The Anthropologist 100
100 students of the human
Anthropology is the long, uneasy attempt to study ourselves with the same care we use to study everything else. These hundred figures — fieldworkers and theorists, archaeologists and linguists, structuralists and storytellers — show how varied that attempt has been, and how much the answers depend on where you stand.
Map A — Theory of culture
Universal patterns ↔ Particular histories × Structure ↔ Agency
Map A asks how each anthropologist locates the unit of analysis. The horizontal axis runs from STRUCTURE — culture as system, function or rule — to AGENCY — culture as practice, performance, improvisation. The vertical from UNIVERSAL — comparative, deep-pattern, species-wide — to PARTICULAR — historical, situated, irreducible.
Map B — Where the evidence comes from
Field ↔ Armchair × Scientific ↔ Interpretive
Map B is about where data is gathered and how it is processed. FIELD means long stays among the people studied; ARMCHAIR means working from texts, comparisons, museum collections or theory. SCIENTIFIC means quantitative, hypothesis-driven, replicable; INTERPRETIVE means qualitative, hermeneutic, meaning-seeking.
Map C — Stance toward people and discipline
Engaged ↔ Detached × Critical ↔ Synthetic
Map C is about temperament. ENGAGED means activist, applied, or public-facing; DETACHED means scholarly, contemplative, deliberately distanced. CRITICAL means destabilising the discipline's assumptions; SYNTHETIC means founding, systematising, building canon.
The Table — All 100
Sortable, searchable, filterable. Click any name to open the full Wikipedia entry.
| # | Name | Years | Subfield | Era | Known for |
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