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anthropology

The study of humankind. It investigates the cultural, social, and physical diversity of the human species, both past and present. It is divided into two broad categories: biological or physical anthropology, which attempts to explain human biological variation from an evolutionary perspective; and the larger field of social or cultural anthropology, which attempts to explain the variety of human cultures. This differs from sociology in that anthropologists are concerned with cultures and societies other than their own.

Biological anthropology

Biological anthropology is concerned with human palaeontology, primatology, human adaptation, demography, population genetics, and human growth and development.

Social anthropology

Social or cultural anthropology is divided into three subfields: social or cultural anthropology proper, prehistory or prehistoric archaelogy, and anthropological linguistics. The term ‘anthropology’ is frequently used to refer solely to social anthropology. With a wide range of theoretical perspectives and topical interests, it overlaps with many other disciplines. It is a uniquely Western social science.

Participant observation

Anthropology's primary method involves the researcher living for a year or more in another culture, speaking the local language and participating in all aspects of everyday life; and writing about it afterwards. By comparing these accounts, anthropologists hope to understand who we are.

Origins Anthropology arose as a branch of history in the 1860s after the discovery of stone tools in situ with the remains of pleistocene animals in Brixham Cave, Devon, England, 1858. This discovery created the possibility of ‘prehistory’ by proving that humans had existed for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of years, and not the mere 6,000 years generally believed at the time. The remarkable similarity between these tools and those used by some contemporary hunter-gatherer societies made Western scientists think that other aspects of their cultures too might resemble those of the earliest Europeans. Whereas previously these peoples had been viewed as ‘savages’, they now came to be viewed as ‘primitives’.

Evolutionism 19th-century anthropologists such as E B Tylor, Henry Morgan, and James Frazer believed that culture progressed in stages from savagery through barbarism (characterized by the advent of agriculture) to civilization (characterized by the advent of writing). Concerned with reconstructing the evolutionary sequence of various aspects of culture, they combed the writings of missionaries, colonial administrators, and travellers to exotic lands and compared the information about other cultures' degree of advancement. To improve the quality and quantity of information, various questionnaires were developed, the most widely used being Notes and Queries on Anthropology first published by the Royal Anthropological Institute 1874.

Diffusionism Many of the proposed developmental sequences were contradicted by the facts, however, and at the end of the 19th century evolutionism began to fall into disfavour, being criticized further for its a priori assumptions, its ethnocentrism, its failure to consider the cultural context, and its intellectualistic portrayal of primitive humans. It was also apparent that few cultures had developed in isolation. Many anthropologists believed that progress was due mainly to cultural borrowing or diffusion. Diffusionism gained popularity in the 1880s and 1890s, reaching an extreme in the 1920s with William Perry and Grafton Elliot Smith arguing that all cultures had originated in Egypt.

Functionalism A turning point came 1898. Fearing that ‘primitive tribes’ were rapidly disappearing in the wake of civilization, and that valuable data would be lost for ever, A C Haddon led the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait between New Guinea and Australia. This expedition demonstrated the need for intensive fieldwork conducted by a sole researcher. By 1910 fieldwork had become a prerequisite for professional status as an anthropologist. An explanatory framework to accompany this new method of data collection, known as functionalism, was developed in the 1920s primarily by Bronislaw Malinowski.

Malinowski spent nearly four years in the Trobriand Islands, Papua New Guinea, where his primary goal was to ‘grasp the native's point of view’. Drawing on the work of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, he argued that societies were systems of interrelated parts and that cultural phenomena must be analysed in terms of their function within the context of a particular culture. Initially, he viewed culture as an integrated whole, the various aspects of culture functioning to maintain the integrity of that whole. This sociological interpretation represented a major analytical shift away from the ethnocentrism and historical approach of the 19th century towards relativism.

Malinowski later came to see the satisfaction of human biological and psychological needs as the ultimate function of culture. This biological reductionism was rejected by virtually all his contemporaries, who preferred the structural-functionalism of Alfred Radcliffe-Brown. Radcliffe-Brown viewed society as consisting of an organized system of relationships or roles and expectations. This system constituted the structure of society and the function of the various aspects of culture was to maintain that structure and so ensure the long-term survival of the society. Functionalism and structural-functionalism dominated British social anthropology from the 1920s until the early 1960s.

Locations In the early decades of the century, anthropologists worked mostly in Australia and Melanesia, but in the 1930s the focus shifted to Africa, owing, in large part, to the expansion of the colonial administration of the continent. The African societies studied were larger, more difficult to demarcate, and had a complex economic and political organization. This made demonstrating the functional integrity of a culture far more difficult than with the small island populations studied earlier. In consequence, anthropologists began to focus on a particular aspect of culture or a limited problem for investigation, taking the rest of the culture into consideration only in so far as it was relevant to their problem. One of the first do to this was E E Evans-Pritchard, whose Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande 1937 attempted to demonstrate the rationality of believing in witches and magic. African cultures also stimulated additional areas of interest, especially politics. Meyer Fortes and Evans-Pritchard's African Political Systems 1940 was particularly influential. This interest continued through the 1950s, kinship and economics being relatively ignored until the 1960s.

Structuralism In the 1960s the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss introduced structuralism into anthropology. He argued that kinship systems, myths, and social phenomena in general, are simply surface phenomena that reflect the fundamental structures of the mind. The human mind, he believed, basically classifies the world into pairs of categories, or ‘binary oppositions’, such as male and female, sacred and profane, nature and culture. Structuralism provided a needed stimulus to anthropology and rekindled interest in kinship and myth, but by the mid-1970s opposition to it arose because all meaning was established by contrasts; nothing could carry meaning in itself.

Symbolic anthropology The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed a diversification of theoretical perspectives. Marxist anthropology analysed the social and political organization of production but suffered many of the same difficulties as structuralism. The political-economy school examined the impact of capitalism on the communities anthropologists studied. The dominant analytical perspective, however, was the symbolic anthropology of the US anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who argued that culture is embedded in symbols that need to be interpreted both by the people themselves and by the anthropologist.

US schools Although both US and British anthropologists rejected evolutionism, they had followed somewhat different theoretical paths early in the 20th century. Franz Boas, the leading US anthropologist at the turn of the century, argued that cultural traits had to be studied in context, and that as much data as possible had to be collected before cultural comparisons could be made or the laws governing cultural variation emerge. This approach, known as historical particularism, was modified by his students Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, who were concerned with cultural patterns and the relationship between culture and personality. This school viewed culture as determining personality and dominated US anthropology during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. In the 1940s, however, a neo-evolutionist school emerged through the work of Leslie White and in the 1950s this developed into cultural ecology, where cultural similarities were seen to be due to the process of adapting to specific environmental conditions. In the 1960s Marvin Harris's cultural materialism was an attempt to show how social and cultural forms function to maintain an existing relationship with the environment. Then Geertz's symbolic anthropology began to draw British and US anthropology together.

Current concerns The 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s also witnessed a growth of topical interests. Current concerns include ethnohistory, art, migration, ethnological museums, ethnicity, and how different peoples experience and construct time, space, and landscape. The anthropologist's primary fieldwork goal, however, still remains that advocated by Malinowski: ‘to grasp the native point of view’.

cultural anthropology Fejos, Paul

Gillin, John P(hilip) Gumperz, John

Harris, Marvin Kroeber, Alfred Louis

physical anthropology Roheim, Geza

social anthropology Tylor, Edward Burnett