The next debate to emerge concerned the idea of relativism. This was central to the Boasian vision of anthropology. Franz Boas believed that no culture is superior to any other, and his anthropology emphasized this. This idea was taken up by his students, including Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. Opposing this we have Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, who believed that some cultures are superior to others. Another key figure was Benjamin Lee Whorf. His linguistic relativism sought to explain that languages classify differently. This is also apparent in kinship, where different categorizations might imply different ways of thinking.

The functionalism of Malinowski and the structural-functionalism of Radcliffe-Brown were the dominant paradigms of anthropology in early twentieth-century Britain. This chapter explores these from their roots in Durkheimian sociology to more recent times. Emile Durkheim introduced the idea of the organic analogy (society is like an organism); Bronislaw Malinowski the idea of functionalism through fieldwork; and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown the notion of a natural science model and theories of totemism.

In recent decades, poststructuralism and feminism have become prominent. This chapter treats both. The coupling is not as odd as it may seem, because the two are in fact related: poststructuralism entailed a rejection of structuralism but also a new and more subtle reading of the phenomenon. One of the key ideas in both is an understanding of power relations. They come to the fore in understanding gender and also among poststructuralist thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, and Bourdieu.

World history is, to say the least, a large topic. Nevertheless, it is an extraordinarily important topic. This chapter focuses on some major themes in the history of anthropology from the early eighteenth century to the Covid-19 pandemic. Interspersed is a reflection on the history of anthropology and native affairs. Also touched on are national traditions and some thoughts on histories of anthropology and on contemporary issues, including Black Lives Matter.

Structuralism emphasizes pattern over substance. Meaning comes in the relation between things. This perspective began in linguistics, with Ferdinand de Saussure, but it continued in anthropology through the work of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. His important books include works on kinship and on myth. Later developments included work by thinkers in Britain, Brazil, and the Netherlands.

Especially in North America, anthropology is dominated by the ‘four-fields’ approach. This was introduced by German immigrant Franz Boas in the late nineteenth century, and it still dominates. The idea is that anthropology consist of these elements: biological, archaeological, linguistic, and cultural components. The cultural one is dominant, and this book is basically about cultural anthropology. Other important notions include the division into ethnography and theory; the idea of a paradigm; diachronic, synchronic, and interactive perspectives; and the emphases on society and on culture.

Marxist perspectives came to hold much interest from the 1970s, and indeed into the late twentieth century. Two important schools of Marxism were the structural Marxism of Godelier and the ‘land and labour’ Marxism of Meillassoux. Both were decidedly French in inspiration. At the end of the twentieth century there was a new challenge, from anarchism, but this challenge did not particularly materialize.

While modern anthropology began in the late nineteenth century, we can place the origins of the subject to much earlier. Seventeenth-century figures include Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke, and Hobbes. Also, the definition of humanity was changing. Were feral children fully human, and what about the ‘Orang Outang’? This chapter explores these figures, as well as Montesquieu, Rousseau, and others in anthropology and in the sociological tradition. It also looks at the ideas of polygenesis and monogenesis.

The chapter begins with antecedents. These include those of the German philological tradition, then Max M� Ratzel, and others, before the British twentieth-century diffusionists, Elliot Smith and Perry. After this came the culture-area theorists, including Wissler, and then the regional approaches of ‘Dutch structuralism’. The chapter highlights the complexity of these schools and ends with a consideration of three types of comparison: illustrative, global-sample, and controlled.