Anthropology
{{about|the social science}}
Anthropology ({{IPA|/ˌænθɹəˈpɒlədʒi/}}, from
Greek ,
anthrōpos, "human"; -λογία,
-logia) is the study of
humanity. Anthropology has origins in the
natural sciences, and the
humanities.
(1) Ethnography is both one of its primary methods and the text that is written as a result of the practice of anthropology and its elements. Since the work of
Franz Boas and
Bronisław Malinowski in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, anthropology has been distinguished from other social science disciplines by its emphasis on in-depth examination of context,
cross-cultural comparisons (socio-cultural anthropology is by nature a comparative discipline), and the importance it places on long-term, experiential immersion in the area of research, often known as
participant-observation. Cultural anthropology in particular has emphasized
cultural relativity and the use of findings to frame cultural critiques. This has been particularly prominent in the United States, from Boas's arguments against 19th-century racial ideology, through
Margaret Mead's advocacy for gender equality and sexual liberation, to current criticisms of
post-colonial oppression and promotion of
multiculturalism.
Historical and institutional context
The anthropologist
Eric Wolf once described anthropology as "the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanistic of the
sciences."
(2) Contemporary anthropologists claim a number of earlier thinkers as their forebears, and the discipline has several sources;
Claude Lévi-Strauss, for example, claimed
Montaigne and
Rousseau as important influences. Ancient and medieval writers and scholars may be considered forerunners of anthropology, insofar as they conducted or wrote detailed studies of the customs of different peoples, including the Greek writer Herodotus, often called the "father of history" and the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote many of our only surviving contemporary accounts of several ancient Celtic and Germanic peoples. A candidate for one of the first scholars to carry out comparative ethnographic-type studies in person was the medieval
Persian scholar
Abū Rayhān Bīrūnī in the 11th century, who wrote about the peoples, customs, and religions of the
Indian subcontinent. Like modern anthropologists, he engaged in extensive
participant observation with a given group of people, learnt their language and studied their primary texts, and presented his findings with
objectivity and
neutrality using
cross-cultural comparisons.
(3) He wrote detailed comparative studies on the religions and cultures in the
Middle East,
Mediterranean and especially
South Asia.
(4)(5) Biruni's tradition of comparative cross-cultural study continued in the
Muslim world through to
Ibn Khaldun's work in the 14th century.
(6) Most 19th-century social theorists, including anthropologists, viewed non-European societies as windows onto the pre-industrial human past. As academic disciplines began to differentiate over the course of the 19th century, anthropology grew increasingly distinct from the biological approach of natural history, on the one hand, and from purely historical or literary fields such as Classics, on the other. A common criticism has been that many social science scholars (such as economists, sociologists, and psychologists) in Western countries focus disproportionately on Western subjects, while anthropology focuses disproportionately on the "Other"
(7); this has changed over the last part of the 20th century as anthropologists increasingly also study Western subjects, particularly variation across class, region, or ethnicity within Western societies, and other social scientists increasingly take a global view of their fields.In the twentieth century, academic disciplines have often been institutionally divided into three broad domains. The natural and biological
sciences seek to derive general laws through reproducible and verifiable experiments. The
humanities generally study local traditions, through their
history,
literature,
music, and
arts, with an emphasis on understanding particular individuals, events, or eras. The
social sciences have generally attempted to develop scientific methods to understand social phenomena in a generalizable way, though usually with methods distinct from those of the natural sciences. In particular, social sciences often develop statistical descriptions rather than the general laws derived in physics or chemistry, or they may explain individual cases through more general principles, as in many fields of psychology. Anthropology (like some fields of history) does not easily fit into one of these categories, and different branches of anthropology draw on one or more of these domains.
(8)Anthropology as it emerged among the colonial powers (mentioned above) has generally taken a different path than that in the countries of southern and central Europe (
Italy,
Greece, and the successors to the
Austro-Hungarian and
Ottoman empires). In the former, the encounter with multiple, distinct cultures, often very different in organization and language from those of Europe, has led to a continuing emphasis on
cross-cultural comparison and a receptiveness to certain kinds of cultural relativism.
(9) In the successor states of continental Europe, on the other hand, anthropologists often joined with folklorists and linguists in the nationalist/nation-building enterprise. Ethnologists in these countries tended to focus on differentiating among local ethnolinguistic groups, documenting local folk culture, and representing the prehistory of the nation through museums and other forms of public education.
(10) In this scheme, Russia occupied a middle position. On the one hand, it had a large Asian region of highly distinct, pre-industrial, often non-literate peoples, similar to the situation in the Americas; on the other hand, Russia also participated to some degree in the nationalist discourses of Central and Eastern Europe. After the Revolution of 1917, anthropology in the USSR and later the Soviet Bloc countries were highly shaped by the need to conform to Marxist theories of social evolution.
(11)Anthropology by country
Anthropology in Britain
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E. B. Tylor, 19th-century British anthropologist.
E. B. Tylor ( 2 October 1832 – 2 January 1917) and
James George Frazer ( 1 January 1854 – 7 May 1941) are generally considered the antecedents to modern
social anthropology in Britain. Though Tylor undertook a field trip to
Mexico, both he and Frazer derived most of the material for their comparative studies through extensive reading not fieldwork: Classics (literature and history of Greece and Rome), the work of the early European folklorists, and reports from missionaries, travelers, and contemporaneous ethnologists. Tylor advocated strongly for unilinealism and a form of "uniformity of mankind".
(12) Tylor in particular laid the groundwork for theories of
cultural diffusionism, stating that there are three ways that different groups can have similar cultural forms or technologies: "independent invention, inheritance from ancestors in a distant region, transmission from one race [sic] to another."
(13) Tylor formulated one of the early and influential anthropological conceptions of
culture as "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."
(14) However, as Stocking notes, Tylor mainly concerned himself with describing and mapping the distribution of particular elements of culture, rather than with the larger function, and generally seemed to assume a Victorian idea of progress rather than the idea of non-directional, multilineal cultural development proposed by later anthropologists. Tylor also theorized about the origins of religious feelings in human beings, proposing a theory of
animism as the earliest stage, and noting that "religion" has many components, of which he believed the most important to be belief in supernatural beings (as opposed to moral systems, cosmology, etc.). Frazer, a Scottish scholar with a broad knowledge of Classics, also concerned himself with religion, myth, and magic. His comparative studies, most influentially in the numerous editions of
The Golden Bough, analyzed similarities in religious belief and symbolism worldwide. Neither Tylor nor Frazer, however, were particularly interested in
fieldwork, nor were they interested in examining how the cultural elements and institutions fit together. Toward the turn of the twentieth century, a number of anthropologists became dissatisfied with this categorization of cultural elements; historical reconstructions also came to seem increasingly speculative. Under the influence of several younger scholars, a new approach came to predominate among British anthropologists, concerned with analyzing how societies held together in the present ((wikt:synchronic|synchronic) analysis, rather than (wikt:diachronic|diachronic) or historical analysis), and emphasizing long-term (one to several years) immersion fieldwork.
Cambridge University financed a multidisciplinary expedition to the
Torres Strait Islands in 1898, organized by Alfred Court Haddon and including a physician-anthropologist,
W. H. R. Rivers, as well as a linguist, a botanist, other specialists. The findings of the expedition set new standards for ethnographic description. A decade and a half later, Polish-born anthropology student
Bronisław Malinowski (1884-1942) was beginning what he expected to be a brief period of
fieldwork in the old model, collecting lists of cultural items, when the outbreak of the First World War stranded him in
New Guinea. As a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire resident on a British colonial possession, he was effectively confined to New Guinea for several years.
(15) He made use of the time by undertaking far more intensive fieldwork than had been done by
British anthropologists, and his classic ethnography,
Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) advocated an approach to
fieldwork that became standard in the field: getting "the native's point of view" through
participant observation. Theoretically, he advocated a
functionalist interpretation, which examined how social institutions functioned to meet individual needs.British social anthropology had an expansive moment in the
Interwar period, with key contributors as
Bronisław Malinowski and
Meyer Fortes(16)A. R. Radcliffe-Brown also published a seminal work in 1922. He had carried out his initial fieldwork in the
Andaman Islands in the old style of historical reconstruction. However, after reading the work of French sociologists
Émile Durkheim and
Marcel Mauss, Radcliffe-Brown published an account of his research (entitled simply
The Andaman Islanders) that paid close attention to the meaning and purpose of rituals and myths. Over time, he developed an approach known as
structural-functionalism, which focused on how institutions in societies worked to balance out or create an equilibrium in the social system to keep it functioning harmoniously. (This contrasted with Malinowski's functionalism, and was quite different from the later French
structuralism, which examined the conceptual structures in language and symbolism.)Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown's influence stemmed from the fact that they, like Boas, actively trained students and aggressively built up institutions that furthered their programmatic ambitions. This was particularly the case with Radcliffe-Brown, who spread his agenda for "Social Anthropology" by teaching at universities across the
British Commonwealth. From the late 1930s until the postwar period appeared a string of monographs and edited volumes that cemented the paradigm of British Social Anthropology (BSA). Famous ethnographies include
The Nuer, by
Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, and
The Dynamics of Clanship Among the Tallensi, by
Meyer Fortes; well-known edited volumes include
African Systems of Kinship and Marriage and
African Political Systems. Max Gluckman, together with many of his colleagues at the
Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and students at
Manchester University, collectively known as the
Manchester School, took BSA in new directions through their introduction of explicitly Marxist-informed theory, their emphasis on conflicts and conflict resolution, and their attention to the ways in which individuals negotiate and make use of the social structural possibilities. In Britain, anthropology had a great intellectual impact, it "contributed to the erosion of
Christianity, the growth of
cultural relativism, an awareness of the survival of the primitive in modern life, and the replacement of (wikt:diachronic|diachronic) modes of analysis with (wikt:synchronic|synchronic), all of which are central to modern culture."
(17)Later in the 1960s and 1970s,
Edmund Leach and his students
Mary Douglas and
Nur Yalman, among others, introduced French structuralism in the style of
Lévi-Strauss; while British anthropology has continued to emphasize social organization and economics over purely symbolic or literary topics, differences among British, French, and American sociocultural anthropologies have diminished with increasing dialogue and borrowing of both theory and methods. Today, social anthropology in Britain engages internationally with many other social theories and has branched in many directions.In countries of the British Commonwealth, social anthropology has often been institutionally separate from
physical anthropology and
primatology, which may be connected with departments of biology or zoology; and from archaeology, which may be connected with departments of
Classics,
Egyptology, and the like. In other countries (and in some, particularly smaller, British and North American universities), anthropologists have also found themselves institutionally linked with scholars of
folklore,
museum studies,
human geography,
sociology,
social relations,
ethnic studies,
cultural studies, and
social work.
Anthropology in the United States
1800s to 1940s
From its beginnings in the early 19th century through the early 20th century, anthropology in the United States was influenced by the presence of
Native American societies.
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Franz Boas, one of the pioneers of modern anthropology, often called the "Father of American Anthropology"
Cultural anthropology in the United States was influenced greatly by the ready availability of Native American societies as ethnographic subjects. The field was pioneered by staff of the
Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Smithsonian Institution's
Bureau of American Ethnology, men such as
John Wesley Powell and
Frank Hamilton Cushing.
Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881), a lawyer from
Rochester, New York, became an advocate for and ethnological scholar of the
Iroquois. His comparative analyses of religion, government, material culture, and especially kinship patterns proved to be influential contributions to the field of anthropology. Like other scholars of his day (such as
Edward Tylor), Morgan argued that human societies could be classified into categories of cultural evolution on a scale of progression that ranged from
savagery, to
barbarism, to
civilization. Generally, Morgan used technology (such as bowmaking or pottery) as an indicator of position on this scale.
(18)Boasian anthropology
Franz Boas established academic anthropology in the United States in opposition to this sort of evolutionary perspective. Boasian anthropology was politically active and suspicious of research dictated by the U.S. government and wealthy patrons. It was rigorously empirical and skeptical of overgeneralizations and attempts to establish universal laws. Boas studied immigrant children to demonstrate that biological race was not immutable, and that human conduct and behavior resulted from nurture, rather than nature.Influenced by the German tradition, Boas argued that the world was full of distinct
cultures, rather than societies whose evolution could be measured by how much or how little "civilization" they had. He believed that each culture has to be studied in its particularity, and argued that cross-cultural generalizations, like those made in the
natural sciences, were not possible. In doing so, he fought discrimination against immigrants, African Americans, and Native North Americans.
(19) Many American anthropologists adopted his agenda for social reform, and theories of race continue to be popular targets for anthropologists today. The so-called "Four Field Approach" has its origins in Boasian Anthropology, dividing the discipline in the four crucial and interrelated fields of sociocultural, biological, linguistic, and prehistoric anthropology (i.e., archaeology). Anthropology in the U.S. continues to be deeply influenced by the Boasian tradition, especially its emphasis on culture.
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Ruth Benedict in 1937
Boas used his positions at
Columbia University and the
American Museum of Natural History to train and develop multiple generations of students. His first generation of students included
Alfred Kroeber,
Robert Lowie,
Edward Sapir and
Ruth Benedict, who each produced richly detailed studies of indigenous North American cultures. They provided a wealth of details used to attack the theory of a single evolutionary process. Kroeber and Sapir's focus on Native American languages helped establish
linguistics as a truly general science and free it from its historical focus on
Indo-European languages.The publication of
Alfred Kroeber's textbook,
Anthropology, marked a turning point in American anthropology. After three decades of amassing material, Boasians felt a growing urge to generalize. This was most obvious in the 'Culture and Personality' studies carried out by younger Boasians such as
Margaret Mead and
Ruth Benedict. Influenced by psychoanalytic psychologists such as
Sigmund Freud and
Carl Jung, these authors sought to understand the way that individual personalities were shaped by the wider cultural and social forces in which they grew up. Though such works as
Coming of Age in Samoa and
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword remain popular with the American public, Mead and Benedict never had the impact on the discipline of anthropology that some expected. Boas had planned for Ruth Benedict to succeed him as chair of Columbia's anthropology department, but she was sidelined by
Ralph Linton, and Mead was limited to her offices at the
AMNH.
Anthropology in Canada
Canadian anthropology began, as in other parts of the Colonial world, as ethnological data in the records of travellers and missionaries. In Canada,
Jesuit missionaries such as Fathers LeClercq, Le Jeune and Sagard, in the 1600s, provide the oldest ethnographic records of native tribes in what was then the Domain of Canada.True anthropology began with a
Government department: the
Geological Survey of Canada, and
George Mercer Dawson (director in 1895). Dawson's support for anthropology created impetus for the profession in Canada. This was expanded upon by Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, who established a Division of Anthropology within the Geological Survey in 1910. Anthropologists were recruited from England and the USA, setting the foundation for the unique Canadian style of anthropology. Early scholars include the brilliant linguist and Boasian
Edward Sapir.
Anthropology in France
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Émile Durkheim
Anthropology in France has a less clear genealogy than the British and American traditions, in part because many French writers influential in anthropology have been trained or held faculty positions in sociology, philosophy, or other fields rather than in anthropology. Most commentators consider
Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), nephew of the influential sociologist
Émile Durkheim to be the founder of the French anthropological tradition. Mauss belonged to Durkheim's
Année Sociologique group; and while Durkheim and others examined the state of modern societies, Mauss and his collaborators (such as
Henri Hubert and
Robert Hertz) drew on ethnography and philology to analyze societies which were not as 'differentiated' as European nation states. Two works by Mauss in particular proved to have enduring relevance:
Essay on the Gift a seminal analysis of
exchange and
reciprocity, and his Huxley lecture on the notion of the person, the first comparative study of notions of person and selfhood cross-culturally.
(20)Throughout the interwar years, French interest in anthropology often dovetailed with wider cultural movements such as
surrealism and
primitivism which drew on ethnography for inspiration.
Marcel Griaule and
Michel Leiris are examples of people who combined anthropology with the French avant-garde. During this time most of what is known as
ethnologie was restricted to museums, such as the
Musée de l'Homme founded by
Paul Rivet, and anthropology had a close relationship with studies of
folklore.Above all, however, it was
Claude Lévi-Strauss who helped institutionalize anthropology in France. In addition to the enormous influence his
structuralism exerted across multiple disciplines, Lévi-Strauss established ties with American and British anthropologists. At the same time he established centers and laboratories within France to provide an institutional context within anthropology while training influential students such as
Maurice Godelier and
Françoise Héritier who would prove influential in the world of French anthropology. Much of the distinct character of France's anthropology today is a result of the fact that most anthropology is carried out in nationally funded research laboratories (
CNRS) rather than academic departments in universities. Other influential writers in the 1970s include
Pierre Clastres, who explains in his books on the
Guayaki tribe in
Paraguay that "primitive societies" actively oppose the institution of the
state. Therefore, these stateless societies are not less evolved than societies with states, but took the active choice of conjuring the institution of
authority as a separate function from society. The
leader is only a spokesperson for the group when it has to deal with other groups ("international relations") but has no inside authority, and may be violently removed if he attempts to abuse this position.The most important French social theorist since Foucault and Lévi-Strauss is
Pierre Bourdieu, who trained formally in philosophy and sociology and eventually held the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France. Like Mauss and others before him, however, he worked on topics both in sociology and anthropology. His fieldwork among the Kabyles of Algeria places him solidly in anthropology, while his analysis of the function and reproduction of fashion and cultural capital in European societies places him as solidly in sociology.
Other countries
Anthropology in
Greece and
Portugal is much influenced by British anthropology.{{Fact|date=February 2008}} In
Greece, there was since the 19th century a science of the
folklore called
laographia (laography), in the form of "a science of the interior", although theoretically weak; but the connotation of the field deeply changed after World War II, when a wave of Anglo-American anthropologists introduced a science "of the outside".
(21) In
Italy, the development of
ethnology and related studies did not receive as much attention as other branches of learning.
(22)Germany and
Norway are the countries that showed the most division and conflict between scholars focusing on domestic socio-cultural issues and scholars focusing on "other" societies.{{Fact|date=February 2008}}
Anthropology after World War II: Increasing dialog in Anglophone anthropology
Before
WWII British 'social anthropology' and American 'cultural anthropology' were still distinct traditions. After the war, enough British and American anthropologists borrowed ideas and methodological approaches from each other that some began to speak of them collectively as 'sociocultural' anthropology.In the 1950s and mid-1960s anthropology tended increasingly to model itself after the
natural sciences. Some anthropologists, such as
Lloyd Fallers and
Clifford Geertz, focused on processes of modernization by which newly independent states could develop. Others, such as
Julian Steward and
Leslie White, focused on how societies evolve and fit their ecological niche—an approach popularized by
Marvin Harris.
Economic anthropology as influenced by
Karl Polanyi and practiced by
Marshall Sahlins and
George Dalton challenged standard neoclassical
economics to take account of cultural and social factors, and also employed Marxian analysis into anthropological study. In England, British Social Anthropology's paradigm began to fragment as
Max Gluckman and
Peter Worsley experimented with Marxism and authors such as
Rodney Needham and
Edmund Leach incorporated Lévi-Strauss's structuralism into their work.Structuralism also influenced a number of developments in 1960s and 1970s, including
cognitive anthropology and componential analysis. Authors such as
David Schneider,
Clifford Geertz, and
Marshall Sahlins developed a more fleshed-out concept of culture as a web of meaning or signification, which proved very popular within and beyond the discipline. In keeping with the times, much of anthropology became politicized through the
Algerian War of Independence and opposition to the
Vietnam War;
(23) Marxism became a more and more popular theoretical approach in the discipline.
(24) By the 1970s the authors of volumes such as
Reinventing Anthropology worried about anthropology's relevance.Since the 1980s issues of power, such as those examined in
Eric Wolf's
Europe and the People Without History, have been central to the discipline. In the 80s books like
Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter pondered anthropology's ties to colonial inequality, while the immense popularity of theorists such as
Antonio Gramsci and
Michel Foucault moved issues of power and
hegemony into the spotlight. Gender and sexuality became popular topics, as did the relationship between history and anthropology, influenced by
Marshall Sahlins (again), who drew on
Lévi-Strauss and
Fernand Braudel to examine the relationship between social structure and individual agency. Also influential in these issues were
Nietzsche,
Heidegger, the critical theory of the
Frankfurt School,
Derrida and
Lacan.
(25)In the late 1980s and 1990s authors such as
George Marcus and
James Clifford pondered ethnographic authority, particularly how and why anthropological knowledge was possible and authoritative. They were reflecting trends in research and discourse initiated by Feminists in the academy, although they excused themselves from commenting specifically on those pioneering critics.
(26) Nevertheless, key aspects of feminist theorizing and methods became
de rigueur as part of the 'post-modern moment' in anthropology: Ethnographies became more reflexive, explicitly addressing the author's methodology, cultural, gender and racial positioning, and their influence on his or her ethnographic analysis. This was part of a more general trend of
postmodernism that was popular contemporaneously.
(27) Currently anthropologists pay attention to a wide variety of issues pertaining to the contemporary world, including
globalization,
medicine and
biotechnology,
indigenous rights,
virtual communities, and the anthropology of
industrialized societies.
Approaches to anthropology
The "four field" approach
Principally in the United States,
(28) anthropology is often defined as being "
holistic" and based on a "four-field" approach. There is an ongoing dispute as to whether this makes sense theoretically or pragmatically in the structure of American academic institutions. Supporters
(29) consider anthropology holistic in two senses: it is concerned with all human beings across times and places, and with all dimensions of humanity (evolutionary, biophysical, sociopolitical, economic, cultural, linguistic, psychological, etc.); also many academic programs following this approach take a "four-field" approach to anthropology that encompasses
physical anthropology,
archaeology,
linguistics, and
cultural anthropology or
social anthropology. The definition of anthropology as
holistic and the "four-field" approach are disputed by some leading anthropologists,
(30)(31)(32) that consider those as artifacts from 19th century
social evolutionary thought that inappropriately impose scientific
positivism upon
cultural anthropology in particular.
(33) (
for more details see the section on the relations with the natural sciences and the Humanities)The four fields are:
- Biological or physical anthropology seeks to understand the physical human being through the study of human evolution and adaptability, population genetics, and primatology. Subfields or related fields include paleoanthropology (study of evolutionary history of the human species), anthropometrics, forensic anthropology, osteology, and nutritional anthropology. On the basis of Tinbergen's four questions a framework of reference or "periodic table" of all fields of anthropological research (including humanities) can be established.
- Socio-cultural anthropology is the investigation, often through long term, intensive field studies (including participant-observation methods), of the culture and social organization of a particular people: language, economic and political organization, law and conflict resolution, patterns of consumption and exchange, kinship and family structure, gender relations, childrearing and socialization, religion, mythology, symbolism, etc. (U.S. universities more often use the term cultural anthropology; British universities have tended to call the corresponding field social anthropology, and for much of the 20th century emphasized the analysis of social organization more than cultural symbolism.) In some European countries, socio-cultural anthropology is known as ethnology (a term coined and defined by Adam F. Kollár in 1783(34) that is also used in English-speaking countries to denote the comparative aspect of socio-cultural anthropology.) Subfields and related fields include psychological anthropology, folklore, anthropology of religion, ethnic studies, cultural studies, anthropology of media and cyberspace, and study of the diffusion of social practices and cultural forms.
- Linguistic anthropology 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. It is the branch of anthropology that brings linguistic methods to bear on anthropological problems, linking the analysis of linguistic forms and processes to the interpretation of sociocultural processes. Linguistic anthropologists often draw on related fields including anthropological linguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, semiotics, discourse analysis, and narrative analysis.(35)
- Archaeology studies the contemporary distribution and form of artifacts (materials modified by past human activities), with the intent of understanding distribution and movement of ancient populations, development of human social organization, and relationships among contemporary populations; it also contributes significantly to the work of population geneticists, historical linguists, and many historians. Archaeology involves a wide variety of field techniques (remote sensing, survey, geophysical studies, coring, excavation) and laboratory procedures (compositional analyses, dating studies (radiocarbon, optically stimulated luminescence dating), measures of formal variability, examination of wear patterns, residue analyses, etc.). Archaeologists predominantly study materials produced by prehistoric groups but also includes modern, historical and ethnographic populations. Archaeology is usually regarded as a separate (but related) field outside North America, although closely related to the anthropological field of material culture, which deals with physical objects created or used within a living or past group as a means of understanding its cultural values.
A number of subfields or modes of anthropology cut across these divisions. For example,
medical anthropology is often considered a subfield of socio-cultural anthropology; however, many anthropologists who study medical topics also look at biological variation in populations or the interaction of culture and biology. They may also use linguistic analysis to understand communication around health and illness, or archaeological techniques to understand health and illness in historical or prehistorical populations. Similarly,
forensic anthropologists may use both techniques from both physical anthropology and archaeology, and may also practice as medical anthropologists. Environmental or
ecological anthropology, a growing subfield concerned with the relationships between humans and their environment, is another example that brings cultural and biological—and at times, archaeological—approaches together, as it can deal with a broad range of topics from
environmentalist movements to
wildlife or
habitat conservation to traditional ecological knowledge and practices.
Biocultural anthropology is a broad term used to describe syntheses of cultural and biological perspectives.
Applied anthropology is perhaps better considered an emphasis than a subfield in the same sense as the standard four; applied anthropologists may work for government agencies, nongovernmental agencies, or private industry, using techniques from any of the subfields to address matters such as policy implementation, impact assessments, education, marketing research, or product development. More recently, anthropology programs at several prominent U.S. universities have begun dividing the field into two: one emphasizing the
humanities,
critical theory, and interpretive or semiotic approaches; the other emphasizing
evolutionary theory, quantitative methods, and explicit theory testing (over idiographic description),
(36) though there have also been institutional pressures to rejoin at least one high-profile split department.
(37) At some universities, biological anthropology and archaeology programs have also moved from departments of anthropology to departments of biology or other related fields. This has occasioned much discussion within the
American Anthropological Association, and it remains to be seen whether some form of the four-field organization will persist in North American universities.As might be inferred from the above list of subfields, anthropology is a methodologically diverse discipline, incorporating both
qualitative methods and
quantitative methods.
Ethnographies—intensive
case studies based on field research—have historically had a central place in the literature of sociocultural and linguistic anthropology, but are increasingly supplemented by
mixed-methods approaches. Currently, technological advancements are spurring methodological innovation across anthropology's subfields.
Radiocarbon dating,
population genetics,
GPS, and digital video- and audio-recording are just a few of the many technologies spurring new developments in anthropological research.
Controversies about the history of anthropology
Anthropologists, like other researchers (esp. historians and scientists engaged in field research), have over time assisted state policies and projects, especially colonialism.
(38)(39) Some commentators have contended:
- That the discipline grew out of colonialism, perhaps was in league with it, and derived some of its key notions from it, consciously or not. (See, for example, Gough, Pels and Salemink, but cf. Lewis 2004).(40)
- That anthropologists typically have more power than the people they study and hence their knowledge-making is a form of theft in which the anthropologist gains something for him or herself at the expense of informants.
- That ethnographic work was often ahistorical, writing about people as if they were "out of time" in an "ethnographic present" (Johannes Fabian, Time and Its Other).
Anthropology and the military
Anthropologists’ involvement with the U.S. government, in particular, has caused bitter controversy within the discipline. Franz Boas publicly objected to US participation in
World War I, and after the war he published a brief expose and condemnation of the participation of several American archeologists in espionage in Mexico under their cover as scientists. But by the 1940s, many of Boas' anthropologist contemporaries were active in the allied war effort against the "Axis" (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan). Many served in the armed forces but others worked in intelligence (for example,
Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the
Office of War Information). At the same time,
David H. Price's work on American anthropology during the Cold War provides detailed accounts of the pursuit and dismissal of several anthropologists from their jobs for communist sympathies. Attempts to accuse anthropologists of complicity with the CIA and government intelligence activities during the Vietnam War years have turned up surprisingly little (although anthropologist Hugo Nutini was active in the stillborn
Project Camelot).
(41) Many anthropologists (students and teachers) were active in the antiwar movement and a great many resolutions condemning the war in all its aspects were passed overwhelmingly at the annual meetings of the
American Anthropological Association (AAA). In the decades since the Vietnam war the tone of cultural and social anthropology, at least, has been increasingly politicized, with the dominant liberal tone of earlier generations replaced with one more radical, a mix of, and varying degrees of, Marxist, feminist, anarchist, post-colonial, post-modern, Saidian, Foucauldian, identity-based, and more.
(42)Professional anthropological bodies often object to the use of anthropology for the benefit of the
state. Their codes of ethics or statements may proscribe anthropologists from giving secret briefings. The
Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth (ASA ) has called certain scholarships ethically dangerous. The AAA's current 'Statement of Professional Responsibility' clearly states that "in relation with their own government and with host governments … no secret research, no secret reports or debriefings of any kind should be agreed to or given."However, anthropologists, along with other social scientists, are once again being used in warfare as part of the
US Army's strategy in Afghanistan. The
Christian Science Monitor reports that "Counterinsurgency efforts focus on better grasping and meeting local needs" in
Afghanistan, under the
rubric of
Human Terrain Team (HTT).
Major discussions about anthropology
urban anthropology,
Ulf Hannerz in the introduction to his seminal
Exploring the City: Inquiries Toward an Urban Anthropology mentions that the "
Third World" had habitually received most of attention; anthropologists who traditionally specialized in "other cultures" looked for them far away and started to look "across the tracks" only in late 1960s.
(43) Now there exist many works focusing on peoples and topics very close to the author's "home".
(44)">
Focus on "other cultures"Some authors argue that anthropology originated and developed as the study of "other cultures", both in terms of time (past societies) and space (non-European/non-Western societies). For example, the classic of urban anthropology, Ulf Hannerz in the introduction to his seminal Exploring the City: Inquiries Toward an Urban Anthropology mentions that the "Third World" had habitually received most of attention; anthropologists who traditionally specialized in "other cultures" looked for them far away and started to look "across the tracks" only in late 1960s.(45) Now there exist many works focusing on peoples and topics very close to the author's "home".(46)
In France, the study of existing contemporary society has been traditionally left to
sociologists, but this is increasingly changing,
(47) starting in the 1970s from scholars like
Isac Chiva and journals like
Terrain ("fieldwork"), and developing with the center founded by Marc Augé (Le Centre d'anthropologie des mondes contemporains, the Anthropological Research Center of Contemporary Societies). The same approach of focusing on "modern world" topics by Terrain'', was also present in the British
Manchester School of the 1950s.{{Fact|date=February 2008}}It has been reported{{who}} that there has been an "institutional and academic
apartheid" between the two sorts of anthropology, the one focusing on the "Other" and the one focusing on the "Self" contemporary society; an apartheid ranging from a "no contact" status to even open conflict. The countries where this was greater were Germany and Norway, but it was also significant in the 1980s France.
References
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[Wolf, Eric (1994) Perilous Ideas: Race, Culture, People. Current Anthropology 35: 1-7. p.227]
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[Wolf, Eric R.(1964) Anthropology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall]
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[Akbar S. Ahmed (1984). "Al-Beruni: The First Anthropologist", RAIN 60, p. 9-10.]
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[J. T. Walbridge (1998). "Explaining Away the Greek Gods in Islam", Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (3), p. 389-403.]
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[Richard Tapper (1995). "Islamic Anthropology" and the "Anthropology of Islam", Anthropological Quarterly 68 (3), Anthropological Analysis and Islamic Texts, p. 185-193.]
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[Most scholars consider modern anthropology as an outgrowth of the Age of Enlightenment, a period when Europeans attempted systematically to study human behavior, the known varieties of which had been increasing since the 15th century as a result of the first European colonization wave. The traditions of jurisprudence, history, philology, and sociology then evolved into something more closely resembling the modern views of these disciplines and informed the development of the social sciences, of which anthropology was a part. Developments in systematic study of ancient civilizations through the disciplines of Classics and Egyptology informed both archaeology and eventually social anthropology, as did the study of East and South Asian languages and cultures. At the same time, the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment produced thinkers, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and later Wilhelm Dilthey, whose work formed the basis for the "culture concept," which is central to the discipline. ]missing image!
- Table of Natural History, Cyclopaedia, Volume 2.jpg -
Table of natural history, 1728 Cyclopaedia
Institutionally, anthropology emerged from the development of natural history (expounded by authors such as Buffon) that occurred during the European colonization of the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Programs of ethnographic study originated in this era as the study of the "human primitives" overseen by colonial administrations. There was a tendency in late 18th century Enlightenment thought to understand human society as natural phenomena that behaved in accordance with certain principles and that could be observed empirically. In some ways, studying the language, culture, physiology, and artifacts of European colonies was not unlike studying the flora and fauna of those places. Early anthropology was divided between proponents of unilinealism, who argued that all societies passed through a single evolutionary process, from the most primitive to the most advanced, and various forms of non-lineal theorists, who tended to subscribe to ideas such as diffusionism.[Stocking, George W. (1968) Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the history of anthropology. London: The Free Press.]
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[Clifford, James and George E. Marcus (1986) Writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.]
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[Wallerstein, Immanuel. (2003) "Anthropology, sociology, and other dubious disciplines." Current Anthropology 44:453-466.]
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[On varieties of cultural relativism in anthropology, see Spiro, Melford E. (1987) "Some Reflections on Cultural Determinism and Relativism with Special Reference to Emotion and Reason," in Culture and Human Nature: theoretical papers of Melford E. Spiro. Edited by B. Kilborne and L. L. Langness, pp. 32-58. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.]
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[Gellner, Ernest. (1998) Language and solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski, and the Habsburg dilemma. New York: Cambridge University Press.]
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[Gellner, Ernest, ed. (1980) Soviet and Western anthropology. New York: Columbia University Press.]
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[Stocking, George Jr. (1963) "Matthew Arnold, E. B. Tylor, and the Uses of Invention," American Anthropologist, 65:783-799, 1963]
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[Tylor, E. B. (1865) Researches into the early history of mankind the development of civilization. London: John Murray.]
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[Tylor, E. B. (1871) Primitive culture: researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, art, and custom. 2 vols. London, John Murray.]
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[ Malinowski, Bronisław (1967) A diary in the strict sense of the term. New York, Harcourt, Brace & World [1967]]
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[Jack Goody (1995) The Expansive Moment: The Rise of Social Anthropology in Britain and Africa, 1918-1970 review: weblink]
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[Thomas William Heyck weblink The American Historical Review, Vol. 102, No. 5 (Dec., 1997), pp. 1486-1488 doi:10.2307/2171126]
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[This would be influential on the ideas of Karl Marx, who dedicated Das Kapital to Morgan.]
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[Stocking, George W. (1968) Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the history of anthropology. London: The Free Press.]
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[Mauss, Marcel (1938) "A category of the human mind: the notion of person; the notion of self.," in M. Carrithers, S. Collins, and S. Lukes, eds. The Category of the Person: anthropology, philosophy, history. Pp. 1-25. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Originally given as “Une categorie de l’Esprit Humain: La Notion de Personne, Celle de ‘Moi’,” for the Huxley Memorial Lecture and appeared in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 68.]
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[Geneviève Zoïa, « L'anthropologie en Grèce », Terrain, Numéro 14—L'incroyable et ses preuves (mars 1990) , [En ligne], mis en ligne le 7 octobre 2005. URL:weblink Consulté le 15 juin 2007. {{fr icon}}]
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[Grottanelli, Vinigi Ethnology and/or Cultural Anthropology in Italy: Traditions and Developments (and Comments and Reply). Other authors: Giorgio Ausenda, Bernardo Bernardi, Ugo Bianchi, Y. Michal Bodemann, Jack Goody, Allison Jablonko, David I. Kertzer, Vittorio Lanternari, Antonio Marazzi, Roy A. Miller, Jr., Laura Laurencich Minelli, David M. Moss, Leonard W. Moss, H. R. H. Prince Peter of Greece and Denmark, Diana Pinto, Pietro Scotti, Tullio Tentori. Current Anthropology, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Dec., 1977), pp. 593-614]
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[Fanon, Frantz. (1963) The Wretched of the Earth, transl. Constance Farrington. New York, Grove Weidenfeld.]
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[Nugent, Stephen Some reflections on anthropological structural Marxism The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Volume 13, Number 2, June 2007, pp. 419-431(13)]
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[Lewis, Herbert S. (1998) The Misrepresentation of Anthropology and its Consequences American Anthropologist 100:" 716-731]
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[Clifford, James and George E. Marcus (1986) Writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.]
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[Gellner, Ernest (1992) Postmodernism, Reason, and Religion. London/New York: Routledge. Pp: 26-50]
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[Sydel Silverman Introduction Current Anthropology, Vol. 33, No. 1, Supplement: Inquiry and Debate in the Human Sciences: Contributions from Current Anthropology, 1960-1990 (Feb., 1992), pp. 1-6]
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[Shore, Bradd (1999) Strange Fate of Holism. Anthropology News 40(9): 4-5.]
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[BOOK, Segal, Daniel A., Sylvia J. Yanagisako (eds.), James Clifford, Ian Hodder, Rena Lederman, Michael Silverstein, Unwrapping the Sacred Bundle: Reflections on the Disciplining of Anthropology, Duke University Press, 2005,weblink introduction: weblink reviews: weblink weblink weblink weblink ]
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[Robert Borofsky The Four Subfields: Anthropologists as Mythmakers American Anthropologist June 2002, Vol. 104, No. 2, pp. 463-480 doi:10.1525/aa.2002.104.2.463]
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[Robin Fox (1991) Encounter With Anthropology ISBN 0887388701 pp.14-16]
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[Smart, Josephine (2006) "In Search of Anthropology in China: A Discipline Caught in a Web of Nation Building, Socialist Capitalism, and Globalization.," in Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and Arturo Escobar, eds. World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations in Systems of Power. Pp. 69-85. Oxford: Berg Publishers.]
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[Han F. Vermeulen, "The German Invention of Völkerkunde: Ethnological Discourse in Europe and Asia, 1740-1798." In: Sara Eigen and Mark Larrimore, eds. The German Invention of Race. 2006.]
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[Salzmann, Zdeněk. (1993) Language, culture, and society: an introduction to linguistic anthropology. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.]
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[Shea, Christopher and Scott Heller (29 May 1998) "Stanford Anthropology Department Will Split." Chronicle of Higher Education]
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[Trei, Lisa (14 Feb 2007) "Anthropology departments instructed to form combined unit." Stanford Daily News]
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[Asad, Talal, ed. (1973) Anthropology & the Colonial Encounter. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.]
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[van Breman, Jan, and Akitoshi Shimizu (1999) Anthropology and Colonialism in Asia and Oceania. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press.]
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[Gellner, Ernest (1992) Postmodernism, Reason, and Religion. London/New York: Routledge. Pp: 26-29.]
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[Horowitz, Lewis ed.(1967) The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot.]
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[D'Andrade, Roy (1995) "Moral Models in Anthropology." Current Anthropology 36: 399-408.]
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[Ulf Hannerz (1980) "Exploring the City: Inquiries Toward an Urban Anthropology", ISBN 0231083769, p. 1]
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[Jack Goody (2007) The Theft of History Cambridge University Press ISBN 0521870690]
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[Ulf Hannerz (1980) "Exploring the City: Inquiries Toward an Urban Anthropology", ISBN 0231083769, p. 1]
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[Jack Goody (2007) The Theft of History Cambridge University Press ISBN 0521870690]
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[*Marc Abélès, How the Anthropology of France Has Changed Anthropology in France: Assessing New Directions in the Field Cultural Anthropology 1999 p. 407]
Bibliography
Fieldnotes and memoirs of anthropologists
- Barley, Nigel (1983) The innocent anthropologist: notes from a mud hut. London: British Museum Publications.
- Geertz, Clifford (1995) After the fact: two countries, four decades, one anthropologist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1967) Tristes tropiques. Translated from the French by John Russell. New York: Atheneum.
- Malinowski, Bronisław (1967) A diary in the strict sense of the term. Translated by Norbert Guterman. New York, Harcourt, Brace & World.
- Rabinow, Paul. (1977) Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco.
History of anthropology
- Asad, Talal, ed. (1973) Anthropology & the Colonial Encounter. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
- Barth, Fredrik, Andre Gingrich, Robert Parkin, and Sydel Silverman. 2005. One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French, and American anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- D'Andrade, R. "The Sad Story of Anthropology: 1950-1999." In E. L. Cerroni-Long, ed. Anthropological Theory in North America. Westport: Berin & Garvey 1999. download
- Darnell, Regna. (2001) Invisible Genealogies: A History of Americanist Anthropology. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
- Deeb, Benjamin. (2007) Anthropology and Social Problems: A Manual of Change.
- Harris, Marvin. (2001[1968]) The rise of anthropological theory: a history of theories of culture. AltaMira Press. Walnut Creek, CA.
- Kehoe, Alice B. (1998) The Land of Prehistory: A Critical History of American Archaeology.
- Lewis, Herbert S. (1998) "The Misrepresentation of Anthropology and its Consequences." American Anthropologist, 100: 716-731.
- Lewis, Herbert S. (2004) "Imagining Anthropology's History." Reviews in Anthropology, v. 33.
- Lewis, Herbert S. (2005) "Anthropology, the Cold War, and Intellectual History. In R. Darnell & F.W. Gleach, eds. Histories of Anthropology Annual, Vol. I.
- Pels, Peter & Oscar Salemink, eds. (2000) Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology.
- Price, David. (2004) Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists.
- Stocking, George, Jr. (1968) Race, Culture and Evolution. New York: Free Press.
- Trencher, Susan. (2000) Mirrored Images: American Anthropology and American Culture, 1960-1980.
Textbooks and key theoretical works
- Clifford, James and George E. Marcus (1986) Writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
- Harris, Marvin (1997) Culture, People, Nature: An Introduction to General Anthropology (7th Edition). Boston: Allyn & Bacon
- Salzmann, Zdeněk. (1993) Language, culture, and society: an introduction to linguistic anthropology. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
- Shweder, Richard A., and Robert A. LeVine, eds. (1984) Culture Theory: essays on mind, self, and emotion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
See also
External links
{{wiktionary}}{{wikiversity3|School:Anthropology|Anthropology|The School of Anthropology}}
Organizations
Resources
Antropologieعلم الإنسانAvakuaatyAntropologiyaনৃবিজ্ঞান(zh-min-nan:Jîn-lūi-ha̍k)(be-x-old:Антрапалёгія)
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