International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Vol. 4, No. 10(1); August 2014 155 An Overview of the Anthropological Theories Nurazzura Mohamad Diah Head Department of Sociology & Anthropology International Islamic University Malaysia Dewan Mahboob Hossain Associate Professor Department of Accounting & Information Systems University of Dhaka Bangladesh Sohela Mustari PhD Student Department of Sociology & Anthropology International Islamic University Malaysia Noor Syafika Ramli Master in Anthropology Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Abstract Theories are treated as the lifeblood of the disciplines like sociology and anthropology. As a newer discipline that has grown approximately over the last two hundred years, anthropology has proposed different important theories on man and culture. This article presents with an overview of the theories of anthropology developed over the last two hundred years. This can be considered as a general summarized reading of the important anthropological theories like evolutionism, diffusionism, historical particularism, functionalism, culture and personality, structuralism, neo-evolutionism, cultural ecology, cultural materialism, postmodernist and feminist explanations. This article concludes that though each of these theories was criticized by the subsequent theorists, all these theories contributed a lot in the development of anthropology as a discipline. Keywords: anthropology, theory, anthropological theory 1.0. Introduction In the academic arena, anthropology is considered as a relatively new discipline as its major development mainly happened in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Though, in France and Germany, this discipline got a momentum in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries in different names (like ethnology, Volkskunde, Volkerkunde etc.), in English, the word ‘anthropology’ first appeared in the year of 1805 (McGee and Warms, 2012; 6). The word anthropology has a Greek origin. The Greek ‘anthropos’ means human and ‘logos’ means science and thus, anthropology represents science of human (Barnard, 2000; 1). According to Haviland, Prins, Walrath and McBride (2011; 2), anthropology is ‘the study of humankind in all times and places’. Ahmed (1986; 13) commented that ‘the major task of anthropology – the study of man - is to enable us to understand ourselves through understanding other cultures’. Langness (1974; 1) defined anthropology as ‘.. the scientific study of human beings- that is, of the human creature viewed in the abstract: male, female, all colors and shapes, prehistoric, ancient, and modern. Anthropology, then, most fundamentally viewed, is simply the attempt of human beings to study and hence to understand themselves at all times and all places’.According to Barrett (1996; 3):