Social anthropology
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Social anthropology was founded in Britain following World War I through a methodological revolution pioneered by Bronislaw Malinowski’s meticulous process-oriented fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands of Melanesia between 1915 and 1918 and through Alfred Radcliffe-Brown's theoretical program for systematic comparison that was based on a conception of rigorous fieldwork and the structure-functionalist conception of Durkheim’s sociology. Other intellectual founders include W. H. R. Rivers and A. C. Haddon, whose orientation reflected the contemprorary Volkerpsychologie of Wilhelm Wundt and Adolph Bastian, and Sir E. B. Tylor, who defined anthropology as a positivistic science following Auguste Comte. Edmund Leach (1962) defined social anthropology as a kind of comparative micro-sociology based on intensive fieldwork studies. There was never a settled theoretical orthodoxy on the nature of science and society but always a tension between several views that were seriously opposed.
Following WW II, sociocultural anthropology as comprised by the fields of ethnography and ethnology diverged into an American school of cultural anthropology while social anthropology diversified in Europe by challenging the principles of structure-functionalism, absorbing ideas from Claude Levi-Strauss’s structuralism and from Max Gluckman’s Manchester school, and embracing the study of conflict, change, urban anthropology, and networks.
A European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) was founded in 1989 as a society of scholarship at a meeting of founder members from fourteen European countries, supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. The Association seeks to advance anthropology in Europe by organizing biennual conferences and by editing its academic journal, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale.
Other universities outside Britain do have departments of Social Anthropology, including in the United States (e.g., Stanford University, Harvard University, University of Chicago) and many non-European anthropologists identify themselves as social anthropologists, and often in ways not anticipated by the founders of the field, as for example in the subfield of structure and dynamics.
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[edit] Bibliography
- Bronislaw Malinowski The Trobriand Islands (1915)
- Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922)
- The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (1929)
- Coral Gardens and Their Magic: A Study of the Methods of Tilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands (1935)
- Edmund Leach Social Anthropology (1982)
- Thomas H. Eriksen Social Anthropology, pp. 926-929 in The Social Science Encyclopedia (1985)
- Adam Kuper Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School (1996)
[edit] Anthropologists associated with British Social Anthropology
- Bronislaw Malinowski
- Alfred Radcliffe-Brown
- Mary Douglas interview by Alan Macfarlane: in which she talks about her life and work in Africa and elsewhere
- E. E. Evans-Pritchard
- Rosemary Firth interview by Alan Macfarlane: about her arrival in anthropology and fieldwork in Malaya with Raymond Firth. The position of a woman anthropologist
- Raymond Firth
- Ernest Gellner
- Adam Kuper
- Edmund Leach
- Alan Macfarlane Eight lectures for first year Cambridge University students in February 2006. Introducing some of the major approaches to the anthropology of politics and economics
- David Maybury-Lewis
- Siegfried Frederick Nadel
- Murray Leaf
- James Woodburn Interview and film of James Woodburn by Alan Macfarlane: about his life and work in anthropology and visual anthropology in Africa and Britain
- Andre Beteille [https://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/179372 After dinner talk on the history of social anthropology: Beteille speaks of his childhood and natural inclination to anthropology, his training, fieldwork in Dehli and the influence of his supervisor, M.N. Srinivas. His work on equality and inequality in human societies and publications on such, esp the caste system. He relflects on and analyses the work of Dumont, as well as Marxism, Hinduism and Islam. He cites those who have influenced him and his work, and closes with an overview of his current interests in Nationalism and tribal identities in India, as well as his lectures on backward classes.
- Audrey Richards
[edit] Anthropologists associated with the Manchester school
- Max Gluckman
- Fredrik Barth
- Ronald Frankenberg
- Maurice Godelier
- J. Clyde Mitchell
- Thayer Scudder
- Victor Turner
- Douglas White
- F. G. Bailey
- John Barnes
- Elizabeth Bott
- Elizabeth Colson talk of Elizabeth Colson and interview by Alan Macfarlane: and after-dinner talk on the history of anthropology
- Ian Cunnison
- A. L. Epstein
- J. F. Holleman
- Bruce Kapferer
- M. G. Marwick
- J. Van Velsen
- W. Watson
[edit] Anthropologists associated with the Macfarlane Interviews in Social Anthropology
- Akbar Ahmed
- Michael Allen
- Nicholas Allen
- George Appell
- Laura Appell
- Raymond Apthorpe
- Asen Balikci
- Michael Banton
- John Barnes
- Fredrick Barth
- John Beattie
- Jonathan Benthall
- Andre Beteille
- Maurice Bloch
- Jeremy Boissevain
- Ursula Graham Bower
- Peter Burke
- Lionel Caplan
- Pat Caplan
- Philippe Descola
- Ronald Dore
- Mary Douglas
- Scarlett Epstein
- Raymond Firth
- Rosemary Firth
- Meyer Fortes
- Ronald Frankenberg
- Christoph Von Furer-Haimendorf
- Jean Claude Galey
- Peter Gathercole
- Clifford Geertz
- Ernest Gellner
- Jack Goody
- Maurice Godelier
- Philip Gulliver
- Michael Herzfeld
- Les Hiatt
- Polly Hill
- Paul Hockings
- G.I. Jones
- Jean La Fontaine
- Bernd Lambert
- Owen Lattimore
- Edmund Leach
- James Lee
- F.K. Lehman
- Godfrey Lienhardt
- Geoffrey Lloyd
- Peter Loizos
- Lucy Mair
- Michael Man
- Emanuel Marx
- Adrian Mayer
- Iona Mayer
- Philip Mayer
- Patrick O'brien
- Robert Paine
- Laurence Picken
- Audrey Richards
- Peter Riviere
- Malcolm Ruel
- Anne Salmond
- David Snellgrove
- Aidan Southall
- M.N. Srinivas
- Marilyn Strathern
- Stanley Tambiah
- Tien Ju-Kang
- Terry Turner
- James Woodburn
- Peter Worsley
- Nur Yalman
