Etymology:anthropos (Greek: human) + logos (study) = the study of humanity — the whole human, everywhere, everywhen: the discipline's own motto calls it "the most humanistic of sciences and the most scientific of the humanities."
Definitions (the classic one plus the working one):
• The four-field classic: anthropology is the comprehensive study of humankind — biologicaland cultural, past and present — of all people in all places (Kroeber's "science of man and his works" tradition).
• Working definition (for exams): anthropology is the holistic, comparative, fieldwork-based study of human beings — their origins, biological variation, cultures, languages, institutions and transformations — with a signature attention to small-scale societies andthe insider's point of view.
Nature — the anthropological perspective (four signatures, the exam's core):
1. Holism — the whole context: kinship with economy, ritual with politics, no institution alone;
2. Comparison — the comparative method across cultures: making the familiar strange and the strange familiar;
3. Cultural relativism — understanding each culture in its own terms (the methodological discipline — not the moral surrender; Sociology Unit 2.2's distinction);
4. Fieldwork — long residence, the local language, participant observation (Unit 9's method): knowledge earned on the ground, not in the library.
Scope: everything human — from hominin evolution to the anthropology of the internet; from the !Kung band to the World Bank; from Newar ritual to Nepali migrant life in Qatar. Where sociology (your last course) studied one's own industrial society through its institutions, anthropology classically studied other societies through their wholes — the two lenses now converging.