A.R. Radcliffe BrownThinkers

Anthropology is a level of analysis where there is no room for judgement as to whether things such as slavery or cabalism, or the institutions of the US or Russia, are or are not right, good, reasonable, or just.

Anthropology is a so-called nomothetic inquiry, aiming to arrive at general propositions or theoretical statements. It contrasts with ethnography, which is a so-called idiographic inquiry, aimed at documenting the particular facts of past and present lives.

Anthropology is an analytic vantage such that say, the economic machinery of a society appears in 'quite a new light' if it is studied in relation to the social structure. The exchange of goods (z.B. The potlatch) was the machinery for maintaining a social structure of lineages, clans and moieties.

Anthropology is grounded in the quite impossible view that all customs and institutions of any society are right and good and that all socially accepted beliefs are true.

Anthropology is tasked with formulating laws of statics and laws of dynamics. Laws of statics formulate and validate statements about the conditions of existence of social systems. Laws of dynamics are concerned with the regularities that are observable in social change.

Anthropology is the study of discoverable regularities while ethnology is the reconstruction of history.

Anthropology is the study of the human being as person (or complex of social relations (a citizen of england, a husband, a father, a bricklayer) rather than, say, as a biological organism.