American anthropology has culture as its central and unifying concept. This most commonly refers to the universal human capacity to classify and encode human experiences symbolically, and to communicate symbolically encoded experiences socially. American anthropology is organized into four fields, each of which plays an important role in research on culture: 1. * biological anthropology 2. * linguistic anthropology 3. * cultural anthropology 4. * archaeology Research in these fields has influenced anthropologists working in other countries to different degrees.