Anthropology, especially applied anthropology, can promote cross-cultural understanding, particularly using its holistic and relativistic lenses. However, in the past, the discipline was associated with colonialism and was more ethnocentric, using “science” and ideas about evolution to construct “race”, something we now know to be a social construct. In cultural anthropology, theories such as neo-evolutionism did the same thing culturally, they created a “scientific” notion that cultures evolve from simple to complex. Explain how this could have created many of the issues we face today globally in terms of inequity…think about Native Americans, the African slave trade, etc.
