For many students, anthropology becomes a framework for integrating knowledge and
a system of organization for their formal education. The anthropological perspective is
holistic; that is, each piece or aspect of a culture is viewed within the context of the
whole culture. Unique among the social sciences and humanities, anthropology studies
people and behavior in a cross-cultural perspective.
It has accumulated the world's largest database of knowledge about humans living in
hunter-gatherer, horticultural, herding, nomadic, peasant, island, urban, industrial, and
post-industrial societies.
It combines sciences with humanities, biology with culture, history with prehistory, in
both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to understanding the human
condition. Anthropology studies commonalties as well as differences in the cultural
behavior of humans. This aspect of the discipline has wide ramifications for expanding
the students' world-view and approaches to other studies by increasing their awareness
of ethnocentric bias.
The evolution of human life and its varied expressions on the face of the globe today is
the result of an interplay of physical, social, and cultural factors. Anthropologists study
various aspects of this development, whether in the remains of ancient civilizations, or in
the isolated mountains of New Guinea, among nomads of the Middle East, or in urban
areas of industrialized societies like New York City, in order to further understand the
human experience.