Anthropology ' onMouseout='HidePop("28448")' href="http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Ancient_Greek">Greek
Ancient Greek is the historical stage in the development of the Greek language spanning across the Archaic , Classical , and Hellenistic periods of ancient Greece and the ancient world. It is predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
,
anthrōpos, "human", and -λογία,
-logia, "discourse", first use in English: 1593) is the study of human beings, everywhere and throughout time.
Anthropology has its intellectual origins in both the natural sciences, and the
humanitiesThe humanities are academic disciplines which study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytic, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural and social sciences....
. Its basic questions concern, "What defines
Homo sapiens?" "Who are the ancestors of modern
Homo sapiens?" "What are our physical traits?" "How do we behave?" "Why are there variations and differences among different groups of humans?" "How has the evolutionary past of
Homo sapiens influenced its social organization and culture?" and so forth.
While specific modern anthropologists have a tendency to specialize in technical subfields, their data and ideas are routinely synthesized into larger works about the scope and progress of our species.
The term "anthropology" refers in common parlance most often to
Cultural AnthropologyCultural anthropology is one of four or five fields of anthropology . It is the branch of anthropology that examines culture as a meaningful scientific concept....
, the study of the culture, beliefs, and practices of living people. In American universities, however, the department of Anthropology often includes three or four subfields, including cultural anthropology,
archaeologyArchaeology or archeology is the science that studies human cultures through the recovery, documentation, analysis, and interpretation of material culture and environmental data, including architecture, artifacts, biofacts, and landscapes...
, biological anthropology and
linguistic anthropologyLinguistic anthropology is that branch of anthropology that brings linguistic methods to bear on anthropological problems, linking the analysis of semiotic and particularly linguistic forms and processes to the interpretation of sociocultural processes....
. However, in universities in the
United KingdomThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
, and much of
EuropeEurope is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally divided from Asia to its east by the water divide of the Ural Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian Sea, the Caucasus Mountains , and the Black Sea to the southeast...
, these fields are frequently housed in separate departments.
A brief overview of the discipline
One traditional approach to simplifying such a vast enterprise has been to divide anthropology into four fields, each with its own further branches: biological or physical anthropology,
cultural anthropologyCultural anthropology is one of four or five fields of anthropology . It is the branch of anthropology that examines culture as a meaningful scientific concept....
,
archaeologyArchaeology or archeology is the science that studies human cultures through the recovery, documentation, analysis, and interpretation of material culture and environmental data, including architecture, artifacts, biofacts, and landscapes...
and
anthropological linguisticsAnthropological linguistics is the study of the relations between language and culture, and the relations between human biology, cognition and language...
.
Briefly put, biological or physical anthropology includes the study of
human evolutionIn biology, evolution is change in the genetic material of a population of organisms from one generation to the next. Though changes produced in any one generation are normally small, differences accumulate with each generation and can, over time, cause substantial changes in the population, a...
, human
evolutionary biologyEvolutionary biology is a sub-field of biology concerned with the origin of species from a common descent and descent of species, as well as their change, multiplication and diversity over time. Someone who studies evolutionary biology is known as an evolutionary biologist...
,
population geneticsPopulation genetics is the study of the allele frequency distribution and change under the influence of the four evolutionary processes: natural selection, genetic drift, mutation and gene flow. It also takes account of population subdivision and population structure in space. As such, it attempts...
, our nearest biological relatives,
classificationTaxonomy is the practice and science of classification. The word finds its roots in the Greek , taxis and , nomos...
of ancient hominids,
paleontologyPaleontology
[from Greek: παλαιός "old, ancient", ὄν, ὀντ- "being, creature", and λόγος "speech, thought"] is the study of prehistoric life, including organisms' evolution and interactions with each other and their environments...
of humans, distribution human alleles, blood types and the
human genome projectThe Human Genome Project was an international scientific research project with a primary goal to determine the sequence of chemical base pairs which make up DNA and to identify and map the approximately 20,000–25,000 genes of the human genome from both a physical and functional standpoint...
.
PrimatologyPrimatology is the study of primates. It is a diverse discipline and primatologists can be found in departments of biology, anthropology, psychology and many others. It is a branch of Physical anthropology, which, in itself, studies the genus Homo, especially Homo sapiens...
studies our nearest non-human relatives (human beings are primates), and some primatologists use field observation methods, written up in a manner quite similar to ethnography.
Biological anthropology is used by other fields to shed light on how a particular folk got to where they are, how frequently they've encountered and married outsiders, whether a particular group is protein-deprived, and to understand the brain processes involved in the production of language. Other related fields or subfields include
paleoanthropologyPaleoanthropology, which combines the disciplines of paleontology and physical anthropology, is the study of ancient humans as found in fossil hominid evidence such as petrifacted bones and footprints.-Nineteenth century:...
, anthropometrics, nutritional anthropology, and
forensic anthropologyForensic anthropology is the application of the science of physical anthropology and human osteology in a legal setting, most often in criminal cases where the victim's remains are in the advanced stages of decomposition...
.
Cultural anthropology is often based on
ethnographyEthnography is a branch of anthropology. It is a methodological strategy used to provide descriptions of human societies, which as a methodology does not prescribe any particular method , but instead prescribes the nature of the study Ethnography (Greek ethnos = folk/people and graphein =...
, a kind of writing used throughout anthropology to present data on a particular people or folk (from the Greek,
ethnos/Έθνος), often based on
participant observationParticipant observation is a type of research strategy. It is a widely used methodology in many disciplines, particularly, cultural anthropology, but also sociology, communication studies, and social psychology...
research.
EthnologyEthnology is the branch of anthropology that compares and analyzes the origins, distribution, technology, religion, language, and social structure of the ethnic, racial, and/or national divisions of humanity.-Scientific Discipline:Compared to ethnography, the study of single groups through direct...
involves the systematic comparison of different cultures. Cultural anthropology is also called socio-cultural anthropology or social anthropology (especially in Great Britain). In some European countries, cultural anthropology is known as
ethnologyEthnology is the branch of anthropology that compares and analyzes the origins, distribution, technology, religion, language, and social structure of the ethnic, racial, and/or national divisions of humanity.-Scientific Discipline:Compared to ethnography, the study of single groups through direct...
(a term coined and defined by
Adam F. KollárAdam František Kollár − Adam Franz Kollár in older English sources, a Slovak lower nobleman, was a historian, ethnologist, and as Imperial-Royal Court Councilor and Chief Imperial-Royal Librarian, an influential advocate of Empress Maria Theresa's Enlightened and centralist policies...
in 1783).
The study of
kinshipKinship is a relationship between any entities that share a genealogical origin, through either biological, cultural, or historical descent. In anthropology the kinship system includes people related both by descent and marriage, while usage in biology includes descent and mating...
and social organization is a central focus of cultural anthropology, as kinship is a human universal. Cultural 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, worldview, sports, music, nutrition, recreation, games, food, festivals, and language, which is also the object of study in linguistics. Note the way in which some of these topics overlap with topics in the other subfields.
Archaeology is the study of human material culture, including both
artifactsAn artifact or artefact is any object made or modified by a human. In archaeology, an artifact is an object recovered by some archaeological endeavor, which may have a cultural interest. Examples include stone tools such as projectile points, pottery vessels, metal objects such as buttons or guns,...
(older pieces of human culture) carefully gathered
in situ, museum pieces and modern garbage. Archaeologists work closely with biological anthropologists, art historians, physics laboratories (for dating), and museums. They are charged with preserving the results of their excavations and are often found in museums. Typically, archaeologists are associated with "digs," or excavation of layers of ancient sites.
Archaeologists subdivide time into cultural periods based on long-lasting artifacts: for example the
PaleolithicThe Paleolithic or Palaeolithic Age, Era, or Period, or Old Stone Age, is a prehistoric era distinguished by the development of the first stone tools, and covers roughly 99% of human technological history...
, the
NeolithicThe Neolithic Age, Era, or Period, or New Stone Age, was a period in the development of human technology, beginning about 9500 BCE in the Middle East that is traditionally considered the last part of the Stone Age...
, the
Bronze AgeThe Bronze Age of a culture is the period when the most advanced metalworking in that culture utilised bronze. This could either have been based on the local smelting of copper and tin from ores, or trading for bronze from production areas elsewhere...
, which are further subdivided according to artifact traditions and culture region, such as the Oldowan or the
Gravettianthumb|right|Burins similar to these are characteristic diagnostic artifacts typical of the digs attributed to the Gravettian culture.The Gravettian toolmaking culture was a specific archaeological industry of the European Upper Palaeolithic era prevalent before the last glacial epoch...
. In this way, archaeologists provide a vast reference of the places human beings have traveled over the past 200,000 years, their ways of making a living, and their
demographicsDemographics or demographic data are selected population characteristics as used in government, marketing or opinion research, or the demographic profiles used in such research...
. Archaeologists also investigate nutrition, symbolization, art, systems of writing, and other physical remnants of human cultural activity.
Linguistics is the study of language.
Linguistic anthropologyLinguistic anthropology is that branch of anthropology that brings linguistic methods to bear on anthropological problems, linking the analysis of semiotic and particularly linguistic forms and processes to the interpretation of sociocultural processes....
(also called
anthropological linguisticsAnthropological linguistics is the study of the relations between language and culture, and the relations between human biology, cognition and language...
) seeks to understand the processes of human communications, verbal and non-verbal, variation in
languageA language is a system for encoding and decoding information. In its most common use, the term refers to so-called "natural languages" — the forms of communication considered peculiar to humankind. In linguistics the term is extended to refer to the human cognitive facility of creating and using...
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 linguisticsAnthropological linguistics is the study of the relations between language and culture, and the relations between human biology, cognition and language...
,
sociolinguisticsSociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used. Sociolinguistics differs from sociology of language in that the focus of sociolinguistics is the effect of the society on the language,...
,
pragmaticsPragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. It studies how the...
,
cognitive linguisticsIn linguistics and cognitive science, cognitive linguistics refers to the school of linguistics that understands language creation, learning, and usage as best explained by reference to human cognition in general. It is characterized by adherence to three central positions...
,
semioticsSemiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of sign processes , or signification and communication, signs and symbols, into three branches:...
,
discourse analysisDiscourse analysis , or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyzing written, spoken or signed language use....
, and
narrativeA narrative is a story that is created in a constructive format that describes a sequence of fictional or non-fictional events...
analysis.
This field is divided into its own subfields:
descriptive linguisticsIn the study of language, description, or descriptive linguistics, is the work of objectively analyzing and describing how language is spoken by a group of people in a speech community...
the construction of grammars and lexicons for unstudied languages;
historical linguisticsHistorical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages;...
, including the reconstruction of past languages, from which our current languages have descended;
ethnolinguisticsEthnolinguistics is a field of linguistic anthropology which studies the relationship between language and culture, and the way different ethnic groups perceive the world...
, the study of the relationship between language and culture, and
sociolinguisticsSociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used. Sociolinguistics differs from sociology of language in that the focus of sociolinguistics is the effect of the society on the language,...
, the study of the social functions of language. Anthropological linguistics is also concerned with the evolution of the parts of the brain that deal with language.
Because anthropology developed from so many different enterprises (see
History of AnthropologyThis article mainly discusses 18th- and 19th-century precursors of modern anthropology. For more information on modern social and cultural anthropology as they have developed in Britain, France, and North America since approximately 1900, see the relevant sections under Anthropology.-Overview:The...
), including but not limited to
fossil-huntingFossil collecting describes the extraction of fossilised material for profit, pleasure, or scientific study. Fossils - the preserved remains of long-dead organisms - are found in many places where sedimentary rocks, such as claystones, shales, limestones, and sandstones, are exposed...
,
exploringExploration is the act of searching or traveling a terrain for the purpose of discovery, e.g. of unknown people, including space , for oil, gas, coal, ores, caves, water, , or information.Although exploration has existed as long as human beings, its peak is seen as being during the Age of Discovery...
, documentary film-making,
paleontologyPaleontology
[from Greek: παλαιός "old, ancient", ὄν, ὀντ- "being, creature", and λόγος "speech, thought"] is the study of prehistoric life, including organisms' evolution and interactions with each other and their environments...
,
primatologyPrimatology is the study of primates. It is a diverse discipline and primatologists can be found in departments of biology, anthropology, psychology and many others. It is a branch of Physical anthropology, which, in itself, studies the genus Homo, especially Homo sapiens...
, antiquity dealings and curatorship,
philologyPhilology considers both form and meaning in linguistic expression, combining linguistics and literary studies.Classical philology is the philology of the Greek, Latin and Sanskrit languages...
,
etymologyEtymology is the study of the history of words and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages, and texts about the languages, to gather knowledge about how words were used at earlier stages, and...
,
geneticsGenetics, , a discipline of biology, is the science of heredity and variation in living organisms. The fact that living things inherit traits from their parents has been used since prehistoric times to improve crop plants and animals through selective breeding...
, regional analysis,
ethnologyEthnology is the branch of anthropology that compares and analyzes the origins, distribution, technology, religion, language, and social structure of the ethnic, racial, and/or national divisions of humanity.-Scientific Discipline:Compared to ethnography, the study of single groups through direct...
,
historyHistory is the study of the human past, with special attention to the written record. Scholars who write about history are called historians. It is a field of research which uses a narrative to examine and analyse the sequence of events, and it often attempts to investigate objectively the patterns...
,
philosophyPhilosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these questions by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned...
and
religious studiesReligious studies, or Religious education, is the academic field of multi-disciplinary, secular study of religious beliefs, behaviors, and institutions...
, it is difficult to characterize the entire field in a brief article, although attempts to write histories of the entire field have been made.
On the one hand this has led to instability in many American anthropology departments, resulting in the division or reorganization of subfields (e.g. at Stanford, Duke, and most recently at Harvard). However, seen in a positive light, anthropology is one of the few place in many American universities where humanities, social, and natural sciences are forced to confront one another.
As such, anthropology has also been central in the development of several new (late 20th century) interdisciplinary fields such as
cognitive neuroscienceCognitive neuroscience is an academic field concerned with the scientific study of biological substrates underlying cognition, with a specific focus on the neural substrates of mental processes. It addresses the questions of how psychological/cognitive functions are produced by the brain...
,
global studiesGlobal studies in its broadest definition is the academic study of political, economic, social and cultural relationships of the world.Global studies can also be referred to as world studies, international studies or International education...
, and various
ethnic studiesEthnic studies is the interdisciplinary study of racialized peoples in the United States and elsewhere. It evolved in the second half of the 20th century partly in response to charges that traditional disciplines such as anthropology, history, English, ethnology, Asian Studies, and orientalism were...
.
Basic trends in anthropology
The goal of anthropology is to provide a
holisticHolism is the idea that all the properties of a given system cannot be determined or explained by its component parts alone...
account of humans and human nature. Since anthropology arose as a science in Western societies that were complex and industrial, a major trend within anthropology has been a methodological drive to study peoples in societies with more simple social organization, sometimes called "primitive" in anthropological literature, but without any connotation of "inferior." Today, most anthropologists use terms such as "less complex" societies or refer to specific modes of subsistence or production, such as "hunter-gatherer" or "forager" or "simple farmer" to refer to humans living in non-industrial, non-Western cultures, such people or folk (
ethnos) remaining of great interest within anthropology.
The quest for holism leads most anthropologists to study a particular folk or people in detail, using biogenetic, archaeological, and linguistic data alongside direct observation of contemporary customs. In the 1990s and 2000s, calls for clarification of what constitutes a culture, of how an observer knows where his or her own culture ends and another begins, and other crucial topics in writing anthropology were heard. It is possible to view all human cultures as part of one large, evolving global culture. These dynamic relationships, between what can be observed on the ground, as opposed to what can be observed by compiling many local observations remain fundamental in any kind of anthropology, whether cultural, biological, linguistic or archaeological.
Anthropologists are interested in both human variation and in the possibility of human universals (behaviors, ideas or concepts shared by virtually all human cultures) They use many different methods of study, but modern population
geneticsGenetics, , a discipline of biology, is the science of heredity and variation in living organisms. The fact that living things inherit traits from their parents has been used since prehistoric times to improve crop plants and animals through selective breeding...
,
participant observationParticipant observation is a type of research strategy. It is a widely used methodology in many disciplines, particularly, cultural anthropology, but also sociology, communication studies, and social psychology...
and other techniques often take anthropologists "into the field" which means traveling to a community in its own setting, to do something called "fieldwork." On the biological or physical side, human measurements, genetic samples, nutritional data may be gathered and published as articles or monographs. Due to the interest in variation, anthropologists are drawn to the study of human extremes, aberrations and other unusual circumstances, such as
headhuntingHeadhunting is the practice of taking a person's head after killing him or her. Headhunting was practiced in historic times in parts of China, India, Nigeria, Nuristan, Myanmar, Borneo, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Japan, Micronesia, Melanesia, New Zealand, and the Amazon Basin, as well as...
, whirling dervishes, whether there were real Hobbit people,
snake handlingSnake handling or serpent handling is a religious ritual in a small number of Pentecostal churches in the U.S., usually characterized as rural and Holiness. The practice began in the early 20th century in Appalachia, spreading to mostly coal mining towns. The practice plays only a small part of...
, and
glossolalia (speaking in tongues)-Etymology:'Glossolalia' is constructed from the Greek word γλωσσολαλιά, itself is a compound of the words γλῶσσα and λαλεῖν . The term 'speaking in tongues' is a translation of these two components of the same word...
, just to list a few.
At the same time, anthropologists urge, as part of their quest for scientific objectivity,
cultural relativismCultural relativism is the principle that an individual human's beliefs and activities should be understood in terms of his or her own culture. This principle was established as axiomatic in anthropological research by Franz Boas in the first few decades of the 20th century and later popularized...
, which has an influence on all the subfields of anthropology. This is the notion that particular cultures should not be judged by one culture's values or viewpoints, but that all cultures should be viewed as relative to each other. There should be no notions, in good anthropology, of one culture being better or worse than another culture.
Ethical commitments in anthropology include noticing and documenting
genocideGenocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.While precise definition varies among genocide scholars, a legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of...
,
infanticideInfanticide is the practice of someone intentionally killing an infant. Often it is the mother who commits the act, but criminology recognizes various forms of non-maternal child murder. In many past societies, certain forms of infanticide were considered permissible...
,
racismRacism is the belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race. In the case of institutional racism, certain racial groups may be denied rights or benefits, or get preferential treatment...
,
mutilationMutilation or maiming is an act or physical injury that degrades the appearance or function of any living body, usually without causing death.- Usage of term :...
including especially circumcision and subincision, and
tortureTorture, according to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, is:In addition to state-sponsored torture, individuals or groups may be motivated to inflict torture on others for similar reasons to those of a state; however, the motive for torture can also be for the sadistic gratification of...
. Topics like racism, slavery or human sacrifice, therefore, attract anthropological attention and theories ranging from nutritional deficiencies to genes to
acculturationAcculturation is the exchange of cultural features that results when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous first hand contact; the original cultural patterns of either or both groups may be altered, but the groups remain distinct...
have been proposed, not to mention theories of
colonialismColonialism is the building and maintaining of colonies in one territory by people from another territory. Sovereignty over the colony is claimed by the metropole...
and many others as root causes of man's inhumanity to man. To illustrate the depth of an anthropological approach, one can take just one of these topics, such as "racism" and find thousands of anthropological references, stretching across all the subfields (and sub-subfields).
In addition to dividing up their project by theoretical emphasis, anthropologists typically divide the world up into relevant time periods and geographic regions. Human time on Earth is divided up into relevant cultural traditions based on material, such as the
PaleolithicThe Paleolithic or Palaeolithic Age, Era, or Period, or Old Stone Age, is a prehistoric era distinguished by the development of the first stone tools, and covers roughly 99% of human technological history...
and the
NeolithicThe Neolithic Age, Era, or Period, or New Stone Age, was a period in the development of human technology, beginning about 9500 BCE in the Middle East that is traditionally considered the last part of the Stone Age...
, of particular use in archaeology. Further cultural subdivisions according to tool types, such as
OlduwanOldowan is an anthropological designation for an industrial complex of stone tools used by prehistoric hominins of the Lower Paleolithic. The Oldowan is the first known tool complex in prehistory, including the simplest known flaked tools...
or
MousterianMousterian is a name given by archaeologists to a style of predominantly flint tools associated primarily with Homo neanderthalensis and dating to the Middle Paleolithic, the middle part of the Old Stone Age....
or
LevalloisLevallois may refer to:*Levallois-Perret, a commune in the northwestern suburbs of Paris, France.*Levallois technique *Nicolas-Eugène Levallois*FC Lavallios, a former French football club from Levallios-Perret...
help archaeologists and other anthropologists in understanding major trends in the human past. Anthropologists and geographers share approaches to Culture regions as well, since mapping cultures is central to both sciences. By making comparisons across cultural traditions (time-based) and cultural regions (space-based), anthropologists have developed various kinds of
comparative methodIn linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages. It requires the use of two or more languages. It is opposed to the method of internal reconstruction, which studies the internal development of a single language over time. Ordinarily both methods are...
, a central part of their science.
Contemporary anthropology is an established science with academic departments at most universities and colleges. The single largest organization of Anthropologists is the
American Anthropological AssociationThe American Anthropological Association is the world's largest professional organization of scholars and practitioners in the field of anthropology...
, which was founded in 1903. Membership is made up of Anthropologists from around the globe. Hundreds of other organizations exist in the various subfields of anthropology, sometimes divided up by nation or region, and many anthropologists work with collaborators in other disciplines, such as
geologyGeology is the science and study of the solid and liquid matter that constitutes the Earth. The field of geology encompasses the study of the composition, structure, physical properties, dynamics, and history of Earth materials, and the processes by which they are formed, moved, and changed...
,
physicsPhysics is a natural science; it is the study of matter and its motion through spacetime and all that derives from these, such as energy and force...
,
zoologyZoology, also spelled zoölogy, is the branch of biology that focuses on the structure, function, behavior, and evolution of animals. The zoologist's pronunciation of "zoology" is , though a common spelling pronunciation is .-Systems of classification:...
,
paleontologyPaleontology
[from Greek: παλαιός "old, ancient", ὄν, ὀντ- "being, creature", and λόγος "speech, thought"] is the study of prehistoric life, including organisms' evolution and interactions with each other and their environments...
,
anatomyAnatomy is a branch of biology and medicine that is the consideration of the structure of living things. It is a general term that includes human anatomy, animal anatomy and plant anatomy...
,
music theoryMusic theory is the field of study that deals with how music works. It examines the language and notation of music. It identifies patterns that govern composers' techniques. In a grand sense, music theory distills and analyzes the parameters or elements of music – rhythm, harmony , melody,...
,
art historyArt history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and look. This includes the "major" arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture as well as the "minor" arts of ceramics,...
,
sociologySociology is the scientific or systematic study of human societies. It is a branch of social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop and refine a body of knowledge about human social structure and activity, often with the goal of applying such...
and so on, belonging to professional societies in those disciplines as well.
History of anthropology
The first use of the term "anthropology" in English to refer to a natural science of humankind was apparently in 1593, the first of the "logies" to be coined. It took
Immanuel KantImmanuel Kant was an 18th-century German philosopher from the Prussian city of Königsberg...
25 years to write one of the first major treatises on anthropology, his
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Kant is not generally considered to be a modern anthropologist, however, as he never left his region of Germany nor did he study any cultures besides his own. He did, however, begin teaching an annual course in anthropology in 1772. Anthropology is thus primarily an
EnlightenmentThe Age of Enlightenment, or simply The Enlightenment, is a term used to describe a time in Western philosophy and cultural life, centered upon the eighteenth century, in which reason was advocated as the primary source and legitimacy for authority....
and post-
EnlightenmentThe Age of Enlightenment, or simply The Enlightenment, is a term used to describe a time in Western philosophy and cultural life, centered upon the eighteenth century, in which reason was advocated as the primary source and legitimacy for authority....
endeavor.
Historians of anthropology, like Marvin Harris, indicate two major frameworks within which empirical anthropology has arisen: interest in comparisons of people over space and interest in longterm human processes or humans as viewed through time. Harris dates both to
Classical GreeceClassical Greece was a culture that was highly advanced and which heavily influenced the cultures of Ancient Rome and still has an enduring effect on Western Civilization. Much of modern politics, artistic thought, scientific thought, literature, and philosophy derives from this ancient society...
and Classical Rome, specifically
HerodotusHerodotus of Halicarnassus was a Greek historian who lived in the 5th century BC and is regarded as the "Father of History" in Western culture. He was the first historian known to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent and arrange them in a...
, often called the "father of history" and the
RomanAncient Rome was a civilization that grew out of a small agricultural community founded on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 10th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea, it became one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
historian
TacitusPublius Cornelius Tacitus was a senator and a historian of the Roman Empire. The surviving portions of his two major works—the Annals and the Histories—examine the reigns of the Roman Emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Nero and those who reigned in the Year of the Four Emperors...
, who wrote many of our only surviving contemporary accounts of several ancient Celtic and
Germanic peoplesThe Germanic peoples are a historical ethno-linguistic group, originating in Northern Europe and identified by their use of the Indo-European Germanic languages which diversified out of Common Germanic in the course of the Pre-Roman Iron Age...
. Herodotus first formulated some of the persisting problems of anthropology.
Medieval scholars may be considered forerunners of modern anthropology as well, insofar as they conducted or wrote detailed studies of the customs of peoples considered "different" from themselves in terms of geography. John of Plano Carpini reported of his stay among the
MongolsThe name Mongol specifies one or several ethnic groups, now mainly located in Mongolia, China, and Russia.-Definition:...
. His report was unusual in its detailed depiction of a non-European culture.
Marco PoloMarco Polo was a merchant from the Venetian Republic who wrote Il Milione, which introduced Europeans to Central Asia and China. He learned about trading whilst his father and uncle, Niccolò and Maffeo, voyaged through Asia and met Kublai Khan. In 1269, they returned to Venice to meet Marco for...
's systematic observations of nature, anthropology, and geography are another example of studying human variation across space. Polo's travels took him across such a diverse human landscape and his accounts of the peoples he encountered as he journeyed were so detailed that they earned for Polo the name "the father of modern anthropology."
Another candidate for one of the first scholars to carry out comparative ethnographic-type studies in person was the medieval
PersianThe Persian people are the majority ethnic group in Iran. However, there are sub-groups who speak the Persian language as their mother tongue throughout the Iranian plateau. The term Persian has also a supra-ethnic significance and has been historically referred to a part of Iranian peoples...
scholar Abū Rayhān Bīrūnī in the 11th century, who wrote about the peoples, customs, and religions of the
Indian subcontinentThe Indian subcontinent, also Indian Subcontinent and other terms, is a region of the Asian continent on the Indian tectonic plate south of the Himalayas, forming a peninsula which extends southward into the Indian Ocean...
. Like modern anthropologists, he engaged in extensive
participant observationParticipant observation is a type of research strategy. It is a widely used methodology in many disciplines, particularly, cultural anthropology, but also sociology, communication studies, and social psychology...
with a given group of people, learnt their language and studied their primary texts, and presented his findings with objectivity and
neutralityNeutrality is the absence of declared bias. In an argument, a neutral person will not choose a side.A Neutral country maintains political neutrality, a related but distinct concept.-What neutrality is not:...
using
cross-cultural comparisonsCross-cultural comparisons take several forms. One is comparison of case studies, another is controlled comparison among variants of a common derivation, and a third is comparison within a sample of cases...
. He wrote detailed comparative studies on the religions and cultures in the
Middle EastThe Middle East is a region that spans southwestern Asia, southeastern Europe, and northeastern Africa. It has no clear boundaries, often used as a synonym to Near East, in opposition to Far East...
,
MediterraneanThe Mediterranean Basin comprises the lands around and surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea. In biogeography, the Mediterranean Basin refers to the lands around the Mediterranean Sea that have a Mediterranean climate, with mild, rainy winters and hot, dry summers, which supports characteristic...
and especially
South AsiaSouth Asia, also known as Southern Asia, is the southern region of the Asian continent, which comprises the sub-Himalayan countries and, for some authorities , also includes the adjoining countries on the west and the east...
. Biruni's tradition of comparative cross-cultural study continued in the
Muslim worldThe term Muslim world has several meanings. In a cultural sense it refers to the worldwide community of Muslims, adherents of Islam. This community numbers about 1.3-1.5 billion people, roughly one-fifth of the world population. This community is spread across many different nations and ethnic...
through to
Ibn KhaldunIbn Khaldūn or Ibn Khaldoun Ibn Khaldūn or Ibn Khaldoun Ibn Khaldūn or Ibn Khaldoun (full name, , , (May 27, 1332 AD/732 AH – March 19, 1406 AD/808 AH) was a North African polymath — an astronomer, economist, historian, Islamic scholar, Islamic theologian, hafiz, jurist, lawyer,...
's work in the 14th century.
Most scholars consider modern anthropology as an outgrowth of the
Age of EnlightenmentThe Age of Enlightenment, or simply The Enlightenment, is a term used to describe a time in Western philosophy and cultural life, centered upon the eighteenth century, in which reason was advocated as the primary source and legitimacy for authority....
, 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
jurisprudenceJurisprudence is the theory and philosophy of law. Scholars of jurisprudence, or legal philosophers, hope to obtain a deeper understanding of the nature of law, of legal reasoning, legal systems and of legal institutions. Modern jurisprudence began in the 18th century and was focused on the first...
,
historyHistory is the study of the human past, with special attention to the written record. Scholars who write about history are called historians. It is a field of research which uses a narrative to examine and analyse the sequence of events, and it often attempts to investigate objectively the patterns...
,
philologyPhilology considers both form and meaning in linguistic expression, combining linguistics and literary studies.Classical philology is the philology of the Greek, Latin and Sanskrit languages...
, and
sociologySociology is the scientific or systematic study of human societies. It is a branch of social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop and refine a body of knowledge about human social structure and activity, often with the goal of applying such...
then evolved into something more closely resembling the modern views of these disciplines and informed the development of the
social sciencesThe social sciences are the fields of scientific knowledge and academic scholarship that study social groups and, more generally, human society. The social sciences initially were constituted of five fields: Jurisprudence and Amendment of the Law; Education; Health; Economy and Trade; Art...
, of which anthropology was a part.
Developments in the systematic study of ancient civilizations through the disciplines of
ClassicsClassics is the branch of the Humanities comprising the languages, literature, philosophy, history, art, archaeology and other culture of the ancient Mediterranean World; especially Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome during Classical Antiquity...
and
EgyptologyEgyptology Egyptology Egyptology (from Egypt and Greek , -logia. , is a major field of archaeology, the study of ancient Egyptian history, language, literature, religion, and art from the 5th millennium BC until the end of its native religious practices in the AD 4th century...
informed both archaeology and eventually social anthropology, as did the study of East and South Asian languages and cultures. At the same time, the
RomanticRomanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution...
reaction to the Enlightenment produced thinkers, such as
Johann Gottfried HerderJohann Gottfried von Herder was a German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the periods of Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang, and Weimar Classicism.-Biography:...
and later
Wilhelm DiltheyWilhelm Dilthey was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist, student of hermeneutics, and philosopher...
, whose work formed the basis for the "culture concept," which is central to the discipline.
Institutionally, anthropology emerged from the development of
natural historyNatural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, leaning more towards the observational than experimental methods of study, and encompasses more research that is published in magazines than in academic journals. Grouped among the natural sciences, Natural history is the systematic...
(expounded by authors such as
BuffonGeorges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon was a French naturalist, mathematician, cosmologist and encyclopedic author. His collected information influenced the next two generations of naturalists, including Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Georges Cuvier...
) 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
unilinealismUnilineal evolution is a 19th century social theory about the evolution of societies and cultures. It was composed of many competing theories by various sociologists and anthropologists, who believed that Western culture is the contemporary pinnacle of social evolution...
, 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. 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"; 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.
20th Century
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
humanitiesThe humanities are academic disciplines which study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytic, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural and social sciences....
generally study local traditions, through their
historyHistory is the study of the human past, with special attention to the written record. Scholars who write about history are called historians. It is a field of research which uses a narrative to examine and analyse the sequence of events, and it often attempts to investigate objectively the patterns...
,
literatureLiterature is the art of written works. Literally translated, the word means "acquaintance with letters" , and therefore the academic study of literature is known as Letters...
,
musicMusic is an art form whose medium is sound. Common elements of music are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...
, and
artArt is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music, literature, film, sculpture, and paintings...
s, with an emphasis on understanding particular individuals, events, or eras.
The
social sciencesThe social sciences are the fields of scientific knowledge and academic scholarship that study social groups and, more generally, human society. The social sciences initially were constituted of five fields: Jurisprudence and Amendment of the Law; Education; Health; Economy and Trade; Art...
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.
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 (
ItalyItaly , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia. Italy shares its northern, Alpine boundary with France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia...
,
GreeceGreece , officially the Hellenic Republic , is a country in southeastern Europe, situated on the southern end of the Balkan Peninsula....
, and the successors to the Austro-Hungarian and
Ottoman empireThe Ottoman Empire or Ottoman State , also known by its contemporaries as the Turkish Empire or Turkey , was an empire that lasted from 1299 to November 1, 1922 The Ottoman Empire or Ottoman State (Ottoman Turkish: دَوْلَتِ عَلِیَّهِ عُثْمَانِیَّه Dawlet-il ʿAliyyat-il ʿOs̠māniyye, Modern Turkish:...
s). 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.
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.
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.
Anthropology in Britain
E. B. TylorSir Edward Burnett Tylor , was an English anthropologist.Tylor is considered representative of cultural evolutionism. In his works Primitive culture and Anthropology, he defined the context of scientific study of anthropology, based on the evolutionary theories of Charles Lyell...
( 2 October 1832 – 2 January 1917) and
James George FrazerSir James George Frazer , was a Scottish social anthropologist influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion....
( 1 January 1854 – 7 May 1941) are generally considered the antecedents to modern
social anthropologySocial anthropology is the branch of anthropology that studies how currently living human beings behave in social groups. Practitioners of social anthropology investigate, often through long-term, intensive field studies , the social organization of a particular people: customs, economic and...
in Britain. Though Tylor undertook a field trip to
MexicoThe United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
, both he and Frazer derived most of the material for their comparative studies through extensive reading, not fieldwork, mainly the 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". 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."
Tylor formulated one of the early and influential anthropological conceptions of
cultureCulture is a term that has different meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
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." 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
animismAnimism is a philosophical, religious or spiritual idea that souls or spirits exist not only in humans but also in other animals, plants, rocks, natural phenomena such as thunder, geographic features such as mountains or rivers, or other entities of the natural environment, a proposition also...
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 BoughThe Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion is a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written by Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer . It first was published in two volumes in 1890; the third edition, published 1906–15, comprised twelve volumes...
, analyzed similarities in religious belief and symbolism globally.
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 (synchronic analysis, rather than diachronic or historical analysis), and emphasizing long-term (one to several years) immersion fieldwork. Cambridge University financed a multidisciplinary expedition to the
Torres Strait IslandsThe Torres Strait Islands are a group of at least 274 small islands which lie in Torres Strait, the waterway separating far northern continental Australia's Cape York Peninsula and the island of New Guinea....
in 1898, organized by Alfred Court Haddon and including a physician-anthropologist,
W. H. R. RiversWilliam Halse Rivers Rivers,
FRCP,
FRS, was an English anthropologist, neurologist, ethnologist and psychiatrist, best known for his work with shell-shocked soldiers during World War I. Rivers' most famous patient was the poet Siegfried Sassoon...
, 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 GuineaNew Guinea, located north of Australia, is the world's second largest island. It became separated from the Australian mainland when the area now known as the Torres Strait flooded after the last glacial period. The name Papua has long been associated with the island...
. As a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire resident on a British colonial possession, he was effectively confined to New Guinea for several years.
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 PacificArgonauts of the Western Pacific is a 1922 book of anthropology by Bronislaw Malinowski. The book is about the Trobriand People who live on a small island chain, called the Kiriwina Islands, Northeast of Papua New Guinea...
(1922) advocated an approach to fieldwork that became standard in the field: getting "the native's point of view" through
participant observationParticipant observation is a type of research strategy. It is a widely used methodology in many disciplines, particularly, cultural anthropology, but also sociology, communication studies, and social psychology...
. 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 periodThe interwar period is understood, within recent Western culture, to be the period between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second World War. This is also called the period between the wars or interbellum....
, with key contributors as Bronisław Malinowski and
Meyer FortesMeyer Fortes was a South African-born anthropologist, best known for his work among the Tallensi and Ashanti in Ghana.Originally trained in psychology, Fortes employed the notion of the "person" into his structural-functional analyses of kinship, the family, and ancestor worship setting a standard...
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown also published a seminal work in 1922. He had carried out his initial fieldwork in the
Andaman IslandsThe Andaman Islands are a group of archipelagic islands in the Bay of Bengal, and are part of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Union Territory of India. The Andaman Archipelago is an oceanic continuation of the Burmese Arakan Yoma range in the North and of the Indonesian Archipelago in the South...
in the old style of historical reconstruction. However, after reading the work of French sociologists
Émile DurkheimDavid Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist and pioneer in the development of modern sociology and anthropology. His work and editorship of the first journal of sociology, L'Année Sociologique, as well as his creation of the first European department of sociology, helped establish sociology...
and
Marcel MaussMarcel Mauss was a French sociologist.-Background:Mauss was born in Epinal, Vosges to a Jewish family, and studied philosophy at Bordeaux, where his uncle Émile Durkheim was teaching at the time and agregated in 1893...
, 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-functionalismStructural functionalism is a sociological paradigm which addresses the social structure with regard to the social function of its constituent elements; namely, norms, customs, traditions, and institutions...
, 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 CommonwealthThe Commonwealth of Nations, often referred to as the Commonwealth and previously as the British Commonwealth, is an intergovernmental organisation of fifty-three independent member states. Most of them were formerly part of the British Empire. They co-operate within a framework of common values...
. 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 FortesMeyer Fortes was a South African-born anthropologist, best known for his work among the Tallensi and Ashanti in Ghana.Originally trained in psychology, Fortes employed the notion of the "person" into his structural-functional analyses of kinship, the family, and ancestor worship setting a standard...
; well-known edited volumes include
African Systems of Kinship and Marriage and
African Political Systems.
Max Gluckman Max Gluckman was a South African-born British social anthropologist.He grew up in South Africa, working later under the British Administration in Northern Rhodesia . He was educated at Exeter College, Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship...
, together with many of his colleagues at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and students at Manchester University, collectively known as the
Manchester SchoolThe Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, founded by Max Gluckman in 1947 became known among anthropologists and other social scientists as the Manchester School. Notable features of the Manchester School included an emphasis on "case studies", deriving from Gluckman's...
, 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
ChristianityChristianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as presented by the revelations in the New Testament....
, the growth of
cultural relativismCultural relativism is the principle that an individual human's beliefs and activities should be understood in terms of his or her own culture. This principle was established as axiomatic in anthropological research by Franz Boas in the first few decades of the 20th century and later popularized...
, an awareness of the survival of the primitive in modern life, and the replacement of diachronic modes of analysis with synchronic, all of which are central to modern culture."
Later in the 1960s and 1970s,
Edmund LeachSir Edmund Ronald Leach was a British social anthropologist.-Personal and academic life:He was provost of King's College, Cambridge from 1966-1979, was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1972 and knighted in 1975...
and his students
Mary DouglasDame Mary Douglas, DBE, FBA was a British anthropologist, known for her writings on human culture and symbolism....
and
Nur YalmanNur Yalman is a leading Turkish social anthropologist and professor at Harvard University.Yalman received his high school diploma from Robert College, Istanbul, one of Turkey’s premier private high schools. For his BA and PhD, he studied Social Anthropology at Cambridge University under the...
, among others, introduced French structuralism in the style of
Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss is a French-Jewish anthropologist.-Biography:Claude Lévi-Strauss, born in Brussels, grew up in Paris, living in a street of the 16th arrondissement named after the artist Claude Lorrain, whose work he later admired and wrote about...
; 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 anthropologyBiological anthropology, or physical anthropology is a branch of anthropology that studies the mechanisms of biological evolution, genetic inheritance, human adaptability and variation, primatology, primate morphology, and the fossil record of human evolution.Physical anthropology was developed in...
and
primatologyPrimatology is the study of primates. It is a diverse discipline and primatologists can be found in departments of biology, anthropology, psychology and many others. It is a branch of Physical anthropology, which, in itself, studies the genus Homo, especially Homo sapiens...
, which may be connected with departments of biology or zoology; and from archaeology, which may be connected with departments of
ClassicsClassics is the branch of the Humanities comprising the languages, literature, philosophy, history, art, archaeology and other culture of the ancient Mediterranean World; especially Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome during Classical Antiquity...
,
EgyptologyEgyptology Egyptology Egyptology (from Egypt and Greek , -logia. , is a major field of archaeology, the study of ancient Egyptian history, language, literature, religion, and art from the 5th millennium BC until the end of its native religious practices in the AD 4th century...
, 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
folkloreFolklore is the body of expressive culture, including stories, music, dance, legends, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, customs, and so forth within a particular population comprising the traditions of that culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which...
,
museum studiesMuseology is the study of how to organize and manage museums and museum collections. More generally, museum studies is a term used to denote academic programs, generally graduate programs, in the management, administration, or theory of museums.A variety of careers exist within the discipline of...
,
human geography-Scope:Human geography broadly differs from physical geography in that it has a greater focus on studying intangible or abstract patterns surrounding human activity and is more receptive to qualitative research methodologies. It encompasses human, political, cultural, social and economic aspects of...
,
sociologySociology is the scientific or systematic study of human societies. It is a branch of social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop and refine a body of knowledge about human social structure and activity, often with the goal of applying such...
, social relations,
ethnic studiesEthnic studies is the interdisciplinary study of racialized peoples in the United States and elsewhere. It evolved in the second half of the 20th century partly in response to charges that traditional disciplines such as anthropology, history, English, ethnology, Asian Studies, and orientalism were...
,
cultural studiesCultural studies is an academic field which combines political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, museum studies and art history/criticism to study cultural phenomena in various societies...
, and
social workSocial Work is both a profession and social science. It involves the application of social theory and research methods to study and improve the lives of people, groups, and societies...
.
19th Century 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 AmericanNative Americans in the United States is the phrase that describes indigenous peoples from North America now encompassed by the continental United States, including parts of Alaska and the island state of Hawaii. They comprise a large number of distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of...
societies.
Cultural anthropologyCultural anthropology is one of four or five fields of anthropology . It is the branch of anthropology that examines culture as a meaningful scientific concept....
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 AffairsThe Bureau of Indian Affairs is an agency of the federal government of the United States within the US Department of the Interior charged with the administration and management of 55.7 million acres of land held in trust by the United States for Native Americans in the United States, Native...
and the Smithsonian Institution's
Bureau of American EthnologyThe Bureau of American Ethnology was established in 1879 by an act of Congress for the purpose of transferring archives, records and materials relating to the Indians of North America from the Interior Department to the Smithsonian Institution...
, men such as
John Wesley PowellJohn Wesley Powell was a U.S. soldier, geologist, and explorer of the American West. He is famous for the 1869 Powell Geographic Expedition, a three-month river trip down the Green and Colorado rivers that included the first passage through the Grand Canyon.-Early life:Powell was born in Mount...
and
Frank Hamilton CushingFrank Hamilton Cushing was born in Northeastern Pennsylvania, later moving with his family to western New York. As a boy he took an interest in the Native American artifacts in the surrounding countryside and taught himself how to knap flint . He published his first scientific paper when he was...
.
Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881), a lawyer from
RochesterRochester is a city in Monroe County, New York, south of Lake Ontario in the United States. The Rochester metropolitan area is the second largest economy in New York State, behind the New York City metropolitan area. Known as The World's Image Centre, it was also once known as The Flour City, and...
,
New YorkNew York is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States and is the nation's third most populous. The state is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, became an advocate for an ethnological scholar of the
IroquoisThe Iroquois , also known as the Haudenosaunee or the "People of the Longhouse", are an indigenous people of North America. In the 16th century or earlier, the Iroquois came together in an association known as the Iroquois League, or the "League of Peace and Power"...
. 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.
Boasian anthropology
Franz BoasFranz Boas was a German American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his doctorate in physics, and did post-doctoral work in geography...
established academic anthropology in the United States in opposition to this sort of evolutionary perspective. His approach was empirical, skeptical of overgeneralizations, and eschewed attempts to establish universal laws. For example, 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 scienceIn Science, the term natural science refers to a naturalistic approach to the study of the universe, which is understood as obeying rules or laws of natural origin...
s, were not possible.
In doing so, he fought discrimination against immigrants, blacks, and indigenous peoples of the Americas. Many American anthropologists adopted his agenda for social reform, and theories of race continue to be popular subjects 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 archaic anthropology (i.e., archaeology). Anthropology in the United States continues to be deeply influenced by the Boasian tradition, especially its emphasis on culture.
Boas used his positions at
Columbia UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia's main campus lies in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City...
and the
American Museum of Natural HistoryThe American Museum of Natural History , located on the Upper West Side, Manhattan, New York, USA, is one of the largest and most celebrated museums in the world...
to train and develop multiple generations of students. His first generation of students included Alfred Kroeber,
Robert LowieRobert Henry Lowie was an Austrian-born American anthropologist. An expert on North American Indians, he was instrumental in the development of modern anthropology....
,
Edward SapirEdward Sapir , was a German-born American anthropologist-linguist and a leader in American structural linguistics. He was one of the creators of what is now called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis...
and
Ruth BenedictRuth Benedict was an American anthropologist.She was born in New York City, and attended Vassar College, graduating in 1909. She entered graduate studies at Columbia University in 1919, studying under Franz Boas, receiving her PhD and joining the faculty in 1923...
, 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
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
as a truly general science and free it from its historical focus on
Indo-European languagesThe Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major languages of Europe, Iran, and northern India, and historically also predominant in Anatolia and Central Asia...
.
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 MeadMargaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist, who was frequently a featured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the 1960s and 1970s....
and
Ruth BenedictRuth Benedict was an American anthropologist.She was born in New York City, and attended Vassar College, graduating in 1909. She entered graduate studies at Columbia University in 1919, studying under Franz Boas, receiving her PhD and joining the faculty in 1923...
. Influenced by psychoanalytic psychologists including
Sigmund FreudSigmund Freud , Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology...
and
Carl JungCarl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, an influential thinker and the founder of analytical psychology known as Jungian psychology. Jung's approach to psychology has been influential in the field of depth psychology and in countercultural movements across the globe...
, 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 SamoaComing of Age in Samoa is a book by Margaret Mead based upon youth in Samoa and lightly relating to youth in America, first published in 1928...
and
The Chrysanthemum and the SwordThe Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture is an influential study of Japan by Ruth Benedict written at the invitation of the Office of War Information in order to understand and predict the behavior of the Japanese in World War II by reference to a series of contradictions in...
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 LintonRalph Linton was one of the best-known American anthropologists of the mid-twentieth century, and is particularly remembered for his works The Study of Man and The Tree of Culture...
, and Mead was limited to her offices at the
AMNHThe American Museum of Natural History , located on the Upper West Side, Manhattan, New York, USA, is one of the largest and most celebrated museums in the world...
.
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
missionariesA missionary is a member of a religion who works to convert those who do not share the missionary's faith; someone who proselytizes. The word "mission" is derived from the Latin missioninimus A missionary is a member of a religion who works to convert those who do not share the missionary's faith;...
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 departmentA government agency is a permanent or semi-permanent organization in the machinery of government that is responsible for the oversight and administration of specific functions, such as an intelligence agency. There is a notable variety of types of agency...
: the
Geological Survey of CanadaThe Geological Survey of Canada is part of the Earth Sciences Sector of Natural Resources Canada. GSC is responsible for performing geologic surveys of the country, developing Canada's natural resources and protecting the environment...
, and
George Mercer DawsonGeorge Mercer Dawson was a Canadian scientist and surveyor. He was born in Pictou, Nova Scotia, the son of Sir John William Dawson. By age 11, he was afflicted with tuberculosis of the spine that resulted in a deformed back and stunted his growth...
(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. Scholars include the linguist and Boasian
Edward SapirEdward Sapir , was a German-born American anthropologist-linguist and a leader in American structural linguistics. He was one of the creators of what is now called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis...
.
Anthropology in France
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 MaussMarcel Mauss was a French sociologist.-Background:Mauss was born in Epinal, Vosges to a Jewish family, and studied philosophy at Bordeaux, where his uncle Émile Durkheim was teaching at the time and agregated in 1893...
(1872-1950), nephew of the influential sociologist
Émile DurkheimDavid Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist and pioneer in the development of modern sociology and anthropology. His work and editorship of the first journal of sociology, L'Année Sociologique, as well as his creation of the first European department of sociology, helped establish sociology...
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 HubertHenri Hubert was an archaeologist and sociologist of comparative religion who is best known for his work on the Celts and his collaboration with Marcel Mauss and other members of the Annee Sociologique....
and
Robert HertzRobert Hertz was a French sociologist who was killed in World War I.Hertz was a student at the École Normale Supérieure, from which he aggregated in philosophy in 1904, finishing first in his class. After a brief period of study in England at the British Museum he returned to France, where he...
) 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 GiftThe Gift is a short book by the French sociologist Marcel Mauss and is best known for being one of the earliest and most important studies of reciprocity and gift exchange.Mauss's original piece was entitled Essai sur le don...
a seminal analysis of
exchangeTrade is the voluntary exchange of goods, services, or both. Trade is also called commerce or transaction. A mechanism that allows trade is called a market. The original form of trade was barter, the direct exchange of goods and services. Later one side of the barter were the metals, precious...
and
reciprocityIn cultural anthropology and sociology, reciprocity is a way of defining people's informal exchange of goods and labour; that is, people's informal economic systems. It is the basis of most non-market economies. Since virtually all humans live in some kind of society and have at least a few...
, and his Huxley lecture on the notion of the person, the first comparative study of notions of person and selfhood cross-culturally.
Throughout the interwar years, French interest in anthropology often dovetailed with wider cultural movements such as
surrealismSurrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
and primitivism which drew on ethnography for inspiration.
Marcel GriauleMarcel Griaule was a French anthropologist known for his studies of the Dogon people of West Africa, and for pioneering ethnographic field studies in France....
and
Michel LeirisJulien Michel Leiris was a French surrealist writer and ethnographer.-Biography:...
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'HommeThe Musée de l'Homme was created in 1937 by Paul Rivet for the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne. It is the descendant of the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro, founded in 1878. The Musée de l'Homme is a research center under the authority of various...
founded by
Paul RivetPaul Rivet was a French ethnologist, who founded the Musée de l'Homme in 1937. He was also one of the founder of the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes, an antifascist organization created in the wake of the February 6, 1934 far right riots.Rivet proposed a theory according to...
, and anthropology had a close relationship with studies of
folkloreFolklore is the body of expressive culture, including stories, music, dance, legends, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, customs, and so forth within a particular population comprising the traditions of that culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which...
.
Above all, however, it was
Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss is a French-Jewish anthropologist.-Biography:Claude Lévi-Strauss, born in Brussels, grew up in Paris, living in a street of the 16th arrondissement named after the artist Claude Lorrain, whose work he later admired and wrote about...
who helped institutionalize anthropology in France. In addition to the enormous influence his
structuralismStructuralism is an approach to the human sciences that attempts to analyze a specific field as a complex system of interrelated parts. It began in linguistics with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure...
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 GodelierBorn in Cambrai, France in 28 February 1934, Maurice Godelier is one of the most influential names in French anthropology. Directeur d'études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales...
and
Françoise HéritierFrançoise Héritier is a French anthropologist and successor to Claude Lévi-Strauss at the Collège de France . Her work deals mainly with the theory of alliances and on the prohibition of incest...
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 (
CNRSThe National Center of Scientific Research is the largest governmental research organization in France and the largest fundamental science agency in Europe....
) rather than academic departments in universities.
Other influential writers in the 1970s include
Pierre ClastresPierre Clastres, , was a French anthropologist and ethnographer. He is best known for his fieldwork among the Guayaki in Paraguay and his theory on stateless societies...
, who explains in his books on the Guayaki tribe in
ParaguayParaguay, officially the Republic of Paraguay , is one of the two landlocked countries which lie entirely within the Western Hemisphere, the other being Bolivia, both in South America....
that "primitive societies" actively oppose the institution of the
stateA sovereign state is a political association with effective internal and external sovereignty over a geographic area and population which is not dependent on, or subject to any other power or state...
. Therefore, these stateless societies are not less evolved than societies with states, but took the active choice of conjuring the institution of
authorityIn government, authority is often used interchangeably with the term "power". However, their meanings differ: while "power" is defined as "the ability to influence somebody to do something that he could not have done", "authority" refers to a claim of legitimacy, the justification and right to...
as a separate function from society. The
leaderLeadership has been described as the “process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task”...
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
Pierre Bourdieu was an acclaimed French sociologist.Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location, and symbolic violence to reveal the dynamics of power relations in social life...
, 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
GreeceGreece , officially the Hellenic Republic , is a country in southeastern Europe, situated on the southern end of the Balkan Peninsula....
and
PortugalPortugal , officially the Portuguese Republic , is a country located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of mainland Europe and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the west and south and by Spain to the north and east...
is much influenced by British anthropology. In
GreeceGreece , officially the Hellenic Republic , is a country in southeastern Europe, situated on the southern end of the Balkan Peninsula....
, there was since the 19th century a science of the
folkloreFolklore is the body of expressive culture, including stories, music, dance, legends, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, customs, and so forth within a particular population comprising the traditions of that culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which...
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". In
ItalyItaly , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia. Italy shares its northern, Alpine boundary with France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia...
, the development of
ethnologyEthnology is the branch of anthropology that compares and analyzes the origins, distribution, technology, religion, language, and social structure of the ethnic, racial, and/or national divisions of humanity.-Scientific Discipline:Compared to ethnography, the study of single groups through direct...
and related studies did not receive as much attention as other branches of learning.
Praveen Attri, an Indian sociologist, emphasised wide research in Indian anthropology.
GermanyGermany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium,...
and
NorwayNorway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a country in Northern Europe occupying the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, as well as Jan Mayen and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard under the Spitsbergen Treaty...
are the countries that showed the most division and conflict between scholars focusing on domestic socio-cultural issues and scholars focusing on "other" societies.
Anthropology after World War II: Increasing dialogue in Anglophone anthropology
Before
WWIIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
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 one another 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 scienceIn Science, the term natural science refers to a naturalistic approach to the study of the universe, which is understood as obeying rules or laws of natural origin...
s. Some anthropologists, such as Lloyd Fallers and
Clifford GeertzClifford James Geertz was an American anthropologist and served until his death as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.-Life:...
, focused on processes of modernization by which newly independent states could develop. Others, such as
Julian StewardJulian Haynes Steward was an American anthropologist best known for his role in developing "the concept and method" of cultural ecology, as well as a scientific theory of culture change.-Biography:...
and
Leslie White-Biography:White's father was a peripatetic civil engineer. White lived first in Kansas and then Louisiana. He volunteered to fight in World War I, but saw only the tail end of it, spending a year in the US Navy before matriculating at Louisiana State University in 1919.In 1921, he transferred to...
, focused on how societies evolve and fit their ecological niche—an approach popularized by
Marvin HarrisMarvin Harris was an American anthropologist. He was born in Brooklyn, New York. A prolific writer, he was highly influential in the development of cultural materialism. In his work he combined Karl Marx's emphasis on the forces of production with Malthus's insights on the impact of demographic...
.
Economic anthropologyEconomic anthropology is a scholarly field that attempts to explain human economic behavior using the tools of both economics and anthropology. It is practiced by anthropologists and has a complex relationship with economics...
as influenced by
Karl PolanyiKarl Paul Polanyi was a Hungarian intellectual known for his opposition to traditional economic thought and his influential book The Great Transformation.-Early life:...
and practiced by
Marshall SahlinsMarshall David Sahlins is a prominent American anthropologist. He received both a Bachelors and Masters degree at the University of Michigan where he studied with Leslie White, and earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1954 where his main intellectual influences included Karl Polanyi and...
and
George DaltonGeorge Dalton is an American playwright. He was born in Pana, Illinois. He lived in the rural countryside of Illinois until the ninth grade when he moved with his parents to California. He began his writing career in high school when he published his first short story, "The Log Gun"...
challenged standard neoclassical
economicsEconomics is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...
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 Max Gluckman was a South African-born British social anthropologist.He grew up in South Africa, working later under the British Administration in Northern Rhodesia . He was educated at Exeter College, Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship...
and Peter Worsley experimented with Marxism and authors such as
Rodney NeedhamRodney Needham was one of the leading British social anthropologists.Born as Rodney Phillip Needham Green, Needham changed his name in 1947 - the same year he married Claudia Brysz....
and
Edmund LeachSir Edmund Ronald Leach was a British social anthropologist.-Personal and academic life:He was provost of King's College, Cambridge from 1966-1979, was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1972 and knighted in 1975...
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 GeertzClifford James Geertz was an American anthropologist and served until his death as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.-Life:...
, and
Marshall SahlinsMarshall David Sahlins is a prominent American anthropologist. He received both a Bachelors and Masters degree at the University of Michigan where he studied with Leslie White, and earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1954 where his main intellectual influences included Karl Polanyi and...
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 IndependenceThe Algerian War, also known as the Algerian War of Independence or in , was a conflict between France and Algerian independence movements from 1954 to 1962, which led to Algeria gaining its independence from France...
and opposition to the
Vietnam WarThe Vietnam War or the Second Indochina War was a Cold War military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1959 to 30 April 1975...
;
MarxismMarxism is the political philosophy and economic worldview based upon a materialist interpretation of history, a Marxist analysis of capitalism, a theory of social change, and an atheist view of human liberation derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels; three primary aspects of...
became a more and more popular theoretical approach in the discipline. 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 WolfEric Robert Wolf was an anthropologist, best known for his studies of peasants, Latin America, and his advocacy of Marxian perspectives within anthropology.-Early Life:...
's
Europe and the People Without HistoryEurope and the People Without History is a book by anthropologist Eric Wolf. First published in 1982, it focuses on the expansion of European societies in the Modern Era. It argues that this expansion affected both the societies that Europeans encountered in their expansion and European societies...
, 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 GramsciAntonio Gramsci was an Italian philosopher, writer, politician and political theorist. A founding member and onetime leader of the Communist Party of Italy, he was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime...
and
Michel FoucaultMichel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, sociologist and historian. He held a chair at the Collège de France with the title "History of Systems of Thought," and also taught at the University of California, Berkeley.Foucault is best known for his critical studies of...
moved issues of power and
hegemonyHegemony is the preponderance of power, and the construction of consent from the powerless through cultural values.-In politics:...
into the spotlight. Gender and sexuality became popular topics, as did the relationship between history and anthropology, influenced by
Marshall SahlinsMarshall David Sahlins is a prominent American anthropologist. He received both a Bachelors and Masters degree at the University of Michigan where he studied with Leslie White, and earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1954 where his main intellectual influences included Karl Polanyi and...
(again), who drew on
Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss is a French-Jewish anthropologist.-Biography:Claude Lévi-Strauss, born in Brussels, grew up in Paris, living in a street of the 16th arrondissement named after the artist Claude Lorrain, whose work he later admired and wrote about...
and
Fernand BraudelFernand Braudel , was the foremost French historian of the postwar era, and a leader of the Annales School. He organized his scholarship around three great projects, each worth several decades of intense study: "The Mediterranean" , "Civilization and Capitalism" , and the unfinished, "Identity of...
to examine the relationship between social structure and individual agency. Also influential in these issues were Nietzsche, Heidegger, the critical theory of the
Frankfurt SchoolThe Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist sociology and philosophy in the tradition of critical theory, which was associated with the early Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main...
, Derrida and Lacan.
In the late 1980s and 1990s authors such as
George MarcusGeorge Marcus is an American anthropologist, founder of the journal and editor of the seriesSince the 1980s, Marcus has helped transform the way social and cultural anthropologists think, research and write about their work. He served as the , where he chaired the anthropology department for 25...
and
James CliffordJames Clifford is a historian and Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Clifford and Hayden White were among the first faculty directly appointed to the History of Consciousness Ph.D. program in 1978, which was originally the only graduate...
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. 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
postmodernismPostmodernism literally means 'after the modernist movement'. While "modern" itself refers to something "related to the present", the movement of modernism and the following reaction of postmodernism are defined by a set of perspectives...
that was popular contemporaneously. Currently anthropologists pay attention to a wide variety of issues pertaining to the contemporary world, including
globalizationGlobalization describes an ongoing process by which regional economies, societies, and cultures have become integrated through a globe-spanning network of communication and exchange....
,
medicineMedicine is the art and science of healing. It encompasses a range of health care practices evolved to maintain and restore health by the prevention and treatment of illness....
and
biotechnologyBiotechnology is technology based on biology, agriculture, food science, and medicine. Modern use of the term usually refers to genetic engineering as well as cell- and tissue culture technologies...
, indigenous rights, virtual communities, and the anthropology of
industrialized societiesIn sociology, industrial society refers to a society with a modern societal structure. Such a structure developed in the west in the period of time following the industrial revolution. Pre-modern, or Pre-industrial society are also called agrarian societies...
.
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.
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).
- 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
Ahistoricism refers to a lack of concern related to history, historical development, or tradition.Ahistoricism is most frequently used as a criticism, referring to being historically inaccurate or ignorant...
, 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 IWorld War I , also known as the First World War, the Great War, and the War to End All Wars, was a global military conflict which involved most of the world's great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances: the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance...
, 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 ServicesThe Office of Strategic Services was a United States intelligence agency formed during World War II. It was the wartime intelligence agency, and it was the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency .-Origins and activities:...
(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 CamelotProject Camelot was a social science research project of the United States Army in 1964. The goal of the project was to assess the causes of violent social rebellion and to identify the actions a government could take to prevent its own overthrow...
). 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 AssociationThe American Anthropological Association is the world's largest professional organization of scholars and practitioners in the field of anthropology...
(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.
Professional anthropological bodies often object to the use of anthropology for the benefit of the
stateA sovereign state is a political association with effective internal and external sovereignty over a geographic area and population which is not dependent on, or subject to any other power or 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
AfghanistanThe War in Afghanistan is an ongoing coalition conflict which began on October 7, 2001, as the British military participated in the US military's Operation Enduring Freedom that was launched in response to the September 11 attacks...
, under the
rubricA rubric is a scoring tool for subjective assessments. It is a set of criteria and standards linked to learning objectives that is used to assess a student's performance on papers, projects, essays, and other assignments...
of
Human Terrain Team (HTT).
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-
WesternThe Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term that can have multiple meanings depending on its context...
societies). For example, the classic of
urban anthropologyUrban Anthropology, a subset of Anthropology, is a relatively new and developing field. Anthropology is recognized most commonly as the “study of man”, or a comparative study of the world’s people. Traditional Anthropology was divided into four main fields: Sociocultural Anthropology, Archaeology,...
,
Ulf HannerzUlf Hannerz, born June 9, 1942 in Malmö, is an emeritus professor of social anthropology at Stockholm University, a honorary doctor at The Faculty of Social Sciences , University of Oslo...
in the introduction to his seminal
Exploring the City: Inquiries Toward an Urban Anthropology mentions that the "
Third WorldThe term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned or neutral with either capitalism and NATO or communism and the Soviet Union...
" 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.
Now there exist many works focusing on peoples and topics very close to the author's "home". It is also argued that other fields of study, like
HistoryHistory is the study of the human past, with special attention to the written record. Scholars who write about history are called historians. It is a field of research which uses a narrative to examine and analyse the sequence of events, and it often attempts to investigate objectively the patterns...
and
SociologySociology is the scientific or systematic study of human societies. It is a branch of social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop and refine a body of knowledge about human social structure and activity, often with the goal of applying such...
, on the contrary focus disproportionately on the West.
In France, the study of existing contemporary society has been traditionally left to sociologists, but this is increasingly changing, starting in the 1970s from scholars like Isac Chiva and journals like
TerrainTerrain is a French academic journal of ethnology, social and cultural anthropology . Each issue is entirely devoted to a specific theme...
("fieldwork"), and developing with the center founded by
Marc AugéMarc Augé is a French anthropologist.In an essay and book of the same title, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity , Marc Augé coined the phrase "non-place" to refer to places of transience that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as "places." Examples of a...
(
Le Centre d'anthropologie des mondes contemporainsThe École des hautes études en sciences sociales is a French institution for research and higher education, a Grand Établissement. Its mission is research and research training in the social sciences, including the relationship these latter maintain with the natural and life sciences...
, 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 SchoolThe Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, founded by Max Gluckman in 1947 became known among anthropologists and other social scientists as the Manchester School. Notable features of the Manchester School included an emphasis on "case studies", deriving from Gluckman's...
of the 1950s.
See also
- Anthropological Index Online
The Anthropological Index Online is an international journal indexing service for anthropology.The service indexes the journals received by The Anthropology Library at the The British Museum which receives periodicals in all branches of anthropology, from academic institutions and publishers...
(AIO)
- Anthrozoology
Anthrozoology is the study of human-animal interaction , also described as the science focusing on all aspects of the human-animal bond and a bridge between the natural and social sciences....
- Ethnology
Ethnology is the branch of anthropology that compares and analyzes the origins, distribution, technology, religion, language, and social structure of the ethnic, racial, and/or national divisions of humanity.-Scientific Discipline:Compared to ethnography, the study of single groups through direct...
- Folklore
Folklore is the body of expressive culture, including stories, music, dance, legends, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, customs, and so forth within a particular population comprising the traditions of that culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which...
- Human evolution
Human evolution, or anthropogenesis, is the origin and evolution of Homo sapiens as a distinct species from other hominids, great apes and placental mammals...
- Intangible Cultural Heritage
The concept of intangible cultural heritage emerged in the 1990s, as a counterpart to the World Heritage that focuses mainly on tangible aspects of culture...
- Legal anthropology
Legal anthropology is a sub-sub-discipline of anthropology which studies conflict management in cultures around the world. Carol Greenhouse describes legal anthropology as "the cross-cultural study of social ordering". Malinowski’s 1926 work, Crime and Custom in Savage Society, law, order, crime,...
- Madison Grant
Madison Grant was an American lawyer, historian, and anthropologist, known primarily for his work as a eugenicist and conservationist...
- Memetics
Memetics is a term coined by Douglas Hofstadter in the 1980s, relating to the notion of meme, introduced by Richard Dawkins, as genetics relates to that of gene....
- Philosophical anthropology
Philosophical anthropology is the attempt to unify disparate ways of understanding behaviour of humans as both creatures of their social environments and creators of their own values...
- Prehistoric medicine
Prehistoric medicine is a term used to describe the use of medicine before the invention of writing. As the timing of the invention of writing varies per culture and region, the term "prehistoric medicine" encompasses a wide range of time periods and dates....
- Sociology
Sociology is the scientific or systematic study of human societies. It is a branch of social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop and refine a body of knowledge about human social structure and activity, often with the goal of applying such...
- Systems theory in anthropology
Systems Theory in Anthropology is an interdisciplinary, non-representative, non-referential, and non-Cartesian approach that brings together natural and social sciences to understand society in its complexity. The basic idea of a system theory in social science is to solve the classical problem of...
- Theological anthropology
Theological anthropology is the branch of theology which is concerned with the study of humankind, or anthropology, in relation to the divine. In a theological context, it is usually referred to simply as anthropology...
, which is not part of anthropology but a subfield of theology
- Periodic Table of Human Sciences / Anthropology in Tinbergen's four questions
When asked questions of animal and human behavior such as why these creatures see, even elementary school children can answer that vision helps them find food and avoid danger. Biologists have three additional explanations: A particular series of evolutionary steps are the cause of sight, the...
Dictionaries and encyclopedias of anthropology
- Barfield, Thomas (1997). The dictionary of anthropology. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing.
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, 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.
External links