Social anthropology
Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behaviour in human societies and cultures. It is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and much of Europe,[1] where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology.[2] In the United States, social anthropology is commonly subsumed within cultural anthropology or sociocultural anthropology.
For the academic journal, see Social Anthropology (journal).Comparison with cultural anthropology[edit]
The term cultural anthropology is generally applied to ethnographic works that are holistic in spirit, are oriented to the ways in which culture affects individual experience, or aim to provide a rounded view of the knowledge, customs, and institutions of 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.[3]
Topics of interest for social anthropologists have included customs, economic and political organization, law and conflict resolution, patterns of consumption and exchange, kinship and family structure, gender relations, childbearing and socialization, religion, while present-day social anthropologists are also concerned with issues of globalism, ethnic violence, gender studies, transnationalism and local experience, and the emerging cultures of cyberspace,[4] and can also help with bringing opponents together when environmental concerns come into conflict with economic developments.[5]
British and American anthropologists including Gillian Tett and Karen Ho who studied Wall Street provided an alternative explanation for the financial crisis of 2007–2010 to the technical explanations rooted in economic and political theory.[6]
Differences among British, French, and American sociocultural anthropologies have diminished with increasing dialogue and borrowing of both theory and methods. Social and cultural anthropologists, and some who integrate the two, are found in most institutes of anthropology. Thus the formal names of institutional units no longer necessarily reflect fully the content of the disciplines these cover. Some, such as the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology[7] (Oxford), changed their name to reflect the change in composition; others, such as Social Anthropology at the University of Kent,[8] became simply Anthropology. Most retain the name under which they were founded.
Long-term qualitative research, including intensive field studies (emphasizing participant observation methods), has been traditionally encouraged in social anthropology rather than quantitative analysis of surveys, questionnaires and brief field visits typically used by economists, political scientists, and (most) sociologists.[9]
Comparison and intersection with cognitive anthropology[edit]
Cognitive anthropology studies how people represent and think about events and objects in the world. It links human thought processes and the physical and ideational aspects of culture.[10] The scopes of these two disciplines intersect in the field of cognitive development. The following part of the section shows the significance of their co-research for understanding the processes that constitute society.
According to Sir Edward Tylor: "Culture, or civilization, taken in its broad, ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”[11] The cultural consensus principle is incorporated in the reasoning behind the cultural consonance model[12] and other similar models (see cognitive anthropology) that seek to evaluate the effects of shared cognitive structures on social life and the human condition[13] beginning from the onset of cognitive development. The major part of social and cognitive anthropology concepts (e.g., Cultural consonance, Cultural models, Knowledge structures, Shared knowledge etc.) seem to rely upon broad pervasive, unaware interactions between society members. Research shows that unconscious remembering increases recall efficiency over time[14] and yields greater confidence in that thought.[15] According to the received view in cognitive sciences, cognition begins from birth (and even from prenatal) due to motive forces of shared intentionality: unaware knowledge assimilation. Therefore, mechanisms of unaware interactions at the onset of life, one of the focuses of research in cognitive sciences, have become the central research issue in social and cognitive anthropology.
Another intersection of these two disciplines appears in neuroscience research. Behavioral propensities (an exteriorization of Cultural models, Schemata, etc.; see key concepts of cognitive anthropology ) are the product of biological and cultural factors that manifest in individual brain development, neural wiring, and neurochemical homeostasis.[16] According to received view in neuroscience, an observed human behavior, in any context, is the last event in a long chain of biological and cultural interactions.[17][18] The brain´s anatomy is subject to neuroplasticity and depends on both, contextual (cultural) and historically dependent (previous experience) mechanisms to shape the neural system.[19] By bridging sociology with anthropology and cognitive science perspectives, we can assess shared cultural knowledge[20] – understand processes underlying unspoken social norms and beliefs, as well as study processes of shaping individual values that together constitute societies.
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