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Social Anthropology: Culture
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The term social anthropology is particularly associated with European, especially British, studies; it can be contrasted with the term cultural anthropology, which is associated with the United States. The focus of social anthropology is on patterns of social interaction and understanding society. Cultural anthropology examines culture, that is, learnt and transmitted beliefs and standards of behaviour, and, in particular, meanings, values, and codes of conduct. It could be described as the study of culture in its social context. However, culture and society are interdependent, and today the single term 'sociocultural anthropology' is sometimes used.
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Cultural anthropology... called [S]ocial anthropology or socio-cultural anthropology, forms one of four commonly-recognized fields of anthropology, the holistic study of humanity. It is the branch of anthropology that has developed and promoted "culture" as a meaningful scientific concept; it is also the branch of anthropology that studies cultural variation among humans. The anthropological concept of "culture" reflects in part a reaction against earlier Western discourses based on an opposition between "culture" and "nature", according to which some human beings lived in a "state of nature". Anthropologists argue that culture is "human nature," and that all people have a capacity to classify experiences, encode classifications symbolically, and teach such abstractions to others.
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MIT Anthropology students learn about the concept of culture, the nature of anthropological fieldwork, and the connections between anthropology and the other social sciences. They study the various theories that attempt to explain human behavior as well as the range of methods anthropologists use to analyze data. Students can focus on geographical areas, and on issues like neocolonialism, gender studies, religion and symbolism, or comparative political organization.
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Today, social anthropology shares with cultural anthropology a number of sub-fields, each concerned with a particular type of activity that is examined cross-culturally (through comparing different societies and cultures) and in its relationship to other institutions and social activities. They include the study of belief systems; sociolinguistics; economic anthropology; political anthropology; gender; medical anthropology; race and ethnicity; and social and economic development. The importance given to symbolism and meaning has led to anthropologies of the body and of the person, which are concerned with how these concepts differ in different cultures. Some of these sub-fields are ... shared with sociology. The study of kinship systems, which has its origin in the work of the 19th-century American Lewis Henry Morgan, remains the only anthropological field shared with no other discipline.
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Social-cultural Anthropology traditionally dealt with kinship, political economy and other social dimensions of non-literate, non-western and often isolated communities which could be observed in their totality. Today, many social anthropologists ... study "western" culture and such aspects of complex societies as gender, sexuality, peasantry, ethnic minorities, and industrial work groups.
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In British anthropology, the creation of a distinct discipline of social anthropology is associated with A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. He and his contemporary Bronislaw Malinowski are together credited with changing the nature of British anthropology, which, under the influence of Radcliffe-Brown’s theoretical approach, became sociological. Previously, its focus was on culture, and various kinds of historical explanation were prominent. The earliest explanations were evolutionary, a product of the 19th-century concern with theories of evolution. When the limitations of this approach, as applied in early anthropology, became evident, it tended to be replaced by another historical approach, which stressed the transmission of cultural items between peoples. Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski rejected such explanations as speculative, and British anthropology in the inter-war years became characterized by an anti-historical attitude.
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