the.com/ethnology
Anthropology's map-and-compare cousin, charting how cultures echo and diverge across the globe.
means The branch of anthropology devoted to comparing peoples and cultures to understand their characteristics and relationships to one another.
from Built from Greek ethnos ('people, nation, tribe') plus -logia ('study of'), the word surfaced in the 19th century as scholars began systematically cataloguing and comparing the world's cultures — part of that era's broader passion for classifying everything, from rocks to races to rituals.
- vs ethnography
- ethnography describes one culture, ethnology compares many
- origin
- coined in the 1830s from Greek ethnos, nation
- old focus
- once obsessed with classifying races, now discredited
- modern role
- folded largely into cultural anthropology departments today