CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: A PERSPECTIVE ON THE HUMAN CONDITION

Cultural Anthropology: A Perspective on the Human Condition

Social Anthropology

Introduction

Anthropology is the study of humanity - our physical characteristics as animals, and our exclusive non-biological characteristics we call culture. The subject is usually broken down into three sub disciplines: biological (physical) anthropology, cultural (social) anthropology, and archaeology.

Social anthropology is a branch of anthropology which mainly focuses on society, traditions, popular parts of the world, schools , conflicts in parts of the world.

Social anthropology benefits very functional, empirical procedures to investigate some quite philosophical-looking troubles about the nature of human life in society. How far can we generalize about the types of social life that we find round us, or in the historical record, and the part these types play in consciousness, knowledge, and the value of personal and interpersonal experience? By 'social forms', we have conventionally focused on a wide range of the world's characteristic, often small-scale patterns of social life. These normally have encompassed notions of family, gender, and kinship association; the output and circulation of necessities and luxuries; moral and devout concepts and ceremonial practices; notions of the human individual and of health and sickness; cosmological ideas about space, time, the relative between human, animal, and religious reality; the life course and rites of route; and the function of the creative arts in communal life. We have asked, and still ask, questions of the major theorists in the social sciences (Turner, 2000) as to the connection between these domains of social life, as reflected in the widest possible set of ethnographic comparisons. We have furthermore developed some characteristic theoretical approaches inside social anthropology, numerous of which originated in answer to initial field enquiries in parts of the world scarcely in writing about before the early twentieth years (for demonstration, those by Malinowski, Marcel Mauss, Evans-Pritchard, Lévi-Strauss). We amassed a large body of field-work based publications on the communal and heritage life of peoples inside the former European empires and this work remains an significant source of ideas for today's anthropology.

Historical context

For many thousands of years, travel, trade and exploration have brought people of different languages and cultures into contact with each other, generating tales of strange and exotic peoples and their customs. What is a universal human trait, curiosity, evolved through the centuries into intellectual speculation and philosophical theories about "the other" and later still became the scientific study of mankind. Although the roots of anthropology can be traced to antiquity, it only emerged as a scientific discipline in the 19th Century. Two distinctive fields are Biological Anthropology, which studies man as an organism and his physical evolution, and Social and Cultural Anthropology, the comparative study of cultural variation through the myths, ritual, kinship patterns, political and economic systems in particular societies or social groups.

According to Hastrup the etymology of the word derives from the Greek, anthropos: human and logos: reason, thus it would mean knowledge about humans (Hastrup, 1995). Levi-Strauss (1983, p.49), the prominent 20th Century anthropologist said that "Anthropology ...