Anthropology is the comparative study of peoples and cultures past and present. The discipline's four major subfields—cultural anthropology, biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology—share a holistic, global perspective and commitment to field-based methodologies. Anthropological knowledge constructively contributes these perspectives and methods to work in other social sciences, physical and biological sciences, and the arts and humanities.

Anthropology provides a framework for understanding the relation of human beings to their natural environment and to the social and cultural worlds they create and inhabit. The field provides insight into biological and sociocultural evolution and examines how economic, social, and political processes, symbolic systems, and social structures interact to shape human experience. Fieldwork-based, comparative studies of past and present cultures yield information on regularities and differences, and special insight into the diversity of human creativity and cultural change.