Cultural anthropology

Cultural Anthropology is one of the four branches of general anthropology, the primary focus of the branch being the study of human culture. In regards to humanity, culture can deal with a host of subjects, such as religion, mythology, art, music, government systems, social structures and hierarchies, family dynamics, traditions and customs as well as cuisine, economy and relationship to the envirnoment. Any and all of these factors make up important aspects of culture and behavior and are some of the pieces of human history that cultural anthropology tries to put to together into a larger, more comprehensive picture of the human experience.

Definition

Depending upon the academic climate of the country in which it is practiced, cultural anthropology can be more focused on ethnography, such as in France and America, which is the direct observance and study of a small society by an anthropologist living and actively participating in local culture, or socio-cultural anthropology, mostly in England and Western Europe, which emphasizes a dichotomy of extensive fieldwork and scholarly research. Despite their differences, cultural, socio-cultural anthropology and ethnography all share the similar core ideology that culture is the essence of “human nature”, that all people have the capacity to classify experiences, encode classifications symbolically, and to teach abstractions to others.

Some people make the mistake of confusing cultural anthropology and its variants with sociology. Certainly there are similarities between the two disciplines, such as the systematic study of groups of people and how they relate to the larger community. However, the disciplines developed independent of one another, cultural anthropology focusing first on those societies that were deemed "primitive", while sociology was interested in contemporary, industralized society. However, as cultural anthropology has also become more interested in the same areas of sociology, the main difference remains that as a tenant of anthropology, all studies seek to aid the complete understanding of humanity at all points in time, a broader approach than sociology, or, as anthropologist Robert Gordon explains “Whereas the sociologist or the political scientist might examine the beauty of a flower petal by petal, the anthropologist is the person that stands on the top of the mountain and looks at the beauty of the field.”

History

Interest in other cultures harks back to the 15th Century, when exploration of the world was beginning to blossom with the discovery of America. The rise of colonialism and discovery of the new world brought the long separated cultures of Western Europe and the Americas, along with cultures of Asia, Africa and the Pacific into more frequent contact. Occidental interest in the “other” peoples of the New World, propagated by early, popular and mostly inaccurate travel narratives, gave rise to ethnocentric mentalities of people as "primitive", "savages" or "noble savages". Such perspectives were wide spread in Europe and were sometimes used as the basis for colonial rule. The legacy of cultural anthropology as a pseudo-scientific justification for racial superiority and oppression has been difficult for the discipline to overcome entirely, especially since it was distorted cultural anthropology that led to such atrocities as the forced removal of Native Americans from their land during the Jackson Administration and the philosophy of Aryian superiority during the Third Reich. Even today, when cultural anthropology has become a recognized, legitimate academic discipline, there is still feelings of distrust, such as how some current Native Americans view anthropologists as arrogant and intrusive. Yet, as early as the 19th century, during the peak of anthropological misuse, there were honest academics attempting to scientifically analyze culture so as to understand humanity.

With the rise of history, antiquity and humanities studies, along with the natural sciences, during the 19th century, such scholars as E.B. Taylor and J.G. Frazer began to plant the seeds of cultural anthropology, wondering why people living in different parts of the world sometimes had similar beliefs and practices. This question became the underlying concern of cultural anthropology and distinguished the academic discipline as its own separate branch of anthropological studies. One scholar who tried to answer this question was Grafton Elliot Smith, who argued that different groups must somehow have learned from one another, as if cultural traits were being spread from one place to another, or “diffused”. Others argued that different groups had the capability of inventing similar beliefs and practices independently. Some of those who advocated "independent invention", like Lewis Henry Morgan, additionally supposed that similarities meant that different groups had passed through the same stages of cultural evolution.

The Beginnings of Ethnology

A breakthrough in cultural anthropological methodology happened in Britain following World War I, pioneered by Bronislaw Malinowski’s meticulous process-oriented fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands of Melanesia between 1915 and 1918 and through a theoretical program for systematic comparison that was based on a conception of rigorous fieldwork and the structure-functionalist conception of Durkheim’s sociology, became the basis of ethnography. Other intellectual founders include W. H. R. Rivers and A. C. Haddon, whose orientation reflected the contemporary Volkerpsychologie of Wilhelm Wundt and Adolph Bastian. Although 19th century ethnologists saw "diffusion" and "independent invention" as mutually exclusive and competing theories, most ethnographers quickly reached a consensus that both processes occur, and that both can plausibly account for cross-cultural similarities. But these ethnographers pointed out the superficiality of many such similarities, and that even traits that spread through diffusion often changed their meaning and functions as they moved from one society to another. Accordingly, these anthropologists showed less interest in comparing cultures, generalizing about human nature, or discovering universal laws of cultural development, than in understanding particular cultures in those cultures' own terms. Such ethnographers and their students promoted the idea of "cultural relativism” the view that one can only understand another person's beliefs and behaviors in the context of the culture in which he or she lived.

Social Anthropology in Europe

Following World War II, Europe under went a difficult reconstruction of society and philosophy, as seen by the 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. European "social anthropologists" focused on observed social behaviors and on "social structure", that is, on relationships among social roles (e.g. husband and wife, or parent and child) and social institutions (e.g. religion, economy, and politics). 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 Assocation seeks to advance anthropology in Europe by organizing biennual confrences and by editing its academic journal, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale.

Cultural Anthropology in America

American "cultural anthropologists" focused on the ways people expressed their view of themselves and their world, especially in symbolic forms (such as art and myths). These two approaches frequently converged (kinship, for example, and leadership function both as a symbolic systems and as social institutions), and generally complemented one another.

Contemporary theory and methods

Today ethnographic methodology continues to dominate cultural anthropology. Nevertheless, many contemporary socio-cultural anthropologists have rejected earlier models of ethnography that treated local cultures as bounded and isolated. These anthropologists continue to concern themselves with the distinct ways people in different locales experience and understand their lives, but they often argue that one cannot understand these particular ways of life solely in the local context; they argue that one must analyze them in the context of regional or even global political and economic relations. Notable proponents of this approach include Arjun Appadurai, James Clifford, George Marcus, Sidney Mintz, Michael Taussig and Eric Wolf.Cultural anthropologists have increasingly turned their investigative eye on to "Western" culture. For example, Philippe Bourgois won the Margaret Mead Award in 1997 for In Search of Respect, a study of the entrepreneurs in a Harlem crack-den. Also growing more popular are ethnographies of professional communities, such as laboratory researchers, Wall Street investors, law firms, or IT computer employees As such, contemporary cultural anthropology has focused more and more on developed cultures and less with traditionally "primitive" societies, although a number of anthropologists still work with the ever decreasing, non-"Westernized" populations of the world in an attempt to record their ways of life before such cultures become extinct.

An outgrowth of this trend trend in anthropological research and analysis is the use of multi-sited ethnography Looking at culture as embedded in macro-constructions of a global social order, multi-sited ethnography uses traditional methodology in various locations both spatially and temporally. Through this methodology greater insight can be gained when examining the impact of world-systems on local and global communities. Also emerging in multi-sited ethnography are greater interdisciplinary approaches to fieldwork, bringing in methods from cultural studies, media studies, science and technology studies, and others. In multi-sited ethnography research tracks a subject across spatial and temporal boundaries. For example, a multi-sited ethnography may follow a "thing," such as a particular commodity, as it transfers through the networks of global capitalism. Multi-sited ethnography may also follow ethnic groups in diaspora, stories or rumors that appear in multiple locations and in multiple time periods, metaphors that appear in multiple ethnographic locations, or the biographies of individual people or groups as they move through space and time. It may also follow conflicts that transcend boundaries. Multi-sited ethnographies, such as Nancy Scheper-Hughes's ethnography of the international black market for the trade of human organs. In this research she follows organs as they transfer through various legal and illegal networks of capitalism, as well as the rumors and urban legends that circulate in impoverished communities about child kidnapping and organ theft.

References

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• Johann Georg Adam Forster Voyage round the World in His Britannic Majesty’s Sloop, Resolution, Commanded by Capt. James Cook, during the Years 1772, 3, 4, and 5 (2 vols), London (1777)
• Lévi-Strauss, Claude, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, (1949), [1], Structural Anthropology' (1958)[2]
• Mauss, Marcel, originally published as Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés archaïques in 1925, this classic text on gift economy appears in the English edition as The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies[3].
• Maybury-Lewis, David, Akwe-Shavante society. (1967) [4], The Politics of Ethnicity: Indigenous Peoples in Latin American States (2003)[5].
• Clastres, Pierre, Society Against the State (1974), [6]
• Bronislaw Malinowski The Trobriand Islands (1915)
• Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922)
• The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (1929)
• Coral Gardens and Their Magic: A Study of the Methods of Tilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands (1935)
• Edmund Leach Social Anthropology (1982)
• Thomas H. Eriksen Social Anthropology, pp. 926-929 in The Social Science Encyclopedia (1985)
• Adam Kuper Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School (1996)

External links

• http://www.aaanet.org/sca/ca/index.html - The Society of Cultural Anthropology
• http://www.anthro.palomer.edu/tutorials/cultural.html - Educational Tutorials on Cultural Anthropology
• http://www.movinganthropology.org - The Moving Anthropology Student Network/Moving Anthropology Social Network connects young Anthropologists and anthropology students from European and other countries
• http://www.ethnologue.com/ describes the languages and ethnic groups found worldwide, grouped by host nation-state.
• http://www.movinganthropology.org - The Moving Anthropology Student Network/Moving Anthropology Social Network connects young anthropologists and anthropology students from European and other countries
• Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History - Over 160,000 objects from Pacific, North American, African, Asian ethnographic collections with images and detailed description, linked to the original catalogue pages, field notebooks, and photographs are available online.

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