Social anthropology is the dominant constituent
of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom
and Commonwealth and much of Europe (France
in particular), where it is distinguished
from cultural anthropology. In the United
States, social anthropology is commonly subsumed
within cultural anthropology (or under the
relatively new designation of sociocultural
anthropology).In contrast to cultural anthropology,
culture and its continuity (including narratives,
rituals, and symbolic behavior associated
with them) have been traditionally seen more
as the dependent "variable" (cf. explanandum)
by social anthropology, embedded in its historical
and social context, including its diversity
of positions and perspectives, ambiguities,
conflicts, and contradictions of social life,
rather than the independent (explanatory)
one (cf. explanans).
Topics of interest for social anthropologists
have included customs, economic and political
organization, law and conflict resolution,
patterns of consumption and exchange, kinship
and family structure, gender relations, childbearing
and socialization, religion, while present-day
social anthropologists are also concerned
with issues of globalism, ethnic violence,
gender studies, transnationalism and local
experience, and the emerging cultures of cyberspace,
and can also help with bringing opponents
together when environmental concerns come
into conflict with economic developments.
British and American anthropologists including
Gillian Tett and Karen Ho who studied Wall
Street provided an alternative explanation
for the financial crisis of 2007–2010 to
the technical explanations rooted in economic
and political theory.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 (Oxford)
changed their name to reflect the change in
composition, others, such as Social Anthropology
at the University of Kent became simply Anthropology.
Most retain the name under which they were
founded.
Long-term qualitative research, including
intensive field studies (emphasizing participant
observation methods) has been traditionally
encouraged in social anthropology rather than
quantitative analysis of surveys, questionnaires
and brief field visits typically used by economists,
political scientists, and (most) sociologists.
== Substantive focus and practice ==
Social anthropology is distinguished from
subjects such as economics or political science
by its holistic 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 from sociology,
both in its main methods (based on long-term
participant observation and linguistic competence),
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.
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 ===
Specializations within social anthropology
shift as its objects of study are transformed
and as new intellectual paradigms appear;
musicology and medical anthropology are examples
of current, well-defined specialities.
More recent and currently cognitive development;
social and ethical understandings of novel
technologies; emergent forms of "the family"
and other new socialities modelled on kinship;
the ongoing social fall-out of the demise
of state socialism; the politics of resurgent
religiosity; and 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. 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.
== 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. Bronislaw 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. This
development was bolstered by Franz Boas's
introduction of cultural 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.
Museums such as the British Museum weren't
the only site of anthropological studies:
with the New Imperialism period, starting
in the 1870s, zoos became unattended "laboratories",
especially the so-called "ethnological exhibitions"
or "Negro villages". Thus, "savages" from
the colonies were displayed, often nudes,
in cages, in what has been called "human zoos".
For example, in 1906, Congolese pygmy Ota
Benga was put by anthropologist Madison Grant
in a cage in the Bronx Zoo, labelled "the
missing link" between an orangutan and the
"white race" — Grant, a renowned eugenicist,
was also the author of The Passing of the
Great Race (1916). Such exhibitions were attempts
to illustrate and prove in the same movement
the validity of scientific racism, which first
formulation may be found in Arthur de Gobineau's
An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races
(1853–55). In 1931, the Colonial Exhibition
in Paris still displayed Kanaks from New 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 entitled A 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
traced Polynesian migrations across the Pacific
Ocean for instance - although some of them
believed it originated in Egypt. Finally,
the concept of race was actively discussed
as a way to classify - and rank - human beings
based on difference.
=== Tylor and Frazer ===
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 social anthropology in Britain.
Although Tylor undertook a field trip to Mexico,
both he and Frazer derived most of the material
for their comparative studies through extensive
reading, not fieldwork, mainly the Classics
(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 [humans] as [members] 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 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 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.).
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 globally.
Neither Tylor nor Frazer, however, were particularly
interested in fieldwork, 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.
=== Malinowski and the British School ===
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 than diachronic
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 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
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 satisfy individual needs.
=== 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 Parapsychologies
of Wilhelm Wundt and Adolf Bastian, and Sir
E. B. Tylor, who defined anthropology as a
positivist science following Auguste 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 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.
=== Post-World War II trends ===
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 Lévi-Strauss's structuralism
and from Max Gluckman’s Manchester school,
and embracing the study of conflict, change,
urban anthropology, and networks. 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. During this period Gluckman
was also involved in a dispute with American
anthropologist Paul 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. The Association of Social Anthropologists
of the UK and Commonwealth was founded in
1946.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 diachronic modes of analysis with synchronic,
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.
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. British anthropology
has continued to emphasize social organization
and economics over purely symbolic or literary
topics.
=== 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/Anthropologies Social.
Departments of Social Anthropology at different
Universities have tended to focus on disparate
aspects of the field.
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.
== Anthropologists associated with social
anthropology ==
== Famous students of social anthropology
==
Nick Clegg – Former Leader of the UK Liberal
Democratic Party and Deputy Prime Minister
of the United Kingdom
Hugh Laurie – Actor – Best known for role
of doctor in House
Thandie Newton – Actress
Alexandra Shulman – Editor of British edition
of Vogue
David Attenborough – Wildlife TV presenter
Charles, Prince of Wales – Heir to the British
throne
Darren Aronofsky – Film director
Amitav Ghosh – Author
Mick Hucknall – Lead singer of Simply Red
Derek Acorah – Ghost Whisperer
Arnab Goswami – Indian journalist who is
the Editor-in-Chief and News anchor of the
Indian news channel Republic TV
== See also ==
Cultural anthropology
Ethnology
Ethnosemiotics
List of important publications in anthropology
Rajamandala
Sociology
== Notes ==
== References ==
Benchmark Statement Anthropology (UK)
== Further reading ==
Malinowski, Bronislaw (1915): The Trobriand
Islands
Malinowski, Bronislaw (1922): Argonauts of
the Western Pacific
Malinowski, Bronislaw (1929): The Sexual Life
of Savages in North-Western Melanesia
Malinowski, Bronislaw (1935): Coral Gardens
and Their Magic: A Study of the Methods of
Tilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites
in the Trobriand Islands
Leach, Edmund (1954): Political systems of
Highland Burma. London: G. Bell.
Leach, Edmund (1982): Social Anthropology
Eriksen, Thomas H. (1985):, pp. 926–929
in The Social Science Encyclopedia Social
Anthropology. ISBN 0-7102-0008-0. OCLC 11623683.
Kuper, Adam (1996): Anthropology and Anthropologists:
The Modern British School. ISBN 0-415-11895-6.
OCLC 32509209.
== External links ==
The Moving Anthropology Student Network (MASN)
- website offers tutorials, information on
the subject, discussion-forums and a large
link-collection for all interested scholars
of social anthropology
