Anthropology, Social and Cultural

The roots of anthropology, as the scientific examination of the human condition, are truly ancient, but its emergence as a separate discipline is associated with the globalization that accompanied the modern era. This entry begins by outlining the roots of modern anthropology and then moves to the end of the nineteenth century, when Darwinian influence led to the growth of academic anthropology. After that, it focuses on the development of ethnographic methodology as the distinctive form of empirical engagement in the discipline. Subsequently, the entry outlines the theoretical development of social and cultural anthropology during the twentieth century and the way in which this came to a moment of decisive crisis in the early 1970s. Finally, it argues that anthropology came to find a renewed identity in the dawning of the twenty-first century, after returning to a concern with action and away from the concern with text that had accompanied the passing of the postcolonial period.