Cultural anthropology

Cultural anthropology, a major division of anthropology that deals with the study of culture in all of its aspects and that uses the methods, concepts, and data of archaeology, ethnography and ethnology, folklore, and linguistics in its descriptions and analyses of the diverse peoples of the world.

Definition and scope

Etymologically, anthropology is the science of humans. In fact, however, it is only one of the sciences of humans, bringing together those disciplines the common aims of which are to describe human beings and explain them on the basis of the biological and cultural characteristics of the populations among which they are distributed and to emphasize, through time, the differences and variations of these populations. The concept of race, on the one hand, and that of culture, on the other, have received special attention; and although their meaning is still subject to debate, these terms are doubtless the most common of those in the anthropologist’s vocabulary.

Anthropology, which is concerned with the study of human differences, was born after the Age of Discovery had opened up societies that had remained outside the technological civilization of the modern West. In fact, the field of research was at first restricted to those societies that had been given one unsatisfactory label after another: “savage,” “primitive,” “tribal,” “traditional,” or even “preliterate,” “prehistorical,” and so on. What such societies had in common, above all, was being the most “different” or the most foreign to the anthropologist; and in the early phases of anthropology, the anthropologists were always European or North American. The distance between the researcher and the object of his study has been a characteristic of anthropological research; it has been said of the anthropologist that he was the “astronomer of the sciences of man.”

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Anthropologists today study more than just primitive societies. Their research extends not only to village communities within modern societies but also to cities, even to industrial enterprises. Nevertheless, anthropology’s first field of research, and the one that perhaps remains the most important, shaped its specific point of view with regard to the other sciences of man and defined its theme. If, in particular, it is concerned with generalizing about patterns of human behaviour seen in all their dimensions and with achieving a total description of social and cultural phenomena, this is because anthropology has observed small-scale societies, which are simpler or at least more homogeneous than modern societies and which change at a slower pace. Thus they are easier to see whole.

What has just been said refers especially to the branch of anthropology concerned with the cultural characteristics of man. Anthropology has, in fact, gradually divided itself into two major spheres: the study of man’s biological characteristics and the study of his cultural characteristics. The reasons for this split are manifold, one being the rejection of the initial mistakes regarding correlations between race and culture. More generally speaking, the vast field of 19th-century anthropology was subdivided into a series of increasingly specialized disciplines, using their own methods and techniques, that were given different labels according to national traditions.

Distinction between physical anthropology and cultural anthropology

Thus two large disciplines—physical anthropology and cultural anthropology—and such related disciplines as prehistory and linguistics now cover the program that originally was set up for a single study of anthropology. The two fields are largely autonomous, having their own relations with disciplines outside anthropology; and it is unlikely that any researchers today work simultaneously in the fields of physical and cultural anthropology. The generalist has become rare. On the other hand, the fields have not been cut off from one another. Specialists in the two fields still cooperate in specific genetic or demographic problems and other matters.

Prehistoric archaeology and linguistics also have notable links with cultural anthropology. In posing the problem of the evolution of mankind in an inductive way, archaeology contributed to the creation of the first concepts of anthropology, and archaeology is still indispensable in uncovering the past of societies under observation. In many areas, when it is a question of interpreting the use of rudimentary tools or of certain elementary religious phenomena, prehistory and cultural anthropology are mutually helpful. “Primitive” societies that have not yet reached the metal age are still in existence.

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Relations between linguistics and cultural anthropology are numerous. On a purely practical level the cultural anthropologist has to serve a linguistic apprenticeship. He cannot do without a knowledge of the language of the people he is studying, and often he has had to make the first survey of it. One of his essential tasks, moreover, has been to collect the various forms of oral expression, including myths, folk tales, proverbs, and so forth. On the theoretical level, cultural anthropology has often used concepts developed in the field of linguistics: in studying society as a system of communication, in defining the notion of structure, and in analyzing the way in which man organizes and classifies his whole experience of the world.

Cultural anthropology maintains relations with a great number of other sciences. It has been said of sociology, for instance, that it was almost the twin sister of anthropology. The two are presumably differentiated by their field of study (modern societies versus traditional societies). But the contrast is forced. These two social sciences often meet. Thus, the study of colonial societies borrows as much from sociology as from cultural anthropology. And it has already been remarked how cultural anthropology intervenes more and more frequently in urban and industrial fields classically the domain of sociology.

There have also been fruitful exchanges with other disciplines quite distinct from cultural anthropology. In political science the discussion of the concept of the state and of its origin has been nourished by cultural anthropology. Economists, too, have depended on cultural anthropology to see concepts in a more comparative light and even to challenge the very notion of an “economic man” (suspiciously similar to the 19th-century capitalist revered by the classical economists). Cultural anthropology has brought to psychology new bases on which to reflect on concepts of personality and the formation of personality. It has permitted psychology to develop a system of cross-cultural psychiatry, or so-called ethnopsychiatry. Conversely, the psychological sciences, particularly psychoanalysis, have offered cultural anthropology new hypotheses for an interpretation of the concept of culture.

The link with history has long been a vital one because cultural anthropology was originally based on an evolutionist point of view and because it has striven to reconstruct the cultural history of societies about which, for lack of written documents, no historical record could be determined. Cultural anthropology has more recently suggested to historians new techniques of research based on the analysis and criticism of oral tradition. And so “ethnohistory” is beginning to emerge. Finally, cultural anthropology has close links with human geography. Both of them place great importance on man either as he uses space or acts to transform the natural environment. It is not without significance that some early anthropologists were originally geographers.