It is concerned with the commonalities that make us all human, and the extraordinary forms in which that shared humanity has been expressed. Understanding human diversity entails stepping back from our own interpretations of the world to ask how and why these may differ from those of other people. A broad comparative knowledge of other ways of interpreting and acting in the world is essential if we are to understand the general processes by which the social and cultural patterns that shape people's lives and give them meaning are produced. Anthropologists have thus been led to examine in detail societies which are very different from their own, in scale and in modes of life and thought. Such differences, of course, are to be found at home as well as abroad, and between the multiple spheres in which people conduct their lives.
Most anthropological research is interdisciplinary as well as cross-cultural.
Anthropologists might, for example, draw on the approaches of economics, ecology, psychology, agronomy, demography, evolutionary biology, history, and symbolic analysis to document how and explain why people structure their society in a certain way. Characteristically, however, anthropology's particular insights have come from intensive and long-term fieldwork conducted by researchers living among the people being studied, speaking with them in their own language, and participating in their daily activities. In this way, anthropologists attempt to come to know the reality of another culture, as it is experienced by those who are its members. Their task is to convey through their ethnographic writings, and to make comprehensible through their analyses, the meaning of that other way of life. To enter into another culture is automatically to render problematic many aspects of one's own, and anthropology can also be understood as a study of 'otherness' that provides us with a critical vantage point from which to reflect on ourselves.