Disciplinary boundaries within the anthropological field differ. European institutions, for example, rarely use the “four-field approach” of American anthropology. Moreover, what in North America and Great Britain would be considered social or cultural anthropology has long been divided into two disciplines in much of central, eastern, and northern Europe. In German, the distinction has been made between Volkskunde and Völkerkunde, and, although these terms may now be somewhat outdated, they express the traditional divide clearly. One discipline was devoted to “the people”; it centred on national cultural traditions, particularly those of the peasantry, and could be seen, in its origins, as a scholarly wing of 19th-century Romantic nationalism. The other dealt with “peoples,” in the plural—particularly non-European peoples—and had its linkages to European global expansion and colonialism. Both studies were usually distinct from sociology. The discipline dealing with distant peoples and cultures usually was more closely related to the field of geography, with which it sometimes shared scholarly associations.

By the beginning of the 21st century, both disciplines had gone through important changes, although in academic organization they tended to remain separate. In places where the more nationally oriented discipline had borne the heavy burden of ideology linked to totalitarian regimes between the World Wars, even a term such as Volk had come to seem suspect. Moreover, there was increasingly less of a peasantry to study. This discipline, then, tended to redefine itself as concerned with “everyday life” and took on other names, such as “European ethnology.” In roughly the first half of the 20th century, the discipline that focused on non-European peoples had developed more strongly in the countries that had colonies, and the regional specializations had much to do with colonial connections: French anthropology was strong on West Africa and Oceania, Dutch anthropology on insular Southeast Asia and Suriname, Belgian anthropology on Central Africa; and what there was of a Portuguese anthropology predictably focused on Lusophone Africa. In much of Europe this discipline was labeled “ethnography” until the latter part of the century, when, under British and American influence, it often became “anthropology,” whether “social” or “cultural.” By then, in the early postcolonial period, it was increasingly associated with key concepts such as “the Third World” or “development,” and the discipline also grew significantly in European countries without much of a colonial past, such as those of Scandinavia. Yet there, as in the Anglophone countries, the emphasis on non-European societies gradually weakened as an increasing number of anthropologists began to practice what was described, sometimes quite loosely, as “anthropology at home.” With this change, the difference between what had been Volkskunde and Völkerkunde would seem to have less significance, but, to a degree, research traditions remain distinct and disciplinary professional identities strong.

Of the European anthropologies, apart from British anthropology, French anthropology has had the greatest long-term international influence. The work of Marcel Mauss, extending the work of the more generally sociological Durkheimian tradition into the mainstream of anthropology, was multifaceted but is especially remembered for his Essai sur le don (1925; The Gift), an analysis of “the gift,” including an examination of the concepts of reciprocity and exchange. The long-term work on West African worldviews (Dieu d’eau: entretiens avec Ogotemmêli [1948]) by the group around Marcel Griaule has perhaps been more admired than really influential. For several decades in the second half of the 20th century, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism (as detailed in such works as La Pensée sauvage, 1962) had a wide intellectual impact far outside the discipline of anthropology, and the work of Louis Dumont (Homo Hierarchicus, 1966) on hierarchy and inequality, especially in the South Asian context, also ranks among the classics of the discipline. In the 1970s the work of such “structural Marxists” as Maurice Godelier on modes of production and related concepts drew considerable attention. In the later decades of the 20th century, French influence on international anthropology was mostly associated with thinkers outside the discipline itself, such as the philosopher Michel Foucault and the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu; but it may be noted that much of Bourdieu’s influence dates to his earlier “anthropological” period, drawing on work in Algeria.

Anthropology in the German-speaking countries had a high international profile in the early part of the 20th century, when it centred on culture history, culture areas, and cultural diffusion. Such interests became increasingly marginal in the discipline elsewhere, and German anthropology went into a period of stagnation in the interwar years, although some individuals remained in the forefront; Richard Thurnwald, for example, is sometimes mentioned as one of the progenitors of functionalism in anthropology. After World War II, as the discipline reconstructed itself, German anthropologists tended to be more preoccupied with detailed ethnography than with more general theoretical concerns, and they increasingly followed the lines of intellectual development emerging elsewhere in the discipline. The fact that German anthropologists write mostly in German—in a period when that language is no longer widely used in the academy—has undoubtedly had a part in making them less noticeable in international intellectual exchange.

Anthropologists in eastern and central Europe during the communist period were unable to communicate easily with colleagues on the other side of the Iron Curtain. For historical reasons, the Volkskunde variant of the discipline tended to be stronger than the Völkerkunde variant, and, in order to survive, it fairly mechanically absorbed a sufficient amount of Marxist-Leninist vocabulary. In the Soviet Union the discipline of ethnography was in large part devoted to the study of the non-Russian peoples of the national periphery. An approach to the study of ethno-national groups was developed that was congruous with Soviet nationality policy as introduced by Joseph Stalin, combining a somewhat superficial recognition of cultural identities with integration into the communist state. In the years after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, anthropologists in Russia and other countries formerly under its domination increasingly oriented themselves toward the contemporary currents of anthropology in western Europe and North America, although, on the whole, the concomitant economic upheavals made academic work very difficult.

Generally speaking, sociocultural anthropology in most European countries is no longer characterized by distinctive “national traditions.” Outside the old colonial powers, it grew considerably only in roughly the latter third of the 20th century. To a degree it is marked by the centre-periphery relationships of international academic life, insofar as some of the pioneers in various countries had their training in the United States, Great Britain, and France; one can sometimes discern a stronger French influence in southern Europe and a stronger Anglophone influence in northern Europe. Yet scholarly interactions within European anthropology are now no longer so dependent on old centres. The formation of a European Association of Social Anthropologists in 1989 encouraged more crosscutting linkages, and from its beginnings this association included researchers from all parts of a continent no longer divided by an Iron Curtain.

Anthropology in Latin America

The Latin American anthropological tradition deviates from that of western Europe and the United States, but it is not separate. Indeed, Latin American anthropology developed in tandem with European scientific thought, in terms of both the level of training and intellectual exchange, with figures such as Franz Boas and Claude Lévi-Strauss contributing directly to the establishment of local research and teaching institutions. The major difference between the Latin American and the western European–U.S. field is that Latin American anthropology developed principally for the study and transformation of the researchers’ own national societies. While most of the broad comparative points and encompassing theoretical approaches were articulated in Europe and the United States, Latin American anthropologists have had a much more immediate impact on society. Latin American anthropologists had a significant influence on the modernization of their countries, and they were among the first to explore the failings of both unilineal evolutionary models and of apolitical forms of celebrating cultural difference.

The Ibero-American territories were among the first sites of early modern ethnography in the 16th century. A number of the principal questions regarding human nature, human rights, and international rights were first raised in the context of Spanish colonization. Great figures of the early contact period, such as Bernardino de Sahagún, Bartolomé de Las Casas, and Francisco de Vitoria, and early mestizo writers such as Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala have been regarded by modern anthropologists as the founders of Latin American ethnography, of the anthropological defense of native peoples, and of the philosophical, juridical, and anthropological criticism of colonialism.

After the early wave of ethnographic interest and philosophical discussions regarding the nature of indigenous peoples and the legitimacy and suitable forms of Spanish rule, 17th-century Creole intellectual elites began to exhibit an antiquarian interest in the pre-Columbian world. Yet ethnography remained of interest because of growing religious concerns with the persistence of “idolatry” among the Indians and, indeed, with its potential influence on nonindigenous Americans. The passion for antiquities was tied to the emergence of Creole patriotism, but concerns with idolatry were an aspect of colonial governance. These two dimensions of anthropological inquiry, the study of the cultural patrimony of a nation and the study and modification of the culture and habits of indigenous peoples, would be central to the development of modern Latin American anthropology.

The independence of Latin America came earlier than that of the rest of the “postcolonial” world, and this had a distinctive effect on its anthropology, since the concern with shaping modern nations existed alongside a keen awareness of what was considered backwardness. The evolutionist ideas imported in the 19th century were generally tied to the notion of racial “degeneration.” So, for example, critical political treatises such as those of the Argentine Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1845), the Brazilian Euclides da Cunha (1902), and the Mexican Andrés Molina Enríquez (1909) drew on anthropological works to posit connections between racial degeneration, civilization, modernization and social justice.

In the 1920s and ’30s, Latin American anthropologists such as Manuel Gamio in Mexico and Gilberto Freyre in Brazil used cultural relativism to shape their nations on the ideal of racial mixture. Gamio’s Teotihuacán project (1922) was notable not only for its accomplishments in the fields of archaeology and ethnography but also because it guided the revolutionary state’s intervention in land distribution, education, credit, and public works in the region. The combination of the study, preservation, and glorification of indigenous cultures with recommendations for the material improvement and modernization of American Indians came to be known as indigenismo, and it was the dominant framework for Latin American anthropological investigation and institutional growth until the 1960s.

Since that time, influenced principally by neo-Marxist, structuralist, and post-structuralist approaches, Latin American anthropology has often been critical of modernization projects. The late 20th-century anthropological study of peasantries, of cities and city dwellers, of social movements, of social networks, of national culture, of internal and transnational migration, of ethnic relations, and of political mediation received some of their earliest explorations in Latin America.