Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behaviour in human societies and cultures. It is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and much of Europe,Dianteill, Erwan, "Cultural Anthropology or Social Anthropology? A Transatlantic Argument", L'Année sociologique 1/2012 (Vol. 62), p. 93-122 . where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In the United States, social anthropology is commonly subsumed within cultural anthropology or sociocultural anthropology.
Comparison with cultural anthropology
The term cultural anthropology is generally applied to ethnographic works that are holistic in spirit, oriented toward how culture affects individual experience, or that aim to provide a rounded view of the knowledge, customs, and institutions of people. Social anthropology is a term applied to ethnographic works that attempt to isolate a particular system of social relations, such as those that comprise domestic life, economy, law, politics, or religion, give analytical priority to the organizational bases of social life, and attend to cultural phenomena as somewhat secondary to the main issues of social scientific inquiry. Academic blog post explaining the similarities/differences between social and cultural anthropology.
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, transnationalism and local experience, and the emerging cultures of cyberspace, and can also help with bringing opponents together when environmental concerns come into conflict with economic developments.Hendry, Joy. 1999. An Introduction to Social Anthropology: Other People's Worlds. London: Macmillan Press Ltd British and American anthropologists, including Gillian Tett and Karen Ho, who studied Wall Street, provided an alternative explanation for the 2008 financial crisis to the technical explanations rooted in economic and political theory.Ho, Karen (2009): "Disciplining Investment Bankers, Disciplining the Economy: Wall Street's Institutional Culture of Crisis and the Downsizing of American Corporations." American Anthropologist, Vol. 111, No. 2.
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 anthropology institutes. Thus, the formal names of institutional units no longer necessarily fully reflect the content of the disciplines they cover. Some, such as the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (Oxford), changed their name to reflect the change in composition; others, such as Social Anthropology at the University of Kent, 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, political scientists, and (most) sociologists.Bernard, R. 2006. Research Methods in Anthropology. Lanham: Alta Mira Press
Comparison and intersection with cognitive anthropology
Cognitive anthropology studies how people represent and think about events and objects in the world. It links human thought processes and the physical and ideational aspects of culture.D'Andrade, Roy (1995). The Development of Cognitive Anthropology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press The scopes of these two disciplines intersect in the field of cognitive development. The following part of the section shows the significance of their co-research for understanding the processes that constitute society. According to Sir Edward Tylor: "Culture, or civilization, taken in its broad, ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society".Tylor, Edward. 1920. Primitive Culture. Vol 1. New York: J.P. Putnam's Sons. The cultural consensus principle is incorporated in the reasoning behind the cultural consonance modelDressler, W. W., Balieiro, M. C., Ribeiro, R. P., & Santos, J. E. D. (2007). "Cultural consonance and psychological distress: Examining the associations in multiple cultural domains." Culture, medicine and psychiatry, 31, 195-224. and other similar models (see cognitive anthropology) that seek to evaluate the effects of shared cognitive structures on social life and the human conditionShore, B. (1998). Culture in mind: Cognition, culture, and the problem of meaning. Oxford University Press. beginning from the onset of cognitive development. The majority of social and cognitive anthropology concepts (e.g., Cultural consonance, Cultural models, Knowledge structures, Shared knowledge, etc.) seem to rely on broad, pervasive, and unconscious interactions among members of society. Research shows that unconscious remembering increases recall efficiency over timeGraf, P., & Mandler, G. (1984). "Activation makes words more accessible, but not necessarily more retrievable," Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior. 23: 553–568. doi:10.1016/s0022-5371(84)90346-3. and yields greater confidence in that thought.Hasher, L., Goldstein, D., Toppino, T. (1977). "Frequency and the conference of referential validity," Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior. 16: 107–112. doi:10.1016/s0022-5371(77)80012-1. According to the received view in cognitive sciences, cognition begins from birth (and even from prenatal) due to motive forces of shared intentionality: unaware knowledge assimilation. Therefore, mechanisms of unaware interactions at the onset of life, a focus of research in cognitive sciences, have become a central research issue in social and cognitive anthropology.
Another intersection of these two disciplines appears in neuroscience research. Behavioral propensities (an exteriorization of Cultural models, Schemata, etc.; see key concepts of cognitive anthropology) are the product of biological and cultural factors that manifest in individual brain development, neural wiring, and neurochemical homeostasis.Sarto-Jackson, I., Larson, D.O. & Callebaut, W. (2017). "Culture, neurobiology, and human behavior: new perspectives in anthropology." Biol Philos 32, 729–748. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-017-9574-2 According to the received view in neuroscience, an observed human behavior, in any context, is the last event in a long chain of biological and cultural interactions.Ramachandran VS (2011). The tell-tale brain: a neuroscientist's quest for what makes us human. W.W.Norton, New YorkChurchland, P. (2007). Neurophilosophy at work. Cambridge University Press, London. The brain's anatomy is subject to neuroplasticity; it depends on both contextual (cultural) and historically dependent (previous experience) mechanisms to shape the neural system.Chalupa, L.M., Berardi, N., Caleo, M., Galli-Resta, L., Pizzorusso, T. (2011). Cerebral plasticity: new perspectives. MIT Press, Cambridge. By bridging sociology with anthropology and cognitive science perspectives, we can assess shared cultural knowledgeMaltseva, K. (2020). "Bridging sociology with anthropology and cognitive science perspectives to assess shared cultural knowledge." Sociology: Theory, Methods, Marketing, (1). https://doi.org/10.15407/sociology2020.01.108 – understand processes underlying unspoken social norms and beliefs, as well as study processes of shaping individual values that together constitute societies.
Focus and practice
Social anthropology is distinguished from subjects such as economics or political science by its holistic scope, its attention 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),"Nanjunda, D.C.(2010) Contemporary Studies in Anthropology: a reading. Mittal Publications: New Delhi, India. p.8"> 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.Ingold, T. (1985). Who Studies Humanity? The Scope of Anthropology. Anthropology Today, 1:6:15-16 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
Specializations within social anthropology shift as its objects of study are transformed and new intellectual paradigms emerge; musicology and medical anthropology are examples of current, well-defined specialities.Tansey, E. M. (2014). Monoclonal Antibodies to Migraine: Witnesses to modern biomedicine, an AZ. Queen Mary, University of London. More recent and current specializations are: cognitive development – neuroscience research for the neuroplasticity and the shared intentionality approach to the extended mind thesis: the anthropological analysis of ecological learning in cognitive development;Andy Clark, David J Chalmers (January 1998). "The extended mind". Analysis. 58 (1): 7–19. doi:10.1093/analys/58.1.7. JSTOR 3328150.; reprinted as: Andy Clark, David J Chalmers (2010). "Chapter 2: The extended mind". In Richard Menary (ed.). The Extended Mind. MIT Press. pp. 27–42. ISBN 9780262014038. social and ethical understandings of novel technologies – the way anthropologists analyze everyday life, cultural reproduction, and human evolution;Pfaffenberger, B. (1992). "Social anthropology of technology". Annual review of Anthropology, 21(1), 491-516. kinship – emergent forms of "the family" and other new socialities modelled on kinship;Andrikopoulos, Apostolos (2023). Argonauts of West Africa: Unauthorized Migration and Kinship Dynamics in a Changing Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. postsocialism crisis – the ongoing social fall-out of the demise of state socialism;Martin, Dominic. (2021) 2023. "Postsocialism". In The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by Felix Stein. Facsimile of the first edition in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Initially published 14 Sep 2021. Online: http://doi.org/10.29164/21postsocialism the politics of resurgent religiosity;Checketts, L. (2017). "New Technologies—Old Anthropologies?". Religions, 8(4), 52. and audit cultures – analysis of audit cultures and accountability.Strathern, M. (2000). Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203449721
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 how 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 behavior in response to being observed.
History