Social and Cultural Anthropology

Cultural and social anthropology are distinguishable if not entirely seperated intellectual or academic traditions. The use of the terms "cultural" and "social" to draw the distinction became common in the 1930s, but the divergence arose earlier, most directly from the differences between the studies advocated by Franz BOAS (1858 1942) in the United States from the 1890s, and the new directions anthropology had begun to take in England around that time at the initiative of R. R. Marrett (1866 1943), C. G. Seligman (1873 1940), W. H. R. RIVERS (1864 1922), and Alfred Haddon (1855 1940).

		Today the two terms do not denote a precise division of approaches and for this reason some anthropologists have dispensed with the distinction (e.g., R. Barrett 1984: 2). For many others, however, the difference remains important, at least as a shorthand way of characterizing ethnographic styles. Definitional issues: The rubric "cultural anthropology" is generally applied to ethnographic works that are holistic in spirit, oriented to the ways in which culture affects individual experience, or aim to provide a rounded view of the knowledge, customs, and institutions of a people. "Social anthropology" is a term applied to ethnographic works that attempt to isolate a particular system of social relations such as those that comprise domestic life, economy, law, politics, or religion give analytical priority to the organizational bases of social life, and attend to cultural phenomena as somewhat secondary to the main issues of social scientific inquiry. National and international influences: Cultural anthropology continues to be the dominant tradition in the United States; social anthropology in Britain and the Commonwealth. The two traditions do not, however, correspond precisely with this division. The British anthropologist Edward TYLOR (1832 1917) is more clearly a forerunner of cultural anthropology, and the American anthropologist Lewis Henry MORGAN (1818 81) become a central figure in British social anthropology. Other anthropologists Bronislaw MALINOWSKI (1884 1942), for example defy simple categorization. Malinowski, with Trobriand Islanders. Malinowski is cosidered to be one of the pioneers to make fieldwork as integrated part of doing anthropology. Moreover, the genealogy of these traditions only partially reflects their national character. Social anthropology drew from nineteenth-century British theorists such as Henry Sumner MAINE (1822 88), William Robertson SMITH (1846 94), and J. F. McLennan (1827 81), but also from such important figures as J. J. Bachofen (1815 87), who was Swiss, Carl Starcke (1858 1926), who was Danish, Edward Westermarck (1862 1939), who was Finnish, Arnold van GENNEP (1873 1957), who was Dutch, and above all from Emile DURKHEIM (1858 1917) and other French ethnologists of the Année sociologique circle, including Marcel MAUSS (1872 1950) and Robert HERTZ (1882 1915). Cultural anthropology at the beginning of the century looked as much to the tradition of such German historical geographers as Karl Ritter (1779 1859) and Adolf Bastian (1826 1905) as it did to the contributions of Morgan, Henry Schoolcraft (1793 1864), and the fieldworkers associated with the Bureau of American Ethnology under the directorship of John Wesley Powell (1834 1902). The usage:Social anthropology has been more strongly associated with the contributions of A. R. RADCLIFFE-BROWN (1881 1955) than with those of Frazer. In 1923, Radcliffe-Brown distinguished between ethnology as "the attempt to reconstruct the history of culture" and social anthropology as "the study that seeks to formulate the general laws that underlie the phenomena of culture" (1958: 8, 25). He illustrated his idea of ethnology by citing the work of BOAS and Boas's students. Radcliffe-Brown's emphasis on typology and rigorous abstraction also entered into the connotation of "social anthropology," if not into the practice of all social anthropologists. "Cultural anthropology" is a more diffuse term. Boas himself did not place his studies under this heading, referring to his approach simply as "anthropology." Some of his students, however, noted the lack of a term to distinguish investigations of culture per se from physical anthropology, and, to a lesser extent, from ARCHAEOLOGY and LINGUISTICS. These students, including Clark Wissler (1870 1947), Alfred KROEBER (1876 1960), Robert LOWIE (1883 1957), Paul Radin (1883 1959), and Edward SAPIR (1884 1939), were clear about the focus on "CULTURE," but did not settle on a single nomenclature until the late 1930s. Sapir (1916) early on referred to "cultural anthropology" in its current sense. But the term did not immediately stick. In his 1929 textbook, Introduction to social anthropology, Wissler, for example, defined his field as "social anthropology" because: our concern will be with the social life of man, rather than with his anatomy, physiology, and psychology. Sometimes we speak of this social life as civilization, but in social anthropology, the term culture is preferred; and culture, when used in this technical sense, includes all the group activities, or conventionalized habits, of a tribe or a community. (pp. 11 12) Paul Radin's (1932) textbook, Social anthropology, continued this usage. The term "cultural anthropology" appears to have gained prominence first from the title of Lowie's (1934) text, An introduction to cultural anthropology, in which he declared: "The general goal of anthropological study is to understand the whole of culture in all periods and ages, and to see each humblest fragment in relation to that totality" (pp. 384 5). Lowie nonetheless remained rather circumspect about the term, acknowledging in 1936 that the discipline "has been variously ticketed 'culture history,' 'ethnography,' 'ethnology,' or 'cultural anthropology,"' (1960: 391). In any case, by the end of the 1930s, American anthropologists whose studies focused on culture and whose work was largely informed by Boas's teachings generally called themselves cultural anthropologists. Aims and Scopes of Social-Cultural Anthropology: Social Cultural Anthropology (SOCIAL-CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY), often simply referred to as cultural anthropology, stands as a critical and distinctive field within the broader spectrum of social sciences. It is defined by its holistic, comparative, and cross-cultural approach to the study of humanity, focusing specifically on human societies, their organizational structures, and the expressive, symbolic, and material dimensions of culture. The discipline is unique in its unwavering commitment to viewing the world through the eyes of its inhabitants, relying on deep, long-term personal engagement to achieve its analytical goals. The vitality of Social Cultural Anthropology lies in the intricate relationship between its Aims—the profound, overarching intellectual and social goals it seeks to achieve—and its Scopes—the rigorous, defining methodologies and areas of investigation it employs to meet those goals. This piece offers a comprehensive exploration of these two foundational elements, emphasizing the discipline’s crucial role in documenting, understanding, and addressing the complexities of the human condition across the global landSocial-Cultural Anthropologype. Part I: The Core Aims of Social Cultural Anthropology The aims of Social Cultural Anthropology are ambitious, seeking nothing less than a complete, nuanced understanding of human social life in all its manifestations. These goals extend from fundamental academic inquiry to direct engagement with contemporary global issues. 1. The Pursuit of Understanding Social-Cultural Diversity The primary, guiding aim of SOCIAL-CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY is to systematically document and understand the vast array of human social and cultural forms. Unlike sociology, which often focuses on modern, industrialized societies, anthropology dedicates itself to studying all human groups, regardless of size, location, or complexity. This aim is rooted in the principle of cultural relativism, which mandates that a culture must be understood on its own terms, without external judgment or ethnocentric bias. This pursuit involves: Challenging Ethnocentrism: SOCIAL-CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY actively works to decenter the researcher’s own cultural assumptions, using cross-cultural comparison to highlight that one's own way of life is merely one variation among many. This promotes global empathy and critical self-reflection. Contextualizing Behavior: The goal is to move beyond superficial descriptions of customs to understand the deeper logic, historical context, and symbolic meaning underpinning social practices, from complex rituals to everyday interactions. The Holistic View: SOCIAL-CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY aims for a holistic understanding, meaning it strives to integrate all aspects of a culture—economic, political, religious, familial—into a single, coherent analytical framework, recognizing that no single part can be fully understood in isolation. The comprehensive understanding derived from this focus on diversity serves as a vital intellectual corrective, demonstrating the boundless capacity of human beings to create meaning and structure the world in fundamentally different, yet equally logical, ways. 2. Creating a Comprehensive Database for Human Difference Beyond simply understanding a single society, SOCIAL-CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY aims to create a cumulative, comparative intellectual resource—a vast, ever-expanding "database" of human experience, behavior, and organization. This is achieved through the production of ethnographies which, when amassed, provide the necessary comparative data for developing robust theories of human nature, society, and culture. This database serves several critical functions: Testing Universal Theories: By drawing on data from diverse societies, anthropologists can test grand social theories (e.g., theories of social stratification, the origin of the state, or religious belief) to see if they hold true outside of the Western context in which they often originate. If a theory cannot explain the social structure of a foraging society in the Arctic or a horticultural community in the Amazon, it is deemed incomplete or culturally specific. Documenting Endangered Knowledge: As globalization and cultural homogenization accelerate, the discipline aims to record the unique knowledge systems, languages, and cultural practices of marginalized or vanishing communities. This documentation is crucial for future generations of scholars and for the preservation of humanity’s cultural heritage. Identifying Patterns and Laws: By comparing human difference, anthropologists also search for underlying universals—the fundamental social needs, cognitive structures, or recurring patterns (like the incest taboo or the necessity of social cooperation) that define the human species across all cultures and historical epochs. 3. Exploring Societal Problems, Policy, and Politics (Micro and Macro) A highly relevant aim of contemporary Social Cultural Anthropology is to apply its deep understanding of cultural systems to analyze, critique, and propose solutions for pressing social problems and policy issues. This is often categorized as Applied Anthropology. The focus operates on two interconnected levels: Level Focus Area Example Application Micro Level (Local) Community disputes, local governance, health behavior, program implementation. Analyzing why a public health initiative (like a vaccination campaign) is failing in a specific village by studying local leaders, belief systems, and communication networks. Macro Level (Global/State) National and international policy, development aid, climate change, human rights, global market integration. Studying the socio-economic impact of a new global trade policy on marginalized farmers, or analyzing the effectiveness of international aid organizations’ strategies. Anthropologists bring an essential, ground-up perspective that often reveals the unintended cultural consequences of top-down policy design. Their aim is to ensure that policies—whether governmental or organizational—are culturally appropriate, locally feasible, and ultimately beneficial to the communities they are intended to serve, bridging the gap between bureaucratic intent and lived reality. 4. Systemic Study of Specific Aspects of Human Society and Culture The holistic aim is achieved by systematically compartmentalizing and intensely studying the various interdependent domains that constitute human life. The ultimate goal is to understand how these domains—economy, politics, religion, family—interact and mutually influence each other within a given cultural system. The key domains of study include: Economy and Livelihood: Studying production, distribution, and consumption beyond market systems, including reciprocal exchange, gift economies, and subsistence patterns (foraging, horticulture, pastoralism). Analyzing the cultural meanings attached to labor, wealth, poverty, and material possessions. Politics, Power, and Law: Investigating political organization across the spectrum, from acephalous (leaderless) societies to state structures. Examining how power is exercised, contested, and legitimized, focusing on local-level conflict resolution, customary law, and resistance movements. Religion, Beliefs, and Rituals: Analyzing symbolic systems, cosmology, myths, and the function of rituals (e.g., rites of passage, healing ceremonies) in maintaining social cohesion and individual meaning. Studying the phenomenon of religious change, conversion, and fundamentalism. Family, Marriage, and Kinship: Exploring the diverse forms of family (nuclear, extended) and marriage (monogamy, polygyny, polyandry). Documenting kinship systems (descent rules, terminology), which often form the fundamental structure of non-Western societies and dictate social rights and obligations. Cognition, Human Knowledge Systems, and Customs: Focusing on how people categorize and understand the world (ethnoscience), including indigenous knowledge systems related to medicine, ecology, and astronomy. Studying collective custom and tradition as transmitted knowledge and social capital. Part II: The Defining Scopes and Methodologies The unique power of Social Cultural Anthropology to achieve its aims stems directly from its specialized methodologies—the scope of its investigative practices. These scopes distinguish it fundamentally from other social science disciplines and are based on immersion, personal experience, and deep qualitative analysis. 1. The Immersion: Intense, Long-Term Fieldwork and Ethnography The paramount scope of SOCIAL-CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY is fieldwork—a prolonged period of intensive, on-site engagement within the community or setting being studied. This commitment to deep immersion is the discipline's signature mark, providing data far richer than short-term surveys or interviews could yield. Long-Term Commitment: Fieldwork typically lasts a minimum of one year, often extending to two or more years, and is frequently revisited throughout an anthropologist's career. This duration is essential for observing seasonal cycles, significant life events (births, deaths, marriages), and the slow, deep currents of social change. Multisited Fieldwork: In an increasingly interconnected world, the scope of fieldwork has expanded beyond single, isolated communities. Anthropologists now often follow people, objects, ideas, and policies across multiple geographic and cultural sites (e.g., following a migration route from a village to a city, or tracking a commodity from production to consumption). Ethnography as Product and Process: Ethnography is the written product of fieldwork—a comprehensive, descriptive, and analytic account of a particular society or cultural phenomenon. Crucially, it also defines the process of research itself: living in the culture, learning the language, and absorbing the tacit, unspoken rules of behavior. This scope ensures that anthropological knowledge is grounded in direct, lived experience, granting the researcher access to the complexities and contradictions of cultural life that are inaccessible through quantitative data alone. 2. The Primary Tool: Participant Observation Participant observation is the core methodological technique within the scope of anthropological fieldwork. It is a dual, dialectical process that requires the anthropologist to simultaneously engage and detach, to become both an actor and a spectator in the cultural drama. Participation: The anthropologist actively engages in the daily life of the community—working, eating, celebrating, mourning, and conversing—to build rapport and gain an "insider’s" perspective. This participation is vital for understanding the subtle, non-verbal cues and emotional meanings that shape social interaction. Observation: Simultaneously, the anthropologist maintains a systematic, detached, and critical observational stance, recording behaviors, conversations, and events in detailed field notes. The goal is to move from the emic perspective (the insider's view, how people explain their own culture) to the etic perspective (the outsider's analytical framework, how the anthropologist explains the culture using disciplinary concepts). The scope of participant observation is designed to bridge the chasm between what people say they do (ideal culture) and what they actually do (real culture), allowing the anthropologist to uncover the social norms and power dynamics that may be invisible even to the cultural participants themselves. 3. Methodological Integration: Learning from Other Social Sciences While fiercely protective of its signature qualitative methods, Social Cultural Anthropology's scope is increasingly interdisciplinary. To address complex modern phenomena like globalization, climate migration, and digital culture, the discipline actively incorporates and adapts methodologies from its sister social sciences, leading to a richer, mixed-methods approach. This integration includes: Quantitative Techniques (from Sociology/Economics): While traditionally qualitative, SOCIAL-CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY now routinely uses quantitative tools such as surveys, statistical analysis, social network mapping, and archival data analysis to provide necessary breadth and generalizability to its detailed qualitative findings. This hybridization allows for a more robust analysis of large-Social-Cultural Anthropologyle trends. Historical and Archival Research (from History): To understand the contemporary condition of a society, anthropologists must trace the historical processes—colonialism, post-colonial shifts, global wars, industrialization—that shaped it. The scope now includes extensive work in national archives, colonial records, and oral history to provide necessary temporal depth. Critical Theory (from Philosophy/Literary Studies): SOCIAL-CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY frequently engages with theoretical frameworks from the humanities, such as post-structuralism, post-colonial theory, and critical race theory, to analyze issues of representation, power, and identity, ensuring its interpretations remain reflexive and politically astute. Digital and Visual Methods: The scope is expanding to include the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping for ecological analysis, video and photographic documentation (Visual Anthropology), and the study of online communities and social media platforms (Digital Anthropology) as new sites of social and cultural expression. This open methodological scope ensures that the discipline remains relevant, capable of addressing multifaceted problems by drawing on the strongest analytical tools available, while maintaining the centrality of the deep cultural context provided by fieldwork. Conclusion: The Holistic Imperative The aims and scopes of Social Cultural Anthropology are intrinsically linked, forming a cohesive strategy for the study of humankind. The ultimate aim of understanding the social logic of human difference and applying that knowledge to contemporary challenges is entirely dependent on the scope defined by intense, long-term fieldwork, participant observation, and the holistic synthesis of qualitative and increasingly, quantitative data. In a world defined by rapid change, intensifying global interconnectedness, and persistent conflict, the anthropological mandate—to seek out the insider's view, to give voice to the marginalized, and to use cross-cultural comparison to challenge deep-seated biases—is more vital than ever. SOCIAL-CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY is not merely a descriptive endeavor; it is a critical, comparative science dedicated to exploring the full problems and prospects of society and culture, equipping practitioners and policymakers with the profound cultural literacy necessary to navigate the complex, diverse, and shared future of humanity.   Source:Barfield, T. (Ed.).(1997) The Dictionary of Anthropology. Oxford: Blackwell publications. Blogger's comment: I find this dictionary exceptionally helpful for students to build up initial concepts in anthropology along with list of references to work out later. However, currently the book is not available in markets but one can always go to library. Video log: https://youtu.be/ltAn7z35Jtc Links: http://anthropology.ac.uk/Teach-yourself/ Social anthropology: an alternative introduction. Read the first chapter "theoretical underpinnings" Click here Anthropology, by Robert Marett. To find the book click here