Like many of the more complicated words in English, anthropology and ethnography both come from words in Ancient Greek. Anthropology is a combination of the words anthropos meaning human and logos meaning discussion or conversation. Literally then it means a conversation about humanity.

Ethnography comes from the words ethnos meaning people or group and graphia meaning writing so really just means writing about peoples. The two words have long been twins and have sometimes been combined to form ethnology meaning the study of peoples.

Humanities
If we accept the meaning of anthropology as a conversation about humanity, then this is a very ancient conversation. People wherever they have lived have had a sense of what it means to be human. This idea is at the core of many religious traditions as well as much literature and philosophy.

Any group of people is likely to have an "anthropology"; a set of ideas or reference points around which they discuss the idea of humanity.

New Encounters, New Challenges
The medieval European sense of humanity built on Christian and Classical values was challenged by encounters with people for whom these ideas meant little. In 1492 Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas and encountered a world that knew nothing of Christianity. In 1498 Vasco da Gama rounded the tip of Africa, encountering on his journeys people of the African continent as well as the people of the Indian ocean.
  

Were these people human and if so what did this mean?

How different were they, but also how much did they have in common with Europeans?

Of course these questions were also asked by the many of the people who encountered Europeans for the first time and this impacted on anthropologies across the world.

Evolution and the Bible
However the issue of humanity became most pronounced in the late 1850s as scientific findings meant that there was a questioning of the very basis of the European notion of humanity.

This was based on the biblical account of the origin of the world and earlier discussions had raged as to whether tribal peoples were part of God’s original creation or not. Archaeological findings now suggested that humans had been around very much longer than the biblical account allowed.

If human history could no longer be accounted for by the sources of biblical and classical knowledge, how would it be understood?

Many Europeans now began to look much more seriously at the activities of peoples on the edge of their empires, prompted by the similarities between the tools they used and those they had found in the archaeological record. Perhaps the lives of these people could help Europeans to understand their own past. It has been said that both Europeans and tribal people around the world mistook each other for their ancestors.

A New Subject
This is perhaps the definitive starting point of anthropology and ethnography as serious academic areas of study, linked as they were to natural history.

Anthropology included the physical study of human bodies alongside archaeology, and the study of objects and practices from around the world. Anthropology as an academic subject became a project to understand the implications of the scientific suggestion that all humans were truly one species.

Ethnography emerged within this as the written description of people from around the world and museum ethnography became the display and description of these people in museums using objects alongside written texts.

Contemporary Anthropology
The world has changed greatly over the last 150 years and so has anthropology. Anthropologists are now as likely to study urban skateboarders in Birmingham as tribes in remote Africa.

Many anthropologists would see their subject as one of the few in the western world with a truly global perspective in that it seeks to understand all human societies in their own terms and engages on a human level - through personal encounters.

The ultimate challenge of anthropology is to recognise the human and the similar in "the other": to go beyond the surface appearance of difference and the exotic. In order to do this, it is necessary to do so as a human and to open up one’s ideas of what it means to be human.

Anthropology is a subject with a history, but it is also conversation about the meaning of humanity. We all contribute to this conversation in the way in which we feel, think, talk and act in relation to the other humans we encounter every day.

Useful links to explore anthropology further.

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