Everything about Anthropologist totally explained
Anthropology (from Greek: ἄνθρωπος,
anthropos, "human being"; and λόγος,
logos, "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. The term was first used in print in 1593 to refer to a branch of history which studies the arts, kinship, and practices of man
Ethnography is both one of its primary methods and the text that's 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, social 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.
Several 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, and wrote detailed comparative studies on the religions and cultures in the
Middle East,
Mediterranean and
South Asia. 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 wasn't 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. 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.
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) doesn't 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 (
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. 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 by country
Anthropology in Britain
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 sociocultural 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 readings of Classical materials (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
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." 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.). James George 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. Towards the turn of the 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 (analysis, rather than 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. 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 anthropology had an expansive moment in the
Interwar period, with key contributors as
Bronisław Malinowski and
Meyer Fortes
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 modes of analysis with, all of which are central to modern culture."
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. As in other colonial powers (including Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, and the countries of Latin America) this encounter with colonial subjects manifested in several ways. Curiosity, admiration, desire to "reform" or "civilize" native practices, or simple puzzlement at how societies could function with such different social and political systems, all motivated early ethnographers. Practical concerns of
Christian missionaries and colonial administrators, seeking to communicate with native peoples or ascertain how to incorporate them, helped gain funding and institutional attention. Statements of ethnologists (as well as many amateurs, missionaries, and colonial administrators, who were not clearly distinguished from more committed scholars in this era prior to the professionalization of anthropology) often played into political debates around the definitions of humanity and citizenship. These conflicts between what may be seen as the pursuit of pure knowledge or the facilitation of intercultural understanding on the one hand, and the potentially exploitative, oppressive, or coercive uses to which that knowledge might be put, on the other, concerned many early anthropologists and has become a major source of controversy and self-examination within the discipline since at least the mid-20th century. The claim that anthropology accompliced to the "project of colonialism" is a misconception that has grown out of several critical perspectives from the 1960s and 70s.
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 wasn't 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. 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.
Boas used his positions at
Columbia University and the
American Museum of Natural History to train and develop multiple generations of students. His first generation of students included
Alfred Kroeber,
Robert Lowie,
Edward Sapir and
Ruth Benedict, who each produced richly detailed studies of indigenous North American cultures. They provided a wealth of details used to attack the theory of a single evolutionary process. Kroeber and Sapir's focus on Native American languages helped establish
linguistics as a truly general science and free it from its historical focus on
Indo-European languages.
The publication of
Alfred Kroeber's textbook,
Anthropology, marked a turning point in American anthropology. After three decades of amassing material, Boasians felt a growing urge to generalize. This was most obvious in the 'Culture and Personality' studies carried out by younger Boasians such as
Margaret Mead and
Ruth Benedict. Influenced by psychoanalytic psychologists such as
Sigmund Freud and
Carl Jung, these authors sought to understand the way that individual personalities were shaped by the wider cultural and social forces in which they grew up. Though such works as
Coming of Age in Samoa and
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword remain popular with the American public, Mead and Benedict never had the impact on the discipline of anthropology that some expected. Boas had planned for Ruth Benedict to succeed him as chair of Columbia's anthropology department, but she was sidelined by
Ralph Linton, and Mead was limited to her offices at the
AMNH.
Anthropology in Canada
Canadian anthropology began, as in other parts of the Colonial world, as ethnological data in the records of travellers and missionaries. In Canada,
Jesuit missionaries such as Fathers LeClercq, Le Jeune and Sagard, in the 1600s, provide the oldest ethnographic records of native tribes in what was then the Domain of Canada.
True anthropology began with a
Government department: the
Geological Survey of Canada, and
George Mercer Dawson (director in 1895). Dawson's support for anthropology created impetus for the profession in Canada. This was expanded upon by Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, who established a Division of Anthropology within the Geological Survey in 1910. Anthropologists were recruited from England and the USA, setting the foundation for the unique Canadian style of anthropology. Early scholars include the brilliant linguist and Boasian,
Edward Sapir, also
Oxford graduates
Marius Barbeau and
Diamond Jenness. Born in rural Québec, Barbeau became a Rhodes scholar and eventually a classmate of Jenness. The two studied under
Tylor and
Marett at Oxford. In Canada, Barbeau and Jenness worked at the National Museum (as it became known later). In 1944, Canada's first home-grown anthropologist established the archive which has become a key source of ethnographic and folklore material.
Following George Mercer Dawson (of
McGill, Montreal) and Franz Boas,
Sapir and Barbeau conducted ethnographic research and collected material culture from the peoples of the Northwest Coast, especially
Haida. Jenness is best known for his research in the Arctic among the
Copper Inuit. However, in actuality, they all worked in a variety of areas in Canada, recording traditions and songs, studying languages, and collecting artifacts for the museum. They essentially had sole responsibility for the development of the profession in Canada from 1910 until 1925 when Sapir left. The development was slow relative to expansion (due to the colonizing needs) of Britain and the USA.
The first academic position in anthropology at a Canadian university was awarded to Thomas McIlwraith at the
University of Toronto in 1925. The next universities to hire anthropologists, UBC and McGill, did so only in 1947. The first PhD in anthropology was granted in 1956, with only a few more being granted until the late 1960s. The 1970s brought a boom in university development and in professional anthropology, and by 1980 about 400 people with doctorates in anthropology were employed in Canada, and many more with a master's degree. Harry Hawthorne built the department at UBC and set a standard for the use of anthropological research as a guide to
public policy in his classic report to the federal government, coauthored by M.-A. Tremblay, "A Survey of the Contemporary Indians of Canada" (1966, 1967).
Canadian Anthropology is characterized by a combination of Americanist Boasian-influenced interest in Native American tribes and peoples, British Anthropological concerns with social function and process, and Francophone concerns with small, rural and ethnically isolated community studies. Issues of disparity, continuity and change, political-economy, environment and cultural ecology, and personality, culture and symbolism predominated the discourse from World War I to the Vietnam War era.
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 Mauss (1872-1950), nephew of the influential sociologist
Émile Durkheim to be the founder of the French anthropological tradition. Mauss belonged to Durkheim's
Année Sociologique group; and while Durkheim and others examined the state of modern societies, Mauss and his collaborators (such as
Henri Hubert and
Robert Hertz) drew on ethnography and philology to analyze societies which were not as 'differentiated' as European nation states. Two works by Mauss in particular proved to have enduring relevance:
Essay on the Gift a seminal analysis of
exchange and
reciprocity, and his Huxley lecture on the notion of the person, the first comparative study of notions of person and selfhood cross-culturally.
Throughout the interwar years, French interest in anthropology often dovetailed with wider cultural movements such as
surrealism and
primitivism which drew on ethnography for inspiration.
Marcel Griaule and
Michel Leiris are examples of people who combined anthropology with the French avant-garde. During this time most of what is known as
ethnologie was restricted to museums, such as the
Musée de l'Homme founded by
Paul Rivet, and anthropology had a close relationship with studies of
folklore.
Above all, however, it was
Claude Lévi-Strauss who helped institutionalize anthropology in France. In addition to the enormous influence his
structuralism exerted across multiple disciplines, Lévi-Strauss established ties with American and British anthropologists. At the same time he established centers and laboratories within France to provide an institutional context within anthropology while training influential students such as
Maurice Godelier and
Françoise Héritier who would prove influential in the world of French anthropology. Much of the distinct character of France's anthropology today is a result of the fact that most anthropology is carried out in nationally funded research laboratories (
CNRS) rather than academic departments in universities.
Other influential writers in the 1970s include
Pierre Clastres, who explains in his books on the
Guayaki tribe in
Paraguay that "primitive societies" actively oppose the institution of the
state. Therefore, these stateless societies are not less evolved than societies with states, but took the active choice of conjuring the institution of
authority as a separate function from society. The
leader is only a spokesperson for the group when it has to deal with other groups ("international relations") but has no inside authority, and may be violently removed if he attempts to abuse this position.
The most important French social theorist since Foucault and Lévi-Strauss is
Pierre Bourdieu, who trained formally in philosophy and sociology and eventually held the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France. Like Mauss and others before him, however, he worked on topics both in sociology and anthropology. His fieldwork among the Kabyles of Algeria places him solidly in anthropology, while his analysis of the function and reproduction of fashion and cultural capital in European societies places him as solidly in sociology.
Other countries
Anthropology in
Greece and
Portugal is much influenced by British anthropology. In
Greece, there was since the 19th century a science of the
folklore called
laographia (laography), in the form of "a science of the interior", although theoretically weak; but the connotation of the field deeply changed after World War II, when a wave of Anglo-American anthropologists introduced a science "of the outside". In
Italy, the development of
ethnology and related studies didn't received as much attention as other branches of learning.
Germany and
Norway are the countries that showed the most division and conflict between scholars focusing on domestic socio-cultural issues and scholars focusing on "other" societies.
Anthropology after World War II: Increasing dialogue in Anglophone anthropology
Before
WWII British 'social anthropology' and American 'cultural anthropology' were still distinct traditions. After the war, enough British and American anthropologists borrowed ideas and methodlogical approaches from each other that some began to speak of them collectively as 'sociocultural' anthropology.
In the 1950s and mid-1960s anthropology tended increasingly to model itself after the
natural sciences. Some anthropologists, such as
Lloyd Fallers and
Clifford Geertz, focused on processes of modernization by which newly independent states could develop. Others, such as
Julian Steward and
Leslie White, focused on how societies evolve and fit their ecological niche—an approach popularized by
Marvin Harris.
Economic anthropology as influenced by
Karl Polanyi and practiced by
Marshall Sahlins and
George Dalton challenged standard neoclassical
economics to take account of cultural and social factors, and also employed Marxian analysis into anthropological study. In England, British Social Anthropology's paradigm began to fragment as
Max Gluckman and
Peter Worsley experimented with Marxism and authors such as
Rodney Needham and
Edmund Leach incorporated Lévi-Strauss's structuralism into their work.
Structuralism also influenced a number of developments in 1960s and 1970s, including
cognitive anthropology and componential analysis. Authors such as
David Schneider,
Clifford Geertz, and
Marshall Sahlins developed a more fleshed-out concept of culture as a web of meaning or signification, which proved very popular within and beyond the discipline. In keeping with the times, much of anthropology became politicized through the
Algerian War of Independence and opposition to the
Vietnam War;
Marxism 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 Wolf's
Europe and the People Without History, have been central to the discipline. In the 80s books like
Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter pondered anthropology's ties to colonial inequality, while the immense popularity of theorists such as
Antonio Gramsci and
Michel Foucault moved issues of power and
hegemony into the spotlight. Gender and sexuality became popular topics, as did the relationship between history and anthropology, influenced by
Marshall Sahlins (again), who drew on
Lévi-Strauss and
Fernand Braudel to examine the relationship between social structure and individual agency. Also influential in these issues were
Nietzsche,
Heidegger, the critical theory of the
Frankfurt School,
Derrida and
Lacan. Nevertheless, key aspects of feminist theorsing and methods became
de rigueur as part of the 'post-modern moment' in anthropology: Ethnographies became more reflexive, explicitly addressing the author's methodology, cultural, gender and racial positioning, and their influence on his or her ethnographic analysis. This was part of a more general trend of
postmodernism that was popular contemporaneously. Currently anthropologists pay attention to a wide variety of issues pertaining to the contemporary world, including
globalization,
medicine and
biotechnology,
indigenous rights,
virtual communities, and the anthropology of
industrialized societies.
Approaches to anthropology
The "four field" approach
Principally in the United States, anthropology is often defined as being "
holistic" and based on a "four-field" approach. There is an ongoing dispute as to whether this makes sense theoretically or pragmatically in the structure of American academic institutions. Supporters consider anthropology holistic in two senses: it's concerned with all human beings across times and places, and with all dimensions of humanity (evolutionary, biophysical, sociopolitical, economic, cultural, linguistic, psychological, etc.); also many academic programs following this approach take a "four-field" approach to anthropology that encompasses
physical anthropology,
archaeology,
linguistics, and
cultural anthropology or
social anthropology. The definition of anthropology as
holistic and the "four-field" approach are disputed by some leading anthropologists, that consider those as artifacts from 19th century
social evolutionary thought that inappropriately impose scientific
positivism upon
cultural anthropology in particular. (
for more details see the section on the relations with the natural sciences and the Humanities)
The four fields are:
- Biological or physical anthropology seeks to understand the physical human being through the study of human evolution and adaptability, population genetics, and primatology. Subfields or related fields include paleoanthropology (study of evolutionary history of the human species), anthropometrics, forensic anthropology, osteology, and nutritional anthropology. On the basis of Tinbergen's four questions a framework of reference or "periodic table" of all fields of anthropological research (including humanities) can be established.
- Socio-cultural anthropology is the investigation, often through long term, intensive field studies (including participant-observation methods), of the culture and social organization of a particular people: language, economic and political organization, law and conflict resolution, patterns of consumption and exchange, kinship and family structure, gender relations, childrearing and socialization, religion, mythology, symbolism, etc. (U.S. universities more often use the term cultural anthropology; British universities have tended to call the corresponding field social anthropology, and for much of the 20th century emphasized the analysis of social organization more than cultural symbolism.) In some European countries, socio-cultural anthropology is known as ethnology (a term coined and defined by Adam F. Kollár in 1783 that's also used in English-speaking countries to denote the comparative aspect of socio-cultural anthropology.) Subfields and related fields include psychological anthropology, folklore, anthropology of religion, ethnic studies, cultural studies, anthropology of media and cyberspace, and study of the diffusion of social practices and cultural forms.
- Linguistic anthropology seeks to understand the processes of human communications, verbal and non-verbal, variation in language across time and space, the social uses of language, and the relationship between language and culture. It is the branch of anthropology that brings linguistic methods to bear on anthropological problems, linking the analysis of linguistic forms and processes to the interpretation of sociocultural processes. Linguistic anthropologists often draw on related fields including anthropological linguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, semiotics, discourse analysis, and narrative analysis.
- Archaeology studies the contemporary distribution and form of artifacts (materials modified by past human activities), with the intent of understanding distribution and movement of ancient populations, development of human social organization, and relationships among contemporary populations; it also contributes significantly to the work of population geneticists, historical linguists, and many historians. Archaeology involves a wide variety of field techniques (remote sensing, survey, geophysical studies, coring, excavation) and laboratory procedures (compositional analyses, dating studies (radiocarbon, optically stimulated luminescence dating), measures of formal variability, examination of wear patterns, residue analyses, etc.). Archaeologists predominantly study materials produced by prehistoric groups but also includes modern, historical and ethnographic populations. Archaeology is usually regarded as a separate (but related) field outside North America, although closely related to the anthropological field of material culture, which deals with physical objects created or used within a living or past group as a means of understanding its cultural values.
A number of subfields or modes of anthropology cut across these divisions. For example,
medical anthropology is often considered a subfield of socio-cultural anthropology; however, many anthropologists who study medical topics also look at biological variation in populations or the interaction of culture and biology. They may also use linguistic analysis to understand communication around health and illness, or archaeological techniques to understand health and illness in historical or prehistorical populations. Similarly,
forensic anthropologists may use both techniques from both physical anthropology and archaeology, and may also practice as medical anthropologists. Environmental or
ecological anthropology, a growing subfield concerned with the relationships between humans and their environment, is another example that brings cultural and biological—and at times, archaeological—approaches together, as it can deal with a broad range of topics from
environmentalist movements to
wildlife or
habitat conservation to traditional ecological knowledge and practices.
Biocultural anthropology is a broad term used to describe syntheses of cultural and biological perspectives.
Applied anthropology is perhaps better considered an emphasis than a subfield in the same sense as the standard four; applied anthropologists may work for government agencies, nongovernmental agencies, or private industry, using techniques from any of the subfields to address matters such as policy implementation, impact assessments, education, marketing research, or product development.
More recently, anthropology programs at several prominent U.S. universities have begun dividing the field into two: one emphasizing the
humanities,
critical theory, and interpretive or semiotic approaches; the other emphasizing
evolutionary theory, quantitive methods, and explicit theory testing (over idiographic description), though there have also been institutional pressures to rejoin at least one high-profile split department. At some universitities, biological anthropology and archaeology programs have also moved from departments of anthropology to departments of biology or other related fields. This has occasioned much discussion within the
American Anthropological Association, and it remains to be seen whether some form of the four-field organization will persist in North American universities.
As might be inferred from the above list of subfields, anthropology is a methodologically diverse discipline, incorporating both
qualitative methods and
quantitative methods.
Ethnographies—intensive
case studies based on field research—have historically had a central place in the literature of sociocultural and linguistic anthropology, but are increasingly supplemented by
mixed-methods approaches. Currently, technological advancements are spurring methodological innovation across anthropology's subfields.
Radiocarbon dating,
population genetics,
GPS, and digital video- and audio-recording are just a few of the many technologies spurring new developments in anthropological research.
Controversies within Anglo-American Anthropology
During the first four decades of the 20th century, American cultural anthropology developed under the powerful influence of Franz Boas and his students and their struggle against racial determinism and the ethnocentrism of 19th-century cultural evolutionism. With the additional impact of the Great Depression and World War II, American anthropology developed a pronounced, obvious left-wing liberal tone by the 1950s. However, the discipline's deep involvement with nonwestern cultures put it in a vulnerable position during the campus upheavals of the late 1960s and in the subsequent "culture wars." The "politics of anthropology" has become a pervasive concern since then. Whatever the realities, the notion of anthropology as somehow complicit in morally unacceptable projects has become a significant topic both within the discipline and in "cultural studies" and "post-colonialism," etc.
A few of the central elements in this discourse are the following:
The claim 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). It is often assumed that an example of this exploitative relationship can be seen in the relationship between British anthropologists and colonial forces in Africa, yet this assumption hasn't been supported by much evidence. However this criticism has been rendered less compelling by many recent works focusing on peoples and topics very close to the author's "home". On the contrary, many anthropologists (students and teachers) were active in the antiwar movement and a great many resolutions condemning the war in all its aspects were passed overwhelmingly at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). In the decades since the Vietnam war the tone of cultural and social anthropology, at least, has been increasingly politicized, with the dominant liberal tone of earlier generations replaced with one more radical, a mix of, and varying degrees of, Marxist, feminist, anarchist, post-colonial, post-modern, Saidian, Foucauldian, identity-based, and more.
Professional anthropological bodies often object to the use of anthropology for the benefit of the state. Their codes of ethics or statements may proscribe anthropologists from giving secret briefings. The Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth (ASA ) has called certain scholarships ethically dangerous. The AAA's current 'Statement of Professional Responsibility' clearly states that "in relation with their own government and with host governments … no secret research, no secret reports or debriefings of any kind should be agreed to or given."
However, anthropology is once again being used in warfare as part of the US Army's strategy in Afghanistan
. The Christian Science Monitor reports that "Counterinsurgency efforts focus on better grasping and meeting local needs" in Afghanistan, under the rubric of Human Terrain Team (HTT).
More recently, there have been concerns expressed about bioprospecting, along with struggles for self-representation for native peoples and the repatriation of indigenous remains and material culture, with anthropologists often in the lead on these issues.
Other political controversies come from the emphasis in American anthropology on cultural relativism and its long-standing dismissal of the concept of race. The development of sociobiology in the late 1960s was opposed by cultural anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins, who argued that these positions were reductive (for more details see the section on the relations with the natural sciences and the Humanities). While authors such John Randal Baker continued to develop the biological concept of race into the 1970s, the rise of genetics has proven to be central to developments on this front. As genetics continues to advance as a science, scholars such as Luca Cavalli-Sforza have continued to transform and advance notions of race through the use of recent developments in genetics, such as tracing past migrations of peoples through their mitochondrial and Y-chromosomal DNA, and ancestry-informative markers.
Major discussions about anthropology
Focus on "other cultures"
Some authors argue that anthropology originated and developed as the study of "other cultures", both in terms of time (past societies) and space (non-European/non-Western societies). For example, the classic of urban anthropology, Ulf Hannerz in the introduction to his seminal Exploring the City: Inquiries Toward an Urban Anthropology mentions that the "Third World" had habitually received most of attention; anthropologists who traditionally specialized in "other cultures" looked for them far away and started to look "across the tracks" only in late 1960s. Now there exist many works focusing on peoples and topics very close to the author's "home".
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 Terrain ("fieldwork"), and developing with the center founded by Marc Augé (Le Centre d'anthropologie des mondes contemporains, the Anthropological Research Center of Contemporary Societies). The same approach of focusing on "modern world" topics by Terrain, was also present in the British Manchester School of the 1950s.
It has been reported that there has been an "institutional and academic apartheid" between the two sorts of anthropology, the one focusing on the "Other" and the one focusing on the "Self" contemporary society; an apartheid ranging from a "no contact" status to even open conflict. The countries where this was greater were Germany and Norway, but it was also significant in the 1980s France.
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