Modernism
The term 'modernism' has its intellectual foundations in the study of literature and the visual arts. There it usually refers to a broad cultural movement characterized by a spirit of constant challenge to received forms modernism opposes itself to the figurative tradition in the visual arts and to realism and naturalism in literature. It is the source of the 'modern' in 'modern art', and its exemplars are Picasso and T.S. Eliot, Schoenberg and Le Corbusier, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein,...
plural society
The paradox of the plural society entered anthropology with J.S. Furnivall's discussion of colonial policy and practice in Burma and Indonesia. He described a plural society as one in which racially distinct peoples met only in the market place, a feature of colonial political economy. Critiques of the concept followed in rapid succession. It was suggested by Maurice Freedman, writing about Malaya, that although ethnicity might be recognized as a preliminary to the useful fiction of a plural...
Further reading Wai
Asad, T. 1993 Genealogies of Religion Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, Baltimore, MD Johns Hopkins University Press. Bellah, R. 1970 Beyond Belief Essays on Religion in a Post Traditional World, New York Harper and Row. Bloch, M. 1985 From Blessing to Violence History and Ideology in the Circumcision Ritual of the Merina of Madagascar, Cambridge Cambridge University Press. Comaroff, J. and J. Comaroff 1991 Of Revelation and Revolution Christianity, Colonialism and...
Dualism and anthropocentrism
The popular association of 'environment' with non-human things derives from the nature culture dualism whereby humanity is defined in opposition to everything else. The idea of environment as surroundings which are relevant to human existence derives from anthropocentrism, a worldview which places humanity in centre stage. The extent to which dualism and anthro-pocentrism vary cross-culturally is a matter of considerable debate. Environmental debates promoted by 'deep ecologists' contrast...
Trends in American anthropology past and present
American anthropology can be encapsulated thematically in the intellectual history of the discovery and passing of modernity not that anthropologists agree on the use of this term Manganaro 1990 . Nevertheless, it is possible to distinguish three phases in modern American anthropology. Voget 1975 characterized them as 'developmentalism', 'structuralism' and 'dif-ferentiative specialization'. Since then the onset of postmodernism in American anthropology must also be acknowledged. The first...
Fcr Anthropology
Bowler, P.J. 1989 The Invention of Progress The Victorians and the Past, Oxford Blackwell. Burrow, J.W. 1966 Evolution and Society A Study in Victorian Social Theory, Cambridge Cambridge University Press. Darnell, R. 2001 Invisible Genealogies A History of Americanist Anthropology, Lincoln University of Nebraska Press. Haddon, A.C. with A.H. Quiggin 1910 History ofAnthropology, London Watts. Hinsley, C. 1981 Savages and Scientists The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American...
Culture versus society
Not all anthropologists of the day were as enthusiastic about the concept of culture as the Boasians. Radcliffe-Brown's dismissal of culture as a 'vague abstraction' 1952 1940 190 was echoed elsewhere in British social anthropology, where 'culturalism' and 'culturalist' were employed as damning epithets for any analysis which sought above all to explicate a culture in its own terms. The usual antonym to 'culturalist' was 'structuralist' which, before the 1960s, usually referred to the study of...
Ritual purity and pollution in South Asia
Several anthropological studies of Indian castes and religions contribute to our subject at this point. For, as Dumont remarked, 'what can India teach us chiefly, if not precisely the meaning of pure and impure ' 1980 1966 xxxix . Since India ranks its thousands of castes by placing the ritually purest Brahman at the top and the Untouchable at the bottom, its contributions are in some ways distinct and instructive. After World War II, especially with the advent of intensive fieldwork, a host of...
Further reading Thi
Appadurai, A. ed. 1986 The Social Life of Things Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge Cambridge University Press. Berman, H.J. 1983 Law and Revolution The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition, Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press. Blim, M. 2000 'Capitalisms in Late Modernity', Annual Review of Anthropology 29 25-38. Braudel, F. 1977 Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, Baltimore, MD Johns Hopkins University Press. Carrier, J. 1990 'The Symbolism of Possession...
Insider presentist histories
Although anthropology was established as a subject only in the nineteenth century, the study of humankind has a greater antiquity. However, reflection on anthropology's past really only began in the early years of the twentieth century as the subject began to acquire academic status. In Britain Haddon's brief survey 1910 stressed the continuity and unity of anthropology, detailing its steady development from the writers of classical antiquity through to the present. The academic development of...
Further reading Yuo
Benedict, R. 1932 'Configurations of Culture in North America', American Anthropologist 34 1 1-27. - 1943 Race and Racism, London Scientific Berlin, I. 1976 Vico and Herder Two Studies in the History of Ideas, London Hogarth Press. Boas, F. 1982 1898 'Summary of the Work of the Committee in British Columbia', in G. Stocking ed. A Franz Boas Reader The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883-1911, Chicago University of Chicago Press. Clifford, J. 1988 The Predicament of Culture Twentieth-Century...
Aboriginal empowerment
The growth of Aboriginal self-determination has had a substantial impact on the practice of anthropology in Australia. While resistance to assimilation has been exercized throughout the present century, it was only in the later 1960s that European Australians began to appreciate the difficulties of enforcing assimilation against sustained indigenous opposition. In 1963, The Australian Social Science Research Council sponsored a project to investigate the policy implications 'arising from...
Further reading Vgr
Ames, M.M. 1992 Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes The Anthropology of Museums, Vancouver UBC Press. Asch, M. 1982 'Dene Self-determination and the Study of Hunter-gatherers in the Modern World', in E. Leacock and R. Lee eds Politics and History in Band Societies, London Cambridge University Press, 347 73. Cole, D. 1973 'The Origins of Canadian Anthropology, 1850-1910', Journal of Canadian Studies 8 33-45. Darnell, R. 1975 'The Uniqueness of Canadian Anthropology Issues and Problems', in Jim...
names and naming
The anthropological study of personal names or anthroponyms , ethnonyms and toponyms aroused little interest before the 1960s. This field seemed of secondary importance when compared with themes such as kinship, social organization and religion. Several pioneers of anthropology had indeed studied certain aspects of it. L.H. Morgan, for example had investigated the use of personal names among Native Americans, B. Malinowski had examined cosmology and reincarnation among the Tro-brianders, and M....
nature and culture
At the foundation of cultural anthropology lies the notion of a great fault line sundering the world of human culture from the rest of the living world. On this view, part of our human constitution falls on one side of the line, the side explicable by biological and allied sciences. On that side we resemble other animals. But on the other side, dominated by our capacity for learning, language and the use of symbols, we reach beyond the ken of biology and attain our essential, unique and, so to...
Further reading Sfa
Aberle, D. 1966 The Peyote Religion among the Navaho, Chicago Aldine. Benedict, R. 1934 Patterns of Culture, New York Mentor Books. Eggan, F. 1937 Social Anthropology of .North American Tribes, Chicago University of Chicago Press. Fienup-Riordan, A. 1990 Eskimo Essays, London Rutgers University Press. Fine-Dare, K.S. 2002 Grave Injustice The American Indian Repatriation Movement and .NAGPRA, Lincoln University of Nebraska Press. Lawlor, M. 2006 Public .Native America Tribal Self-Representation...
functionalism
Broadly speaking, 'functionalism' refers to a range of theories in the human sciences, all of which provide explanations of phenomena in terms of the function, or purpose, they purportedly serve. In the period spanning the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, virtually every human science generated a school that identified itself as functionalist, and in nearly every instance that school dominated its discipline for a time. Darwinian evolutionary theory...
Materialism idealism and holism
However it may be used, the term 'environment' refers both to things and to relations between humans and biophysical factors . Everything which merits the term 'anthropology' must in some sense also be environmental anthropology and avoid the dangers of socio-centrism or the circularity of cultural determinism. Attempts to interpret culture in purely cultural terms are like attempts to interpret religion in purely theological terms they are circular and non-contextual, and therefore don't...
nongovernmental organizations NGOs
Non-governmental organizations NGOs have become a ubiquitous feature of both Western and non-Western societies, particularly since the end of the Cold War. The rise of NGOs can be linked to interest in the concept of the 'third sector' often associated with the early work of US sociologist Amitai Etzioni , which posits an institutional space between the state, the market and the household, populated by diverse groups of organizations, from informal community self-help groups to formal...
The family and the household
This model of the evolution from kinship to nuclear family has been criticized from two quite different perspectives. Those associated with the Cambridge Group for Population Studies, most notably Peter Laslett, questioned the widespread existence of the pre-industrial extended family, and used census materials and other historical data to show that even in 'past times' households based on the small conjugal family were often the norm Laslett and Wall 1972 . Mac-Farlane 1978 specifically linked...
Hunger famine and food aid
The anthropological concern with combining global and local variables is reflected in studies of hunger and famine. Thus, while most food crises share key features e.g. upheaval, social differentiation, climatic disturbance and develop along predictable lines, each crisis must also be regarded as unique. It is for this reason that detailed famine ethnographies are encouraged D'Souza 1988 . D'Souza argues that social scientists should go over, in some detail, the harrowing events which precede...
Divinity and experience
Nilotic religions are characterized by a subtle theism, and both Evans-Pritchard 1957 and then Godfrey Lienhardt 1961 found it necessary to discuss at length at the beginning of their books on Nuer and Dinka religion the meanings of the words for God, kwoth and nhialic respectively. God, or 'Divinity' in Lienhardt's more sensitive terminology, does not dwell in some other world, and spiritual beings are only of interest to Nilotes as ultra-human agents operating in this world. Many observers...
Further reading Itp
Boon, J. 1973 From Symbolism to Structuralism L vi-Strauss in a Literary Tradition, Oxford Blackwell. Charbonnier, G. 1969 1961 Conversations with Claude L vi-Strauss, London Cape. Hayes, E.N. and T. Hayes eds 1970 Claude L vi-Strauss The Anthropologist as Hero, Cambridge, MA MIT Press. H naff, M. 1998 Claude L vi-Strauss and the Making of Structural Anthropology, Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press. Leach, E. 1970 L vi-Strauss, London Fontana. L vi-Strauss, C. 1963 1958 Structural...
Amoral familism
The example of amoral familism may be used to illustrate the differences between earlier and recent approaches to Southern European societies. The American sociologist Banfield 1958 coined the term 'amoral familism' on the basis of his research in South Italy to define a characteristic Mediterranean peasant 'ethos', a 'fundamental view of the world', which held that an individual's primary responsibility was towards his or her family. This ethos meant that public projects or initiatives which...
gossip
In any social milieu, people may be occupied in gossip for a substantial part of their every day lives. Recognizing, since Malinowski, that studying the world of the everyday is the key to an understanding of how people behave, anthropologists have long appreciated gossip to be a key sociocultural phenomenon. Nevertheless, sustained analysis of gossip per se remained intermittent P. Radin, M. Herskovits, fE. Colson until the 1960s, when three broadly distinct approaches emerged the...
Further reading Rit
Barth, F. 1961 .Nomads of South Persia, Boston, MA Little, Brown. Behnke, R. 1994 .Natural Resource Management in Pastoral Africa, London Commonwealth Secretariat. Clutton-Brock, J. 1989 The Walking Larder Patterns of Domestication, Pastoralism and Predation, London Unwin Hyman. Dahl, G. and A. Hjort 1976 Having Herds Pastoral Herd Growth and Household Economy, Stockholm Department of Anthropology, University of Stockholm. Digard, J.-P. 1990 L'homme et les animaux domes-tiques Anthropologie...
Margaret Mead and childhood
Boas's interest in children and young people had a profound influence on Margaret Mead and, encouraged by him, she went to Samoa intending to disprove the biological determinism of psychologist G. Stanley Hall. He had claimed that adolescence was characterized by particular behaviours brought on by the biological changes at puberty. Most famously, Hall described adolescence as a time of 'storm and stress', when young people were in the grip of powerful biological changes they could not control....
Further reading Pbe
Barth, Fredrik 1969 'Introduction', in Fredrik Barth ed. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries The Social Organization of Culture Difference, London George Allen and Unwin. Boyarin, Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin 2003 1993 , 'Diaspora Generation and the Ground of Jewish Diaspora', in Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur eds Theorizing Diaspora, Oxford Blackwell. Braziel, Jana Evans and Anita Mannur 2003 'Nation, Migration, Globalization Points of Contention in Diaspora Studies', in Jana Evans Braziel and...
avunculate
The term 'avunculate' evokes two related images. First, there is the social institution that the term designates. Second, there is the complex of theories which have been thought up to explain that insitution where it occurs. In the first sense, the avunculate is any institutionalized, special relationship between a mother's brother MB and a sister's son ZS . In some societies this relationship is formal or one of authority, as for example, in the well-known Trobriand case. In others, it is an...
Further reading Ubl
Ardener, E. 1971 'Introduction', in E. Ardener ed. Social Anthropology and Language, ASA Monographs 10, London Tavistock Publications. Frake, C.O. 1980 Language and Cultural Description Essays by Charles 0. Frake Selected and Introduced by Anwar S. Dil , Stanford, CA Stanford University Press. Goodenough, W. 1956 'Componential Analysis and the Study of Meaning', Language 32 195-216. Tyler, S.A. ed. 1969 Cognitive Anthropology, New York Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
cattle complex
The term cattle complex derives from Melville Herskovits's PhD thesis, which the American Anthropologist serialized as 'The Cattle Complex in East Africa'. Herskovits adapted a method, developed by Clark Wissler and others, which sought to classify the different American Indian cultures according to the complex of traits which each demonstrated, to understand the diffusions and mixings of those traits and to map the areas in which they were found. The method derived from attempts to bring order...
Crosscultural studies of child rearing
By the 1950s the focus had shifted away from Culture and Personality to a concern for understanding the extent and nature of cross-cultural variation. The work of John Whiting, in particular, focused on aspects of child rearing and cross-cultural child development, and one of the most important studies he initiated was the Six Cultures project which sought to compare child rearing and socialization in six different cultures Whiting 1963 . In each fieldwork setting a male and female ethnographer...
comparative method
'There is only one method in social anthropology, the comparative method and that is impossible.' So, it is often reported, said E.E. Evans-Pritchard though the aphorism appears nowhere in his published writings. In fact, the comparative method is far from impossible, although in social and cultural anthropology it is constrained by severe limitations. The first to point this out was Sir Francis Galton in a discussion of a paper delivered by E. B. Tylor at the Anthropological Institute in 1888....
reflexivity
The concept of reflexivity, after some hectic years as the pennant of a seminar revolution, has at last settled into a kind of comfortable convention. Perhaps too comfortable. Reflexivity, in practice, has become the recognition by most ethnographers of the symbolic wing of American cultural anthropology that adequate anthropological accounts cannot be crafted without acknowledging the forces epistemological and political that condition their writing. At its most useful and bland, this has...
Bantuspeaking Southern Africa
Bantu-speaking Southern Africa can be divided into two linguistic and cultural units Central and Southern, while the Southern Bantu-speakers may be further divided into Nguni, Sotho, Venda and Tsonga linguistic units which coincide more-or-less with cultural ones. The term 'Bantu-speaking' rather than simply 'Bantu' is usually preferred in this part of Africa because of the derogatory usage of 'Bantu' as a singular noun during the apartheid era. In any case, the term comes from the plural form...
Further reading Vjk
Aron, R. 1968 Progress and Disillusion, London Pall Mall Press. Bailey, F.G. 1957 Caste and the Economic Frontier A Village in Highland Orissa, Manchester Manchester University Press. Berreman, G.D. 1963 Hindus of the Himalayas, Berkeley University of California Press. Beteille, A. 1965 Caste, Class and Power Changing Patterns of Stratification on a Tanjore Village, Berkeley University of California Press. - 1977 Inequality Among Men, Oxford - 1991 Some Observations on the Comparative Blau,...
French anthropology
The modern tradition of French anthropology, which dates from the beginning of this century, has always been stretched between the two poles of grand theory, on the one hand, and the minute and exacting study of data on the other. In the history of the discipline, these have sometimes been integrated into single bodies of work and have sometimes represented complementary or rival approaches Jamin 1991 . At the pole of specific data, French anthropology has been characterized by penetrating...
Second edition
The idea of a second edition for the Encyclopedia was first put to us by Gerard Greenaway, and then enthusiastically supported by Lesley Riddle, anthropology editor at Routledge. Lesley saw the project through, from signing the contract to submission of the final manuscript, ably supported by Lalle Pursglove. We are hugely grateful to our editorial board for the careful reading they gave the original edition and the thoughtful suggestions they gave us for revisions. During the commissioning...
property
Property was a key subject in the evolutionist arguments of several of the greatest pioneers of anthropology. For L.H. Morgan 1877 6 , 'A critical knowledge of the evolution of the idea of property would embody, in some respects, the most remarkable portion of the mental history of mankind'. However, property has been a casualty of increasing specialization in intellectual practice in modern anthropology. It tends to fall between the subdisciplines of economic anthropology and the anthropology...
compadrazgo
Compadrazgo literally co-fatherhood is the Spanish form of ritual kinship established through the rites of the Catholic Church especially at baptism, confirmation and marriage between a person, his or her biological parents, and his or her godparents. From Spain, compadrazgo has spread to Latin America where it is sometimes even more important than in its place of origin Mintz and Wolf 1950 van den Berghe and van den Berghe 1966 . At baptism, confirmation and marriage, an individual acquires...
Symbolism and metaphor
The influences of the biophysical environment on human behaviour are never purely material or 'natural', but are always in part cultural since they are mediated by the culturally determined ways in which they are perceived. The influence of seasonal fluctuations in temperature may be perceived as bodily influences restricting our opportunities, but these influences are culturally reconstructed as, for example, the traditional opposition between rugby and cricket, winter and summer, in Britain....
conception
Theories of conception were of central importance to the nineteenth-century debates about social organization out of which anthropology emerged. Specifically, it was argued by theorists such as Bachofen that the acquisition of accurate knowledge of physical paternity comprised an elementary transition out of primitivism, representing a triumph of intellect over nature as a component of human progress towards civilization. Writing at the same time, McLennan also argued for the central importance...
Indian anthropology
The term 'Indian anthropology' may be used to refer either to the study of society and culture in India by anthropologists irrespective of their nationality, or to the study by Indian anthropologists of society and culture in and outside India. The focus of this article will be on the study by Indian anthropologists of their own society and culture, although their studies have been and continue to be significantly influenced by the work of anthropologists the world over. With a few significant...
Africa Nilotic
The term 'Nilotic' is used in various senses. First, it describes the geographical region of the upper Nile basin as in The Pagan Tribes of the Nilotic Sudan, the title of the Seligmans' 1932 comprehensive ethnography of the region. Second, it refers to a set of cultural traits shared by some, but not all, of the peoples of the upper Nile, with others in an area extending south beyond the Nile basin into Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. Finally, Nilotic describes a language family in a...
Morgan and the Iroquois
Lewis Henry Morgan, best known in anthropology for his evolutionism, is more properly remembered for developing an understanding of human social institutions as components of a broader social structure. His theoretical insights rest principally on the comparative study of North American Indians, and most especially on his work on the Iroquois, the tribal confederacy in the northeastern United States among whom he conducted both field and archival research. Morgan's studies, principally...
diffusionism
Fundamental to anthropological inquiry in the late nineteenth century was the task of explaining similarities observed in the habits and beliefs of so-called primitives all over the world. Were peoples everywhere essentially identical, joined in the 'psychic unity' postulated by such figures as the German Adolf Bastian, and therefore capable of independently inventing the basic constituents of social life Or did common practices denote common origins, indicating that similarities were products...
ritual
According to most theories, ritual either involves different forms of action from everyday life, or at least different purposes. For example, in Christian ritual, the act of ingesting bread during holy communion is different from eating bread at any other time. The difference relates to the meaning attached to the ritual act, which is suggested by the use of symbols. Paraphrasing Clifford Geertz's definition of culture, David Kertzer defines ritual as 'action wrapped in a web of symbolism' 1988...
Ritual and social integration
Taking their lead from Emile Durkheim, the British functionalist anthropologists of the 1950s and 1960s concentrated on the integrative function of ritual. Durkheim had argued that because the apparent function of ritual is to strengthen the bonds attaching the believer to god, and god is no more than a figurative expression of society itself, so ritual in fact serves to attach the individual to society Dur-kheim 1915 226 . Because ritual is a direct representation of society to itself,...
The relativist critique of universal human rights
Anthropologists initially had a sceptical relationship to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 1947 the Executive board of the American Anthropological Association issued a statement warning the UN against not attending to cultural particularities. The statement was rooted in the dominant anthropological cultural relativism of the time, but was not an absolute criticism of the idea of human rights. Rather, it expressed an anxiety that the human rights codified by the UN were not as...
Contemporary perspectives
Whereas earlier studies developed in a context of modernizing projects, with the dual focus of discontinuity and integration, contemporary perspectives, seeking to transcend the former perspectives, recognize Latin America as representing modern, plural and basically urban societies. Other issues of research are brought to the fore, such as the focus on the various articulations of modernity and identity. One significant development in this direction has been the growing interest in the...