What is Anthropology?

Agency

Agency

is the capacity of human beings to act in meaningful ways that affect their own lives and those of others.

Community

is one of the oldest concepts used in anthropological studies.

Internet communities or communities of taste

communities have also been defined as interest groups accessed through space

Comparative

Anthropologists strive to capture the diversity of social action and its predictability by focusing on the way in which particular aspects of society and culture are organized similarly and differently across groups.

cultural relativism

is a methodological principle that emphasizes the importance of searching for meaning within the local context. 

Non-anthropologists

often interpret cultural relativism as a moral doctrine, which asserts that the practices of one society cannot be judged according to the moral precepts and evaluative criteria of another society.

Culture

refers to organized systems of symbols, ideas, explanations, beliefs and material production that humans create and manipulate in the course of their daily lives.

Ethnographic materials

are usually gathered through participant observation.

Ethnographic

Anthropology places considerable emphasis on its empirical foundation based on a direct engagement with particular people and their social and cultural context.

Meaning

is both constructed and transmitted through cultural categories.

Social process

is what humans actually do, including human action that may work against social structure.

Qualitative

This data may be textual (oral or written), observational, or impressionistic, or may take the form of images or sounds.

Social reproduction

is the concept that, over time, groups of people reproduce their social structure and patterns of behavior.

Society

refers to the way in which humans organize themselves in groups and networks.

Ethnographic films

and other visual or virtual media may be used in the teaching of ethnography, but these must be treated in the same critical and reflective manner as the written ethnographies.

Ethnographic accounts

are often the product of many years of work, from the initial observation to field notes, analysis and the written report.

Decisions

are influenced by the anthropologists’ theoretical orientation, the audience served by the research and the goals of the research.

Ethnographic findings

can be validated by comparison within a society, within a region or by cross-cultural comparison.

Reading ethnography

 the student needs to identify the claims, examine the evidence and evaluate whether the data supports the claims and conclusions. 

Anthropological accounts

are based on detailed and wide-ranging data collected over a substantial period of time.

Fieldwork

The time that an ethnographer spends studying a group is a process called

Participant observation

has traditionally been the main method in anthropological fieldwork.

Ethnographers

use a broad variety of techniques in collecting data, including interviewing, observation, note-taking, audio and visual recording, discussing recordings with members of the group being studied, keeping journals, collecting censuses, life histories, questionnaires, archival materials, material culture and genealogies.

Data

may also be collected in a variety of forms that illustrate different aspects of a given society and culture at a given time and place.

body of data

collected during fieldwork is often substantial, and is used selectively in analysis and in writing up the results of the fieldwork. 

Fieldwork data

is often supplemented with the materials gathered in libraries and museums.

Quantitative

data can be expressed in numbers. 

analysis of anthropological data

consists of discovering consistencies and other recurrent patterns in the data. 

Ethics

is also concerned with the relationship between ethnographers and their colleagues, students and audiences.