There a variety of subfields within cultural anthropology. The study of kinship and social structure is a core subfield, along political and economic anthropology. There is a huge body of anthropological literature on the developing world and on culture change. Urban and applied anthropology are contemporary trends. The study of religion, myth and symbol is ever-popular as anthropologists seek to understand the basics of human nature. There are separate subfields devoted to the various human expressive arts, such as art, music, dance, storytelling and so forth. Ultimately, though, in describing any culture, most anthropologists would like to touch on everything about that culture. A tall order. The central kind of writing in anthropology is called ethnography.

An ethnography is a piece of descriptive writing about a culture or a "folk." It is supposed to include every little detail that the author has uncovered about that culture, usually by living among the culture's practitioners (or being a member of that culture). There are ethnographic films as well as books.

Anthropology is such a big field that an introduction to it must necessarily leave out certain things. There are a number of published texts, for example, that focus primarily on kinship or social structure or politics. In this text, my ethnographic focus is going to be on

and their various subtopics, such as globalization and a world culture. Is it true that the various distinct cultures of the world are collapsing/merging into one big culture?

My goal is to do something in this text that cannot easily be done in a traditonal paper-text, which is to illustrate how anthropologists approach their questions by collecting and posting data "on the fly" from the Web. Obviously, the Web itself is a strand in the globalization of culture. But does the Web encourage homogeneity or diversity? Just while I was typing these words, I learned from my tickertape newsbrowser that there is yet another pop culture oriented magazine start-up in the United States, something called Talk. So naturally, I went to talk.com to see if it contained any information about the mag, other than the fact that Hillary Clinton is its first major interview (this is the issue where she discusses Bill's problems as a child and how they relate to his "weaknesses" in the present). The main feature of the resulting page was an ad for 5 cents a minute long distance calling and, oh yes, a .gif leading to a magazine entitled Talk. When you go to that site, you can learn about the history of the new magazine (its related to Vanity Fair) and its goals (general interest, online and offline reading). Presto! A new pop culture entity is born. Will it last? Well, have you ever heard of it? If you have, then I assume it's garnering some success. Naturally, if you hadn't heard of it before, you have now.

This is a good example of how anthropology itself changes the objects it studies: it changes culture. This is a deep ethical and scientific concern. Anthropology is not and can never be an experimental science, in the sense that it can conduct controlled cultural experiments on unwary subjects. But anthropology does run "experiments" of sorts or at least test hypotheses in specific, describable ways. One of the main ways to test hypotheses about human cultures is to compare and contrast two cultures, either two different cultures or the same culture at two different times. For example, if we wanted for some reason to know more about the cultural context of Talk magazine, we could study the similarities among those of you who already knew about it (and contrast your group norms and mores with those of the group who had not heard of it). What might we find? Would we find anything at all? This is called the comparative method.

One of the goals of anthropology is to come up with theories or explanations for human behavior. The problems of explaining human behavior in a non-laboratory setting are daunting. The word "theory" does not mean "good guess," as some believe. Instead, a theory is an explanation that accounts for all the known data, leaving out no available and relevant information. A theory is still a belief, of course. It is NEVER itself a fact, which it cannot be. But facts without theories are useless, and human always operate in a world of both.

There can of course be competing theories, and then it's up to you to decide which one you believe (or prefer). Theories have political, moral, ethical and other consequences, which I personally find important to think about in choosing a "proper" theory. An overview on anthropology wouldn't be complete without grounding in certain basic theories or topics. Before going very far in anthropology, you should know what anthropologists think about

These terms are actually used in a variety of different ways within anthropologists' more general theories, such as functionalism, or structural-functionalism or structuralism. Sometimes anthropologists seem to have so many named theories (isms?) that one could spend an entire lifetime perusing them and not reach the end. And since other disciplines (including some as disparate from each other aspsychology, philosophy, literary criticism, music theory and biology) also have competing theories on similar data...well, it gets confusing. My own approach is to learn a lot of theory, and, when overwhelmed...return to the facts themselves. Anthropologists like lots of facts and some of us, like Franz Boas (who may well have founded American anthropology) can pretty much do without theories, at least until ALL the facts are down.