what is anthropology?

‘anthropos’ + ‘logia’ = the study of mankind/humanity

what is it to live as someone else?

anthropology vs sociology

• sociology:

  • more likely to focus on urban, industrialised societies

  • quantitative use of statistical data and survey methods

  • mostly about correlation

• anthropology:

  • more likely to focus on small scale societies in developing countries

  • qualitative fieldwork data

  • mostly about description

both have since expanded

anthropology, the method

• long-term fieldwork

• participant observation

• focus on the texture of everyday life

• words n actions

• language skills

anthropology, the way of thinking

• making the strange familiar and the familiar strange

• avoiding ethnocentrism

  • suspending our own judgements and assumptions in order to understand

• adopting a stance of openness towards other ways of life

• questioning our own assumptions

• research as a transformative endeavour

a concept: culture

culture: “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, custom, and any other capabilities or habits acquired by man as a member of society”

anthropologists studying culture (1880s - 1960s)

• evolutionism: traits and evolution. a conjectural history of humankind

• culture-area approach: cultural difference, identity marks and the study of singular cultures

• functionalism: structure, form n function

• structuralism: cultures as systems of abstraction, shaped through binary oppositions

rethinking anthropology and culture (1970s)

Clifford Geertz

• against an idea of culture as bounded and fixed

• culture as a text

• “thick descriptions”

• interpretation of interpretations

a method: participant observation

armchair anthropologists

• mid 19th century

• early interest in evolution

• making use of data from missionaries, colonial officers n explorers

• comparative and conjectural history

• Victorian England as the highest point of human evolution

Bronislaw Malinowski & the birth of the field

• lived experience of communities as a source of knowledge

• used participant observation to generate specific anthropological knowledge

• transformed anthropological theory as an attempt to make sense of the ethnographic data being collected

• a method of knowledge that was inductive and not deductive

participant observation in summary

• “to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world”

• words n actions

• “the imponderabilia of everyday life”

• institutions, actions and meaning

a way of writing: ethnography

Malinowski continued

• description of the exchange

• a theory of the economic and the symbolic

• connecting the particular to the whole

• a “realistic, objective” description of the community

• the assumption that the “other” is to be seen

• exclusion of alternative consciousness, alternative points of view

• “a world robbed of its idiosyncrasies and foibles which is foreign to the experience of its readers”

• “absence of any tangible point of view”

• no names and subjectivities

• the coloniality of fieldwork