anthropology.iresearchnet.comAnthropology

Skip to primary sidebar IResearchNet Custom Writing Services Overview of is a study of human diversity. This overview article discusses global variations in the delimitation of the discipline, and its development from a study closely linked historically to the Western expansion into other parts of the world, to the current situation with anthropologists from varied nations studying social and cultural life everywhere. Key concepts – culture, cultural translation, comparison, and fieldwork – are identified; main dimensions of specializations and practical applications are discussed; and the future of anthropology in an increasingly interconnected world is considered. as a discipline is concerned with human diversity. In its most inclusive conception, this is what brings together the four fields of cultural anthropology, archaeology, biological anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. With its formative period in the historical era, when Europeans and people of European descent were exploring other parts of the world and establishing their dominance over them, and when evolutionary thought was strong, it also came to focus its attention especially on what was, from the Western point of view, distant in time or space – early humans or hominoids, and non-European peoples. In that early period, there was indeed a strong tendency to conflate distances in time with those in space: some living non-Europeans could be taken to be ‘contemporary ancestors,’ dwelling in ‘primitive societies.’ Understandings of the discipline have changed over time, however; and they are not now entirely unitary across the world. What is held together under one academic umbrella in one place may be divided among half a dozen disciplines somewhere else. A mapping of the contemporary state of the discipline, consequently, may usefully begin by taking some note of international variations. Terminologies and Boundaries of It is particularly in North America that academic anthropology has retained what has come to be known as ‘the four-field approach.’ Generally, it seems to have had its greatest strength in countries where dominant settler populations faced sizable indigenous populations, and may have found it practical to assemble academic knowledge about these in a single discipline. In recent times, the continued viability of this arrangement has come under debate. Among the founders of the discipline, some were perhaps able to work (or at least dabble) in all the main branches, but with time, in American anthropology as well, it has certainly been recognized that most scholars reach specialist skills in only one of them – even as it may be acknowledged that a broad intellectual sweep across humanity has its uses, and at the same time as it is recognized that, here as elsewhere, research in the border zones between established disciplines or subdisciplines often brings its own rewards. On the whole, in any case, scholars in archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistics, and sociocultural anthropology now mostly work quite autonomously of one another, and while terminologies vary, in many parts of the world, they are understood as separate disciplines. In Europe, varying uses of the terms ‘anthropology,’ ‘ethnology,’ and ‘ethnography,’ between countries and regions as well as over time, often reflect significant historical and current intellectual divides (Vermeulen and Alvarez Roldán, 1995). In parts of the continent, in an earlier period, the term ‘anthropology’ (in whatever shape it appeared in different languages) tended to be used mostly for physical anthropology, but since the later decades of the twentieth century, it has largely been taken over by what we here term ‘sociocultural anthropology’ – itself a hybrid designation for what is usually referred to either as social anthropology or as cultural anthropology (in German usage especially, however, ‘anthropology’ also frequently refers to a branch of philosophy). Physical or biological anthropology, meanwhile, was absorbed in many places by other disciplines concerned with human biology, while archaeology and linguistics maintained their positions as separate disciplines. In some European countries, now or in the past, the term ‘ethnography’ has been used, unlike in present-day usage in Anglophone countries, to refer to sociocultural anthropology as a discipline. Matters of discipline boundaries are further complicated, however, by the fact that sociocultural anthropology, especially in Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe, is often itself divided into two separate disciplines, with separate origins in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One, which was often originally designated something like ‘folk life studies,’ had its historical links with cultural nationalism, and concerned itself with local and national traditions, especially with regard to folklore and material culture. This discipline mostly did not acquire a strong academic foothold in those Western European countries that were most involved in exploration and colonialism outside Europe, particularly Great Britain and France, where, on the other hand, sociocultural anthropology that focused on non-European forms of life was earliest and most securely established. The more Europeoriented, or nationally inclined, ‘folk life studies’ discipline has tended, in recent decades, to redesignate itself as ‘European ethnology’ – or, in some contexts, simply as ‘ethnology’ – in contrast to a rather more globally oriented ‘anthropology.’ In another usage, ‘ethnology’ has been taken to refer to a more historical and museological orientation (in contrast with what was for a time a more presentist social anthropology), while in other contexts again, it is more or less synonymous with ‘sociocultural anthropology.’ Yet further national variations in terminology continue to make direct transpositions of terms between languages treacherous. Furthermore, if in its historical beginnings anthropology tended to be a matter of ‘the West studying the rest,’ with the colonial powers and their settler offshoots taking the greatest interest in establishing the discipline as an academic field, this is no longer the situation. Since the latter half of the twentieth century, the number of practitioners has grown conspicuously, and their global distribution has changed. There are now anthropologists everywhere, locals of just about all countries, based in their home academic institutions or other organizations (Fahim, 1982; Ribeiro and Escobar, 2006; Boskovic, 2008). Yet this is not always clearly reflected in the terminology of the academic landscape. In India, where anthropology has an extended history, its distinctiveness is frequently taken to involve a particular preoccupation with ‘tribal’ populations, and perhaps with physical anthropology – while some of the scholars recognized internationally as leading Indian anthropologists, concerned with the mainstream of Indian society, may be seen as sociologists in their own country (Uberoi et al., 2007). In African universities, too, founded in the late colonial or the postcolonial period, there has often been no distinction made, at least organizationally, between anthropology and sociology. If in Africa, anthropology has also for a period had to carry the stigma of being historically associated with the evils of colonialism, it seems now to find its own intellectual base in a collaboration between local and expatriate scholars (Devisch and Nyamnjoh, 2011). Back in North America and Europe, again, the framework of academic life is not altogether stable over time. ‘Cultural studies,’ born in Britain but expanding from there, and putting itself on the intellectual map mostly from the 1970s onward, has been most successful as a cross-disciplinary movement in the Anglophone countries but has had an impact elsewhere as well. Its center of gravity may have been mostly in literary and media studies, but insofar as it has engaged...