| The anthropologist [[Eric Wolf]] once described anthropology as "the most scientific of the humanities, and the most humanistic of the [[sciences]]." Contemporary anthropologists claim a number of earlier thinkers as their forebears, and the discipline has several sources; [[Claude Lévi-Strauss]], for example, claimed [[Montaigne]] and [[Rousseau]] as important influences. Anthropology can best be understood as an outgrowth of the [[Age of Enlightenment]], a period when Europeans attempted systematically to study human behavior, the known varieties of which had been increasing since the 15th century as a result of the [[First European colonization wave]]. The traditions of [[jurisprudence]], [[history]], [[philology]], and [[sociology]] then evolved into something more closely resembling the modern views of these disciplines and informed the development of the [[social sciences]], of which anthropology was a part. At the same time, the [[Romanticism|Romantic]] reaction to the Enlightenment produced thinkers, such as [[Johann Gottfried Herder]] and later [[Wilhelm Dilthey]], whose work formed the basis for the "culture concept," which is central to the discipline. | | The anthropologist [[Eric Wolf]] once described anthropology as "the most scientific of the humanities, and the most humanistic of the [[sciences]]." Contemporary anthropologists claim a number of earlier thinkers as their forebears, and the discipline has several sources; [[Claude Lévi-Strauss]], for example, claimed [[Montaigne]] and [[Rousseau]] as important influences. Anthropology can best be understood as an outgrowth of the [[Age of Enlightenment]], a period when Europeans attempted systematically to study human behavior, the known varieties of which had been increasing since the 15th century as a result of the [[First European colonization wave]]. The traditions of [[jurisprudence]], [[history]], [[philology]], and [[sociology]] then evolved into something more closely resembling the modern views of these disciplines and informed the development of the [[social sciences]], of which anthropology was a part. At the same time, the [[Romanticism|Romantic]] reaction to the Enlightenment produced thinkers, such as [[Johann Gottfried Herder]] and later [[Wilhelm Dilthey]], whose work formed the basis for the "culture concept," which is central to the discipline. |