This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Anthropology is the comparative study of human societies, their cultures, their kinship systems, their beliefs and their material culture, studied across peoples and periods rather than within a single one. Its method is comparative ethnographic fieldwork, direct study of a society from within it, set beside cross cultural analysis that looks for what varies and what recurs across many societies at once, an approach that lets a single people's practice be read against a much wider human range rather than taken as self explanatory on its own.
The field's classic definition of its own subject, culture as a complex whole including belief, custom, law, art and every other capability a person acquires as a member of a society, comes from Edward Burnett Tylor's 1871 book Primitive Culture, which is why the field is generally dated to that year as the point its subject received a definition precise enough to organize a discipline around. Anthropology is classified among the social sciences, its evidence drawn from observed human behavior and testimony rather than from physical or chemical measurement.
Several regional and applied branches of anthropology narrow this same comparative method onto the ritual and cosmological life of a single people, asking of one culture in particular the same questions anthropology asks of human societies broadly, what a group holds as belief, how its kinship is organized, and how its world view is transmitted and lived, read the way an anthropologist reads any human social configuration rather than assessed against any one tradition's own doctrine.