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Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behaviour in human societies and cultures. It is the dominant constituent ofanthropology throughout theUnited Kingdom and much of Europe,[1] where it is distinguished fromcultural anthropology.[2] In the United States, social anthropology is commonly subsumed within cultural anthropology orsociocultural anthropology.
The termcultural anthropology is generally applied toethnographic works that are holistic in spirit, are oriented to the ways in whichculture affects individual experience, or aim to provide a rounded view of the knowledge, customs, and institutions of people.Social anthropology is a term applied to ethnographic works that attempt to isolate a particular system of social relations such as those that comprise domestic life, economy, law, politics, or religion, give analytical priority to the organizational bases of social life, and attend to cultural phenomena as somewhat secondary to the main issues of social scientific inquiry.[3]
Topics of interest for social anthropologists have includedcustoms,economic andpolitical organization,law andconflict resolution, patterns ofconsumption and exchange,kinship and family structure,gender relations, childbearing andsocialization,religion, while present-day social anthropologists are also concerned with issues ofglobalism, ethnic violence,gender studies, transnationalism and local experience, and the emerging cultures ofcyberspace,[4] and can also help with bringing opponents together when environmental concerns come into conflict with economic developments.[5] British and American anthropologists includingGillian Tett andKaren Ho who studiedWall Street provided an alternative explanation for thefinancial crisis of 2007–2010 to the technical explanations rooted in economic and political theory.[6]
Differences among British, French, and American sociocultural anthropologies have diminished with increasing dialogue and borrowing of both theory and methods. Social and cultural anthropologists, and some who integrate the two, are found in most institutes of anthropology. Thus the formal names of institutional units no longer necessarily reflect fully the content of the disciplines these cover. Some, such as the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology[7] (Oxford), changed their name to reflect the change in composition; others, such as Social Anthropology at the University of Kent,[8] became simply Anthropology. Most retain the name under which they were founded.
Long-termqualitative research, including intensivefield studies (emphasizingparticipant observation methods), has been traditionally encouraged in social anthropology rather than quantitative analysis of surveys, questionnaires and brief field visits typically used byeconomists,political scientists, and (most)sociologists.[9]
Cognitive anthropology studies how people represent and think about events and objects in the world. It links human thought processes and the physical and ideational aspects of culture.[10] The scopes of these two disciplines intersect in the field ofcognitive development. The following part of the section shows the significance of their co-research for understanding the processes that constitute society.According to Sir Edward Tylor: "Culture, or civilization, taken in its broad, ethnographic sense, is 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.”[11] The cultural consensus principle is incorporated in the reasoning behind the cultural consonance model[12] and other similar models (seecognitive anthropology) that seek to evaluate the effects of shared cognitive structures on social life and the human condition[13] beginning from the onset of cognitive development. The major part of social and cognitive anthropology concepts (e.g., Cultural consonance, Cultural models, Knowledge structures, Shared knowledge etc.) seem to rely upon broad pervasive, unaware interactions between society members. Research shows that unconscious remembering increases recall efficiency over time[14] and yields greater confidence in that thought.[15] According to the received view incognitive sciences,cognition begins from birth (and even from prenatal) due to motive forces ofshared intentionality: unaware knowledge assimilation. Therefore, mechanisms of unaware interactions at the onset of life, one of the focuses of research in cognitive sciences, have become the central research issue in social and cognitive anthropology.
Another intersection of these two disciplines appears inneuroscience research. Behavioral propensities (an exteriorization of Cultural models, Schemata, etc.; see key concepts ofcognitive anthropology) are the product of biological and cultural factors that manifest in individual brain development, neural wiring, and neurochemical homeostasis.[16] According to received view in neuroscience, an observed human behavior, in any context, is the last event in a long chain of biological and cultural interactions.[17][18] The brain´s anatomy is subject to neuroplasticity and depends on both, contextual (cultural) and historically dependent (previous experience) mechanisms to shape the neural system.[19] By bridging sociology with anthropology and cognitive science perspectives, we can assess shared cultural knowledge[20] – understand processes underlying unspoken social norms and beliefs, as well as study processes of shaping individual values that together constitute societies.
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Social anthropology is distinguished from subjects such aseconomics orpolitical science by itsholistic range and the attention it gives to the comparative diversity of societies and cultures across the world, and the capacity this gives the discipline to re-examine Euro-American assumptions. It is differentiated fromsociology, both in its main methods (based on long-term participant observation and linguistic competence),[21] and in its commitment to the relevance and illumination provided by micro studies. It extends beyond strictly social phenomena to culture, art, individuality, and cognition.[22] Many social anthropologists use quantitative methods, too, particularly those whose research touches on topics such as local economies,demography,human ecology, cognition, or health and illness.
Specializations within social anthropology shift as its objects of study are transformed and as new intellectual paradigms appear;musicology andmedical anthropology are examples of current, well-defined specialities.[23] More recent and currently specializations are:
The subject has been enlivened by, and has contributed to, approaches from other disciplines, such asphilosophy (ethics,phenomenology,logic), thehistory of science,psychoanalysis, andlinguistics.
The subject has both ethical andreflexive 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. An example of this is the "hawthorne effect", whereby those being studied may alter their behaviour in response to the knowledge that they are being watched and studied.
Social anthropology hashistorical roots in a number of 19th-century disciplines, including the study ofClassics,ethnography,ethnology,folklore,linguistics, andsociology, among others. Its immediate precursor took shape in the work ofEdward Burnett Tylor andJames 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.
Polish anthropologist and ethnographerBronisław Malinowski, one of the most important influences on British social anthropology, emphasized long-term fieldwork in which anthropologists work in the vernacular and immerse themselves in the daily practices of local people.[30] This development was bolstered byFranz Boas' introduction of the concept ofcultural relativism, arguing that cultures are based on different ideas about the world and can therefore only be properly understood in terms of their own standards and values.[31]
Museums such as theBritish Museum weren't the only site of anthropological studies; with theNew Imperialism period, starting in the 1870s,zoos became unattended "laboratories", especially the so-called "ethnological exhibitions" or "Negro villages". Thus, "savages" from the Americas, Africa and Asia were displayed, often nude, in cages, in what has been termed "human zoos". In 1906, CongolesepygmyOta Benga was put by American anthropologistMadison Grant in a cage in theBronx Zoo, labelled "the missing link" between an orangutan and the "White race"—Grant, a renownedeugenicist, was also the author ofThe Passing of the Great Race (1916). Such exhibitions were attempts to illustrate and prove in the same movement the validity ofscientific racism, whose first formulation may be found inArthur de Gobineau'sAn Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853–1855). In 1931, theColonial Exhibition in Paris still displayedKanaks fromNew Caledonia in the "indigenous village"; it received 24 million visitors in six months, thus demonstrating the popularity of such "human zoos".
Anthropology grew increasingly distinct from natural history and by the end of the 19th century the discipline began to crystallize into its modern form—by 1935, for example, it was possible for T. K. Penniman to write a history of the discipline entitledA Hundred Years of Anthropology. At the time, the field was dominated by "the comparative method". It was assumed that all societies passed through a single evolutionary process from the most primitive to most advanced. Non-European societies were thus seen as evolutionary "living fossils" that could be studied in order to understand the European past. Scholars wrote histories of prehistoric migrations which were sometimes valuable but often also fanciful. It was during this time that Europeans first accurately tracedPolynesian migrations across thePacific Ocean for instance—although some of them believed it originated inEgypt. Finally, the concept ofrace was actively discussed as a way to classify—and rank—human beings based on difference.
Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) andJames George Frazer (1854–1941) are generally considered the antecedents to modern social anthropologists inGreat Britain. Although the British anthropologist Tylor undertook a field trip toMexico, both he and Frazer derived most of the material for their comparative studies through extensive reading, notfieldwork, mainly the Classics (literature and history ofAncient Greece andRome), 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".[32] Tylor in particular laid the groundwork for theories ofcultural 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."[33]
Tylor formulated one of the early and influential anthropological conceptions ofculture as "that complex whole, which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by [humans] as [members] of society."[34] 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 he generally seemed to assume a Victorian idea of progress rather than the idea of non-directional, multilineal cultural change proposed by later anthropologists. Tylor also theorized about the origins of religious beliefs in human beings, proposing a theory ofanimism 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 thestudy of religion,mythology, andmagic. His comparative studies, most influentially in the numerous editions ofThe Golden Bough, analyzed similarities in religious belief and symbolism globally. Neither Tylor nor Frazer, however, were particularly interested infieldwork, nor were they interested in examining how the cultural elements and institutions fit together.The Golden Bough was abridged drastically in subsequent editions after his first.
Toward the turn of the 20th century, a number of anthropologists became dissatisfied with this categorization of cultural elements; historical reconstructions also came to seem increasingly speculative to them. 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 thandiachronic or historical analysis), and emphasizing long-term (one to several years) immersion fieldwork.Cambridge University financed amultidisciplinary expedition to theTorres Strait Islands in 1898, organized byAlfred Cort Haddon and including a physician-anthropologist,William Rivers, as well as a linguist, a botanist, and other specialists. The findings of the expedition set new standards for ethnographic description.
A decade and a half later, the Polish anthropology studentBronisław Malinowski (1884–1942) was beginning what he expected to be a brief period offieldwork in the old model, collecting lists of cultural items, when the outbreak of the First World War stranded him inNew Guinea. As a subject of theAustro-Hungarian Empire resident on aBritish colonial possession, he was effectively confined to New Guinea for several years.[35]
He made use of the time by undertaking far more intensive fieldwork than had been done byBritish anthropologists, and his classic ethnographical work,Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) advocated an approach tofieldwork that became standard in the field: getting "the native's point of view" throughparticipant observation. Theoretically, he advocated afunctionalist interpretation, which examined how social institutions functioned to satisfy individual needs.
Modern social anthropology was founded inBritain at theLondon School of Economics and Political Science followingWorld War I. Influences include both the methodological revolution pioneered byBronisław Malinowski's process-orientedfieldwork in theTrobriand Islands ofMelanesia between 1915 and 1918[36] andAlfred Radcliffe-Brown's theoretical program for systematic comparison that was based on a conception of rigorous fieldwork and thestructure-functionalist conception ofDurkheim’ssociology.[37][38] Other intellectual founders includeW. H. R. Rivers andA. C. Haddon, whose orientation reflected the contemporaryParapsychologies ofWilhelm Wundt andAdolf Bastian, and SirE. B. Tylor, who defined anthropology as a positivist science followingAuguste Comte.Edmund Leach (1962) defined social anthropology as a kind of comparative micro-sociology based on intensive fieldwork studies. Scholars have not settled a theoretical orthodoxy on the nature of science and society, and their tensions reflect views which are seriously opposed.
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown also published a seminal work in 1922. He had carried out his initial fieldwork in theAndaman Islands in the old style of historical reconstruction. However, after reading the work of French sociologistsÉmile Durkheim andMarcel Mauss, Radcliffe-Brown published an account of his research (entitled simplyThe Andaman Islanders) that paid close attention to the meaning and purpose of rituals and myths. Over time, he developed an approach known asstructural 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. His structuralist approach contrasted with Malinowski's functionalism, and was quite different from the later Frenchstructuralism, 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 theBritish Empire and 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 includeThe Nuer, byEdward Evan Evans-Pritchard, andThe Dynamics of Clanship Among the Tallensi, byMeyer Fortes; well-known edited volumes includeAfrican Systems of Kinship and Marriage andAfrican Political Systems.
FollowingWorld War II, sociocultural anthropology as comprised by the fields of ethnography and ethnology diverged into an American school ofcultural anthropology while social anthropology diversified in Europe by challenging the principles of structure-functionalism, absorbing ideas fromClaude Lévi-Strauss'sstructuralism and from the followers ofMax Gluckman, and embracing the study of conflict, change, urban anthropology, and networks. Together with many of his colleagues at theRhodes-Livingstone Institute and students atManchester University, collectively known as theManchester 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. During this period Gluckman was also involved in a dispute with American anthropologistPaul Bohannan on ethnographic methodology within the anthropological study of law. He believed that indigenous terms used in ethnographic data should be translated into Anglo-American legal terms for the benefit of the reader.[39][40] The Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth was founded in 1946.[41]
In Britain, anthropology had a great intellectual impact, it "contributed to theerosion of Christianity, the growth ofcultural relativism, an awareness of the survival of the primitive in modern life, and the replacement ofdiachronic modes of analysis withsynchronic, all of which are central to modern culture."[42] Later in the 1960s and 1970s,Edmund Leach and his studentsMary Douglas andNur Yalman, among others, introduced French structuralism in the style ofClaude Lévi-Strauss.
In countries of theBritish Commonwealth, social anthropology has often been institutionally separate fromphysical anthropology andprimatology, which may be connected with departments ofbiology andzoology; and fromarchaeology, which may be connected with departments ofClassics,Egyptology,Oriental studies, 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 ofcultural studies,ethnic studies,folklore,human geography,museum studies,sociology,social relations, andsocial work. British anthropology has continued to emphasize social organization and economics over purely symbolic or literary topics.
TheEuropean Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) was founded in 1989 as a society of scholarship at a meeting of founder members from fourteenEuropean countries, supported by theWenner-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/Anthropologies Social. Departments of Social Anthropology at different universities have tended to focus on disparate aspects of the field, and can be found in several 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 ofstructure and dynamics.
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