DIFFERENT ANTHROPOLOGY Anthropologists have approached the subject of social relations points of biological approach, by Herbert Spencer and common in the nineteenth century, was that people formed a 'social organism' that followed the rules of evolution, just like a biological being. The work of scholars such as Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss established the discipline of sociology, which focused on the groups formed by human beings that they named societies. Understanding society by looking at systems of classification took its inspiration from the work of linguists, and the aim became one of seeing social relations as a structure, with variations in each society, but with a common form determined by the nature of the human brain. Claude Lévi-Strauss was the most famous proponent of this approach, along with anthropologists such as Edmund Leach, Mary Douglas, Rodney Needham, and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, although each had slightly different ideas of what they meant by 'structure'. The Norwegian Fredrik Barth insisted that we need to start from an individual to understand his or her social relations, and his approach became known as transactional anthropology. A major approach initiated by Franz Boas in nineteenth-century America was to start his study from the objects made by human beings in a field and to examine their social relations through this material culture. His work laid the foundations of the discipline now called cultural anthropology the United States those who focus on language in their Today anthropologists studies are termed linguistic anthropologists