Social Anthropology

Anth1012
November, 2021
 Definition, Scope and Subject Matter
of Anthropology
• Two Greek words:
 ‘anthropos’: ‘mankind’
 ‘logos’: ‘science’
Anthropology means the science of
humankind or humanity
 Definition……

• Comparative study of humans as

a group, from its appearance on
earth to its present stage of
development
 Definition…..
• Of all the disciplines that study
humans, anthropology is by far the
broadest in scope :
• Strategies for living-economy
• Characteristics that human beings share-culture
• Products of social groups( material
objects/material cultures and non-material
creations
 The Historical Development of
Anthropology

• Is a fairly recent discipline

• Was given its present shape
during the 20th century
• Would be traced its roots back to
the European Enlightenment in
the 18th C.
 The Historical…..
• The present academic anthropology
has its roots in the works and ideas of
the great ancient and medieval
Greek, Roman and Hebrew
philosophers and social thinkers
• Emerged as a distinct field of study
in the mid-19th C.
 The Historical…….
• Late 1870s:
• was beginning to emerge as a profession
• The expansion of western colonial empires
• Became a profession primarily in museums:
The first professional anthropologists were
museum curators
 The Historical……
• Early anthropologists:
Mainly studied small
communities
Technologically simple societies
This approach is called
ethnography
 The Historical…….
• By the mid-1900:
• Anthropologists attempted to discover
universal human patterns and the common
bio-psychological traits that bind all human
beings: this approach is called ethnology
• Ethnology aims at the comparative
understanding and analysis of different
ethnic groups across time and space
 The Historical…….
• In Ethiopia:
• Since the late 1950s
• The initial emphasis was on
ethnography, the description
of specific customs, cultures
and ways of life
 Scope and subject matter of
anthropology
• The breadth and depth of anthropology
is immense
• The temporal dimension covers the
past, the present and even the future
• Spatially, anthropology studies from
Arctic to Desert, from Megapolis to
hunting gathering areas
 Scope…..
• The discipline covers all aspects of human
ways of life, experiences and existence
• Claude Levi-Strauss:
Anthropology studies humanity with its all
aspects of existence
Wide-ranging and frequently highly
specialized interests
 Sub-fields of Anthropology

1.Physical/Biological
Anthropology
2.Archaeological Anthropology
3.Linguistic Anthropology
4.Socio-cultural Anthropology
Physical/Biological Anthropology

• Related to the natural sciences,

particularly biology
• Focuses on biological
evolution and contemporary
variations
 Physical/Biological…….
• The major sources of biological
variations are derived from the
interrelated effects of natural
selection, geographical isolation,
and genetic mutations
 Physical/Biological…..

• Is essentially concerned with two

broad areas of investigation:
Human evolution
genetics
 Physical/Biological……

• Human evolution is further

divided into two specialties:
1. Paleoanthropology and
2. primatology
 Physical/Biological….

• Paleoanthropology is the study of

human biological evolution through
the analysis of fossil remains from
prehistoric times to determine the
missing link that connect modern
human with its biological ancestors
 Physical/Biological……

• Primatology, on the other

hand, studies about primates or
recent human ancestors to
explain human evolution
 Physical/ Biological…….
• Human genetics concerns to
investigate how and why the physical
traits of contemporary human
populations vary throughout the world
• Human genetics focuses to examine the
genetic materials of an organism such
as DNA and RNA
 Archaeological Anthropology

• Studies the ways of lives of past

peoples by excavating and
analyzing the material
culture(physical remains) such
as artefacts, features and eco-facts
 Archaeological…..
• Artefacts are material remains made
and used by the past peoples and that
can be removed from the site and taken
to the laboratory for further analysis:
• Eg. Tools, ornaments, arrowheads,
coins and fragments of pottery
 Archaeological….
• Features are like artefacts which are
made or modified by past people, but
they cannot be readily carried away
from the site:
• Eg. House foundations, ancient
buildings, fireplaces, steles, and
postholes
 Archaeological….

• Eco-facts are non-artefactual,

organic and environmental
remains such as soil, animal
bones, and plant remains
 Archaeological…..
• Archaeology is also sub-divided into two
areas of specialties:
1.Prehistoric Archaeology: 2.5 MYA-
6,000YA
2.Historical Archaeology: analyzes the
whole period after the invention of the
technique of writing and documenting
 Linguistic Anthropology
• Studies human language as a cultural
resource
• Focuses on the evolution of languages
• Language is the most distinctive feature of
being human
• Studies contemporary human languages as
well as those of the past
• Is divided into four distinct branches or areas
of research:
 Structural or Descriptive Linguistics

• Examines sound systems,

grammatical systems
• Studies the structure of
linguistic patterns
 Historical Linguistics

Deals with the emergence of

language
 Ethno-linguistics

• Examines the relationship

between language and culture
 Socio-linguistics

• Investigates linguistic variation

within a given language
• Analyzes regional dialects and
accents
 Socio-cultural Anthropology
• Is the largest sub-field of anthropology
• Deals with human society and culture
• Describes, analyzes, interprets, and
explains social, cultural and material life
of contemporary human societies
 Socio-cultural….

• Is engaged in two aspects of study

Ethnography: based on fieldwork
Ethnology : based on cross-
cultural comparison
 Ethnography

• Requires fieldwork to collect data

• Often descriptive
• Group/community specific
 Ethnology

• Uses data collected by a series of

researchers
• Usually synthetic
• Comparative/cross-cultural
• Builds a theory
 Unique features of Anthropology
• Broader in scope
• Holistic and relativistic approach
• Comparative perspective
• Its research approach(highly dependent on
qualitative approach)
• Insiders’ view-emic perspective
• Focuses on the local than the big social
process
 Misconceptions about
anthropology

• Due to lack of appropriate awareness

about the nature, scope and subject
matter of the discipline, different
misconceptions are held about
anthropology
 Misconceptions…
1. Anthropology is limited to the study of “
primitive” people
2. Anthropologists only study the rural people and
rural areas
3. Anthropology is the study/analysis of fossil
evidences of the proto-humans
4. The purpose of anthropology is to study in order
to keep and preserve communities far from
development and obsolete cultural practices in
museums
 The relationship between
Anthropology and other disciplines
• Is similar with other social sciences
such as sociology, psychology,
political sciences, economics and
history
• Greatly overlaps with these
disciplines that study human society
 The relationship….
• Differs from other social sciences:
 Its broader scope
 Unique approach: holistic, comparative, relativistic
 Unit of analysis: small-scale societies
 Relativistic manner
 Empirical
 Naturalistic
 Ideographic/ particularizing
 Extended fieldwork-method of research
 Ethnographic data collection techniques
The contributions of Anthropology

• To understand man’s civilization

• To get a fuller understanding of other
cultures and our own
• Gives us an insight into different
ways and modes of life of human
society
 The contributions….
• Because of its relativistic approach,
anthropology helps us fight against
prejudice and discriminations
• Helps us fight against
ethnocentrism
 The contributions….
• Used as a tool for development( that
is to solve community problems)
• Protects local people from harmful
policies and projects
• Suggests sound solutions to all
human problems
 Application of Anthropological
knowledge
• Environmental change/climate change
• Health and nutrition
• Globalization
• Social justice
• Human rights
• Cultural Resource Management(CRM)
• Cultural Dimensions of civil and religious
conflicts
 Unit Two

Human Culture
 Definition of culture

• The term culture is not used

with consistent meanings
 Edward B .Tylor
“a complex whole which
includes knowledge, belief,
art, morals, law, custom, and
any other capabilities and
habits acquired by man as a
member of society.”
B. Malinowski
“Cumulative creation of
man”
 Robert Bierstedt
“culture is the complex whole
that consists of everything we
think and do, and have as
members of society”
 Culture
• The common way of life shared by a group
of people
• Includes all things except nature and
biology
• A moral, intellectual and spiritual aspects of
a group
• Is an accumulated heritage
 Culture

• Is a system of learned behavior shared

by and transmitted among the members
of the group
• Is a collective heritage learned by
individuals and passed from one
generation to another
 Characteristic Features of Culture
1. Culture is learned
2. Culture is shared
3. Culture is symbolic
4. Culture is all-encompassing
5. Culture is integrated
6. Culture can be adaptive and maladaptive
7. Culture is dynamic
 Aspects/Elements of culture
• Values, language, myths, customs,
rituals and law all are aspects of
culture
• The two most basic aspects of
culture, however, are material and
non-material culture
 Material culture
• Consists of man-made objects:
Tools, furniture, automobiles,
buildings, dams, and roads
Technical and material equipment
Is referred to as civilization
 Non-material culture
• Internal and intrinsically valuable
• the inward nature of man
• Words people use
• The language people speak
• The beliefs people hold
 Non-material culture
• Values, virtues, habits, rituals
and practices, ceremonies,
customs and tastes, attitudes
and outlook, our ways of
acting , feeling and thinking
 Values
• Are the standards by which member of
a society define what is good or bad
• Central aspects of the nonmaterial
culture of a society
• Influence the behavior of the members
of a society
 Beliefs
• Are cultural conventions
• Specific descriptions of the
nature of the universe
• Are more specific
 Norms
• Are shared rules or guidelines that
define how people “ought” to behave
under certain circumstances
• Are generally connected to the values,
beliefs, and ideologies of a society
• Vary in terms of their importance to a
culture: Folkway &Mores
 Folkway
• Norms guiding ordinary
usages and conventions of
everyday life
• Are not strictly enforced
 Mores
• Are much stronger norms than
folkways
• Are norms that are believed to be
essential to core values
• People who violate mores are
usually severely punished
Cultural Unity and Variations:
Universality
Generality
particularity
 Universality
• Universals are cultural traits that
span across all cultures:
• Examples: complex brain, life in
group, incest taboo, exogamy,
family system, football
 Generality
• Cultural traits that occur in many
societies but not to all of them
• Borrowed beliefs and customs
• Independent invention( eg.
Farming)
• Nuclear family
 Particularity
• Unique/particular to a certain
cultural group:
Food, Marriage, Parenthood,
Death, Puberty, Birth
Evaluating cultural differences:

•ethnocentrism,
cultural relativism
and human rights
 Ethnocentrism:
• Refers to the tendency to see the
behaviors, beliefs, values, and
norms of one’s own group as
the only right way of living and
to judge others by those
standards
 Cultural Relativism:
• A culture has to be studied in terms of
its own meanings and values
• Every culture contains its own unique
pattern of behavior
• Describes a situation where there is an
attitude of respect for cultural
differences
 Human rights
• Human rights advocates challenge many of the
tenets of cultural relativism:
Slavery, violence against women,
circumcision/FGC, torture, genocide are
extremely criticized by human rights
advocates
 anthropologists respect human diversity
 Culture change
1.Diffusion
2.Acculturation
3.Invention
4.Globalization
 Marriage, Family and
Kinship
•An assignment to be
read and presented
by students
 Unit 3
• Human Diversity and
Culture Areas in
Ethiopia
 Human Beings
Humanity evolves both as a
result of biological factors and
cultural factors(henceforth bio-
cultural evolution)
• Humanity is the most common
term we use to refer to human
beings
Humanity/human species
• Bipedalism (walking on two legs)
• Relatively small teeth
• Relatively large brains
• Language skill or capability
• Having complex sets of ideas
called culture to survive
Origin of the Modern Human
Species(homo sapiens sapiens)
1.Cosmological Views
2.Biblical View
3.Evolutionary/the
Scientific View
 Origin…
• Theories concerning the
evolution of life date back to the
ancient Greeks, but it was only
during the 19 C. that the first
th

comprehensive theories of
evolution were developed
 Cosmologies
• Are conceptual frameworks that
present the universe(cosmos) as an
orderly system
• Account for the ways in which
supernatural beings or forces
formed human beings and the planet
we live on
 Cosmologies
• Cosmological beliefs or
views are transmitted from
generation to generation
through ritual, education,
laws, art, and language
 Biblical View
• The most important cosmological
tradition affecting western views of
creation is recounted in the Biblical
Book of Genesis, which is found in
Greek texts dating back to the 3rd
Century BC. This Judaic tradition
describes how GOD created the
cosmos/the universe
Evolutionary/Paleo-anthropological
Perspectives
• Adaptation
• Bergmann’s rule
• Habituation or acclimatization
• Race is nearly meaningless
when applied to humanity
 Evolutionary…
• Rather than talk about races,
physical anthropologists more
commonly talk today of ancestry,
a more general term that
recognizes the reality of some
geographically specific human
adaptations
 The History of Racial Typing
• By the 16th C., during the Age of Discovery,
Europeans voyaging around the world were
encountering many previously unknown
peoples and developed their own racial
classifications:
• Negroid, Caucasoid, Mongoloid, European,
etc
 The History….
• Some naturalists in the 16th C.
through the 19th centuries
proposed the savages were even
a different species
 The History…
• By the mid-1800s, naturalists began
using a method of describing the
shape of the head called the
cephallic index, a ratio
measurement of the length and
width of the head( called Biological
determinism)
 The History….
• Application of Darwin’s
principles of biological
evolution to societies is
called Social Darwinism
 The History…
• In the 19th C. and early 20th C. some
even advocated for state regulation of
marriages, family size and whether to
allow an individual to reproduce. This
practice is known as eugenics. Eg. The
Nazis
 Culture Areas in Ethiopia
• In Anthropology the concept of culture area
has been used beginning from the 1920s by
Alfred Kroeber
• Culture areas refers to a cluster of related
cultures occupying a certain geographical
region.
• In relation to subsistence, we have 3 culture
areas in Ethiopia
The Plough Culture Area
predominantly agricultural society
Highland and central parts of the country
Subject of anthropological inquiries since
the 1950s
Ethnographers who studied the area
include: Donald Levine, Allen Hobben,
Frederick Gamst and Jack Bauer
 Enset Culture Area
• Covers a vast region in the
southern part of the country
• Enset is a staple diet
• Eg. Guraghe, Sidama and Gedeo
 Pastoral Culture Area
• Found in the lowland areas covering a
large section of the Afar in the
northeast, Somali in the Southeast and
Borena of Southern of Ethiopia
• Rely on their herds and cattle for a
living
• Mobility of people and herds
 Unit 4
• Marginalized,
Minority, and
Vulnerable Groups