The Grand Science of Anthropology

The Philosophy of Anthropology

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These fields frequently overlap but tend to use different methodologies and techniques. European countries with overseas colonies tended to practice more ethnology a term coined and defined by Adam F. It is sometimes referred to as sociocultural anthropology in the parts of the world that were influenced by the European tradition. Anthropology is a global discipline involving humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. Anthropology builds upon knowledge from natural sciences , including the discoveries about the origin and evolution of Homo sapiens , human physical traits, human behavior , the variations among different groups of humans, how the evolutionary past of Homo sapiens has influenced its social organization and culture, and from social sciences , including the organization of human social and cultural relations, institutions, social conflicts, etc.

Long after natural history, moral philosophy, philology, and political economy have dissolved into their specialized successors, it has remained a diffuse assemblage of ethnology, human biology, comparative linguistics, and prehistory, held together mainly by the vested interests, sunk costs, and administrative habits of academia, and by a romantic image of comprehensive scholarship. Sociocultural anthropology has been heavily influenced by structuralist and postmodern theories, as well as a shift toward the analysis of modern societies. During the s and s, there was an epistemological shift away from the positivist traditions that had largely informed the discipline.

In contrast, archaeology and biological anthropology remained largely positivist. Due to this difference in epistemology, the four sub-fields of anthropology have lacked cohesion over the last several decades. Sociocultural anthropology draws together the principle axes of cultural anthropology and social anthropology. Cultural anthropology is the comparative study of the manifold ways in which people make sense of the world around them, while social anthropology is the study of the relationships among individuals and groups.

There is no hard-and-fast distinction between them, and these categories overlap to a considerable degree. Inquiry in sociocultural anthropology is guided in part by cultural relativism , the attempt to understand other societies in terms of their own cultural symbols and values.

Ethnography can refer to both a methodology and the product of ethnographic research, i. As a methodology, ethnography is based upon long-term fieldwork within a community or other research site. Participant observation is one of the foundational methods of social and cultural anthropology.

The process of participant-observation can be especially helpful to understanding a culture from an emic conceptual, vs. The study of kinship and social organization is a central focus of sociocultural anthropology, as kinship is a human universal. Sociocultural anthropology also covers economic and political organization , law and conflict resolution, patterns of consumption and exchange, material culture, technology, infrastructure, gender relations, ethnicity, childrearing and socialization, religion, myth, symbols, values, etiquette, worldview, sports, music, nutrition, recreation, games, food, festivals, and language which is also the object of study in linguistic anthropology.

Comparison across cultures is a key element of method in sociocultural anthropology, including the industrialized and de-industrialized West. Biological anthropology and physical anthropology are synonymous terms to describe anthropological research focused on the study of humans and non-human primates in their biological, evolutionary, and demographic dimensions. It examines the biological and social factors that have affected the evolution of humans and other primates, and that generate, maintain or change contemporary genetic and physiological variation.

Archaeology is the study of the human past through its material remains. Artifacts, faunal remains, and human altered landscapes are evidence of the cultural and material lives of past societies. Archaeologists examine this material remains in order to deduce patterns of past human behavior and cultural practices. Ethnoarchaeology is a type of archaeology that studies the practices and material remain of living human groups in order to gain a better understanding of the evidence left behind by past human groups, who are presumed to have lived in similar ways.

Linguistic anthropology not to be confused with anthropological linguistics seeks to understand the processes of human communications, verbal and non-verbal, variation in language across time and space, the social uses of language, and the relationship between language and culture. Linguistic anthropologists often draw on related fields including sociolinguistics , pragmatics , cognitive linguistics , semiotics , discourse analysis , and narrative analysis. One of the central problems in the anthropology of art concerns the universality of 'art' as a cultural phenomenon.

Several anthropologists have noted that the Western categories of 'painting', 'sculpture', or 'literature', conceived as independent artistic activities, do not exist, or exist in a significantly different form, in most non-Western contexts. Media anthropology also known as the anthropology of media or mass media emphasizes ethnographic studies as a means of understanding producers, audiences, and other cultural and social aspects of mass media. The types of ethnographic contexts explored range from contexts of media production e. Other types include cyber anthropology , a relatively new area of internet research , as well as ethnographies of other areas of research which happen to involve media, such as development work, social movements , or health education.

This is in addition to many classic ethnographic contexts, where media such as radio, the press , new media , and television have started to make their presences felt since the early s. Ethnomusicology is an academic field encompassing various approaches to the study of music broadly defined , that emphasize its cultural, social, material, cognitive, biological, and other dimensions or contexts instead of or in addition to its isolated sound component or any particular repertoire.

Visual anthropology is concerned, in part, with the study and production of ethnographic photography, film and, since the mids, new media. While the term is sometimes used interchangeably with ethnographic film , visual anthropology also encompasses the anthropological study of visual representation, including areas such as performance, museums, art, and the production and reception of mass media.

Visual representations from all cultures, such as sandpaintings, tattoos, sculptures and reliefs, cave paintings, scrimshaw, jewelry, hieroglyphics, paintings, and photographs are included in the focus of visual anthropology. Economic anthropology attempts to explain human economic behavior in its widest historic, geographic and cultural scope.

It has a complex relationship with the discipline of economics, of which it is highly critical. Economic Anthropology remains, for the most part, focused upon exchange. The school of thought derived from Marx and known as Political Economy focuses on production, in contrast. Political economy in anthropology is the application of the theories and methods of Historical Materialism to the traditional concerns of anthropology, including, but not limited to, non-capitalist societies.

Political economy introduced questions of history and colonialism to ahistorical anthropological theories of social structure and culture. Three main areas of interest rapidly developed. The first of these areas was concerned with the "pre-capitalist" societies that were subject to evolutionary "tribal" stereotypes.

Sahlin's work on hunter-gatherers as the "original affluent society" did much to dissipate that image. The second area was concerned with the vast majority of the world's population at the time, the peasantry, many of whom were involved in complex revolutionary wars such as in Vietnam. The third area was on colonialism, imperialism, and the creation of the capitalist world-system. Applied anthropology refers to the application of the method and theory of anthropology to the analysis and solution of practical problems.

It is closely related to development anthropology distinct from the more critical anthropology of development. Anthropology of development tends to view development from a critical perspective. The kind of issues addressed and implications for the approach simply involve pondering why, if a key development goal is to alleviate poverty, is poverty increasing? Why is there such a gap between plans and outcomes?

Why are those working in development so willing to disregard history and the lessons it might offer? Why is development so externally driven rather than having an internal basis? In short, why does so much planned development fail? Kinship can refer both to the study of the patterns of social relationships in one or more human cultures, or it can refer to the patterns of social relationships themselves. Over its history, anthropology has developed a number of related concepts and terms, such as " descent ", " descent groups ", " lineages ", " affines ", " cognates ", and even " fictive kinship ".

Broadly, kinship patterns may be considered to include people related both by descent one's social relations during development , and also relatives by marriage. Feminist anthropology is a four field approach to anthropology archeological , biological , cultural , linguistic that seeks to reduce male bias in research findings, anthropological hiring practices, and the scholarly production of knowledge. Anthropology engages often with feminists from non-Western traditions, whose perspectives and experiences can differ from those of white European and American feminists. Historically, such 'peripheral' perspectives have sometimes been marginalized and regarded as less valid or important than knowledge from the western world.

Feminist anthropologists have claimed that their research helps to correct this systematic bias in mainstream feminist theory. Feminist anthropologists are centrally concerned with the construction of gender across societies. Feminist anthropology is inclusive of birth anthropology [45] as a specialization. The first African-American female anthropologist and Caribbeanist is said to be Vera Mae Green who studied ethnic and family relations in the Caribbean as well as the United States, and thereby tried to improve the way black life, experiences, and culture were studied. Medical anthropology is an interdisciplinary field which studies "human health and disease, health care systems, and biocultural adaptation".

Currently, research in medical anthropology is one of the main growth areas in the field of anthropology as a whole. It focuses on the following six basic fields: Other subjects that have become central to medical anthropology worldwide are violence and social suffering Farmer, , ; Beneduce, as well as other issues that involve physical and psychological harm and suffering that are not a result of illness.

On the other hand, there are fields that intersect with medical anthropology in terms of research methodology and theoretical production, such as cultural psychiatry and transcultural psychiatry or ethnopsychiatry. Nutritional anthropology is a synthetic concept that deals with the interplay between economic systems , nutritional status and food security , and how changes in the former affect the latter.

If economic and environmental changes in a community affect access to food, food security, and dietary health, then this interplay between culture and biology is in turn connected to broader historical and economic trends associated with globalization. Nutritional status affects overall health status, work performance potential, and the overall potential for economic development either in terms of human development or traditional western models for any given group of people.

Psychological anthropology is an interdisciplinary subfield of anthropology that studies the interaction of cultural and mental processes. It also examines how the understanding of cognition, emotion, motivation, and similar psychological processes inform or constrain our models of cultural and social processes. Cognitive anthropology seeks to explain patterns of shared knowledge, cultural innovation , and transmission over time and space using the methods and theories of the cognitive sciences especially experimental psychology and evolutionary biology often through close collaboration with historians, ethnographers, archaeologists, linguists, musicologists and other specialists engaged in the description and interpretation of cultural forms.

Cognitive anthropology is concerned with what people from different groups know and how that implicit knowledge changes the way people perceive and relate to the world around them. Transpersonal anthropology studies the relationship between altered states of consciousness and culture. As with transpersonal psychology , the field is much concerned with altered states of consciousness ASC and transpersonal experience.

Political anthropology concerns the structure of political systems , looked at from the basis of the structure of societies. Political anthropology developed as a discipline concerned primarily with politics in stateless societies, a new development started from the s, and is still unfolding: The turn towards complex societies meant that political themes were taken up at two main levels. Firstly, anthropologists continued to study political organization and political phenomena that lay outside the state-regulated sphere as in patron-client relations or tribal political organization.

Secondly, anthropologists slowly started to develop a disciplinary concern with states and their institutions and on the relationship between formal and informal political institutions. An anthropology of the state developed, and it is a most thriving field today. Geertz' comparative work on "Negara", the Balinese state, is an early, famous example.

Definition and scope

Legal anthropology or anthropology of law specializes in "the cross-cultural study of social ordering". More recent applications include issues such as human rights , legal pluralism , [53] and political uprisings. Public anthropology was created by Robert Borofsky, a professor at Hawaii Pacific University, to "demonstrate the ability of anthropology and anthropologists to effectively address problems beyond the discipline — illuminating larger social issues of our times as well as encouraging broad, public conversations about them with the explicit goal of fostering social change".

Cyborg anthropology originated as a sub-focus group within the American Anthropological Association 's annual meeting in Cyborg anthropology studies humankind and its relations with the technological systems it has built, specifically modern technological systems that have reflexively shaped notions of what it means to be human beings. Digital anthropology is the study of the relationship between humans and digital-era technology, and extends to various areas where anthropology and technology intersect.

It is sometimes grouped with sociocultural anthropology , and sometimes considered part of material culture. The field is new, and thus has a variety of names with a variety of emphases. These include techno-anthropology, [56] digital ethnography, cyberanthropology, [57] and virtual anthropology. Ecological anthropology is defined as the "study of cultural adaptations to environments". Many characterize this new perspective as more informed with culture, politics and power, globalization, localized issues, century anthropology and more.

Often, the observer has become an active part of the struggle either directly organizing, participation or indirectly articles, documentaries, books, ethnographies. Such is the case with environmental justice advocate Melissa Checker and her relationship with the people of Hyde Park. Ethnohistory is the study of ethnographic cultures and indigenous customs by examining historical records.

It is also the study of the history of various ethnic groups that may or may not exist today. Ethnohistory uses both historical and ethnographic data as its foundation. Its historical methods and materials go beyond the standard use of documents and manuscripts. Practitioners recognize the utility of such source material as maps, music, paintings, photography, folklore , oral tradition, site exploration, archaeological materials, museum collections, enduring customs, language, and place names.

The anthropology of religion involves the study of religious institutions in relation to other social institutions, and the comparison of religious beliefs and practices across cultures. Modern anthropology assumes that there is complete continuity between magical thinking and religion, [65] [n 6] and that every religion is a cultural product, created by the human community that worships it. Urban anthropology is concerned with issues of urbanization , poverty, and neoliberalism.

Ulf Hannerz quotes a s remark that traditional anthropologists were "a notoriously agoraphobic lot, anti-urban by definition". Various social processes in the Western World as well as in the " Third World " the latter being the habitual focus of attention of anthropologists brought the attention of " specialists in 'other cultures' " closer to their homes.

These two methods are overlapping and dependent of each other.

Cultural anthropology

By defining different types of cities, one would use social factors as well as economic and political factors to categorize the cities. By directly looking at the different social issues, one would also be studying how they affect the dynamic of the city. Anthrozoology also known as "human—animal studies" is the study of interaction between living things.

It is an interdisciplinary field that overlaps with a number of other disciplines, including anthropology, ethology , medicine, psychology , veterinary medicine and zoology. A major focus of anthrozoologic research is the quantifying of the positive effects of human-animal relationships on either party and the study of their interactions. Biocultural anthropology is the scientific exploration of the relationships between human biology and culture.

Physical anthropologists throughout the first half of the 20th century viewed this relationship from a racial perspective; that is, from the assumption that typological human biological differences lead to cultural differences. Evolutionary anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of the evolution of human physiology and human behaviour and the relation between hominins and non-hominin primates.

Historical development of cultural anthropology

Evolutionary anthropology is based in natural science and social science , combining the human development with socioeconomic factors. Evolutionary anthropology is concerned with both biological and cultural evolution of humans, past and present. It is based on a scientific approach, and brings together fields such as archaeology , behavioral ecology , psychology , primatology , and genetics.

All human societies have been curious about how their customs originated and what the differences between their own culture and that of neighbouring societies might mean. Thus, in a sense they have all constructed their own anthropologies. But the interpretations put forward, even when they were founded partly on accurate observation, most often remained on the level of myth. Embryonic scientific thought began to appear in only a limited number of centres of civilization: Only in the West, however, did various ideas converge to bring about the birth of scientific anthropology in the 19th century.

A characteristic common to all these centres of civilization was the control that they exercised over vast areas and the opportunity that they enjoyed—through their soldiers, merchants, pilgrims, and missionaries—to gather observations on a wide variety of populations. Such a gathering of data was necessary in order even to begin to understand how men adapted to their environments , how they used their various economic, social, and political institutions, and how mankind evolved from simple to complex societies.

Historians and philosophers among the ancient Greeks, Arabs, and Chinese all asked such questions. To take only the example of western Europe, many pertinent questions were posed by the French philosophers Jean Bodin and Michel de Montaigne as early as the 16th century, by the English philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke in the 17th, and by the French philosophers Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire in the 18th, to mention only those who are often placed among the precursors of modern anthropology.

Modern anthropology began to take shape before the middle of the 19th century because of a series of innovations in the Western world. The last great phase of the discovery of the world had begun at the end of the 18th century. At the same time, political and intellectual revolutions had facilitated the questioning of certain religious dogmas , thus opening the way to the discussion of hitherto half-forbidden subjects. The 19th century, therefore, soon saw a revival of interest in and study of the origin of man, the unity or plurality of the human species, and the fixity or mutability of animal species.

Finally, about , a principle for the study of human facts was proposed: This was even before Charles Darwin had published his celebrated Origin of Species This concept, arising in strong debates, provided the starting point for anthropology. Almost to the end of the 19th century, evolutionism determined the complexion of the new science.

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A major task of cultural anthropology was thought to be that of classifying different societies and cultures and defining the phases and states through which all human groups pass—the linear interpretation of history. Some groups progress more slowly, some faster, as they advance from the simple to the complex, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous , from the irrational to the rational.

It suffices to quote an American anthropologist, Lewis Henry Morgan:. As it is undeniable that portions of the human family have existed in a state of savagery, other portions in a state of barbarism , and still other portions in a state of civilization, it seems equally so that these three distinct conditions are connected with each other in a natural as well as necessary sequence of progress Ancient Society , Other quotations from a Scotsman, John F.

MacLennan , or an Englishman, Edward B. Tylor , would take the same position. Cultural anthropology, then, set out to analyze the totality of human culture in time and space. But by assuming a linear conception of history, it too often neglected the discontinuities and interferences of concrete history. At the same time, in the second half of the 19th century another kind of evolutionism developed, that of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A society was defined by its mode of production, on which its political, juridical, and ideological superstructures were allegedly based.

These superstructures continued to exist after the mode of production had changed; and in the conflict that followed, this contradiction opened the way to a new type of society. Numerous anthropologists have taken the Marxist analysis into account, even if only to retain its historical view and to reject its economic determinism. These rather encyclopaedic collections of customs, religious and magical practices, and other curious data were read with relish by the intellectual community; the theories that accompanied the collections were equally appreciated by evolutionary-minded anthropologists, as the theories were meant to establish an evolutionary sequence of magical, religious, and scientific thought, using the data as evidence.

By the beginning of the 20th century, many cultural anthropologists had already begun to turn toward what might be called a more pluralistic viewpoint. To account for the variety of societies and cultures and the broadening of the differences that separated them, they suggested taking the total circumstances of each human group into account by considering the whole of its history, the contacts that it had had with other groups, and the favourable or unfavourable circumstances that had weighed on its development.

Such a view was distinguished by a marked relativism: Cultural anthropology was also diversifying its concepts and its areas of research without losing its unity. Kroeber , Margaret Mead , and Edward Sapir —to go out and seek evidence of human behaviour among people in their natural environs, to venture into the field to gather facts and artifacts and record observable cultural processes.

Consequently he is known as the founder of the so-called culture history school, which for much of the 20th century dominated American cultural anthropology. Beyond this emphasis on field work and first-hand observation, it may also be said that Boas inclined toward what was called functionalism or the functional approach—an approach based on sociological theories of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that tended to liken societies to living organisms or machines, with interdependent parts. In the words of Melville J.

Anthropology, The Philosophy of | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Its object is essentially to achieve some expression of the unities in culture by indicating how trait and complex and pattern, however separable they may be, intermesh, as the gears of some machine, to constitute a smoothly running, effectively functioning whole from Man and His Works , Boas insisted upon this method of considering any single culture as a whole. Finally, by emphasizing the importance of collecting life histories, he drew attention to the problems posed by connections between culture and personality.

In general it may be said that Mauss, like Boas, was insistent upon studying social phenomena as a system—but in a slightly different fashion. Like many others of his time he conceived of systems as self-regulating or equilibrium-seeking, composed of elements that operate to maintain the integration or adaptation of the system. Like Boas, Mauss also tried to twin culture and personality—that is, cultural anthropology and psychology. These latter, too, rejected classical 19th-century evolutionism, but they were nevertheless inclined toward painting grand theories—principally the theory that out of a few ancient cultural centres or civilizations, born quite separately, there had developed the array of cultures existing today.

Diffusion , or the spreading of culture traits, in their view, was the prime force of human development, and all cultural development could be traced to a few inventive centres. This kind of pseudo-history was carried to even greater lengths by a British group of diffusionists, led by Grafton Elliot Smith and William J. Perry , who even named a single fountainhead of all cultural development—Egypt. In the novel Shadows in the Sun the protagonist, Paul Ellery, is an anthropologist doing field work in the town of Jefferson Springs, Texas—a place where he discovers extraterrestrial aliens.

It has been remarked that:. Not only are these aliens comprehensible in anthropological terms, but it is anthropology, rather than the physical sciences, that promises a solution to the problem of alien colonization. According to the science of anthropology, every society, regardless of its level of development, has to functionally meet certain human needs. The aliens of Jefferson Springs "had learned, long ago, that it was the cultural core that counted-the deep and underlying spirit and belief and knowledge, the tone and essence of living.

Once you had that, the rest was window dressing. Not only that, but the rest, the cultural superstructure, was relatively equal in all societies ; emphasis in original. For Ellery, the aliens are not "supermen" a favorite Campbellian conceit: Since they are not superior, they are susceptible to defeat, but the key lies not in the procurement of advanced technologies, but in the creative cultural work of Earth people themselves.

A reviewer of The Shores of Another Sea finds the book "curiously flat despite its exploration of an almost mythical, and often horrific, theme". In striking contrast to the familiar chumminess of the aliens in Shadows in the Sun and The Winds of Time , humans and aliens in Shores of Another Sea systematically misunderstand one another. In fact, the intervening decade between Oliver's field research and the publication of Shores [] had been one of critical self-reflection in the field of anthropology.

In the United States, qualms about the Vietnam war, together with evidence that anthropologists had been employed as spies and propagandists by the US government, prompted critiques of anthropology's role in systems of national and global power. Various strains of what came to be known as dependency theory disrupted the self-congratulatory evolutionism of modernization models, evoking and critiquing a world system whose political economy structurally mandated unequal development.

Less narrowly academic works such as Vine Deloria, Jr. Two major collections of essays -- Dell Hymes 's Reinventing Anthropology and Talal Asad 's Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter -- explored anthropology's colonial legacy and precipitated a critical engagement with the ethics and politics of ethnographic representation. The lesson of Chad Oliver for sf is that his Campbell-era commitments to the power of technology, rational thinking, and the evolutionary destiny of "humanity" came to seem an enshrinement of a Western imperialist vision that needed to be transcended, through a rethinking of otherness driven by anthropological theory and practice.

Above all, Oliver's career speaks to many of the shared impulses and assumptions of anthropology and sf, connections that have only grown more multifarious and complex since his death in It has often been observed that Ursula K. Le Guin 's interest in anthropology and its influence on her fiction derives from the influence of both her mother Theodora Kroeber , and of her father, Alfred L.

Another critic has observed that Le Guin's "concern with cultural biases is evident throughout her literary career", and continues,. In The Word for World is Forest , for example, she explicitly demonstrates the failure of colonialists to comprehend other cultures, and shows how the desire to dominate and control interferes with the ability to perceive the other. Always Coming Home is an attempt to allow another culture to speak for itself through songs and music available in cassette form , writings, and various unclassifiable fragments.

Like a documentary, the text presents the audience with pieces of information that they can sift through and examine. But unlike a traditional anthropological documentary, there is no "voice-over" to interpret that information and frame it for them. The absence of "voice-over" commentary in the novel forces the reader to draw conclusions rather than rely on a scientific analysis which would be tainted with cultural blind spots.

The novel, consequently, preserves the difference of the alien culture and removes the observing neutral eye from the scene until the very end. Le Guin's novel The Left Hand of Darkness [27] has been called "the most sophisticated and technically plausible work of anthropological science fiction, insofar as the relationship of culture and biology is concerned", [28]: Though innovative in its time, it is not its construction of androgyny itself that is remarkable about Le Guin's text. Rather, it is her focus on the way that the androgynes are perceived and how they are constructed within a particular discourse, that of scientific observation.

This discourse is manifested specifically in the language of anthropology, the social sciences as a whole, and diplomacy. This focus, in turn, places Le Guin's novel within a body of later works — such as Mary Gentle 's Golden Witchbreed novels and C. Cherryh 's Foreigner series — that deal with an outside observer's arrival on an alien planet, all of which indicate the difficulty of translating the life-style of an alien species into a language and cultural experience that is comprehensible.

As such, these texts provide critiques of anthropological discourse that are similar to Trinh Minh-ha 's attempts to problematize the colonialist beginnings and imperialistic undertones of anthropology as a science. Geoffery Samuel has pointed out some specific anthropological aspect to Le Guin's fiction, noting that:. However, Fredric Jameson says of The Left Hand of Darkness that the novel is "constructed from a heterogeneous group of narratives modes

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