Everything about Social Anthropology totally explained
Social anthropology is the branch of
anthropology that studies how currently living human beings behave in social groups.
Substantive focus and practice
Practitioners of social anthropology investigate, often through long term, intensive
field studies (including
participant observation methods), the
social organization of a particular people:
customs,
economic and
political organization,
law and conflict resolution, patterns of
consumption and exchange,
kinship and family structure,
gender relations, childrearing and
socialization,
religion, and so on.
Social anthropology also explores the role of meanings, ambiguities and contradictions of
social life, patterns of sociality, violence and conflict, and the underlying logics of
social behaviour. Social anthropologists are trained in the interpretation of
narrative,
ritual and symbolic behaviour not merely as
text, but with communication examined in relation to action, practice, and the historical context in which it's embedded. Social anthropologists address the diversity of positions and perspectives to be found within any
social group.
Social anthropology is distinguished from subjects such as
economics or
political science by its
holistic range and the attention it gives to the diversity of culture and society across the world, and the capacity this gives the discipline to re-examine Euro-American assumptions. It is differentiated from
sociology both in its main methods (based on long-term participant observation and linguistic competence), its commitment to the relevance and illumination provided by micro studies, and its extension beyond strictly social phenomena to culture, art, individuality, and cognition. While some social anthropologists use quantitative methods (particularly those whose research touches on topics such as local economies,
demography, or health and illness), social anthropologists generally emphasize qualitative analysis of long-term fieldwork, rather than the more quantitative methods used by most economists or sociologists.
Specialisations
Specialisations within social anthropology shift as its objects of study are transformed and as new intellectual paradigms appear;
ethnomusicology and
medical anthropology afford examples of current, well-defined specialisms.
More recent and currently emergent areas within social anthropology include the relation between cultural diversity and new findings in
cognitive development; social and ethical understandings of novel technologies; emergent forms of 'the family' and other new socialities modeled on
kinship; the ongoing social fall-out of the demise of
state socialism; the politics of resurgent
religiosity; analysis of audit cultures and accountability.
The subject has been enlivened by, and has contributed to, approaches from other disciplines, such as
philosophy (
ethics,
phenomenology,
logic), the history of science,
psychoanalysis, and
linguistics.
Ethical considerations
The subject has both ethical and
reflexive dimensions. Practitioners have developed an awareness of the sense in which scholars create their objects of study and the ways in which anthropologists themselves may contribute to processes of change in the societies they study.
History
Social anthropology has historical roots in a number of 19th-century disciplines, including
ethnology,
folklore studies, and
Classics, among others. (See
History of anthropology.) Its immediate precursor took shape in the work of
Edward Burnett Tylor and
James George Frazer in the late 19th century and underwent major changes in both method and theory during the period 1890-1920 with a new emphasis on original fieldwork, long-term holistic study of social behavior in natural settings, and the introduction of French and German social theory.
Departments of Social Anthropology exist in universities around the world. The field of social anthropology has expanded in ways not anticipated by the founders of the field, as for example in the subfield of
structure and dynamics.
1920s-1940
Modern social anthropology was founded in
Britain at
The London School of Economics and Political Science following
World War I. Influences include both the methodological revolution pioneered by
Bronisław Malinowski's process-oriented
fieldwork in the
Trobriand Islands of
Melanesia between 1915 and 1918 and
Alfred Radcliffe-Brown's theoretical program for systematic comparison that was based on a conception of rigorous fieldwork and the
structure-functionalist conception of
Durkheim’s
sociology. Other intellectual founders include
W. H. R. Rivers and
A. C. Haddon, whose orientation reflected the contemporary Volkerpsychologie of
Wilhelm Wundt and
Adolf Bastian, and Sir
E. B. Tylor, who defined anthropology as a positivistic science following
Auguste Comte.
Edmund Leach (1962) defined social anthropology as a kind of comparative micro-sociology based on intensive fieldwork studies. There was never a settled theoretical orthodoxy on the nature of science and society but always a tension between several views that were seriously opposed.
1940s-1980s
Following
World War II, sociocultural anthropology as comprised by the fields of ethnography and ethnology diverged into an American school of
cultural anthropology while social anthropology diversified in Europe by challenging the principles of structure-functionalism, absorbing ideas from
Claude Levi-Strauss’s
structuralism and from
Max Gluckman’s
Manchester school, and embracing the study of conflict, change, urban anthropology, and networks.
1980s to present
A European Association of Social Anthropologists (
EASA) was founded in 1989 as a society of scholarship at a meeting of founder members from fourteen European countries, supported by the
Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
The Association seeks to advance anthropology in Europe by organizing biennial conferences and by editing its academic journal,
Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale.
Anthropologists associated with social anthropology
Bibliography
Bronislaw Malinowski (1915) The Trobriand Islands
(1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific
(1929) The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia
(1935) Coral Gardens and Their Magic: A Study of the Methods of Tilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands
Edmund Leach (1954) Political systems of Highland Burma. London: G. Bell.
(1982) Social Anthropology
Thomas H. Eriksen (1985) Social Anthropology, pp. 926-929 in The Social Science Encyclopedia
Adam Kuper (1996) Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British SchoolFurther Information
Get more info on 'Social Anthropology'.
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