The rise of anthropology stems from people's unique curiosity about different cultures and nationalities. When people in a certain society discover another human group completely different from themselves in terms of body, language and customs, they will inevitably have interest and impulse to explore the mystery of this group. This concern and understanding of different cultures and nationalities is anthropological practice in the original sense.

Human cognition of different nationalities and cultures began very early. The ancient Egyptians painted different images of Assyrians, blacks and Libyans on the murals of their graves. The ancient documents of China in the pre-Qin period also recorded the existence of different nationalities, such as Dongyi, Xirong, Nanman and Beidi. Shan Hai Jing describes a large number of nationalities with different physical characteristics in foreign countries, such as "Tonghun", "Tongshen", "Long-armed country" and "One-armed people". In the west, Herodotus, an ancient Greek philosopher, also described many countries and nations along the Mediterranean coast in his masterpiece History, and tried to explain the causes of different societies.

Although human beings have long realized the similarities and differences between different human groups, and people have been thinking and exploring different cultures and nationalities for a long time, the origin of anthropology in a strict sense is accompanied by the rise of modern capitalism and subsequent colonial expansion. Cultural anthropology gradually became independent from anthropology and formed its own theoretical system, which began in the 1960s of 19.