Social anthropology is the dominant constituent
of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom
and Commonwealth and much of Europe where
it is distinguished from cultural anthropology.
In the USA, social anthropology is commonly
subsumed within cultural anthropology.
In contrast to cultural anthropology, culture
and its continuity have been traditionally
seen more as the dependent 'variable' 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 one.
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, trans nationalism 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
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 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 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, 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 emt|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, 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. 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. 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.
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 and James George Frazer 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, 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.
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,
and emphasizing long-term 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, 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
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 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 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.
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. 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 WW 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, 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
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 - 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 Times Now.
See also
Cultural Anthropology
Ethnology
List of important publications in anthropology
Rajamandala
Sociology
Notes
References
Benchmark Statement Anthropology
Further reading
Malinowski, Bronislaw: The Trobriand Islands
Malinowski, Bronislaw: Argonauts of the Western
Pacific
Malinowski, Bronislaw: The Sexual Life of
Savages in North-Western Melanesia
Malinowski, Bronislaw: Coral Gardens and Their
Magic: A Study of the Methods of Tilling the
Soil and of Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand
Islands
Leach, Edmund: Political systems of Highland
Burma. London: G. Bell.
Leach, Edmund: Social Anthropology
Eriksen, Thomas H.:, pp. 926–929 in The
Social Science Encyclopedia Social Anthropology.
ISBN 0-7102-0008-0. OCLC 11623683. 
Kuper, Adam: Anthropology and Anthropologists:
The Modern British School. ISBN 0-415-11895-6.
OCLC 32509209. 
External links
MASN- The Moving Anthropology Student Network
- website offers tutorials, information on
the subject, discussion-forums and a large
link-collection for all interested scholars
of social anthropology
