Anthropology, described by Eric Wolf as the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanist of the sciences, is today a diverse and in many ways sprawling academic discipline. Yet, it is united through a shared genealogy and methodology. This chapter charts the development of anthropological theory and methodology by focusing on three historical breaks or ruptures, as well as the resulting bifurcations. The first break is conceptual and consists in the abandoning of unilinear evolutionist thinking about cultural change, and the main protagonist is Franz Boas, whose historical particularism and methodological relativism contributed to a less biased and more rigorous approach to the diverse empirical materials. The second break is methodological and is associated with Bronislaw Malinowski. He emphasised the need to move beyond superficial survey work and distorting interviews, and laid out the principles of participant observation as the most accurate methodology for gaining knowledge about any society. The ethnographic method has subsequently become the most significant defining trait of social and cultural anthropology. The third, more recent break was expressed through the epistemological critique retrospectively known as ‘the Writing Culture turn’, where fundamental questions were raised about the validity of anthropological concepts, methods of comparison and theoretical constructions. Each of these historical ruptures are accompanied by frictions, disagreements in the professional community and theoretical bifurcation. After Boas, neo-evolutionists tried to recover big questions formerly raised in cultural history; the fieldwork revolution, though less controversial, led to its own counterreactions in the shape of theoretical and comparative work; and the ‘postmodernism’ from the 1980s has similarly led to counterreactions among scholars who insist on the veraciousness of their objects of study. Constructing the chapter around a few dramatic moments enables the author to demonstrate that anthropology is a community of disagreement, advancing through internal friction, and at the same time a unitary discipline based on fundamental, shared principles of a theoretical, epistemological and methodological nature. Since anthropology is a comparative, empirical discipline rooted in local realities, theoretical and methodological developments vary geographically. Some of this variation, though not all, are discussed in the chapter.