American Anthropologist - Four-field Approach

Four-field Approach

The four fields of Anthropology include cultural, linguistic, archeology and biological/physical. Sometimes applied anthropology is added as a fifth division.

Among the journals published by the AAA, The American Anthropologist is the only one that follows the "four field" approach, publishing articles from all the subdisciplines of anthropology. Proponents of four-field anthropology see American Anthropologist's broad scope as important to maintaining disciplinary unity, while critics have expressed serious reservations about this aim, and criticize pressures since the 1970s against editors and works that do not subscribe to four field holism as an ideal for anthropological scholarship.

Read more about this topic:  American Anthropologist

Famous quotes containing the word approach:

    A lady with whom I was riding in the forest said to me that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the genii who inhabit them suspend their deeds until the wayfarer had passed onward; a thought which poetry has celebrated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the approach of human feet.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)