Anthropology

Anthropological traditions

There exist various ancient anthropological traditions, then modern (allemande, Anglo-Saxon, French, etc.).

Most important are currently the French sociological school (Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss), the British social anthropology (J.G. Frazer, Bronislaw Malinowski, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, E.E. Evans-Pritchard) and Cultural anthropology American (L.H. Morgan, Franz Boas, Marvin Harris, Clifford Geertz, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict).

American anthropology attaches much importance to the aspects Culturel S of the Langue S and the action and ways of thinking. There was an Institute of Anthropology at Washington DC to help the federal authorities in their relationships to the foreign countries and the transcultural contacts. It would seem that sociology is, from this American point of view, a reduction of anthropology at a singular company in a space and a particular time.

The French model, which makes ethnology a under-discipline of the Sociologie, privileges especially the aspects symbolic systems and social, but neglects some of the material and physical aspects of the study of the human being.

The Anglo-Saxon model is for its part centered on the multidisciplinarity and traditionally divides anthropology into four pennies disciplines:

the Physical anthropology or anthropobiology , which studies the diversity and the evolution of the human physical characteristics;
the Ethnology or social anthropology and Cultural , the social anthropology (especially in Europe) is interested inter alia in the study of the Parenté, the Politique and the Social organization while the anthropology Culturelle (especially in the United States) studies the Mœurs, the Religion and the other aspects symbolic systems of the human society;
the Archeology, which studies the human society passed through the material Vestiges that they left behind them;
the Ethnolinguistique or Anthropolinguistique, which considers linguistic variability through the various human society and which close consequently with the Sociolinguistique and the Dialectologie.

Sets of themes of anthropology

The human and the Natural

Homo sapiens
Theory of the evolution
Primatologie compared
human Ecology
Paléoanthropologie

The anthropological discipline

anthropology in its study of the Homme is interested in his biological variability and its cultural variability from a synchronic point of view (contemporary) and diachronic (through time). Thus, this discipline is made of four parts or under-disciplines.

Social anthropology and Cultural (ethnology)

The social anthropology and cultural deals with:

Social models and codes

the Culture
the Ethnos group
the ethnic Membership
the cultural exchanges
the Social networks
the Hierarchy
the kinds and sexes
the Manners
the Right
socialization and education
propriety and the label

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the Anthropology of orality: to see Speech, Word
the Anthropology of the image or (visual Anthropology): to see Semiology, Icon

The relationship and alliances

the Relationship: family, Filiation, Descent, Chalk-lining.
types of alliances: the Marriage.
intra-family interactions.
human Evolution.

Organization of the policy

the Political anthropology
the War

Aspects symbolic systems

the psychic Anthropology
the Religious anthropology
the Anthropology of art
the Play X
the Word and the Speech
the Rites
the manual Symbolic system
Technical of the body

Economic anthropology

the economy of the traditional companies
Karl Marx, and its " héritiers" school of economic anthropology Marxist or " French school of anthropology économique" (called thus abroad), and more recently " Anthropology of the release ". Principal holding of this school are Claude Meillassoux, Pierre Philippe Rey, Emmanuel Terray, Maurice Godelier
the Anthropologie of company

Other fields of anthropology

the anthropology of sciences and technology

cognitive anthropology

The Religious anthropology

Surfaces Cultural S

Charts

List companies

alphabetical List of the people of the world
Amerindian groups in North America before colonization

History of the social anthropology

Historical and institutional context

The anthropologist Eric Wolf has one day definite anthropology as being more scientist of the social sciences, and like most human of sciences of nature. By this simple sentence, it shows into which point the contributions of anthropology fit in the middle of all other sciences.

The contemporary anthropologists claim many thinkers of the last centuries, making the discipline dependant on multiple and varied sources. However anthropology can be included/understood as well as possible while being regarded as downward Century of the lights, period when Europeans started to study in a systematic and meticulous way the human behaviors. The large currents of the Jurisprudence, of the History, the Philosophy and the Sociologie appeared at that time, contributing gradually to give form to the Social sciences, of which anthropology forms part today. To the same moment, the romantic movement of the Lights gave rise to thinkers such as Herder, and later Wilhelm Dilthey whose work was at the base of the concept of Culture, exchange today in the discipline. These intellectual movements tried at their time to solve one of these greater paradoxes of modernity: more the world narrows and tends towards integration, plus each one in its personal experience the feeling has which the company atomizes and disperses. It is besides what observed Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the years 1840.

Ironically, the emergence of this Universalization, rather than to reveal best human solidarity, coincided with the increase in divisions racial, ethnic, religious and social, in the emergence of news Culture S. They are the living conditions with which people must make today, but one can notice that it is a tendency appeared at the 16th century which accelerated with.

Institutionnellement, it is side of the historical discipline which anthropology emerged (what work of authors like Buffon shows, with its Natural history where the man finds his place among the animals). It was then in an encyclopedic objective that one started to study being-human “primitive” people living in the European colonies. Consequently of what, the studies on the language, the Culture, the physiology and of the manufactured objects were more or less equivalent studying fauna and the flora in other places. For example two monographs of Lewis Henry Morgan: The league off the Iroquois (the League of Iroquois) and The American Beaver and His Works (American Beaver and its works). This distinction between “people primitive” and “people civilized” in the spirits of the time explains in particular why Chinese art for example (known as then “civilized”), was historically exposed in the museums of the fine arts to the sides of European art, whereas the artefacts originating in Africa or North America were them placed in the museums of natural history at the sides of the bones of dinosaurs. This being known as, the practices of conservation radically changed these last years, and it would be false to see anthropology like simply an extension of the colonial development and European chauvinism.

Then, anthropology developed gradually with the variation of the history, and in the last years of the nineteenth century, the discipline starts to take its modern form. It was then possible for T.K. Penniman to write in 1935 a history of the discipline, under the title of has Hundred Years Anthropology off (One century of anthropology). At this time, the field of study was still dominated by an evolutionary ideology . It was recognized that all the companies evolved/moved according to a single linear diagram, energy of the most primitive statute to most advanced. The non-European companies were regarded as “fossil companies”, which could be studied with an aim of including/understanding which was the past of the European nations. The specialists imagined theories of prehistoric migrations, sometimes valid, but often very whimsical. That lasted until Europeans recall with exactitude the migrations of the Polynesian populations through the Pacific Ocean. Finally the concept of race was highly called in question, being shown to establish a classification between thehuman ones, while being based on biological differences inherent in each one.

At the 20th century, the academic disciplines started to be organized around three principal fields. Firstly, the Sciences which sought to discover the natural laws through the experimentation. Secondly, the Social sciences which tried to study the various national traditions, for example by the history and arts, and which also tried to give a coherence to the emergence of the state-nations. Thirdly, the Social sciences which emerged at that time while seeking to develop scientific methods devoted to the study of the social phenomena, and also to set up a universal knowledge on knowledge related to the social one. It should be noted that anthropology easily did not find its place in these categories, because of the various branches of the discipline which were not attached necessarily all to the same fields.

Being detached from the traditional methods to sciences of nature, by developing clean novel methods (creation of the concept of the participating observation not-structured, simultaneously with the traditional structured talks), and by taking its distances with the Theory of the evolution and the Natural selection, a new object appeared in the anthropological study: the humanity designed like a whole. The concept of Culture is then central in these studies, defining at the same time the capacity and the universal tendency in the training, the thought, and the social dealing, and also the adaptation to the local conditions Géographique S, which takes extremely variable forms in term of Croyance S and practices. These Culture S transcends and absorbs the historical distinctions that the Européen S made between Politique, Religion, relationship and economy by conceiving them like autonomous fields. This anthropology thus transcends divisions between the Sciences of nature, the Social sciences, and the Social sciences, by exploring as well dimensions biological, Linguistique S, material and Symbolique S of the human society.

Large currents

Throughout its history, anthropology was thus marked by some main tendencies, whose researchers today claim themselves:

the evolutionism
the Materialism
the Diffusionnisme
the Functionalism
the Structuralism
the Culturalisme
the dynamism , which corresponds to the particular concern of certain researchers being studied of the change in the companies (in particular, the influence of colonialism).
the dogmatic Anthropology