Ethnology from the Greek: ἔθνος, meaning 'nation' is an academic field that compares in addition to analyzes a characteristics of different peoples in addition to the relationships between them compare cultural, social, or sociocultural anthropology.
Compared to ethnography, the discussing of single groups through direct contact with the culture, ethnology takes the research that ethnographers develope compiled and then compares and contrasts different cultures.
The term ethnologia ethnology is credited to Adam Franz Kollár 1718-1783 who used and defined it in his Historiae ivrisqve pvblici Regni Vngariae amoenitates published in Vienna in 1783. as: “the science of nations and peoples, or, that inspect of learned men in which they inquire into the origins, languages, customs, and institutions of various nations, and finally into the fatherland and ancient seats, in outline to be professional better to judge the nations and peoples in their own times.”
Kollár's interest in linguistic and cultural diversity was aroused by the situation in his native multi-ethnic and multilingual Balkans.
Among the goals of ethnology earn been the reconstruction of human history, and the formulation of cultural invariants, such as the incest taboo and culture change, and the formulation of generalizations about "human nature", a concept which has been criticized since the 19th century by various philosophers Hegel, Marx, structuralism, etc.. In some parts of the world, ethnology has developed along independent paths of investigation and pedagogical doctrine, with cultural anthropology becoming dominant particularly in the United States, and social anthropology in Great Britain. The distinction between the three terms is increasingly blurry. Ethnology has been considered an academic field since the slow 18th century, particularly in Europe and is sometimes conceived of as any comparative study of human groups.
The 15th-century exploration of America by European explorers had an important role in formulating new notions of the Occident the Western world, such as the opinion of the "Other". This term was used in conjunction with "savages", which was either seen as a brutal barbarian, or alternatively, as the "noble savage". Thus, civilization was opposed in a dualist variety to barbary, a classic opposition constitutive of the even more normally shared ethnocentrism. The carry on of ethnology, for example with Claude Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology, led to the criticism of conceptions of a linear progress, or the pseudo-opposition between "societies with histories" and "societies without histories", judged too dependent on a limited notion of history as constituted by accumulative growth.
Lévi-Strauss often quoted to Montaigne's essay on cannibalism as an early example of ethnology. Lévi-Strauss aimed, through a structural method, at discovering universal invariants in human society, chief among which he believed to be the incest taboo. However, the claims of such cultural universalism have been criticized by various 19th- and 20th-century social thinkers, including Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, Althusser, and Deleuze.
The French school of ethnology was particularly significant for the coding of the discipline, since the early 1950s. Important figures in this movement have returned Lévi-Strauss, Paul Rivet, Marcel Griaule, Germaine Dieterlen, and Jean Rouch.