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As a term and a subject area, applied anthropology refers to that broad array of research, methods, and outcomes developed and used for the explicit purpose of recognizing,...

Archaeology is a historical social science concerned with study of past societies and cultures through material traces, called the archaeological record. These traces may have been left...

Business refers to the buying and selling of goods and services in the marketplace, and the organized economic activities attendant to those practices—for example, product and service...

Clifford Geertz (b. 1926–d. 2006) has had a tremendous impact on cultural anthropology and, more generally, all of the social sciences and humanities. In particular, Geertz is associated...

“Cultural evolution” is the idea that human cultural change––that is, changes in socially transmitted beliefs, knowledge, customs, skills, attitudes, languages, and so on––can be...

Culture is a term that describes and characterizes various ways in which human differences and similarities are recognized and marked. It is inseparable from many important ideas such as...

The term culture of poverty emerged in 1959 to explain why people were poor. The culture of poverty concept delineates factors associated with poor people’s behaviors, and argues that...

Sir Edward Evans Evans-Pritchard (b. 1902–d. 1973), known to his friends, colleagues, and students as “E-P,” was arguably the preeminent British social anthropologist of the 20th...

Environmental anthropology deals broadly with culture and environment. Early anthropologists were interested in human relations with the environment as factors in cultural development....