Anthropology Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 3

Anthropology - Essay Example Anthropology is made up of four subfields: Physical anthropology - It deals with the learning about humans' biological aspects by examining their skeletal and other physical remains of earlier humans. It also includes research on human evolution as well as forensic studies" (unt.edu). The social sciences are a group of academic disciplines that also include anthropology as a sub discipline and study various human aspects of the world. In general, it can be said that social sciences is involved in studying subjective, inter-subjective and objective or structural aspects of society and is traditionally referred to as soft sciences. On the other hand hard sciences, such as the natural sciences focus mainly on objective aspects of nature. However, today due to the flow of various aspects it is become much difficult to distinguish between hard science and soft science. Other social science disciplines other than anthropology include economics, education, geography, history, law, linguistics, political science, social work, psychology, sociology etc. Anthropology is a unique and holistic discipline that deals with the integration of different aspects of the Social Sciences, Humanities, and Human Biology. There are several fields such as Archaeology, Prehistory and Paleontology, Physical or Biological Anthropology, Anthropological Linguistics, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Ethnology and Ethnography that are linked with anthropology. In other words, anthropology is the only social science subject that interlinks most of these branches. For instance, economics is a social science that seeks to analyze and describe the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth (economics). Education is a sub-division of social science which deals with teaching, learning specific skills, etc. These are all independent subjects where as anthropology is the only subject that interlinks all other social science subjects. Numerous subfields or modes of anthropology cut across these divisions. For instance, medical anthropology is over and over again considered a subfield of socio-cultural anthropology; but, today there are several anthropologists are involved in studying medical topics especially to look at biological variation in human populations or the interaction of culture and biology. It is seen that they may use linguistic analysis to understand communication around health and illness, or archaeological techniques to understand health and illness in historical or pre-historical human populations. Forensic anthropologists in general may use both techniques from physical anthropology as well as archaeology and may also at times practice as medical anthropologists. Environmental or ecological anthropology is currently a growing subfield concerned with the interactions between humans and their environment. This is in fact another interlinked subject where the cultural and biological and some times archaeological approaches combine together, to deal with a broad range of topics