Introduction to Anthropology

Anthropology is a science that integrates knowledge from the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts to study human beings comprehensively. Emerging in the 19th century, anthropology holds a particularly important academic position, with profound practical significance and a high international relevance.Anthropology is divided into five fields: physical anthropology, archaeology, socio-cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and applied anthropology. These fields form a comprehensive research framework for studying human beings in the past and present, everywhere in the world. Anthropology is unique because it has a distinctive system of field research methods, paying close attention to theory, comparison, and description of human socio-cultural aspects. Each anthropologist usually specializes in one of the five fields mentioned above and focuses their research on one or a few specific countries. Vietnamese anthropology today is built on the foundation of inheriting the tradition of ethnology, which has been established in our country since the beginning of the 20th century, combined with modern European and American anthropological traditions.