Cultural anthropology uses observation and field research, in order to study human beings and investigate their behaviour within groups. The aim is to discover which rules hold everything together, and how a certain community or society functions, starting by observing one particular individual, and moving on to make generalisations.
There have been many different approaches to anthropology over the course of recent history, but they are all are based roughly on two main schools of thought: the relativist approach, in which cultural practices are explained by analysing the cultural framework of that person’s own society; and the ethnocentric approach, according to which the group is at the centre of everything, and is therefore perceived as ‘good’ compared to everything else.
Another popular approach, albeit relating back to the end of the 19th century, was social evolutionism, which classified human beings according to their degree of evolution. Later, neo-evolutionism was developed, according to which every society goes through different stages of complexity, and follows a certain path, which may change from one society to the next. The late 19th century also saw the emergence of diffusionism, which identified certain areas of the world where similar cultural traits appeared. During the 20th century, other schools of thought and methods of investigation also flourished, including structuralism, which was backed by the French social anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Despite these different approaches, the work of the anthropologist largely follows the same process, and generally involves an initial stage of description, then an analysis, and finally interpretation, in which we attempt to make sense of the material we have collected in relation to the information we already have.
