I was trying to decide what I wanted to major in so I would know what colleges to apply. However, I was having some difficulties because so many of the majors sounded really good. Finally, I realized I was going about it the wrong way for me I had to stop and think okay what do I want my job to be. I looked at what I was interested in and what always caught my attention and it went down to learning, history, cultures, and humanity. I loved learning about people from modern times to ancient times. I always want to know how they lived and why they lived a certain way. Okay I knew this now and so I used sites to help me narrow down majors that include these interests. Eventually after going through a lot of majors I found it and with it my dream job in museum curation. And the major was Anthropology.

I know you are probably wondering what the heck is anthropology. Well as my Cultural Anthropology professor put it; it is the study of humanity in all space and time. Still confused? Well thank the Lord there is this article to tell you all about it.

Alright well lets break down how my professor described Anthropology. It is the study of humanity meaning well humans; anthropologists study humans from every race, culture, ethnicity, land, language, and the very DNA in every human. It is simple as that and as for the space and time part anthropologists study humanity from the earliest human being known to the humans in modern time and to even how humans could be in the future. Of course this is broken down into the four categories that make up Anthropology.

Anthropology breaks down into four categories: Cultural Anthropology, Linguistics, Archaeology, and Biological Anthropology. Each of these categories studies aspects of humanity. Cultural Anthropology studies all aspects that make a human culture. However, cultural anthropologists tend to study one or maybe three aspects of a culture. So this can be studying a specific group of people and their religion in a certain area and how it affects some aspect of their lives. So for example in Anthropology & Humanity Daniela Castellanos wrote an article on the Aguabuena People and how envy is ordinary and practiced daily in their community and how it is even reciprocated in their community. Using this study, she wanted show how other scientists can revisit other universalistic ideas. Her article is just one example of what a cultural anthropologist could write about pertaining to a culture. Cultural Anthropology does actually have a sub category which is sociocultural anthropology which combines sociology and anthropology together. This one can really go into the social and cultural aspects of a group.

In Linguistic Anthropology they study how language influences the social life by looking at the structure of a language or how it is even recorded in no literate societies. They break down a language see how it has evolved and see how certain things are communicated and understood through language. So for example some linguistic anthropologists could theoretically focus on the word racists and find its origin see how it began then evolved throughout the years and how it comes across to people.

Archaeology is the study of past and recent cultures and humanity through artifacts and materials that remain behind. Now this one is more widely known due to Indiana Jones even though he did a lot of stuff that an archaeologist would never do and would probably get fired for doing. But besides that many archaeologists do actually go to sites and do archaeological digs and discover remains and artifacts of different cultures and civilizations. And finally there is biological anthropology.

Biological anthropology is also known as Physical anthropology and it is the study of evolution and adaption in humanity. Biological anthropologists compare humans and animals to understand what makes humans unique. They also compare humans from now to humans they found in the past seeing how we evolved and developed. A famous sub category of Biological Anthropology is forensic anthropology. Forensic Anthropology is a relatively new field that has begun to really pick up lately and was furthered put into the spotlight because of the TV show BONES.

These are all very brief summaries of what each category of Anthropology studies, but there are plenty of sites from colleges that can explain them in more detail or there are books that go really into detail and show what each field does, their subcategories, and what jobs can come from the different fields. You can combine anthropology with anything and it will help you in your job you just have to know what to combine them with and which ones to choose for your career, but that is an article for another time.