Cultural Anthropology

Cultural Anthropology

Cultural anthropology is a major division of anthropology that deals with the study of culture in all its aspects and that uses the methods, concepts, and data of archaeology, ethnography and ethnology, folklore, and linguistics in its descriptions and analyses of the diverse peoples of the world.

Modern cultural anthropology as a field of research has its roots in the Age of Discovery, when technologically advanced European cultures came into extended contact with various "traditional" cultures, which for the most part the Europeans grouped indiscriminately under the general rubrics "savage" or "primitive." By the mid-19th century, such questions as the origins of the world's diverse cultures and peoples and their languages had become matters of great interest in western Europe.

The concept of evolution, as formally proposed by Charles Darwin with the publication in 1859 of The Origin of Species, lent considerable impetus to this research into the development of societies and cultures over time.

Anthropology was dominated in the latter 19th century by a linear conception of history, in which all human groups were said to pass through specified stages of cultural evolution, from a state of "savagery" to "barbarism" and finally to that of "civilized man" (i.e., western European man).

At the onset of the 20th century, the strong cultural biases of the early western European and North American anthropologists were gradually discarded in favour of a more pluralistic, relativistic outlook in which each human culture was viewed as a unique product of physical environment, cultural contacts, and other divergent factors. Out of this orientation came a new emphasis on empirical data, fieldwork, and hard evidence of human behaviour and social organization within a given cultural environment. The prime exemplar of this approach was a German-born American, Franz Boas, known as the founder of the culture history school of anthropology.

Boas and his followers--notably, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Edward Sapir - dominated American anthropology throughout much of the 20th century. The culture history school was rooted in a functionalist approach to culture materials and sought an expression of unity between the various patterns, traits, and customs within a particular culture.

Meanwhile, in France, Marcel Mauss, founder of the Institute of Ethnology of the University of Paris, studied human societies as total systems, self-regulating and adaptive to changing circumstances in ways designed to preserve the integrity of the system. Mauss exerted considerable influence over such disparate figures as Claude Levi-Strauss in France and Bronislaw Malinowski and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown in England.

While Malinowski went on to pursue a strictly functionalist approach, Radcliffe-Brown and Levi-Strauss developed the principles of structuralism. The functionalists asserted that the only valid method of analyzing social phenomena was to define the function they performed in a society. The structuralists, by contrast, sought to identify a system or structure underlying the broad spectrum of social phenomena in particular cultures, a system of which the members of a society maintain only a dim awareness through the use of myths and symbols.

Studies of Southwest American Indian groups in the 1930s by Ruth Benedict marked the emergence of the subdiscipline of cultural anthropology known as cultural psychology. Benedict proposed that cultures in their slow development imposed a unique "psychological set" on their members, who interpreted reality along lines oriented by the culture, regardless of environmental factors.

The interrelation of culture and personality, as exemplified in the cultural value-systems of both traditional and modern societies, has become the subject of extensive research.
 In their fieldwork, early 20th-century cultural anthropologists produced many studies of family life and structure, marriage, kinship and local grouping, and magic and witchcraft.

During the second half of the century, while kinship studies remained a central concern, social status and power attracted more attention as researchers investigated the political and legal systems of different societies from an anthropological standpoint. More serious attention was paid to religious ideas and rituals as well. Interest shifted from African peoples, who had occupied cultural anthropologists for a quarter of a century, to peoples in India, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific Ocean islands.

The analysis of social change became a prominent area of research in the decades after World War II as many Third World countries undertook programs of economic development and industrialization. Since then, the application of computers has made possible a much greater use of quantitative data, as in studies of family and domestic group relations, marriage, divorce, and economic transactions.