Aberdeen, United Kingdom

Anthropology and History

Integrated Master's degree
Table of contents

Anthropology and History at University of Aberdeen

Language: EnglishStudies in English
Subject area: social
Qualification: MA
Kind of studies: full-time studies
Master of Arts (MA)
University website: www.abdn.ac.uk

Definitions and quotes

Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humans and human behaviour and societies in the past and present. Social anthropology and cultural anthropology study the norms and values of societies. Linguistic anthropology studies how language affects social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the biological development of humans.
History
History (from Greek ἱστορία, historia, meaning "inquiry, knowledge acquired by investigation") is the study of the past as it is described in written documents. Events occurring before written record are considered prehistory. It is an umbrella term that relates to past events as well as the memory, discovery, collection, organization, presentation, and interpretation of information about these events. Scholars who write about history are called historians.
Anthropology
Economics and cultural anthropology … have as their clear presuppositions one or the other of the two states of nature. Locke argued that man’s conquest of nature by his work is the only rational response to his original situation. … Economics comes into being as the science of man’s proper activity, and the free market as the natural and rational order. … Rousseau argued that nature is good and man far away from it. So the quest for those faraway origins becomes imperative. … What economists believe to be things of the irrational past—known only as underdeveloped societies—become the proper study of man, a diagnosis of our ills and a call to the future. … Economists teach that the market is the fundamental social phenomenon, and its culmination is money. Anthropologists teach that culture is the fundamental social phenomenon, and its culmination is the sacred. Such is the confrontation—man the producer of consumption goods vs. man the producer of culture, the maximizing animal vs. the reverent one.
Allan Bloom (1987) The Closing of the American Mind. p. 361-363
History
The greater part of what passes for diplomatic history is little more than the record of what one clerk said to another clerk.
G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (1936)
History
Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.
W. H. Auden, The Dyers Hand, "D.H. Lawrence" (1962)
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