From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Anthropology (/ˌænθɹəˈpɒlədʒi/, from Greek: ἄνθρωπος, anthropos, "human being"; and λόγος, logos, "reason" or "speech," lit. to talk about human beings) is the study of humanity. Anthropology has origins in the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences.[1] Ethnography is both one of its primary methods and the text that is written as a result of the practice of anthropology and its elements.
Since the work of Franz Boas and Bronisław Malinowski
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, anthropology has been
distinguished from other social science disciplines by its emphasis on
in-depth examination of context, cross-cultural comparisons
(socio-cultural anthropology is by nature a comparative discipline),
and the importance it places on long-term, experiential immersion in
the area of research, often known as participant-observation. Cultural anthropology in particular has emphasized cultural relativity
and the use of findings to frame cultural critiques. This has been
particularly prominent in the United States, from Boas's arguments
against 19th-century racial ideology, through Margaret Mead's advocacy for gender equality and sexual liberation, to current criticisms of post-colonial oppression and promotion of multiculturalism.
Historical and institutional context
-
The anthropologist Eric Wolf once described anthropology as "the most scientific of the humanities, and the most humanistic of the sciences." Contemporary anthropologists claim a number of earlier thinkers as their forebears, and the discipline has several sources; Claude Lévi-Strauss, for example, claimed Montaigne and Rousseau as important influences.
Ancient and medieval writers and scholars may be considered
forerunners of anthropology, insofar as they conducted or wrote
detailed studies of the customs of different peoples, including the
Greek writer Herodotus, often called the "father of history" and the
Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote many of our only surviving
contemporary accounts of several ancient Celtic and Germanic peoples. A
candidate for one of the first scholars to carry out comparative
ethnographic-type studies in person was the medieval Persian scholar Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī in the 11th century, who wrote about the peoples, customs, and religions of the Indian subcontinent,[2] and wrote detailed comparative studies on the religions and cultures in the Middle East, Mediterranean and South Asia.[3][4]
None of these scholars' activities, however, led to the establishment
of a sustained tradition of comparative study of customs, beliefs, and
the ways that human behavior and experience are shaped by participation
in a particular group of people with a shared history.
Most scholars consider modern anthropology as an outgrowth of the Age of Enlightenment,
a period when Europeans attempted systematically to study human
behavior, the known varieties of which had been increasing since the
15th century as a result of the first European colonization wave. The traditions of jurisprudence, history, philology, and sociology then evolved into something more closely resembling the modern views of these disciplines and informed the development of the social sciences, of which anthropology was a part. Developments in systematic study of ancient civilizations through the disciplines of Classics and Egyptology
informed both archaeology and eventually social anthropology, as did
the study of East and South Asian languages and cultures. At the same
time, the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment produced thinkers, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and later Wilhelm Dilthey, whose work formed the basis for the "culture concept," which is central to the discipline.
Institutionally, anthropology emerged from the development of natural history (expounded by authors such as Buffon)
that occurred during the European colonization of the 17th, 18th, 19th
and 20th centuries. Programs of ethnographic study originated in this
era as the study of the "human primitives" overseen by colonial
administrations. There was a tendency in late 18th century
Enlightenment thought to understand human society as natural phenomena
that behaved in accordance with certain principles and that could be
observed empirically. In some ways, studying the language, culture,
physiology, and artifacts of European colonies was not unlike studying
the flora and fauna of those places.
Early anthropology was divided between proponents of unilinealism,
who argued that all societies passed through a single evolutionary
process, from the most primitive to the most advanced, and various
forms of non-lineal theorists, who tended to subscribe to ideas such as
diffusionism.[5]
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"[6];
this has changed over the last part of the 20th century as
anthropologists increasingly also study Western subjects, particularly
variation across class, region, or ethnicity within Western societies,
and other social scientists increasingly take a global view of their
fields.
In the twentieth century, academic disciplines have often been
institutionally divided into three broad domains. The natural and
biological sciences seek to derive general laws through reproducible and verifiable experiments. The humanities generally study local traditions, through their history, literature, music, and arts, with an emphasis on understanding particular individuals, events, or eras. The social sciences
have generally attempted to develop scientific methods to understand
social phenomena in a generalizable way, though usually with methods
distinct from those of the natural sciences. In particular, social
sciences often develop statistical descriptions rather than the general
laws derived in physics or chemistry, or they may explain individual
cases through more general principles, as in many fields of psychology.
Anthropology (like some fields of history) does not easily fit into one
of these categories, and different branches of anthropology draw on one
or more of these domains.[7]
Anthropology as it emerged among the colonial powers (mentioned
above) has generally taken a different path than that in the countries
of southern and central Europe (Italy, Greece, and the successors to the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires).
In the former, the encounter with multiple, distinct cultures, often
very different in organization and language from those of Europe, has
led to a continuing emphasis on cross-cultural comparison and a receptiveness to certain kinds of cultural relativism.[8]
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.[9]
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.[10]
Anthropology by country
Anthropology in Britain
E. B. Tylor, 19th-century British anthropologist.
E. B. Tylor ( 2 October 1832 – 2 January 1917) and James George Frazer ( 1 January 1854 – 7 May 1941) are generally considered the antecedents to modern social anthropology in Britain. Though Tylor undertook a field trip to Mexico,
both he and Frazer derived most of the material for their comparative
studies through extensive reading not fieldwork: Classics (literature
and history of Greece and Rome), the work of the early European
folklorists, and reports from missionaries, travelers, and
contemporaneous ethnologists. Tylor advocated strongly for unilinealism
and a form of "uniformity of mankind".[11] 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."[12] Tylor formulated one of the early and influential anthropological conceptions of culture
as "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals,
law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a
member of society."[13]
However, as Stocking notes, Tylor mainly concerned himself with
describing and mapping the distribution of particular elements of
culture, rather than with the larger function, and generally seemed to
assume a Victorian idea of progress rather than the idea of
non-directional, multilineal cultural development proposed by later
anthropologists. Tylor also theorized about the origins of religious
feelings in human beings, proposing a theory of animism
as the earliest stage, and noting that "religion" has many components,
of which he believed the most important to be belief in supernatural
beings (as opposed to moral systems, cosmology, etc.). Frazer, a
Scottish scholar with a broad knowledge of Classics, also concerned
himself with religion, myth, and magic. His comparative studies, most
influentially in the numerous editions of The Golden Bough, analyzed similarities in religious belief and symbolism worldwide.
Neither Tylor nor Frazer, however, were particularly interested in fieldwork,
nor were they interested in examining how the cultural elements and
institutions fit together. Toward the turn of the twentieth century, a
number of anthropologists became dissatisfied with this categorization
of cultural elements; historical reconstructions also came to seem
increasingly speculative. Under the influence of several younger
scholars, a new approach came to predominate among British
anthropologists, concerned with analyzing how societies held together
in the present (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 Islands in 1898, organized by Alfred Court Haddon and including a physician-anthropologist, W. H. R. Rivers,
as well as a linguist, a botanist, other specialists. The findings of
the expedition set new standards for ethnographic description.
A decade and a half later, Polish-born anthropology student Bronisław Malinowski (1884-1942) was beginning what he expected to be a brief period of fieldwork in the old model, collecting lists of cultural items, when the outbreak of the First World War stranded him in New Guinea.
As a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire resident on a British
colonial possession, he was effectively confined to New Guinea for
several years.[14]
He made use of the time by undertaking far more intensive fieldwork
than had been done by British anthropologists, and his classic
ethnography, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) advocated an approach to fieldwork that became standard in the field: getting "the native's point of view" through participant observation. Theoretically, he advocated a functionalist interpretation, which examined how social institutions functioned to meet individual needs.
British social anthropology had an expansive moment in the Interwar period, with key contributors as Bronisław Malinowski and Meyer Fortes[15]
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown also published a seminal work in 1922. He had carried out his initial fieldwork in the Andaman Islands in the old style of historical reconstruction. However, after reading the work of French sociologists Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Radcliffe-Brown published an account of his research (entitled simply The Andaman Islanders) that paid close attention to the meaning and purpose of rituals and myths. Over time, he developed an approach known as structural-functionalism,
which focused on how institutions in societies worked to balance out or
create an equilibrium in the social system to keep it functioning
harmoniously. (This contrasted with Malinowski's functionalism, and was
quite different from the later French structuralism, which examined the conceptual structures in language and symbolism.)
Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown's influence stemmed from the fact
that they, like Boas, actively trained students and aggressively built
up institutions that furthered their programmatic ambitions. This was
particularly the case with Radcliffe-Brown, who spread his agenda for
"Social Anthropology" by teaching at universities across the British Commonwealth.
From the late 1930s until the postwar period appeared a string of
monographs and edited volumes that cemented the paradigm of British
Social Anthropology (BSA). Famous ethnographies include The Nuer, by Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, and The Dynamics of Clanship Among the Tallensi, by Meyer Fortes; well-known edited volumes include African Systems of Kinship and Marriage and African Political Systems.
Max Gluckman, together with many of his colleagues at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and students at Manchester University, collectively known as the Manchester School,
took BSA in new directions through their introduction of explicitly
Marxist-informed theory, their emphasis on conflicts and conflict
resolution, and their attention to the ways in which individuals
negotiate and make use of the social structural possibilities.
In Britain, anthropology had a great intellectual impact, it "contributed to the erosion of Christianity, the growth of cultural relativism, an awareness of the survival of the primitive in modern life, and the replacement of diachronic modes of analysis with synchronic, all of which are central to modern culture."[16]
Later in the 1960s and 1970s, Edmund Leach and his students Mary Douglas and Nur Yalman, among others, introduced French structuralism in the style of Lévi-Strauss;
while British anthropology has continued to emphasize social
organization and economics over purely symbolic or literary topics,
differences among British, French, and American sociocultural
anthropologies have diminished with increasing dialogue and borrowing
of both theory and methods. Today, social anthropology in Britain
engages internationally with many other social theories and has
branched in many directions.
In countries of the British Commonwealth, social anthropology has often been institutionally separate from physical anthropology and primatology,
which may be connected with departments of biology or zoology; and from
archaeology, which may be connected with departments of Classics, Egyptology,
and the like. In other countries (and in some, particularly smaller,
British and North American universities), anthropologists have also
found themselves institutionally linked with scholars of folklore, museum studies, human geography, sociology, social relations, ethnic studies, cultural studies, and social work.
Anthropology in the United States
1800s to 1940s
From its beginnings in the early 19th century through the early 20th
century, anthropology in the United States was influenced by the
presence of Native American societies.
Franz Boas, one of the pioneers of modern anthropology, often called the "Father of American Anthropology"
Cultural anthropology
in the United States was influenced greatly by the ready availability
of Native American societies as ethnographic subjects. The field was
pioneered by staff of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology, men such as John Wesley Powell and Frank Hamilton Cushing. Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881), a lawyer from Rochester, New York, became an advocate for and ethnological scholar of the Iroquois.
His comparative analyses of religion, government, material culture, and
especially kinship patterns proved to be influential contributions to
the field of anthropology. Like other scholars of his day (such as Edward Tylor),
Morgan argued that human societies could be classified into categories
of cultural evolution on a scale of progression that ranged from savagery, to barbarism, to civilization. Generally, Morgan used technology (such as bowmaking or pottery) as an indicator of position on this scale.[17]
Boasian anthropology
Franz Boas
established academic anthropology in the United States in opposition to
this sort of evolutionary perspective. Boasian anthropology was
politically active and suspicious of research dictated by the U.S.
government and wealthy patrons. It was rigorously empirical and
skeptical of overgeneralizations and attempts to establish universal
laws. Boas studied immigrant children to demonstrate that biological
race was not immutable, and that human conduct and behavior resulted
from nurture, rather than nature.
Influenced by the German tradition, Boas argued that the world was full of distinct cultures,
rather than societies whose evolution could be measured by how much or
how little "civilization" they had. He believed that each culture has
to be studied in its particularity, and argued that cross-cultural
generalizations, like those made in the natural sciences, were not possible. In doing so, he fought discrimination against immigrants, African Americans, and Native North Americans.[18]
Many American anthropologists adopted his agenda for social reform, and
theories of race continue to be popular targets for anthropologists
today. The so-called "Four Field Approach" has its origins in Boasian
Anthropology, dividing the discipline in the four crucial and
interrelated fields of sociocultural, biological, linguistic, and
prehistoric anthropology (i.e., archaeology). Anthropology in the U.S.
continues to be deeply influenced by the Boasian tradition, especially
its emphasis on culture.
Boas used his positions at Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History to train and develop multiple generations of students. His first generation of students included Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Edward Sapir and Ruth Benedict,
who each produced richly det
Classical
from 
