- Evolutionism/ Classical Evolutionism
- Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755)
- Henry Summer Maine (1822-1888)
- Johann Jacob Bachofen (1815-1887)
- John F. McLennan (1827-1881)
- James George Frazer (1854-1941)
- Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)
- Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881)
- Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) unilineal evolutionism
- Diffusionism (late 19th C. - early 20th C.)
- German Diffusionism
- Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904) criterion of form
- Wilhelm Schmidt (1868-1954)
- Leo Frobenius (1873-1938) criterion of quantity
- Frtiz Graebner (1877-1934)
- American diffusionism
- Franz Boas (1858-1942) historical particularism
- Clark Wissler (1870-1947) age-area hypothesis
- Albert L. Kroeber (1876-1960) configurations of cultural growth
- British Diffusionism
- Grafton Elliot Smith (1871-1937)
- W.H.R. Rivers (1864-1922)
- William James Perry (1887-1949)
- Historical Particularism
- Franz Boas (1858-1942)
- Neo - Evolutionism
- V. Gordon Childe (1892-1957) universal evolutionism
- Leslie White (1900-1975)
- Julian Steward (1902-1972) multilineal evolutionism
- Marshal Sahlins (1930-2021)
- Functionalism
- Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) positivism
- Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) functionalism
- Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955) structural functionalism
- Talcott Parsons (1902-1979)
- Robert K. Merton (1910-2003)
- Dynamic theories of structure
- Culture and Personality School
- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
- Ruth Benedict (1887-1948) configuration of culture
- Margaret Mead (1901-1978)
- Neo - Functionalism
- Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998)
- Jurgen Habermas (1929-)
- Jeffrey Alexander (1947-)
- Paul Colomy
- Marxism/ Marxist Anthropology
- Karl Marx (1818-1883)
- Cultural Ecology
- Cultural materialism
- Structuralism
- Feminism/ Feminist Anthropology
- Post modernism
- Post colonialism
- Ethnoscience
- Symbolic Anthropology
*a brief list with the names of the main proponents, may not include all.
source - History and Theory in Anthropology, Alan Barnard