Social and Cultural anthropology: What defines and justifies the study of the discipline.

Introduction. For many thousands of years, travel, trade and exploration have brought people of different languages and cultures into contact with each other, generating tales of strange and exotic peoples and their customs. What is a universal human trait, curiosity, evolved through the centuries into intellectual speculation and philosophical theories about "the other" and later still, became the scientific study of mankind. Although the roots of anthropology can be traced to antiquity, it only emerged …

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