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The study of work. 'Work' is used here to refer to any social activity. The analytic interest is in how that work is accomplished within the setting in which it is performed. The haecceity of work. Just what makes an activity what it is? e.g. what makes a test a test, a competition a competition, or a definition a definition?
Community studies is an academic field drawing on both sociology and anthropology and the social research methods of ethnography and participant observation in the study of community. In academic settings around the world, community studies is variously a sub-discipline of anthropology or sociology, or an independent discipline.
The typical ethnography is a holistic study and so includes a brief history, and an analysis of the terrain, the climate, and the habitat. A wide range of groups and organisations have been studied by this method, including traditional communities, youth gangs , religious cults , and organisations of various kinds.
Among the goals of ethnology have 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.).
Cross-cultural studies, sometimes called holocultural studies or comparative studies, is a specialization in anthropology and sister sciences such as sociology, psychology, economics, political science that uses field data from many societies through comparative research to examine the scope of human behavior and test hypotheses about human behavior and culture.
Ethnohistory is the study of cultures and indigenous peoples customs by examining historical records as well as other sources of information on their lives and history. It is also the study of the history of various ethnic groups that may or may not still exist. The term is most commonly used in writing about the history of the Americas.
White, Douglas R. (1986) Focused Ethnographic Bibliography for the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample World Cultures 2(1):1–126. (Reprinted 1989 Behavior Science Research 23:1–145 and 2000 by William Divale) White, Douglas R. (2007) Standard Cross-Cultural Sample Free Distribution Site (UC Irvine) White, Douglas R. and George P. Murdock. (2006).
Cross-cultural (comparative ethnographic) studies can provide archaeological indicators of cultural and other (e.g., physical and social environmental) features. Using those indicators, researchers could test many causal ideas about the major events in cultural evolution and devolution on the time-series data in the archaeological record.