the year of The Origin of Species), the Anthropological Society of London in 1863, and their merger in 1871 became the Royal Anthropological Institute. The evolutionists of the 1860s and 1870s (Maine, McLennan, Tylor, Morgan) built theory from travellers' and missionaries' reports; Boas in America and the Cambridge Torres Straits expedition of 1898 (Haddon, Rivers, Seligman) took anthropologists themselves to the field; Malinowski's Trobriand years (1915–18) and Radcliffe-Brown's Andaman work (1906–08) made intensive fieldwork the standard. Tylor was given a readership at Oxford in 1884, Haddon a lectureship at Cambridge in 1900, and Frazer the first chair titled social anthropology, at Liverpool, in 1908.

Each field has its own sub-branches. Biological anthropology contains palaeoanthropology (fossil hominins), primatology, human genetics, human growth and development, human ecology and adaptation, forensic anthropology, nutritional anthropology and kinanthropometry. Archaeological anthropology contains prehistoric archaeology, ethno-archaeology, experimental, environmental, settlement and cognitive archaeology. Social-cultural anthropology contains economic, political, legal, medical, urban, ecological, symbolic, cognitive, psychological, visual and applied anthropology, and the anthropology of religion, of gender and of development. Linguistic anthropology contains descriptive linguistics (the structure of a language: phonology, morphology, syntax), historical linguistics (how languages change and are related — the family trees of Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austroasiatic and Tibeto-Burman), sociolinguistics (language and social difference — dialect, register, code-switching) and ethnolinguistics (language and world-view). Dell Hymes called the last the ethnography of speaking; the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, that the categories of a language shape its speakers' habitual thought, is its most-examined claim, now read in a weak, relativist form rather than as determinism.

The branches are not compartments. The peopling of India is read from skeletal series and ancient DNA (biological), from Palaeolithic and Neolithic sites (archaeological), from the distribution of the four language families (linguistic) and from the caste and tribal groups of the present (social). Kinship terminology is at once a linguistic fact and a social one. Growth studies need the economist's data on income and the nutritionist's on diet. This interdependence is what "holism" means in practice, and it is why a single-field answer to a four-field question loses marks: an examiner asking why the Andamanese are short expects a reply that weighs island isolation, diet, genetic drift and colonial depopulation together.

Anthropology borrows methods and lends perspective. With sociology it shares theory (Durkheim stands behind Radcliffe-Brown, Weber behind Geertz) but differs in scale and method: sociology grew up studying industrial societies with surveys and statistics, anthropology small-scale societies with participant observation, and Kroeber's remark that the two are "the same subject" is only half true, because anthropology also studies bones and stone tools. With history the relation was argued out by Evans-Pritchard, who in 1961 called social anthropology "a kind of historiography" against Radcliffe-Brown's natural-science model; ethnohistory and the Annales school now join them. With psychology the culture-and-personality school shared Freud and projective tests; with economics anthropology disputes whether "economic man" exists outside markets; with political science it studies power where there is no state; with biology, medicine and genetics it shares the study of evolution, disease and heredity; with geology and geography it shares stratigraphy, the Quaternary and human ecology; with linguistics it shares a whole field.

Ontology asks what exists — is "society" a thing with a structure of its own (realism, holism), or only the sum of individuals and their meanings (nominalism, constructionism)? Epistemology asks how it can be known — by observation of regularities from outside (positivism, after Comte; Durkheim's "social facts as things"), by understanding meaning from inside (interpretivism; Weber's Verstehen; Geertz), or by exposing the interests that shape knowledge (critical theory; feminist and postcolonial critiques). The choice sets the theoretical perspective: functionalism and structural-functionalism assume an integrated whole to be explained by the part's contribution; conflict and Marxist perspectives assume contradiction; symbolic and interpretive perspectives assume that action is meaningful and must be read; evolutionist and ecological perspectives assume adaptation over time; postmodern perspectives doubt that any account is neutral. Methodology follows: a positivist designs a survey and tests a hypothesis; an interpretivist keeps a field diary and writes thick description.

A research design is the plan that links the question to the data: the design of a study is exploratory (a new problem, flexible methods), descriptive (a census of a tribe, a village survey; who, what, where), explanatory or causal (why; the experimental design with control and treatment groups, or the quasi-experimental and correlational designs anthropology usually has to settle for), or, in the anthropological idiom, the cross-sectional, longitudinal, comparative and case-study designs. Its components are the problem, the review of literature, the concepts and their operational definitions, the variables, the hypotheses, the universe and the sample, the tools, the plan of analysis and the time-frame. A hypothesis is a testable statement of the relation between variables — "children in households with migrant fathers have lower height-for-age than others" — stated as a null hypothesis (no difference) and an alternative. A Type I error rejects a true null (the level of significance α, usually 0.05, is its permitted probability); a Type II error retains a false one (its probability is β, and 1 − β is the power of the test). A good hypothesis is clear, specific, testable, related to a body of theory and falsifiable, in Popper's sense: the claim that survives an honest attempt to refute it is the one worth keeping.