Folklorists and cultural anthropologists such as P. Saintyves and Edward Burnett Tylor saw " Little Red Riding Hood " in terms of solar myths and other naturally-occurring cycles.

Folklorists and other ethnographers have taken advantage of each succeeding technology, from Thomas Edison's wax-cylinder recording machine ( invented in 1877 ) to the latest CD or digital audio equipment, to record the voices and music of many regional, ethnic, and cultural groups in the United States and around the world.

Folklorists such as Gwenith Gwynn, interviewing people in the early twentieth century, were unwittingly discovering folk memories of a Victorian misunderstanding rather than an actual, earlier folk practice.

Folklorists generally resist universal interpretations of narratives and, wherever possible, analyze oral versions of tellings in specific contexts, rather than print sources, which often show the work or bias of the writer or editor.

Folklorists associate the practice with the widespread British custom of blacking up for mumming and morris dancing, and suggest there is no record of slave ships coming to Padstow.

Folklorists have classified fairy tales in various ways.

Folklorists have attempted to determine the origin by internal evidence, which can not always be clear ; Joseph Jacobs, comparing the Scottish tale The Ridere of Riddles with the version collected by the Brothers Grimm, The Riddle, noted that in The Ridere of Riddles one hero ends up polygamously married, which might point to an ancient custom, but in The Riddle, the simpler riddle might argue greater antiquity.

Folklorists of the " Finnish " ( or historical-geographical ) school attempted to place fairy tales to their origin, with inconclusive results.

Folklorists have suggested that their actual origin lies in a conquered race living in hiding, or in religious beliefs that lost currency with the advent of Christianity.

Folklorists have suggested that the most popular legends about Whittington — that his fortunes were founded on the sale of his cat, who was sent on a merchant vessel to a rat-beset Eastern emperor — originated in a popular 17th-century engraving by Renold Elstracke in which his hand rested on a cat, but the picture only reflects a story already in wide circulation.

Folklorists have long studied variants on this tale across cultures.

Folklorists sometimes divide oral tales into two main groups: Märchen and Sagen.

Folklorists of the 19th century saw these figures as Celtic fairies.

Folklorists have proposed that the mine kobold derives from the beliefs of the ancient Germanic people.

History of British Folklore, Volume I: The British Folklorists: A History.

Folklorists often interpret the French folk tale Cinderella as the competition between the stepmother and the stepdaughter for resources, which may include the need to provide a dowry.

James Sharpe, in The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: the Western Tradition, states: " Folklorists began their investigations in the 19th Century found that familiars figured prominently in ideas about witchcraft.

Folklorists Iona and Peter Opie indicate in The Classic Fairy Tales ( 1974 ) that " Hansel and Gretel " belongs to a group of European tales especially popular in the Baltic regions about children outwitting ogres into whose hands they have involuntarily fallen.

Folklorists who have collected traditional music of Massachusetts include Eloise Hubbard Linscott, whose field recordings from 1938 and 1941 are in the Library of Congress American Folklife Center.

Folklorists Iona and Peter Opie have observed in The Classic Fairy Tales ( 1974 ) that " the tenor of Jack's tale, and some of the details of more than one of his tricks with which he outwits the giants, have similarities with Norse mythology.

Folklorists of the first decade of the 20th century, especially those from Britain, included shanties among their interests in collecting folk songs connected with the idea of national heritage.

Robert Winslow Gordon, Lomax's predecessor at the Library of Congress, had written ( in an article in the New York Times, c. 1926 ) that, " Nearly every type of song is to be found in our prisons and penitentiaries " Folklorists Howard Odum and Guy Johnson also had observed that, " If one wishes to obtain anything like an accurate picture of the workaday Negro he will surely find his best setting in the chain gang, prison, or in the situation of the ever-fleeing fugitive.

Folklorists often go further, defining myths as " tales believed as true, usually sacred, set in the distant past or other worlds or parts of the world, and with extra-human, inhuman, or heroic characters ".

Folklorists also began to work as consultants in city planning, gerontology, economic development, multicultural education, conservation, and other fields.

Folklorists Iona and Peter Opie point out in The Classic Fairy Tales ( 1999 ) that the tale has a " partial analogue " in " Snow White ": the lost princess enters the dwarves ' house, tastes their food, and falls asleep in one of their beds.

Thus military expeditions employ anthropologists to discern strategic cultural footholds ; marketing professionals employ anthropology to determine propitious placement of advertising ; and humanitarian agencies depend on anthropological insights as means to fight poverty.

At the same time, anthropologists urge, as part of their quest for scientific objectivity, cultural relativism, which has an influence on all the sub-fields of anthropology.

Further cultural subdivisions according to tool types, such as Olduwan or Mousterian or Levalloisian help archaeologists and other anthropologists in understanding major trends in the human past.

By making comparisons across cultural traditions ( time-based ) and cultural regions ( space-based ), anthropologists have developed various kinds of comparative method, a central part of their science.

In the successor states of continental Europe, on the other hand, anthropologists often joined with folklorists and linguists in building cultural perspectives on nationalism.

" However, as Stocking notes, Tylor mainly concerned himself with describing and mapping the distribution of particular elements of culture, rather than with the larger function, and he generally seemed to assume a Victorian idea of progress rather than the idea of non-directional, multilineal cultural development proposed by later anthropologists.

Toward the turn of the twentieth century, a number of anthropologists became dissatisfied with this categorization of cultural elements ; historical reconstructions also came to seem increasingly speculative to them.

In other countries ( and in some, particularly smaller, British and North American universities ), anthropologists have also found themselves institutionally linked with scholars of folklore, museum studies, human geography, sociology, social relations, ethnic studies, cultural studies, and social work.

" The relative status of various humans, some of whom had modern advanced technologies that included engines and telegraphs, while others lacked anything but face-to-face communication techniques and still lived a Paleolithic lifestyle, was of interest to the first generation of cultural anthropologists.

Accordingly, most of these anthropologists showed less interest in comparing cultures, generalizing about human nature, or discovering universal laws of cultural development, than in understanding particular cultures in those cultures ' own terms.

In the 20th century, most cultural and social anthropologists turned to the crafting of ethnographies.

Numerous other ethnographic techniques have resulted in ethnographic writing or details being preserved, as cultural anthropologists also curate materials, spend long hours in libraries, churches and schools poring over records, investigate graveyards, and decipher ancient scripts.

American " cultural anthropologists " focused on the ways people expressed their view of themselves and their world, especially in symbolic forms, such as art and myths.

These anthropologists continue to concern themselves with the distinct ways people in different locales experience and understand their lives, but they often argue that one cannot understand these particular ways of life solely from a local perspective ; they instead combine a focus on the local with an effort to grasp larger political, economic, and cultural frameworks that impact local lived realities.

Historically, allegations of cannibalism were used by the colonial powers to justify the enslavement of what were seen as primitive peoples ; cannibalism has been said to test the bounds of cultural relativism as it challenges anthropologists " to define what is or is not beyond the pale of acceptable human behavior ".

Arens bases his thesis on a detailed analysis of numerous " classic " cases of cultural cannibalism cited by explorers, missionaries, and anthropologists.

Neoliberalism is often critiqued by sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural studies scholars as being culturally imperialistic.

Internalists countered with various arguments: that brain states will eventually be directly observable with advanced technology, that most cultural anthropologists agree that culture is about beliefs and not artifacts, or that artifacts cannot be replicators in the same sense as mental entities ( or DNA ) are replicators.

Several historical anthropologists have done field research Nevis and in Nevisian migrant communities in order to trace the creation and constitution of a Nevisian cultural community.

This conceptual distinction continues to operate in political science, although some political scientists, philosophers, historians and cultural anthropologists have argued that most political action in any given society occurs outside of its state, and that there are societies that are not organized into states which nevertheless must be considered in political terms.

In considering these alternate traditions that differ from biomedicine ( see above ), medical anthropologists emphasize that all ways of thinking about health and disease have a significant cultural content, including conventional western medicine.

In the early 20th century, many anthropologists accepted and taught the belief that biologically distinct races were isomorphic with distinct linguistic, cultural, and social groups, while popularly applying that belief to the field of eugenics, in conjunction with a practice that is now called scientific racism. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was co-opted by the budding eugenics movement to justify systematic population and racial planning in the early 20th century.

Today, anthropologists and many social scientists vigorously oppose the notion of cultural evolution and rigid " stages " such as these.

Recognizing these flaws in political economy and cultural ecology, geographers and anthropologists ( Wolf 1972 ; Blaikie 1985, Greenberg & Park 1994 ; Hershkovitz 1993 ) worked with the strengths of both to form the basis of political ecology.