Ethnology

Ethnology started in the eighteenth century as a systematic attempt to acquire and compare information on those nonEuropean populations who did not possess written records of their history and cultural heritage. Coined as a derivation of the Greek word ‘ethnos,’ meaning ‘a people,’ the term ‘ethnology’ in its most general meaning indicates a scholarly interest in how aggregations of human beings are distinct from each other in terms of material culture, language, religion, moral ideas, or social institutions. Early developments in ethnology also included speculative theories on assumed interrelations between cultural and biological group differences.

Ethnology was first considered to be a subfield of anthropology. In the late nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, the umbrella term of anthropology was applied to a much broader domain of scholarly interest than today and included physical anthropology, linguistics, and archeology along with ethnology. Because what has become known as Cultural Anthropology in the USA, and as Social Anthropology in Great Britain and the Commonwealth countries, grew out of earlier ethnological concerns, ethnology is also regarded as the predecessor of Anglo–American anthropology.

By the end of World War II, the meaning of ‘ethnology’ had contracted to define but one of the scholarly practices that form the anthropological enterprise. Ethnography was understood as data-gathering in a single society, usually in a spatially and temporally bounded situation, such as when the fieldworker spends one year as a participant observer in a local community and later writes up the findings in a stand-alone, case study-type monograph (also called ethnography). Ethnology, by contrast, utilizes the information collected in a number of ethnographies in order to engage in systematic cross-cultural comparisons between two or more societies.

In recent decades, the term ethnology has acquired yet another meaning. In a number of European countries, ethnology is prefixed with European and replaces earlier approaches to the study of folklore and the investigation of national culture history.