Anthropology (Gr. ανθρωπολογία, or anthropologia, anthr=man and ology=study of). Traditionally known as the study of man - anthropology grew out of the golden age of colonial exploration, with its allure of foreign adventure and travel to exotic lands. Young men of means and to a lesser extent, women, whether for personal, institutional, or national gains set out from European nations to distant colonial outposts in Africa, Asia, North or South America for the purposes of identifying and describing native populations and the lands on which they lived.
The first-hand observations that these early explorers wrote in journals, letters, and offical government reports were the informal precursors of the ethnography, or descriptive account, of the people encountered while traveling in the colonies. Missionaries too, contributed to the rise of modern anthropology by writing about native religions, and in America, the Western expansion provided fertile ground for anthropological studies of native American Indians.
In addition to the published output of these early ethnologists, artifacts collected in the field and shipped home or brought back for study or for display in the parlor or museum provided the material means for a further understanding of non-Western societies. In this manner, items like ceremonial masks, tools, weapons, garments, textiles, handicrafts, and various forms of native art became the basis for interpretive studies of the populations from which they derived.
In its totality, anthropology developed a holistic approach to the study of small-scale societies that took into account the full range of cultural, social, or learned behaviors, as well as physiological, linguistic, and historical characteristics. Less concerned with the individual than with the role that culture - or traditional way of life - exerts on individuals or groups, anthropologists traditionally aim to define, analyze, and uncover local manifestations of universal human traits and to explain differences or similarities in patterns of behavior among societies by applying the methods of study of one or more of the four subfields of anthropology: cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, linguistics, and archaeology.
This list contains but a small sampling of nineteenth and early twentieth century anthropological writings by ethnologists and other scholars.