ocial anthropology is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United

Kingdom and Commonwealth and much of Europe (France in particular

[1]
) where it is
distinguished from cultural anthropology.
[2]
In the USA, Social Anthropology is commonly
subsumed within cultural anthropology (or under the relatively new designation of
sociocultural anthropology).
In contrast to cultural anthropology, culture and its continuity (including narratives, rituals,
and symbolic behavior associated with them) have been traditionally seen more as the
dependent "variable" by social anthropology, embedded in its historical and social context,
including its diversity of positions and perspectives, ambiguities, conflicts, and contradictions
of social life, rather than the independent (explanatory) one.
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, trans nationalism and local experience, and the emerging cultures of cyberspace,
[3]

and can also help with bringing opponents together when environmental concerns come into
conflict with economic developments.
[4]
British and American anthropologists including
Gillian Tett and Karen Ho who studied Wall Street provided an alternative explanation for
the Financial crisis of 20072010 to the technical explanations rooted in economic and
political theory.
[5]

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
[6]
(Oxford) changed their name to reflect the change in composition, others,
such as Social Anthropology at the University of Kent
[7]
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 and sociologists.
[8]

Contents
1 Substantive focus and practice
o 1.1 Specializations
o 1.2 Ethical considerations
2 History
o 2.1 E.B. Tylor and James Frazer
o 2.2 Bronislaw Malinowski and the British School
o 2.3 1920s-1940
o 2.4 Post WW II trends
o 2.5 1980s to present
3 Anthropologists associated with social anthropology
4 Famous students of social anthropology
5 See also
6 Notes
7 References
8 Further reading
9 External links
Substantive focus and practice
Social anthropology is distinguished from subjects such as economics or political science by
its holistic range and the attention it gives to the comparative diversity of societies and
cultures across the world, and the capacity this gives the discipline to re-examine Euro-
American assumptions. It is differentiated from sociology, both in its main methods (based
on long-term participant observation and linguistic competence),
[9]
and in its commitment to
the relevance and illumination provided by micro studies. It extends beyond strictly social
phenomena to culture, art, individuality, and cognition.
[10]
Many social anthropologists use
quantitative methods, too, particularly those whose research touches on topics such as local
economies, demography, human ecology, cognition, or health and illness.
Specializations
Main article: Anthropology Key topics by field: Socio-cultural anthropology
Specializations within social anthropology shift as its objects of study are transformed and as
new intellectual paradigms appear; musicology and medical anthropology are examples of
current, well-defined specialities.
More recent and currently emt|cognitive development]]; social and ethical understandings of
novel technologies; emergent forms of 'the family' and other new socialities modelled on
kinship; the ongoing social fall-out of the demise of state socialism; the politics of resurgent
religiosity; and analysis of audit cultures and accountability.
The subject has been enlivened by, and has contributed to, approaches from other disciplines,
such as philosophy (ethics, phenomenology, logic), the history of science, psychoanalysis,
and linguistics.
Ethical considerations
The subject has both ethical and reflexive dimensions. Practitioners have developed an
awareness of the sense in which scholars create their objects of study and the ways in which
anthropologists themselves may contribute to processes of change in the societies they study.
An example of this is the 'hawthorne effect', whereby those being studied may alter their
behaviour in response to the knowledge that they are being watched and studied.
History
Social anthropology has historical roots in a number of 19th-century disciplines, including
ethnology, folklore studies, and Classics, among others. (See History of anthropology.) Its
immediate precursor took shape in the work of Edward Burnett Tylor and James George
Frazer in the late 19th century and underwent major changes in both method and theory
during the period 1890-1920 with a new emphasis on original fieldwork, long-term holistic
study of social behavior in natural settings, and the introduction of French and German social
theory. Bronislaw Malinowski, one of the most important influences on British social
anthropology, emphasized long term fieldwork in which anthropologists work in the
vernacular and immerse themselves in the daily practices of local people.
[11]
This
development was bolstered by Franz Boas' introduction of cultural relativism arguing that
cultures are based on different ideas about the world and can therefore only be properly
understood in terms of their own standards and values.
[12]



The British Museum, London.
Museums such as the British Museum weren't the only site of anthropological studies: with
the New Imperialism period, starting in the 1870s, zoos became unattended "laboratories",
especially the so-called "ethnological exhibitions" or "Negro villages". Thus, "savages" from
the colonies were displayed, often nudes, in cages, in what has been called "human zoos". For
example, in 1906, Congolese pygmy Ota Benga was put by anthropologist Madison Grant in
a cage in the Bronx Zoo, labelled "the missing link" between an orangutan and the "white
race" Grant, a renowned eugenicist, was also the author of The Passing of the Great Race
(1916). Such exhibitions were attempts to illustrate and prove in the same movement the
validity of scientific racism, which first formulation may be found in Arthur de Gobineau's
An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (185355). In 1931, the Colonial Exhibition in
Paris still displayed Kanaks from New Caledonia in the "indigenous village"; it received 24
million visitors in six months, thus demonstrating the popularity of such "human zoos".
Anthropology grew increasingly distinct from natural history and by the end of the nineteenth
century the discipline began to crystallize into its modern form - by 1935, for example, it was
possible for T.K. Penniman to write a history of the discipline entitled A Hundred Years of
Anthropology. At the time, the field was dominated by 'the comparative method'. It was
assumed that all societies passed through a single evolutionary process from the most
primitive to most advanced. Non-European societies were thus seen as evolutionary 'living
fossils' that could be studied in order to understand the European past. Scholars wrote
histories of prehistoric migrations which were sometimes valuable but often also fanciful. It
was during this time that Europeans first accurately traced Polynesian migrations across the
Pacific Ocean for instance - although some of them believed it originated in Egypt. Finally,
the concept of race was actively discussed as a way to classify - and rank - human beings
based on difference.
E.B. Tylor and James Frazer


E. B. Tylor, nineteenth-century British anthropologist
E. B. Tylor ( 2 October 1832 2 January 1917) and James George Frazer (1 January 1854 7
May 1941) are generally considered the antecedents to modern social anthropology in
Britain. Although Tylor undertook a field trip to Mexico, both he and Frazer derived most of
the material for their comparative studies through extensive reading, not fieldwork, mainly
the Classics (literature and history of Greece and Rome), the work of the early European
folklorists, and reports from missionaries, travelers, and contemporaneous ethnologists.
Tylor advocated strongly for unilinealism and a form of "uniformity of mankind".
[13]
Tylor in
particular laid the groundwork for theories of cultural diffusionism, stating that there are three
ways that different groups can have similar cultural forms or technologies: "independent
invention, inheritance from ancestors in a distant region, transmission from one race [sic] to
another."
[14]

Tylor formulated one of the early and influential anthropological conceptions of culture as
"that complex whole, which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any
other capabilities and habits acquired by [humans] as [members] of society."
[15]
However, as
Stocking notes, Tylor mainly concerned himself with describing and mapping the distribution
of particular elements of culture, rather than with the larger function, and he generally
seemed to assume a Victorian idea of progress rather than the idea of non-directional,
multilineal cultural development proposed by later anthropologists.
Tylor also theorized about the origins of religious beliefs in human beings, proposing a
theory of animism as the earliest stage, and noting that "religion" has many components, of
which he believed the most important to be belief in supernatural beings (as opposed to moral
systems, cosmology, etc.). Frazer, a Scottish scholar with a broad knowledge of Classics, also
concerned himself with religion, myth, and magic. His comparative studies, most
influentially in the numerous editions of The Golden Bough, analyzed similarities in religious
belief and symbolism globally. Neither Tylor nor Frazer, however, was particularly interested
in fieldwork, nor were they interested in examining how the cultural elements and institutions
fit together. The Golden Bough was abridged drastically in subsequent editions after his first.
Bronislaw Malinowski and the British School


Bronislaw Malinowski, Anthropologist at the London School of Economics
Toward the turn of the twentieth century, a number of anthropologists became dissatisfied
with this categorization of cultural elements; historical reconstructions also came to seem
increasingly speculative to them. Under the influence of several younger scholars, a new
approach came to predominate among British anthropologists, concerned with analyzing how
societies held together in the present (synchronic analysis, rather than diachronic or historical
analysis), and emphasizing long-term (one to several years) immersion fieldwork. Cambridge
University financed a multidisciplinary expedition to the Torres Strait Islands in 1898,
organized by Alfred Cort Haddon and including a physician-anthropologist, William Rivers,
as well as a linguist, a botanist, and other specialists. The findings of the expedition set new
standards for ethnographic description.
A decade and a half later, the Polish anthropology student, Bronisaw Malinowski (1884
1942), was beginning what he expected to be a brief period of fieldwork in the old model,
collecting lists of cultural items, when the outbreak of the First World War stranded him in
New Guinea. As a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire resident on a British colonial
possession, he was effectively confined to New Guinea for several years.
[16]

He made use of the time by undertaking far more intensive fieldwork than had been done by
British anthropologists, and his classic ethnography, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922)
advocated an approach to fieldwork that became standard in the field: getting "the native's
point of view" through participant observation. Theoretically, he advocated a functionalist
interpretation, which examined how social institutions functioned to satisfy individual needs.
1920s-1940


The main LSE entrance
Modern social anthropology was founded in Britain at the London School of Economics and
Political Science following World War I. Influences include both the methodological
revolution pioneered by Bronisaw Malinowski's process-oriented fieldwork in the Trobriand
Islands of Melanesia between 1915 and 1918
[17]
and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown's theoretical
program for systematic comparison that was based on a conception of rigorous fieldwork and
the structure-functionalist conception of Durkheims sociology.
[18][19]
Other intellectual
founders include W. H. R. Rivers and A. C. Haddon, whose orientation reflected the
contemporary Parapsychologies of Wilhelm Wundt and Adolf Bastian, and Sir E. B. Tylor,
who defined anthropology as a positivist science following Auguste Comte. Edmund Leach
(1962) defined social anthropology as a kind of comparative micro-sociology based on
intensive fieldwork studies. Scholars have not settled a theoretical orthodoxy on the nature of
science and society, and their tensions reflect views which are seriously opposed.


Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown also published a seminal work in 1922. He had carried out his initial
fieldwork in the Andaman Islands in the old style of historical reconstruction. However, after
reading the work of French sociologists mile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Radcliffe-
Brown published an account of his research (entitled simply The Andaman Islanders) that
paid close attention to the meaning and purpose of rituals and myths. Over time, he
developed an approach known as structural functionalism, which focused on how institutions
in societies worked to balance out or create an equilibrium in the social system to keep it
functioning harmoniously. (This contrasted with Malinowski's functionalism, and was quite
different from the later French structuralism, which examined the conceptual structures in
language and symbolism.)
Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown's influence stemmed from the fact that they, like Boas,
actively trained students and aggressively built up institutions that furthered their
programmatic ambitions. This was particularly the case with Radcliffe-Brown, who spread
his agenda for "Social Anthropology" by teaching at universities across the British
Commonwealth. From the late 1930s until the postwar period appeared a string of
monographs and edited volumes that cemented the paradigm of British Social Anthropology
(BSA). Famous ethnographies include The Nuer, by Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, and The
Dynamics of Clanship Among the Tallensi, by Meyer Fortes; well-known edited volumes
include African Systems of Kinship and Marriage and African Political Systems.
Post WW II trends
Following World War 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 Lvi-Strauss's structuralism and from Max
Gluckmans Manchester school, and embracing the study of conflict, change, urban
anthropology, and networks. Together with many of his colleagues at the Rhodes-Livingstone
Institute and students at Manchester University, collectively known as the Manchester
School, took BSA in new directions through their introduction of explicitly Marxist-informed
theory, their emphasis on conflicts and conflict resolution, and their attention to the ways in
which individuals negotiate and make use of the social structural possibilities. During this
period Gluckman was also involved in a dispute with American anthropologist Paul
Bohannan on ethnographic methodology within the anthropological study of law. He believed
that indigenous terms used in ethnographic data should be translated into Anglo-American
legal terms for the benefit of the reader.
[20][21]
The Association of Social Anthropologists of
the UK and Commonwealth was founded in 1946.
[22]

In Britain, anthropology had a great intellectual impact, it "contributed to the erosion of
Christianity, the growth of cultural relativism, an awareness of the survival of the primitive in
modern life, and the replacement of diachronic modes of analysis with synchronic, all of
which are central to modern culture."
[23]

Later in the 1960s and 1970s, Edmund Leach and his students Mary Douglas and Nur
Yalman, among others, introduced French structuralism in the style of Lvi-Strauss.
In countries of the British Commonwealth, social anthropology has often been institutionally
separate from physical anthropology and primatology, which may be connected with
departments of biology or zoology; and from archaeology, which may be connected with
departments of Classics, Egyptology, and the like. In other countries (and in some,
particularly smaller, British and North American universities), anthropologists have also
found themselves institutionally linked with scholars of folklore, museum studies, human
geography, sociology, social relations, ethnic studies, cultural studies, and social work.
British anthropology has continued to emphasize social organization and economics over
purely symbolic or literary topics.
1980s to present
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 biennial conferences and by editing its
academic journal, Social Anthropology/Anthropologies Social. Departments of Social
Anthropology at different Universities have tended to focus on disparate aspects of the field.
Departments of Social Anthropology exist in universities around the world. The field of
social anthropology has expanded in ways not anticipated by the founders of the field, as for
example in the subfield of structure and dynamics.
Anthropologists associated with social anthropology
Andre Beteille
[24]

Edmund Snow Carpenter
Mary Douglas
[25]

E. E. Evans-Pritchard
Raymond Firth
Rosemary Firth
[26]

Meyer Fortes
Ernest Gellner
Stephen D. Glazier
Jack Goody
David Graeber
Don Kalb
Adam Kuper
Edmund Leach
Murray Leaf
Claude Lvi-Strauss
Alan Macfarlane
[27]

Bronisaw Malinowski
Siegfried Frederick Nadel
Susan Visvanathan
A.H.J. Prins
Alfred Radcliffe-Brown
Audrey Richards
Victor Turner
Marshall Sahlins
Marilyn Strathern
Douglas R. White
Eric Wolf
Robert Layton
Famous students of social anthropology
Nick Clegg - Leader of the UK Liberal Democratic Party and Deputy Prime Minister
of the United Kingdom
Hugh Laurie - Actor - Best known for role of doctor in House
Thandie Newton - Actress
Alexandra Shulman - Editor of British edition of Vogue
David Attenborough - Wildlife TV presenter
Charles, Prince of Wales - Heir to the British throne
Darren Aronofsky - Film director
Amitav Ghosh - Author
Mick Hucknall - Lead singer of Simply Red
Derek Acorah - Ghost Whisperer
Arnab Goswami - Indian journalist who is the Editor-in-Chief and News anchor of the
Indian news channel Times Now.
See also