American anthropology studies the human condition across cultures in both the past and present, as well as considers the primate family in general. For most of the twentieth century this “holistic perspective” fostered a “four-field approach,” including archaeological, physical, linguistic and cultural anthropology. What held the four fields together was the concept of “culture”—whether embodied in the material remains of past human activity, the physical attributes of Homo sapiens, or their relatives and ancestors, as a guide for human action or media of meaning and interpreting experience.

The four-field approach emerged from earlier natural histories that sought to catalogue in genealogical relationships all observable elements of nature, including humans.

Anthropology concerned itself with non-western peoples, the “simple societies of the primitive world,” while sociology became the study of “modern complex societies of the West.” In America, the readily available nonwestern subjects were American Indians, while British and French anthropology examined social structure and meaning among colonized peoples.

In recent years the four-field approach has become the source of heated debate, with many academic departments abandoning it as an organizing principle. Increasing specialization and cross-disciplinary ties have contributed to this. Perhaps most significant to this fragmentation is a divide between those who embrace anthropology as a “science” and those who link it to a challenge to Eurocentric meta-narratives that include science itself as a subject of study.

Because of its cross-cultural, multi-temporal, relativist perspective, anthropologists have always considered all phenomena on their own terms, whether employing the comparative method or seeking universal or particular features. In the late 1960s and the 1970s other academic disciplines of study particularly the humanities, began to look to anthropology for theoretical orientations that became pivotal in “de-centering” conventions of study that refracted unequal relations of power, Euro- and ethnocentric.

Yet, the anthropological perspective did not play much of a role in the “culture wars” that followed (Rosaldo 1994).

American anthropology continues to reflect and shape social forms and practices in the study of the human condition. Once holding the contradictory position as a handmaiden of the European and American colonial enterprise while acting as advocate of nonwestern peoples in the face of imperialism, anthropology now is a contested site in the contemporary politics of identity. Local and global flows, displacements, and reintegrations of populations which have produced ethnic politics as a site of contestation, and a fragmented “social imaginary” (Appadurai 1996) are both the subjects of contemporary anthropology and the cause of some of its recent theoretical and practical reformations.

The face of American anthropology is increasingly female and increasingly “other” (see Behar and Gordon 1995). Post-colonial theorists from what once were the peripheries of the EuroAmerican core also have entered the anthropological enterprise.

Anthropology as a “science,” the notion of holism, the comparative method, the culture concept, relativism, fieldwork, analytical and interpretative frameworks, and forms of textual presentations have all come under attack as symptoms of an inequality in power relations between western and non-western peoples, places and spaces.

This critique of anthropology often referred to as the “crisis of representation” (Marcus and Fischer 1986) has led to ill-feeling among anthropologists. Contemporary American anthropology is increasingly seen to be a cultural anthropology that often includes linguistic anthropology, with archaeology and physical anthropology aligned with each other or completely separated. Some archaeologists and physical anthropologists, meanwhile, believe that cultural anthropology has lost its subject—culture—to other disciplines, which has led to its demise as a subfield.

What relevance does anthropology have for contemporary American culture? More so than ever before anthropologists, particularly cultural anthropologists, are engaging in research here at “home.” Medical anthropology, practice anthropology and its problemsolving orientation, urban ethnographies, film and media studies, a revitalized partnership with folklore and folk-life studies, and an interest on the part of the corporate world in anthropology have brought it closer to the surface of public culture.