Editing Cultural anthropology (section)

===Ethnography===
{{main|Ethnography}}
In the 20th century, most cultural and social anthropologists turned to the crafting of [[ethnography|ethnographies]]. An ethnography is a piece of writing about a people, at a particular place and time. Typically, the anthropologist lives among people in another society for a period of time, simultaneously [[participant observation|participating in and observing]] the social and cultural life of the group.

Numerous other ethnographic techniques have resulted in ethnographic writing or details being preserved, as cultural anthropologists also curate materials, spend long hours in libraries, churches and schools poring over records, investigate graveyards, and decipher ancient scripts. A typical ethnography will also include information about physical geography, climate and habitat. It is meant to be a holistic piece of writing about the people in question, and today often includes the longest possible timeline of past events that the ethnographer can obtain through primary and secondary research.

[[Bronisław Malinowski]] developed the ethnographic method, and [[Franz Boas]] taught it in the [[United States]]. Boas' students such as [[Alfred L. Kroeber]], [[Ruth Benedict]] and [[Margaret Mead]] drew on his conception of culture and [[cultural relativism]] to develop cultural anthropology in the United States. Simultaneously, Malinowski and [[Alfred Radcliffe-Brown|A.R. Radcliffe Brown]]'s students were developing [[social anthropology]] in the United Kingdom. Whereas cultural anthropology focused on symbols and values, social anthropology focused on social groups and institutions. Today socio-cultural anthropologists attend to all these elements.

In the early 20th century, socio-cultural anthropology developed in different forms in [[Europe]] and in the United States. European "social anthropologists" focused on observed social behaviors and on "social structure", that is, on [[interpersonal relationship|relationships]] among social [[role]]s (for example, husband and wife, or parent and child) and social [[institution]]s (for example, [[anthropology of religion|religion]], [[economic anthropology|economy]], and [[political anthropology|politics]]).

American "cultural anthropologists" focused on the ways people expressed their view of themselves and their world, especially in [[symbol]]ic forms, such as [[art]] and [[Mythology|myths]]. These two approaches frequently converged and generally complemented one another. For example, [[kinship]] and [[leadership]] function both as symbolic systems and as social institutions. Today almost all socio-cultural anthropologists refer to the work of both sets of predecessors and have an equal interest in what people do and in what people say.