Small Places, Large Issues
An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
(Fourth Edition)
1. Anthropology: Comparison and Context 2
2. A Brief History of Anthropology 3
3. Fieldwork and Ethnography 6
4. The Social Person 9
5. Local Organisation 11
6. Person and Society 12
7. Kinship as Descent 15
8. Marriage and Relatedness 17
9. Gender and Age 20
10. Caste and Class 23
11. Politics and Power 25
12. Exchange and Consumption 27
13. Production, Nature and Technology 31
14. Religion and Ritual 34
15. Language and Cognition 36
16. Complexity and Change 39
17. Ethnicity 42
18. Nationalism and Minorities 44
19. Anthropology and the Paradoxes of Globalisation 47
20. Public Anthropology 50
,1. Anthropology: Comparison and Context
Social and cultural anthropology has the whole of human society as its area of interest,
and tries to understand the ways in which human lives are unique, but also the sense
in which we are all similar. Anthropology tries to account for the social and cultural
variation in the world, but a crucial part of anthropological projects also consists in
conceptualising and understanding similarities between social systems and human
relationships.
Anthropologist are concern in trying to understand both connections within societies
as between societies.
An outline of the Subject
Anthropology could be translated from the Greek word ‘anthropos’ and logos’ what
means ‘human’ and ‘reason’. Anthropology: ‘Reasons about humans’ or rather
‘Knowledge about humans’.
Culture: define it as those abilities, notions and forms of behaviour persons have
acquired as members of society.
The relationship between culture and society can be described in the following way:
culture refers to the acquired, cognitive and symbolic aspects of existence, whereas
society refers to social organisation of human life, patterns of interaction and power
relationships.
The most important data collection method of an anthropologist is fieldwork.
The Universal and the Particular
Anthropological research tries to strike a balance between similarities and differences,
and theoretical issues has often revolved around the issue of universal versus
relativism.
The Problem of Ethnocentrism
A society or cultural world must be understood in its own terms. In saying this, we
warn against the application of a shared, universal scale to be used in the evaluation
of every society. For example, what is considered ‘a good life’ is culturally defined, or
to rate non-European countries by the members that go to Christian church is
irrelevant in anthropological studies.
In order to understand people’s live, it is therefore necessary to try to grasp the
totality of their experimental world; and in order to succeed in these projects, it is
inadequate to look at selected ‘isolated’ values.
Ethnocentrism: means evaluating people from one’s own vantage point and describing
them in one’s own terms (including one’s own personal values).
Rather than comparing strangers with our own society and placing ourselves on top of
an imaginary pyramid, anthropology calls for the understanding of different societies
as they appear from the inside.
Cultural relativism: is sometimes posited as the opposite of ethnocentrism. This is the
doctrine that societies or cultures are qualitatively different and have their own unique
inner logic, and that it is therefore scientifically absurd to rank them on a scale.
Cultural relativism is an indispensable and unquestionable theoretical premise and
methodological rule-of-thumb in our attempts to understand other societies in an as
unprejudiced way as possible. As an ethical principle, however, it is probably
impossible in practice, since it seems to indicate that everything is as good as
,everything else, provided it makes sense in a particular social context. Taken to its
extreme, it would ultimately lead to nihilism. For this reason it may be timely to stress
that many anthropologist are impeccable cultural relativists in their daily work, while
they may perfectly well have definite, frequently dogmatic notions about right and
wrong in their private lives.
,2. A Brief History of Anthropology
Like the other social sciences, anthropology has fairly recent origins. It developed as
an academic discipline during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but it
has important forerunners in early historiography, geography, travel writing,
philosophy, comparative linguistic and jurisprudence.
Proto-Anthropology
If anthropology is the study of cultural variation, its roots may be traced as far back in
history as the ancient Greeks. The historian Herodotos wrote detailed accounts of
‘barbarian’ peoples to the east and north of the Greek peninsula, comparing their
customs and beliefs to those of Athens.
A more credible ancestor is the Tunisian intellectual Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), a
remarkable thinker who anticipated the social sciences by several centuries. His main
work contains a wealth of observations on law, education, politics and the economy.
In Europe, scholarly interest in cultural variation and human nature re-emerged in the
following century as a consequence of the new intellectual freedom of the Renaissance
and increasing European explorations, ‘discoveries’ and conquests of distant lands.
By the end of the eighteenth century, several of the theoretical questions still raised
by anthropologist had already been formulated: universalism versus relativism,
ethnocentrism versus cultural relativism, and humanity versus (the rest of) the animal
kingdom (culture versus nature).
Victorian Anthropology
A characteristic of the anthropology of the nineteenth century was the belief in social
evolution - the idea that human societies developed in a particular direction - and the
related notion that European societies were the end-product of a long developmental
chain which began with ‘savagery’. European colonialism was cause of this theory
frequently justified. Kiplings famous words: ‘the white man’s burden’; the alleged duty
of European to ‘civilise the savages’.
Morgen -> evolutionary scheme distinguished between seven stages (from lower
savagery to civilisation) and the typology was mainly based on technological
achievements.
Edward Tylor -> Culture or Civilization, takes in it widest ethnographic sense, is that
complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, custom and any other
capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.
The quality of the ethnographic data used by the early anthropologists was variable.
Most of the scholars mentioned above relied on the written sources that were
available, ranging from missionaries’ accounts to travelogues of varying accuracy.
The emergence of modern anthropology is usually associated with four outstanding
scholars working in three countries in the early decades of the twentieth century:
Franz Boas in the USA, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski in the UK, and
Marcel Mauss in France.
Boas and Cultural Relativism
Boas -> made cultural relativism a central premise for anthropological research. He
argued that each culture had to be understood on its own terms and that it would be
scientifically misleading to judge and rank other cultures according to a Western,
ethnocentric, typology/view.
,The Two British Schools
Malinowski -> stressed the need to learn the local language properly and to engage in
everyday life in the society under scrutiny, in order to learn its categories ‘from
within’, and to understand the often subtle interconnections between the various
social institutions and cultural notions.
He did 2 years of fieldwork on the Trobiand Islands. His fieldwork wasn’t intended to be
so long, but because of World War One he couldn’t go home earlier. Because he saw
the importance of fieldwork he stressed the need for proper fieldwork.
Radcliffe-Brown -> structural-functionalism.
Social institutions are more important than individual. He hoped to develop ‘general
laws of society’. He searched for functions, tasks that need to be present in every
society (so you can find differences) for example: eating, reproduce, problem solving.
Mauss
Mauss -> Never did fieldwork (armchaired anthropologist). He wrote a series of
learned, original, compacts essays (on gift exchange, the body, sacrifice, the concept
of the person and more).
The Second Half of the Twentieth Century
The number of professional anthropologists and institutions devoted to teaching and
research in the field grew rapidly after the Second World War. The discipline also
diversified, partly because of ‘population pressure’ within the subject. New
specialisations such as psychological anthropology, political anthropology and the
anthropology of ritual emerged.
From the 1950s onwards, the end of colonialism has also affected anthropology, both
in a banal sense - it has become more difficult to obtain research permits in Third
World countries - and more profoundly as the relationship between the observer and
the observed has become problematic since the traditionally ‘observed’ peoples
increasingly have their own intellectuals and spokespersons who frequently object to
Western interpretations of their way of life.
Structuralism
(The doctrine that structure is more important than function)
The first major theory to emerge after the Second World War was Claude Lévi-
Strauss’s structuralism. An admirer of Mauss and, like him, not a major fieldworker.
Lévi-Strauss developed an original theory of the human mind, based on inspiration
from structural linguistics, Mauss’s theory of exchange and Lévy-Bruhl’s theory of the
primitive mind.
His first major work introduced a formal way of thinking about kinship, with particular
reference to systems of marriage, later he expanded his theory to cover totemism,
myth and art.
Structuralism was criticised for being untestable, positing as it did certain unprovable
and unfalsifiable properties of the human mind, but many saw Lévi-Strauss’s work,
always committed to human universals, as a major source of inspiration in the study of
symbolic systems such as knowledge and myth as well as kinship.
A rather different brand of structuralism was developed by another follower of Mauss,
namely Louis Dumont. He argues in his major work on the Indian caste system for a
holistic perspective claiming that Indians saw themselves not as ‘free individuals’ but
as actors irretrievable enmeshed in a web of commitments and social relations, which
in the Indian case was clearly hierarchical.
,Reactions to Structural-Functionalism
In Britain and the colonies, the structural functionalism now associated chiefly with
Evans-Pritchard and Fortes was under increased pressure after the was. Indeed, Evans-
Pritchard himself repudiated his former views in 1950s, arguing that the search for
‘natural laws of society’ had been shown to be futile and that anthropology should
fashion itself as a humanities discipline rather than a natural science. Retrospectively,
this shift has often been quoted as marking a shift ‘from function meaning’.
Following a different itinerary, Max Gluckman, a former pupil of Radcliffe-Browns and a
close associate of Evans-Pritchard, also increasingly abandoned the strong holist
programme of the structural-functionalists, reconceptualising social structure as a
rather loose set of constraints, while emphasising the importance of individual actors.
Neo-Evolutionism, Cultural Ecology and Neo-Marxism
The influence from the Basin cultural relativist school remains strong US anthropology
to this day, other theoretical trends have also made their mark.
Cultural ecology, largely a North American speciality, sprang from the teachings of
Steward and White, and led to some rare collaborations between anthropology and
biology.
Of the more lasting contributions, apart from the historically informed peasant studies
initiated by Steward and furthered by Eric Wolf, Sidney, Mintz and others, the French
attempt at synthesising Lévi-Straussian structuralism, Althusserian Marxism and
anthropological relativism must be mentioned here.
Although both Marxism and structuralism eventually became unfashionable, many
anthropologist continue to draw inspiration from Marxist thought.
Symbolic and Cognitive Anthropology
More true to the tenor of the Boasian legacy than the materialist approaches, studies
of cognition and symbolic systems have developed and diversified enormously in the
decades after the Second World War. A leading theorist was Clifford Geertz, who wrote
a string of influential essays advocating hermeneutics (interpretive method) in the
1960s and 1970s.
In Britisch anthropology, too, interest in meaning, symbols and cognition grew
perceptibly after the war, especially from the 1960s (partly due to the belated
discovery of Lévi-Strauss). British social anthropology had until then been strongly
sociological with the study of symbols and meaning in outstanding ways.
Although symbolic anthropology often emphasises the culturally unique and thereby
defends a relativist position, this sometimes conceals a deeper universalism. The most
influential theory in linguistics during the latter half of the twentieth century was
Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar, which stressed the similarities between all
languages.
Even strong relativist positions need a notion of the universal in order to make
comparison. This universal is ultimately located to the human mind in structuralism
and many varieties of cognitive anthropology and from this perspective, it can even be
said that the relativity of cultures is merely a surface phenomenon since the mind
works in the same way everywhere.
, 3. Fieldwork and Ethnography
Fieldwork
Anthropology distinguishes itself from other social sciences through the strong
emphasis placed on ethnographic fieldwork as the most important source of new
knowledge about society and culture. A field study may last for a few months, a year,
or even two years or more, and it aims to develop as intimate an understanding as
possible of the phenomena investigated.
Many anthropologist return to the same field throughout their career, to deepen their
understanding further and record changes.
In the Field
A principal requirement in fieldwork nonetheless consists of trying to take part in local
life as much as possible. Anthropologists also use a variety of specified, formal and
informal techniques for the collection of data. For example structural interviews,
statical sampling, Most anthropologist depend on a combination of formal techniques
and unstructured participant observation.
During participant observation one tries to immerse oneself into the life of the locals
and tries not to be noticed. The ethical guidelines nonetheless state in no uncertain
terms that it is unethical not to inform your hosts what you are up to. The people
explored have the right to refuse to be subjected to anthropological research.
The most import research instrument is the anthropologist him- or herself.
Common problems in fieldwork can be limited knowledge of the field language, gender
bias, or the fact that one’s main informants fail to be representative of the society as a
whole.
Theory and Data
The relationship between theory and empirical material, or data, is fundamental in all
empirical science, including anthropology. No science can rely on theory alone, just as
it cannot rely on pure facts: in that case, it would be unable to tell us anything
interesting. To put it differently, research has an inductive and a deductive dimension.
Inductive consist of going out the, ‘watching and wondering’, collecting information
about what people say and do. Deduction consists of attempts to account for facts by
means of a general hypothesis or research question.
The choice of an accurate, clearly delineated topic for investigation is an important
part of the preparation for fieldwork. At the very least, you should know if you are
interested in, say, resource management or child-raising before embarking on
fieldwork. Otherwise you will end up knowing too little about everything rather than
knowing enough about something.
Anthropology at Home
Anthropology has traditionally distinguished itself from sociology through (1) the
emphasis placed on participant observation and fieldwork, and (2) studying chiefly
non-industrialised societies.
For a number of reasons, fieldwork in the anthropologist’s own society or a similar one
has become much more common since the founding period of the discipline. First,
anthropology today faces a number of new challenges because of historical changes in
the world, including the dramatic transformation of ‘the tribal world’ and the forces of
globalisation - from the Internet to migration. It has become impossible to posit sharp
distinctions between ‘us’ (moderns) and ‘them’ (primitives).
Anthropology is no longer a ‘science of the tribal’ or of the ‘non-industrial world’, but it
remains a truly global science which may just as well study Internet activism in
