A Comparative Ethnography of Alternative Spaces

Political anthropology concerns the structure of political systems , looked at from the basis of the structure of societies. Political anthropology developed as a discipline concerned primarily with politics in stateless societies, a new development started from the s, and is still unfolding: The turn towards complex societies meant that political themes were taken up at two main levels.

Firstly, anthropologists continued to study political organization and political phenomena that lay outside the state-regulated sphere as in patron-client relations or tribal political organization. Secondly, anthropologists slowly started to develop a disciplinary concern with states and their institutions and on the relationship between formal and informal political institutions. An anthropology of the state developed, and it is a most thriving field today.

Geertz' comparative work on "Negara", the Balinese state, is an early, famous example. Legal anthropology or anthropology of law specializes in "the cross-cultural study of social ordering". More recent applications include issues such as human rights , legal pluralism , [53] and political uprisings. Public anthropology was created by Robert Borofsky, a professor at Hawaii Pacific University, to "demonstrate the ability of anthropology and anthropologists to effectively address problems beyond the discipline — illuminating larger social issues of our times as well as encouraging broad, public conversations about them with the explicit goal of fostering social change".

Cyborg anthropology originated as a sub-focus group within the American Anthropological Association 's annual meeting in Cyborg anthropology studies humankind and its relations with the technological systems it has built, specifically modern technological systems that have reflexively shaped notions of what it means to be human beings. Digital anthropology is the study of the relationship between humans and digital-era technology, and extends to various areas where anthropology and technology intersect. It is sometimes grouped with sociocultural anthropology , and sometimes considered part of material culture.

The field is new, and thus has a variety of names with a variety of emphases. These include techno-anthropology, [56] digital ethnography, cyberanthropology, [57] and virtual anthropology. Ecological anthropology is defined as the "study of cultural adaptations to environments". Many characterize this new perspective as more informed with culture, politics and power, globalization, localized issues, century anthropology and more.

Often, the observer has become an active part of the struggle either directly organizing, participation or indirectly articles, documentaries, books, ethnographies. Such is the case with environmental justice advocate Melissa Checker and her relationship with the people of Hyde Park. Ethnohistory is the study of ethnographic cultures and indigenous customs by examining historical records.

It is also the study of the history of various ethnic groups that may or may not exist today. Ethnohistory uses both historical and ethnographic data as its foundation. Its historical methods and materials go beyond the standard use of documents and manuscripts. Practitioners recognize the utility of such source material as maps, music, paintings, photography, folklore , oral tradition, site exploration, archaeological materials, museum collections, enduring customs, language, and place names.

The anthropology of religion involves the study of religious institutions in relation to other social institutions, and the comparison of religious beliefs and practices across cultures. Modern anthropology assumes that there is complete continuity between magical thinking and religion, [65] [n 6] and that every religion is a cultural product, created by the human community that worships it.

Urban anthropology is concerned with issues of urbanization , poverty, and neoliberalism. Ulf Hannerz quotes a s remark that traditional anthropologists were "a notoriously agoraphobic lot, anti-urban by definition". Various social processes in the Western World as well as in the " Third World " the latter being the habitual focus of attention of anthropologists brought the attention of " specialists in 'other cultures' " closer to their homes. These two methods are overlapping and dependent of each other.

By defining different types of cities, one would use social factors as well as economic and political factors to categorize the cities.

By directly looking at the different social issues, one would also be studying how they affect the dynamic of the city. Anthrozoology also known as "human—animal studies" is the study of interaction between living things. It is an interdisciplinary field that overlaps with a number of other disciplines, including anthropology, ethology , medicine, psychology , veterinary medicine and zoology.

A major focus of anthrozoologic research is the quantifying of the positive effects of human-animal relationships on either party and the study of their interactions. Biocultural anthropology is the scientific exploration of the relationships between human biology and culture. Physical anthropologists throughout the first half of the 20th century viewed this relationship from a racial perspective; that is, from the assumption that typological human biological differences lead to cultural differences.

Evolutionary anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of the evolution of human physiology and human behaviour and the relation between hominins and non-hominin primates. Evolutionary anthropology is based in natural science and social science , combining the human development with socioeconomic factors. Evolutionary anthropology is concerned with both biological and cultural evolution of humans, past and present.

It is based on a scientific approach, and brings together fields such as archaeology , behavioral ecology , psychology , primatology , and genetics. It is a dynamic and interdisciplinary field, drawing on many lines of evidence to understand the human experience, past and present. Forensic anthropology is the application of the science of physical anthropology and human osteology in a legal setting, most often in criminal cases where the victim's remains are in the advanced stages of decomposition.

A forensic anthropologist can assist in the identification of deceased individuals whose remains are decomposed, burned, mutilated or otherwise unrecognizable.

The adjective "forensic" refers to the application of this subfield of science to a court of law. Paleoanthropology combines the disciplines of paleontology and physical anthropology. It is the study of ancient humans, as found in fossil hominid evidence such as petrifacted bones and footprints. Contemporary anthropology is an established science with academic departments at most universities and colleges. The single largest organization of anthropologists is the American Anthropological Association AAA , which was founded in In , a group of European and American scholars in the field of anthropology established the European Association of Social Anthropologists EASA which serves as a major professional organization for anthropologists working in Europe.

The EASA seeks to advance the status of anthropology in Europe and to increase visibility of marginalized anthropological traditions and thereby contribute to the project of a global anthropology or world anthropology. Hundreds of other organizations exist in the various sub-fields of anthropology, sometimes divided up by nation or region, and many anthropologists work with collaborators in other disciplines, such as geology , physics , zoology , paleontology , anatomy , music theory , art history , sociology and so on, belonging to professional societies in those disciplines as well.

As the field has matured it has debated and arrived at ethical principles aimed at protecting both the subjects of anthropological research as well as the researchers themselves, and professional societies have generated codes of ethics. Anthropologists, like other researchers especially historians and scientists engaged in field research , have over time assisted state policies and projects, especially colonialism. As part of their quest for scientific objectivity , present-day anthropologists typically urge cultural relativism , which has an influence on all the sub-fields of anthropology.

There should be no notions, in good anthropology, of one culture being better or worse than another culture. Ethical commitments in anthropology include noticing and documenting genocide , infanticide , racism , mutilation including circumcision and subincision , and torture.

Topics like racism, slavery, and human sacrifice attract anthropological attention and theories ranging from nutritional deficiencies [83] to genes [84] to acculturation have been proposed, not to mention theories of colonialism and many others as root causes of Man's inhumanity to man. To illustrate the depth of an anthropological approach, one can take just one of these topics, such as "racism" and find thousands of anthropological references, stretching across all the major and minor sub-fields.

Anthropologists' involvement with the U. Franz Boas publicly objected to US participation in World War I, and after the war he published a brief expose and condemnation of the participation of several American archaeologists in espionage in Mexico under their cover as scientists. But by the s, many of Boas' anthropologist contemporaries were active in the allied war effort against the Axis Powers Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. Many served in the armed forces, while others worked in intelligence for example, Office of Strategic Services and the Office of War Information.

At the same time, David H. Price 's work on American anthropology during the Cold War provides detailed accounts of the pursuit and dismissal of several anthropologists from their jobs for communist sympathies. Attempts to accuse anthropologists of complicity with the CIA and government intelligence activities during the Vietnam War years have turned up surprisingly little. Many anthropologists students and teachers were active in the antiwar movement. Numerous resolutions condemning the war in all its aspects were passed overwhelmingly at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association AAA.

Professional anthropological bodies often object to the use of anthropology for the benefit of the state. Their codes of ethics or statements may proscribe anthropologists from giving secret briefings. The AAA's current 'Statement of Professional Responsibility' clearly states that "in relation with their own government and with host governments Anthropologists, along with other social scientists, are working with the US military as part of the US Army's strategy in Afghanistan.

In summary, while we stress that constructive engagement between anthropology and the military is possible, CEAUSSIC suggests that the AAA emphasize the incompatibility of HTS with disciplinary ethics and practice for job seekers and that it further recognize the problem of allowing HTS to define the meaning of "anthropology" within DoD. After the war, enough British and American anthropologists borrowed ideas and methodological approaches from one another that some began to speak of them collectively as 'sociocultural' anthropology.

There are several characteristics that tend to unite anthropological work. One of the central characteristics is that anthropology tends to provide a comparatively more holistic account of phenomena and tends to be highly empirical. In the s and s, calls for clarification of what constitutes a culture, of how an observer knows where his or her own culture ends and another begins, and other crucial topics in writing anthropology were heard.

These dynamic relationships, between what can be observed on the ground, as opposed to what can be observed by compiling many local observations remain fundamental in any kind of anthropology, whether cultural, biological, linguistic or archaeological. Biological anthropologists are interested in both human variation [94] [95] and in the possibility of human universals behaviors, ideas or concepts shared by virtually all human cultures.

Along with dividing up their project by theoretical emphasis, anthropologists typically divide the world up into relevant time periods and geographic regions.

Human time on Earth is divided up into relevant cultural traditions based on material, such as the Paleolithic and the Neolithic , of particular use in archaeology. By making comparisons across cultural traditions time-based and cultural regions space-based , anthropologists have developed various kinds of comparative method , a central part of their science. Because anthropology developed from so many different enterprises see History of anthropology , including but not limited to fossil-hunting , exploring , documentary film-making, paleontology , primatology , antiquity dealings and curatorship, philology , etymology , genetics , regional analysis, ethnology , history, philosophy , and religious studies , [98] [99] it is difficult to characterize the entire field in a brief article, although attempts to write histories of the entire field have been made.

Inquiries Toward an Urban Anthropology mentions that the " Third World " had habitually received most of attention; anthropologists who traditionally specialized in "other cultures" looked for them far away and started to look "across the tracks" only in late s. Now there exist many works focusing on peoples and topics very close to the author's "home". Since the s it has become common for social and cultural anthropologists to set ethnographic research in the North Atlantic region, frequently examining the connections between locations rather than limiting research to a single locale.

There has also been a related shift toward broadening the focus beyond the daily life of ordinary people; increasingly, research is set in settings such as scientific laboratories, social movements, governmental and nongovernmental organizations and businesses. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article is about anthropology in the 20th and 21st centuries. For earlier development, see History of anthropology. For other uses, see Anthropology disambiguation.

The science of human behavior and societies. Archaeological Biological Cultural Linguistic Social. Actor—network theory Alliance theory Cross-cultural studies Cultural materialism Culture theory Diffusionism Feminism Historical particularism Boasian anthropology Functionalism Interpretive Performance studies Political economy Practice theory Structuralism Post-structuralism Systems theory.

Anthropologists by nationality Anthropology by year Bibliography Journals List of indigenous peoples Organizations. Cultural anthropology , Social anthropology , and Sociocultural anthropology. List of indigenous peoples. Color symbolism Visual culture Body culture Material culture New media. Hunting-gathering Pastoralism Nomadic pastoralism Shifting cultivation Moral economy Peasant economics. Original affluent society Formalist vs substantivist debate The Great Transformation Peasant economics Culture of poverty Political economy State formation Nutritional anthropology Heritage commodification Anthropology of development.

Political economy in anthropology. Murray Michelle Rosaldo David M. Social Bonding and Nurture Kinship. Health Culture-bound syndrome Double bind. Nutritional anthropology Psychological anthropology Cognitive anthropology Transpersonal anthropology Ethnomedicine Clinical ethnography Critical medical anthropology Cross-cultural psychiatry Person-centered ethnography Society for Medical Anthropology National character studies Syndemic.

Thomas Lawson Robert I. Circumscription theory Legal anthropology Left—right paradigm State formation Political economy in anthropology Network Analysis and Ethnographic Problems. Adamson Hoebel Georges Balandier F. Cultural ecology Cyborg anthropology Digital anthropology Ecological anthropology Environmental anthropology Political ecology Science, technology and society. Augustin Calmet Akbar S. Archaeological and Biological anthropology.

Outline of anthropology Anthropological science fiction Christian anthropology , a sub-field of theology Engaged theory Ethnobiology Human ethology Human Relations Area Files Intangible cultural heritage List of anthropologists Memetics Origins of society Philosophical anthropology , a sub-field of philosophy Prehistoric medicine Qualitative research. This part of History is named Anthropology. Previous organizations used other names. The German Anthropological Association of St.

Petersburg, however, in fact met first in , but due to the death of its founder never met again. We have no empirical evidence at all that there ever was an age of magic that has been followed and superseded by an age of religion. Retrieved 10 August Retrieved 23 March First Anthropologist review ".

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The Rise of Anthropological Theory.

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Peter Hammer Verlag Gmbh. A guide to a new interdisciplinary field. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics. Human—Animal Studies Across the Disciplines. Archived from the original on 25 June Retrieved 23 February Building A New Biocultural Synthesis. University of Michigan Press. The Study of Ethnomusicology. University of Illinois Press. Retrieved 18 June Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches. Times Higher Education The State of the Science.

International Institute for Human Evolutionary Research. American Journal of Physical Anthropology. Archived from the original on 21 January The remaking of social analysis. The Anthropology of Globalization. Introduction to Physical Anthropology. Anthropological Universality and Particularity in Transciplinary Perspectives. Walter de Gruyter Publishing. A History of Anthropological Theory. University of Wisconsin Press.

Man, Mind and Science: A History of Anthropology. See also Prem Poddar et al. Assessing New Directions in the Field". Barnard, Alan; Spencer, Jonathan, eds. The dictionary of anthropology. Levinson, David; Ember, Melvin, eds. Rapport, Nigel; Overing, Joanna Social and Cultural Anthropology: Translated from the French by John Russell.

A diary in the strict sense of the term. Translated by Norbert Guterman. Letters from the field, — Further information on the Library's opening hours is available at: A comparative ethnography of alternative spaces. Request this item to view in the Library's reading rooms using your library card. To learn more about how to request items watch this short online video. You can view this on the NLA website. New search User lists Site feedback Ask a librarian Help.

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