Plain-language explanation.
Anthropology is the study of what it means to be human — across all times and all places. Physical anthropologists study our evolutionary origins and how our bodies work. Cultural anthropologists study how different societies organise their lives, what they believe, and how they make meaning. Archaeology studies human life through material remains. Linguistic anthropologists study the relationship between language and culture.
Core concepts and standard treatment.
Anthropology's four fields: biological/physical anthropology (human evolution, primatology, osteology, genetics of human populations), cultural/social anthropology (ethnographic study of living societies, culture theory, kinship, religion, economics), archaeology (material culture of past societies), and linguistic anthropology (language and social life, discourse, and communication). Anthropology's distinctive method is ethnography: long-term fieldwork immersion in a community, participant observation, and qualitative data collection.
Deeper theory, debates and edge cases.
Cultural relativism (Boas: each culture must be understood on its own terms — a methodological stance distinguishing descriptive from normative relativism); ethnocentrism (judging other cultures by the standards of one's own); and moral universalism (some human rights and values transcend cultural difference). Key figures: Boas (cultural relativism, critique of scientific racism), Malinowski (functionalism, participant observation), Radcliffe-Brown (structural functionalism), Evans-Pritchard (Nuer kinship and religion), Margaret Mead (coming-of-age in Samoa — contested), Ruth Benedict (culture as personality writ large), and Clifford Geertz (interpretive anthropology, thick description).
How it is applied in practice.
Applied anthropology: international development, global health, UX research, corporate ethnography (using anthropological methods to understand consumer behaviour and workplace cultures), humanitarian response, and indigenous land rights. Business anthropology: IDEO and design firms use ethnographic methods to understand user needs; corporations embed anthropologists to study employee and customer behaviour. Medical anthropology: cross-cultural perspectives on illness, healing, and health systems — how biomedicine intersects with local health beliefs and practices. Digital anthropology: the ethnography of online communities, social media culture, and human-computer interaction in everyday life.