Anthropology: Schools of Thought , Theorists, & Methods

From Reader's Guide to the Social Sciences
Described by Edward Burnett Tyler as the belief that natural phenomena, such as climatic phenomena, or rocks and stones, could possess some kind of “spirit” or life force so that the apparently lifeless material world was actually animated by a host of unseen and supernatural forces.

From Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought
Diffusionism is the term used by anthropologists and sociologists to account for the spread, through time, of aspects of culture—artistic traditions, language, music, myths, religious beliefs, social organization, technological ideas—from one society or group to another.

From Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought
Evolutionism is a movement in anthropology and sociology which was much in vogue in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It refers to theories of change in which development is seen to go through stages of increasing complexity and diversification. It is closely related to the idea of progress and technology, which is most prevalent in capitalist society.

From Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Broadly speaking, ‘functionalism’ refers to a range of theories in the human sciences, all of which provide explanations of phenomena in terms of the function, or purpose, they purportedly serve.

From Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought.
It developed out of two motives: the need to evaluate anthropology's historical relationship with colonialism, arising out of a discontent with earlier functionalist paradigms for the study of societies; and to conduct social enquiry with a greater sense of political and economic perspectives.

In general, the postmodern view is cool, ironic, and accepting of the fragmentation of contemporary existence. It tends to concentrate on surfaces rather than depths, to blur the distinctions between high and low culture, and as a whole to challenge a wide variety of traditional cultural values.

From Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought
Primitivism, in anthropology, refers to a body of thought that there exist remote and exotic ‘primitive’: peoples whose lifestyles and technologies are considered to show marked contrast to those of modern societies.

From Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
"Cultural relativism," to most western anthropologists, is a combination of two notions: first, that behavioral differences between various populations of people are the result of cultural (sometimes societal) variation rather than anything else; and, second, that such differences are deserving of respect and understanding in their own terms.

From Reader's Guide to the Social Sciences
Structuralism is the approach which seeks to isolate, and decode, deep structures of meaning, organised through systems of signs inherent in human behaviour (language, ritual, dress and so on).

From Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought
Anthropologists use the word syncretism to describe the general cultural changes which result when different cultural traditions appear to be blended together.

From Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought
Claude Lévi-Strauss developed the idea that totemism resulted from a universal mode of human classification that created homologies between the natural and cultural spheres. The important factor was not the way an individual totem related to an individual clan, but how relationships between totems reflected relations between social groups.

Ruth Benedict originated the controversial concept of patterns of culture, which combined anthropology with sociology, psychology, and philosophy. In her 1934 book Patterns of Culture, Benedict proposed her holistic theory of culture to explain why certain personalities and types were valued in one society while discouraged in another. In an era of fascism, racism, and ethnic stereotyping for political purposes, Benedict's theory was controversial because it called for judging each culture only on its own merits and values, and argued that no culture should be forced to conform to the standards or values of another.

Boas greatly influenced American anthropology, particularly in his development of the theoretical framework known as cultural relativism, which argued against the evolutionary scale leading from savagery to Culture, laid out by his 19th-century predecessors.

From Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Blending the theoretical framework of A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (and E. Durkheim) with the detailed ethnographic empiricism of B. Malinowski, E.E. Evans-Pritchard was the most significant figure in the foundation of modern social anthropology.

From Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology
He produced an ethnographic record unsurpassed in its subtlety and precision of detail. He considered fieldwork to be an ‘empirical discipline’; a science in which it was essential to distinguish between the actor and the observer’s point of view.

From Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology
In the wake of The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), and its sister volume of collected papers, Local Knowledge (1983), Clifford Geertz became celebrated for initiating an interpretive revolution across disciplines, which shifted the focus of anthropological study from structure to meaning.

From Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Alfred Cort Haddon is best known for two contributions to early British anthropology: his leadership of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Strait in 1898–9 and his efforts to institutionalise anthropology as a discipline in the UK.

From Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Marvin Harris has been one of the most important scholars of cultural anthropology over the course of decades. He supported and developed theories of the so-called cultural materialism.

He helped to formulate the principles of structuralism by stressing the interdependence of cultural systems and the way they relate to each other, maintaining that social and cultural life can be explained by a postulated unconscious reality concealed behind the reality by which people believe their lives to be ordered.

From Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Malinowski treated culture as an instrumental reality and emphasised its derivation from human needs, from the basic universal needs of the individual organism to the highly elaborated and often specialised needs of a complex society.

US anthropologist who established the practice of fieldwork in anthropology and – with her account of adolescence in Samoa – popularized the idea within her own country that there are alternatives to the American way of life.

From Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Radcliffe-Brown, along with Bronislaw Malinowski, is credited as a co-founder of the functionalist school of anthropology—and in Radcliffe-Brown’s case the structural-functionalist branch of that school.

From Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
As a written account, an ethnography focuses on a particular population, place and time with the deliberate goal of describing it to others.

From Key Concepts in Ethnography
A case study investigates a few cases, or often just one case, in considerable depth. In ethnography, case studies are used in various ways to illuminate themes or draw inferences.

From Key Concepts in Ethnography
Coding is a euphemism for the sorting and labelling which is part of the process of analysis.

From Key Concepts in Social Research
Reflexivity is the practice of researchers being self-aware of their own beliefs, values and attitudes, and their personal effects on the setting they have studied, and self-critical about their research methods and how they have been applied, so that the evaluation and understanding of their research findings, both by themselves and their audience, may be facilitated and enhanced.

From Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
There is a troubled relationship between the representation of anthropological fieldwork and the actuality of any particular fieldwork. In sober fact, fieldwork can take as many forms as there are anthropologists, projects, and circumstances.

From The A-Z of Social Research
Content analysis involves the description and analysis of text in order to represent its content. This takes the form of enumeration, such as counting the frequency of words and the number of column inches, and more qualitative assessment of the words and terms used, as undertaken in certain forms of discourse analysis.

From Key Concepts in Ethnography
Fieldnotes are the written record of the observations, jottings, full notes, intellectual ideas, and emotional reflections that are created during the fieldwork process.

From Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
The method required extensive interviewing of named individuals in order to: (1) collect vital statistics among a non-literate population, and (2) record their pedigrees, which reflected rights and responsibilities relating primarily to descent, succession, and inheritance.

From The A-Z of Social Research
Interviews are one of the most widely used and abused research methods. They provide a way of generating data by asking people to talk about their everyday lives. Their main function is to provide a framework in which respondents can express their own thoughts in their own words.

From Key Concepts in Ethnography
Participant observation is the main method of ethnography and involves taking part as a member of a community while making mental and then written, theoretically informed observations.