anthrōpos + logos

Greek anthrōpos meant human being and logos meant study, discourse, or reason. Anthropologia appeared in Latin texts from the early 16th century — Magnus Hundt used it in his 1501 work Anthropologium de hominis dignitate, referring to the study of human nature and the body. The word was a scholarly coinage for a scholarly project: understanding what humans are.

Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BCE, is sometimes called the father of anthropology for his Histories — a vast comparative survey of the customs, religions, and social arrangements of Egyptians, Persians, Scythians, Lydians, and dozens of other peoples. Herodotus did not study them to judge them as inferior; he studied them because he found humanity's variety interesting. This is anthropology's founding attitude.

The modern discipline took shape in the 19th century, largely in the shadow of European colonialism. Anthropologists studied colonized peoples for governments that wanted to administer them. E.B. Tylor's 1871 Primitive Culture established the evolutionary framework: societies progressed from primitive to civilized, and anthropologists mapped where each stood. The framework was wrong and the politics were worse.

Franz Boas, working from the 1890s onward, dismantled the evolutionary hierarchy. He argued that cultures had to be understood on their own terms — cultural relativism — and that race was a social construction, not a biological fact. Boas trained a generation of anthropologists, including Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston, who reshaped the discipline. Anthropology is still reckoning with its colonial origins.