Social and Cultural Anthropology

Social and cultural anthropology overlap to a considerable extent. There is no hard-and-fast

distinction between them, although there are differences of emphasis. Very broadly, the term cultural
anthropology relates to an approach particularly prominent in the US and associated with the work
of pioneers such as Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict which stresses the coherence of cultures,
including their rules of behaviour, language, material creations and ideas about the world and the
need to understand each in its own terms. Social anthropology on the other hand has mainly
developed within Britain since the early years of the 20th century. Historically, it has been heavily
influenced by intellectual traditions coming from continental Europe, especially from France. Its
tendency is to emphasise social institutions and their interrelationships. It has gone through many
theoretical shifts over the past hundred years, but its emphasis, like that of cultural anthropology, is
still on what has been called the deep structure of social relations in a particular society: the
organising principles of social life that may govern individual behaviour but may also, under some
circumstances, be challenged and break down. Here, we will refer to social anthropology to include
both.

Social anthropologists conduct their research in many ways, but the method most characteristic of the
discipline is that of fieldwork based on participant observation. This usually means spending a long
period (a year or more) living as closely as possible with the community being studied; learning the
language if necessary; sharing the activities of daily life; observing and participating in the texture of
social interactions; and identifying underlying patterns. Through analysing this experience and
exchanging ideas with members of the community, the anthropologist aims to gain a deep
understanding of how the society works, including its inherent tensions and contradictions. Social
anthropologists usually report their research in the form of ethnographies, which are detailed
descriptions of the society in question, shaped and informed by the research questions the
anthropologist has posed. Frequently, these questions change in the course of fieldwork, as growing
knowledge reveals ever-deeper issues calling for investigation. With this deep knowledge of very local
situations as their grounding, it is often possible for social anthropologists to make comparisons
across societies, and draw out broader hypotheses about human life in society.

Many people think that social anthropologists exclusively study small-scale societies in remote
places. Many classic studies are indeed of this kind, and social anthropologists continue to carry out
research in communities far from metropolitan centres. But it has been recognised for many years
that the interactions between global patterns and local communities have complex effects that lend
themselves to anthropological study; and also that the methods of anthropological enquiry are readily
applied to sectors and components of industrial and post-industrial societies. Nowadays, social
anthropologists are as likely to be found carrying out research in businesses, educational
establishments, hospitals or public-sector bureaucracies, as in the more traditional remote places.
The relationship between the social anthropologist and those he or she studies has also changed
radically in recent years, moving from one of privileged observer to the other being observed,
towards something closer to a dialogue between equals.
Cultural anthropology was always about what we could learn about ourselves by studying others.
So, the classical era anthropologists asked such still relevant questions as: Why do American
families have to live in nuclear households when in so many other cultures families were
embedded in much larger extended households in which work, household maintenance, and
child rearing could be shared among kin? Is marriage always about love? What happens to
couples where elders arrange marriages for their children? Do they come to love each other? Or
is love, as we know it, beside the point? Are little girls 'feminine' and 'sensitive' in all cultures
and societies? Are men in all societies aggressive and dominant? Are teenagers rebellious in
every society? Do people everywhere reason the same?
Social anthropology or anthroposociology is the dominant constituent of anthropology
throughout the United Kingdom and Commonwealth and much of Europe (France in
particularly), where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. 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.