Cultural anthropology is that major division of anthropology that explains culture in its many aspects. It is anchored in the collection, analysis, and explanation (or interpretation) of the primary data of extended ethnographic field research. This discipline, both in America and in Europe, has long cast a wide net and includes various approaches. It has produced such collateral approaches as culture-and-personality studies, culture history, cultural ecology, cultural materialism, ethnohistory, and historical anthropology. These subdisciplines variously exploit methods from the sciences and the humanities. Cultural anthropology has become a family of approaches oriented by the culture concept.
The central tendencies and recurrent debates since the mid-19th century have engaged universalist versus particularist perspectives, scientific versus humanistic perspectives, and the explanatory power of biology (nature) versus that of culture (nurture). Two persistent themes have been the dynamics of culture change and the symbolic meanings at the core of culture.
The definition of culture has long provoked debate. The earliest and most quoted definition is the one formulated in 1871 by Edward Burnett Tylor:
Three things of enduring relevance are to be remarked in this definition. First, it treats culture and civilization as interchangeable terms. Second, it emphasizes ethnography. And third, it singles out that which is learned by means of living in society rather than what is inherited biologically.
In respect to culture and civilization, Tylor collapses the distinction between the total social legacy of a human group, including every mundane matter from pot making to toilet practices, and its most refined attainments, such as the fine arts, that has been at the heart of the debate over what culture is. On the second point, he emphasizes what has continued to be the anchor of cultural anthropology in ethnographic fieldwork and writing. At the same time, the positioning and gender of the ethnographer and the bias in ethnographic data have undergone increasingly close scrutiny. On the third point, by emphasizing what is socially learned rather than what is biologically transmitted, Tylor points up the enduring problem of distinguishing between biological and cultural influences, between nature and nurture.
Tylor’s definition is taken as the inception of the awareness of culture in anthropology, but Classical thinkers such as Herodotus and Tacitus were also aware of differences in beliefs and practices among the diverse peoples of the then-known world—that is, of cultural difference. It was the age of exploration and discovery that exposed the breadth of human diversity, posing those fundamental questions of universality and particularity in human lifeways that have become the province of cultural anthropology. In the face of such diversity, Enlightenment thinkers sought to discover what could still be taken as universally reasonable—enlightened or truly civilized—in the living out of human relationships. The French Enlightenment emphasized universals grounded in human reason against which the German thinkers, most notably Johann Gottfried von Herder, spoke of Kultur, which is to say the particular identity-defining differences characteristic of peoples and nations. This universalism-particularism debate between French and German thinkers, which is a version of the debate between Classicism and Romanticism, has continued to be central in cultural anthropology. There is also the related debate between idealism and materialism: European idealism emphasized the subtle meaningfulness of local configurations of thought and value over against the practical focus on utilitarian analysis of health, material well-being, and survival. This idealism flourished in German anthropology in the late 19th century, notably in the work of Rudolf Virchow and Adolf Bastian, and influenced the German-born Franz Boas, a longtime professor at Columbia University, who trained most of the formative generation of 20th-century American anthropologists. The debate between idealism and materialism in cultural anthropology continues today.