Cultural Anthropology Contemporary Public and Critical Readings Ebook

Cultural Anthropology Definition

Cultural anthropology is the written report of human patterns of idea and behavior, and how and why these patterns differ, in contemporary societies. Cultural anthropology is sometimes called social anthropology, sociocultural anthropology, or ethnology. Cultural anthropology also includes pursuits such as ethnography, ethnohistory, and cross-cultural inquiry.

Cultural anthropology is one of the 4 subdisciplines of anthropology. The other subdisciplines include biological anthropology, archaeology, and linguistic anthropology. Some anthropologists include a fifth subdiscipline, applied anthropology, although other anthropologists meet practical anthropology as an approach that crosscuts traditional subdisciplinary boundaries rather than as a subdiscipline itself. In the U.s.a., the subfields tend to exist unified: Departments of anthropology include all of the sub-fields within their bookish structures. In Europe, withal, subdisciplines oftentimes reside in different academic departments. These differences between American and European anthropology are due more to historical than philosophical differences in how the discipline developed.

The key organizing concept of cultural anthropology is culture, which is ironic given that culture is largely an abstraction that is difficult to measure and even more hard to ascertain, given the loftier number of unlike definitions of the concept that populate anthropology textbooks. Despite over a century of anthropology, the most normally used definition of anthropology is Edward Burnett Tylor'south, who in 1871 defined culture as "that complex whole that includes noesis, conventionalities, fine art, law, morals, custom, and whatsoever other capabilities and habits acquired past [humans] every bit members of a society."

Tylor'due south definition is resonant with contemporary anthropologists considering it points to some important, universally agreed-upon aspects of culture, even though it does not satisfactorily ascertain what culture is. Teachers of cultural anthropology often cite civilisation every bit a constellation of features that piece of work together to guide the thoughts and behaviors of individuals and groups of humans. Aspects of civilisation ofttimes seen in introductory classes include: (1) Culture is usually shared by a population or grouping of individuals; (two) cultural patterns of behavior are learned, caused, and internalized during childhood; (three) culture is generally adaptive, enhancing survival and promoting successful reproduction; and (four) culture is integrated, meaning that the traits that brand up a detail cultural are internally consistent with i another.

Nevertheless, anthropologists differ greatly in how they might refine their own definition of the civilisation concept. Anthropologists as well differ in how they approach the written report of culture. Some anthropologists begin with the observation that since culture is an brainchild that exists only in the minds of people in a particular society, which we cannot directly notice, civilization must be studied through human beliefs, which we can observe. Such an approach is oftentimes termed an objective, empiricist, or scientific arroyo and sometimes called an etic perspective. By etic, anthropologists mean that our understanding of civilisation is based upon the perspective of the observer, not those who are really being studied.

Other anthropologists, while recognizing that culture is an abstraction and is difficult to measure, withal hold that a worthy goal of anthropologists is to understand the structure of ideas and meanings every bit they be in the minds of members of a item civilisation. Such an approach is often labeled subjective, rationalist, or humanistic, and sometimes called an emic approach. By emic, anthropologists mean that the central goal of the anthropologist is to empathise how culture is lived and experienced by its members.

Although these two approaches accept quite unlike emphases, cultural anthropologists have traditionally recognized the importance of both styles of investigation as disquisitional to the report of culture, although nearly anthropologists work only within one style.

How Cultural Anthropology Differs From Folklore

In many colleges and universities in the Usa, sociology and anthropology are included under the same umbrella and exist equally articulation departments. This wedlock is non without justification, every bit cultural anthropology and folklore share a similar theoretical and philosophical ancestry. In what ways is cultural anthropology unlike?

Cultural anthropology is unique considering its history equally a discipline lies in a focus on exploration of the "Other." That is, the anthropologists of the 19th century took a swell interest in the lives and customs of people not descended from Europeans. The first anthropologists, Due east. B. Tylor and Sir James Frazer among them, relied mostly on the reports of explorers, missionaries, traders, and colonial officials and are commonly known as "armchair anthropologists." It was not long, however, before travel effectually the globe to directly engage in the investigation of other homo societies became the norm. The development of cultural anthropology is directly tied to the colonial era of the late 19th and early on 20th centuries.

The late 19th century was an era in which evolutionary theory dominated the nascent social sciences. The armchair anthropologists of the period were not immune from the dominant image, and even scholars like Lewis Henry Morgan, who worked extensively and directly with American Indians, developed complicated typologies of cultural evolution, grading known cultures according to their technological accomplishments and the sophistication of their material culture. As is to exist expected, Europeans were invariably civilized, with others categorized as existence somewhat or extremely primitive in comparing. It was merely every bit anthropologists began to investigate the presumably primitive societies that were known only through hearsay or incomplete reports that it was realized that such typologies were wildly inaccurate.

In the United States, the evolution of anthropology equally a field-based discipline was driven largely by westward expansion. An important part of westward expansion was the pacification and extermination of the indigenous Native American cultures that in one case dominated the continent. By the late 1870s, the Bureau of American Ethnology was sponsoring trips by trained scholars, charged with recording the life-ways of American Indian tribes that were believed to exist on the verge of extinction. This "relieve ethnology" formed the basis of American anthropology and led to of import works such equally James Mooney's Ghost Dance Organized religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, published in 1896, and Edward Nelson's The Eskimo near Bering Strait, published in 1899.

In Britain, some of the earliest investigations of aboriginal peoples were conducted by West. H. R. Rivers, C. Yard. Seligmann, Alfred Haddon, and John Meyers, members of the 1898 trek to the Torres Straits. The expedition was a voyage of exploration on behalf of the British government, and for the anthropologists it was an opportunity to document the lives of the indigenous peoples of the region. This work later inspired Rivers to return to the Torres Straits in 1901 to 1902 to conduct more than extensive fieldwork with the Toda. By the 1920s, scientific expeditions to remote corners of the world to certificate the cultures of the inhabitants, geology, and ecology of the region were commonplace. Many of these expeditions, such equally the Steffansson-Anderson Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913 to 1918, have since proven invaluable, as they recorded the cultures of people only recently in con-tact with the European societies that would forever alter them.

Cultural anthropology, therefore, has its roots as a colonial enterprise, one of specializing in the study of small, simple, "primitive" societies. This is, however, not an accurate description of contemporary cultural anthropology. Many anthropologists today piece of work inside complex societies. Merely the anthropology of complex societies is withal much different than sociology. The history of working inside pocket-size-scale, isolated cultural settings as well led to the development of a particular methodology that is unique to cultural anthropology.

The fieldwork experiences of anthropologists of the late 19th and early on 20th centuries were critical for the development of anthropology every bit a rigorous, scientific subject area. How does an outsider accurately describe cultural practices and an understanding of the significance of those practices for members of the culture studied? Achieving these goals meant living with and participating in the lives of the people in the report culture. It is this residue betwixt careful observation and participation in the lives of a group of people that has become the cornerstone of modernistic cultural anthropology.

Called participant observation, the method is the means past which well-nigh of an anthropologist'southward information most a lodge is obtained. Anthropologists often use other methods of data collection, but participant observation is the sole ways by which anthropologists tin can generate both emic and etic understandings of a culture.

There are, withal, no straightforward guidelines almost how one actually goes virtually doing participant observation. Cultural settings, personal idiosyncrasies, and personality characteristics all ensure that fieldwork and participant observation are unique experiences. All anthropologists agree that fieldwork is an intellectually and emotionally demanding exercise, especially considering that fieldwork traditionally lasts for a year, and often longer. Participant ascertainment is as well fraught with problems. Finding the balance between discrete ascertainment and engaged participation can exist extremely difficult. How does i balance the two at the funeral of a person who is both key informant and friend, for case? For these reasons, the fieldwork feel is an intense rite of passage for anthropologists starting out in the discipline. Non surprisingly, the intense nature of the fieldwork experience has generated a large literature near the nature of fieldwork itself.

Office of the reason for lengthy fieldwork stays was due to a number of factors, including the difficulty of reaching a field site and the need to acquire competence in the local language. However, as information technology has become possible to travel to the remotest corners of the globe with relative ease, and as anthropologists pursue opportunities to study obscure languages increasingly taught in large universities, and every bit information technology is more difficult to secure inquiry funding, field experiences have by and large go shorter. Some anthropologists take abandoned traditional participant observation in favor of highly focused research issues and archival research, made possible especially in areas where significant "traditional" ethnographic field-work has been done.

A second research strategy that separates cultural anthropology from other disciplines is holism. Holism is the search for systematic relationships between two or more phenomena. One of the advantages of lengthy periods of fieldwork and participant observation is that the anthropologist can brainstorm to see interrelationships betwixt unlike aspects of culture. One case might be the discovery of a relationship between ecological conditions, subsistence patterns, and social organization. The holistic arroyo allows for the documentation of systematic relationships betwixt these variables, thus assuasive for the eventual unraveling of the importance of various relationships within the arrangement, and, ultimately, toward an understanding of general principles and the construction of theory.

In practical terms, holism besides refers to a kind of multifaceted arroyo to the report of civilisation. Anthropologists working in a specific cultural setting typically acquire data about topics non necessarily of firsthand importance, or even interest, for the research project at paw. However, anthropologists, when describing the civilization they are working with, will ofttimes include discussions of culture history, linguistics, political and economical systems, settlement patterns, and religious ideology. Just as anthropologists become proficient at balancing emic and etic approaches in their work, they also go experts nearly a particular theoretical trouble, for which the civilisation provides a good testing ground, and they become experts about the cultural area, having been immersed in the politics, history, and social science of the region itself.

History of Cultural Anthropology

The earliest historical roots of cultural anthropology are in the writings of Herodotus (fifth century BCE), Marco Polo (c. 1254-c. 1324), and Ibn Khaldun (1332—1406), people who traveled extensively and wrote reports about the cultures they encountered. More recent contributions come from writers of the French Enlightenment, such equally eighteenth century French philosopher Charles Montesquieu (1689-1755). His book, Spirit of the Laws, published in 1748, discussed the temperament, appearance, and authorities of non-European people effectually the globe. Information technology explained differences in terms of the varying climates in which people lived.

The mid- and late nineteenth century was an important time for science in full general. Influenced by Darwin's writings about species' development, three founding figures of cultural anthropology were Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) in the United States, and Edward Tylor (1832-1917) and James Frazer (1854-1941) in England. The three men supported a concept of cultural evolution, or cumulative change in culture over fourth dimension leading to improvement, as the explanation for cultural differences around the world. A primary distinction in cultures was between Euro-American culture ("civilisation") and non-Western peoples ("primitive"). This distinction is maintained today in how many N American museums identify European art and artifacts in mainstream art museums, while the art and artifacts of non-Western peoples are placed in museums of natural history.

The cultural evolutionists generated models of progressive stages for diverse aspects of culture. Morgan's model of kinship development proposed that early forms of kinship centered on women with inheritance passing through the female person line, while more than evolved forms centered on men with inheritance passing through the male line. Frazer'south model of the development of belief systems posited that magic, the most archaic stage, is replaced by religion in early civilizations which in plough is replaced by science in advanced civilizations. These models of cultural development were unilinear (following one path), simplistic, often based on little evidence, and ethnocentric in that they always placed European civilization at the apex. Influenced by Darwinian thinking, the three men believed that later forms of civilization are inevitably superior and that early forms either evolve into later forms or else disappear.

Nigh nineteenth century thinkers were "armchair anthropologists," a nickname for scholars who learned most other cultures by reading reports of travelers, missionaries, and explorers. On the ground of readings, the armchair anthropologist wrote books that compiled findings on particular topics, such as faith. Thus, they wrote virtually faraway cultures without the benefit of personal experience with the people living in those cultures. Morgan stands out, in his era, for diverging from the armchair approach. Morgan spent substantial amounts of time with the Iroquois people of central New York. One of his major contributions to anthropology is the finding that "other" cultures make sense if they are understood through interaction with and direct observation of people rather than reading reports about them. This insight of Morgan's is now a permanent part of anthropology, being firmly established by Bronislaw Malinowski (18841942).

Malinowski is more often than not considered the "father" of the cornerstone research method in cultural anthropology: participant observation during fieldwork. He established a theoretical approach called functionalism, the view that a culture is similar to a biological organism wherein various parts piece of work to support the operation and maintenance of the whole. In this view a kinship system or religious organisation contributes to the functioning of the whole civilisation of which it is a function. Functionalism is linked to the concept of holism, the perspective that ane must study all aspects of a culture in club to sympathise the whole civilization.

The "Father" of 4-Field Anthropology

Another major figure of the early twentieth century is Franz Boas (1858-1942), the "father" of North American iv-field anthropology. Born in Germany and educated in physics and geography, Boas came to the Us in 1887. He brought with him a skepticism toward Western science gained from a year's report amidst the Innu, indigenous people of Baffin Island, Canada. He learned from that experience the of import lesson that a physical substance such every bit "water" is perceived in dissimilar ways by people of different cultures. Boas, in contrast to the cultural evolutionists, recognized the equal value of dissimilar cultures and said that no culture is superior to any other. He introduced the concept of cultural relativism: the view that each civilisation must be understood in terms of the values and ideas of that culture and must not be judged past the standards of some other. Boas promoted the detailed report of individual cultures inside their own historical contexts, an arroyo chosen historical particularism. In Boas'due south view, wide generalizations and universal statements virtually civilization are inaccurate and invalid because they ignore the realities of individual cultures.

Boas contributed to the growth and professionalization of anthropology in North America. Equally a professor at Columbia Academy, he hired faculty and built the department. Boas trained many students who became prominent anthropologists, including Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. He founded several professional associations in cultural anthropology and archæology. He supported the development of anthropology museums.

Boas was involved in public advancement and his socially progressive philosophy embroiled him in controversy. He published articles in newspapers and popular magazines opposing the U.S. entry into World War I (1914-1918), a position for which the American Anthropological Association formally censured him equally "united nations-American." Boas likewise publicly denounced the role of anthropologists who served as spies in Mexico and Primal America for the U.S. authorities during World War I. One of his nearly renowned studies, commissioned by President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), was to examine the effects of the environment (in the sense of i'south location) on immigrants and their children. He and his research squad measured height, weight, head size and other features of over 17,000 people and their children who had migrated to the U.s.a.. Results showed substantial differences in measurements between the older and younger generations. Boas concluded that body size and shape can change quickly in response to a new ecology context; in other words, some of people's physical characteristics are culturally shaped rather than biologically ("racially") determined.

Boas' legacy to anthropology includes his evolution of the field of study as a 4-field try, his theoretical concepts of cultural relativism and historical particularism, his critique of the view that biological science is destiny, his anti-racist and other advocacy writings, and his ethical stand that anthropologists should not do undercover research.

Several students of Boas, including Mead and Benedict, developed what is called the "Culture and Personality School." Anthropologists who were role of this intellectual tendency documented cultural variation in modal personality and the role of kid-rearing in shaping adult personality. Both Mead and Benedict, along with several other U.Southward. anthropologists, made their knowledge bachelor to the authorities during and following Earth War Two (1939-1945). Benedict's classic 1946 volume, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword was influential in shaping U.S. armed forces policies in post-state of war Japan and in behavior toward the Japanese people during the occupation. Mead as well, offered advice about the cultures of the South Pacific to the U.S. military occupying the region.

The Expansion of Cultural Anthropology

In the second half of the twentieth century cultural anthropology in the The states expanded substantially in the number of trained anthropologists, departments of anthropology in colleges and universities, and students taking anthropology courses and seeking anthropology degrees at the bachelor's, master's, and doctoral level. Along with these increases came more theoretical and topical diversity.

Cultural ecology emerged during the 1960s and 1970s. Anthropologists working in this expanse adult theories to explain cultural similarity and variation based on environmental factors. These anthopologists said that similar environments (e.yard., deserts, tropical rainforests, or mountains) would predictably lead to the emergence of similar cultures. Because this approach sought to formulate cross-cultural predictions and generalizations, it stood in clear dissimilarity to Boasian historical particularism.

At the same fourth dimension, French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (b. 1908) developed a dissimilar theoretical perspective influenced past linguistics and called structuralism. Structuralism is an analytical method based on the belief that the all-time way to learn about a civilisation is past analyzing its myths and stories to discover the themes, or basic units of meaning, embedded in them. The themes typically are binary opposites such equally life and death, dark and light, male and female. In the view of French structuralism these oppositions constitute an unconsciously understood, underlying structure of the culture itself. Levi-Strauss nerveless hundreds of myths from native peoples of S America as sources for learning most their cultures. He besides used structural analysis in the estimation of kinship systems and art forms such equally the masks of Northwest Coast Indians. In the 1960s and 1970s French structuralism began to attract attention of anthropologists in the United States and has had a lasting influence on anthropologists of a more humanistic bent.

Descended loosely from these two contrasting theoretical perspectives—cultural environmental and French structuralism—are two important approaches in contemporary cultural anthropology. One approach, descended from cultural environmental, is cultural materialism. Cultural materialism, as defined by its leading theorist Marvin Harris (1927-2001), takes a Marxist-inspired position that understanding a culture should be pursued kickoff by examining the material conditions in which people live: the natural environment and how people make a living within particular environments. Having established understanding of the "material" base of operations (or infrastructure), attention may then be turned to other aspects of culture, including social organisation (how people live together in groups, or structure) and ideology (people's style of thinking and their symbols, or superstructure). Ane of Harris' nearly famous examples of a cultural materialist approach is his analysis of the material importance of the sacred cows of Hindu Republic of india. Harris demonstrates the many material benefits of cows, from their plowing roles to the use of their dried dung as cooking fuel and their utility as street-cleaning scavengers, underlay and are ideologically supported by the religious ban on cow slaughter and protection of even old and disabled cows.

The second approach in cultural anthropology, descended from French structuralism and symbolic anthropology, is interpretive anthropology or intepretivism. This perspective, championed past Clifford Geertz (1926-2006), says that understanding civilization is first and foremost about learning what people remember about, their ideas, and the symbols and meanings important to them. In contrast to cultural materialism'due south accent on economic and political factors and beliefs, interpretivists focus on webs of significant. They treat civilization every bit a text that can simply be understood from the inside of the culture, in its own terms, an approach interpretivists refer to as "feel well-nigh" anthropology, in other words, learning about a civilization through the perspectives of the study population as possible. Geertz contributed the concept of "thick description" as the best manner for anthropologists to present their findings; in this manner, the anthropologist serves equally a medium for transferring the richness of a civilisation through detailed notes and other recordings with minimal analysis.

Late Twentieth and Turn of Century Growth

Starting in the 1980s, several additional theoretical perspectives and research domains emerged in cultural anthropology. Feminist anthropology arose in reaction to the lack of anthropological inquiry on female roles. In its formative stage, feminist anthropology focused on culturally embedded discrimination against women and girls. As feminist anthropology evolved, it looked at how attention to human agency and resistance within contexts of hierarchy and discrimination sheds light on complexity and modify. In a similar fashion, gay and lesbian anthropology, or "queer anthropology," has exposed the marginalization of gay and lesbian sexuality and culture in previous anthropology research and seeks to correct that state of affairs.

Members of other minority groups vocalisation parallel concerns. African American anthropologists have critiqued mainstream cultural anthropology equally suffering from embedded racism in the topics it studies, how it is taught to students, and its exclusion of minorities from positions of ability and influence. This critique has produced recommendations well-nigh how to build a non-racist anthropology. Progress is occurring, with one notable positive change beingness the increase in trained anthropologists from minority groups and other excluded groups, and their ascension visibility and impact on the enquiry calendar, textbook contents, and futurity direction of the field.

Another of import tendency is increased communication among cultural anthropologists worldwide and growing sensation of the diversity of cultural anthropology in different settings. Non-Western anthropologists are contesting the say-so of Euro-American anthropology and offering new perspectives. In many cases, these anthropologists deport native anthropology, or the report of one's own cultural group. Their work provides useful critiques of the historically Western, white, male person discipline of anthropology.

At the plow of the twenty-first century, two theoretical approaches became prominent and link together many other diverse perspectives, such equally feminist anthropology, economic anthropology, and medical anthropology. The two approaches have grown from the earlier perspectives of cultural materialism and French structuralism, respectively. Both are influenced by postmodernism, an intellectual pursuit that asks whether modernity is truly progress and questions such aspects of modernism every bit the scientific method, urbanization, technological change, and mass communication.

The first approach is termed structurism, which is an expanded political economic system framework. Structurism examines how powerful structures such as economics, politics, and media shape culture and create and maintain entrenched systems of inequality and oppression. James Scott, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Paul Farmer are pursuing this direction of work. Many anthropologists utilise terms such as social suffering or structural violence to refer to the forms and furnishings of historically and structural embedded inequalities that crusade excess illness, expiry, violence, and hurting.

The second theoretical and research emphasis, derived to some extent from interpretivism, is on human agency, or free will, and the power of individuals to create and change civilisation by acting against structures. Many anthropologists avoid the credible dichotomy in these two approaches and seek to combine a structurist framework with attention to human agency.

The Concept of Culture

Culture is the cadre concept in cultural anthropology, and thus information technology might seem likely that cultural anthropologists would concur well-nigh what it is. Consensus may have been the case in the early on days of the discipline when in that location were far fewer anthropologists. Edward B. Tylor (1832-1917), a British anthropologist, proposed the first anthropological definition of culture in 1871. He said that "Culture, or culture … is that complex whole which includes knowledge, conventionalities, fine art, police force, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits caused by human being as a member of society" (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952, p. 81). Past the 1950s, still, an effort to collect definitions of civilization produced 164 different definitions. Since that time no one has tried to count the number of definitions of culture used by anthropologists.

In contemporary cultural anthropology, the theoretical positions of the cultural materialists and the interpretive anthropologists correspond to two dissimilar definitions of culture. Cultural materialist Marvin Harris defines culture as the total socially acquired life-way or life-way of a grouping of people, a definition that maintains the emphasis on the holism established by Tylor. In contrast, Clifford Geertz, speaking for the interpretivists, defines culture as consisting of symbols, motivations, moods, and thoughts. The interpretivist definition excludes behavior as office of culture. Once again, avoiding a somewhat extreme dichotomy, it is reasonable and comprehensive to prefer a broad definition of civilisation equally all learned and shared behavior and ideas.

Culture exists, in a general fashion, as something that all humans take. Some anthropologists refer to this universal concept of civilisation as "Culture" with a capital "C." Civilization also exists in a specific way, in referring to particular groups as distinguised by their behaviors and beliefs. Culture in the specific sense refers to "a culture" such every bit the Maasai, the Maya, or heart-form white Americans. In the specific sense culture is variable and changing. Sometimes the terms "microculture" or local civilisation are used to refer to specific cultures. Microcultures may include ethnic groups, indigenous peoples, genders, age categories, and more. At a larger scale exist regional or fifty-fifty global cultures such every bit Western-style consumer culture that now exists in many parts of the globe.

Characteristics of Culture

Since information technology is difficult to settle on a neat and tidy definition of culture, some anthropologists find information technology more useful to discuss the characteristics of culture and what makes it a special adaptation on which humans rely and so heavily.

Culture is based on symbols

A symbol is something that stands for something else. Almost symbols are arbitrary, that is, they bear no necessary human relationship to that which is symbolized. Therefore, they are cantankerous-culturally variable and unpredictable. For example, although 1 might guess that all cultures might have an expression for hunger that involves the stomach, no 1 could predict that in Hindi, the linguistic communication of northern Republic of india, a colloquial expression for being hungry says that "rats are jumping in my tum." Our lives are shaped by, immersed in, and made possible through symbols. It is through symbols, especially language, that civilisation is shared, changed, stored, and transmitted over fourth dimension.

Civilization is learned

Cultural learning begins from the moment of birth, if non before (some people think that an unborn baby takes in and stores data through sounds heard from the exterior earth). A big simply unknown amount of people's cultural learning is unconscious, occurring every bit a normal part of life through observation. Schools, in contrast, are a formal style to learn culture. Not all cultures throughout history accept had formal schooling. Instead, children learned civilisation through guidance from others and by observation and practice. Longstanding ways of enculturation, or learning one'south civilization, include stories, pictorial art, and performances of rituals and dramas.

Cultures are integrated

To country that cultures are internally integrated is to assert the principle of holism. Thus, studying only one or two aspects of civilisation provides understanding and so limited that it is more likely to be misleading or wrong than more than comprehensively grounded approaches. Cultural integration and holism are relevant to applied anthropologists interested in proposing ways to promote positive change. Years of experience in applied anthropology evidence that introducing programs for change in ane aspect of culture without considering the furnishings in other areas may be detrimental to the welfare and survival of a civilisation. For example, Western missionaries and colonialists in parts of Southeast Asia banned the practise of head-hunting. This exercise was embedded in many other aspects of culture, including politics, organized religion, and psychology (i.east., a man's sense of identity every bit a homo sometimes depended on the taking of a caput). Although stopping head-hunting might seem similar a adept affair, it had disastrous consequences for the cultures that had practiced information technology.

Cultures Interact and Alter

Several forms of contact bring about a variety of changes in the cultures involved. Trade networks, international evolution projects, telecommunications, education, migration, and tourism are but a few of the factors that bear upon cultural alter through contact. Globalization, the process of intensified global interconnectedness and movement of appurtenances, information and people, is a major force of contemporary cultural change. Information technology has gained momentum through contempo technological alter, especially the nail in information and communications technologies, which is closely related to the global motion of capital letter and finance.

Globalization does not spread evenly, and its interactions with and effects on local cultures vary essentially, from positive change for all groups involved to cultural destruction and extinction for those whose state, livelihood and civilization are lost. Electric current terms that endeavour to capture varieties of cultural change related to globalization include hybridization (cultural mixing into a new course) and localization (appropriation and adaptation of a global class into a new, locally meaningful form).

Ethnography and Ethnology

Cultural anthropology embraces ii major pursuits in its report and understanding of civilisation. The first is ethnography or "culture-writing." An ethnography is an in-depth clarification of one culture. This approach provides detailed information based on personal ascertainment of a living civilization for an extended period of fourth dimension. An ethnography is ordinarily a total-length book.

Ethnographies have changed over time. In the first one-half of the twentieth century, ethnographers wrote about "exotic" cultures located far from their homes in Europe and Northward America. These ethnographers treated a particular local group or village as a unit of measurement unto itself with clear boundaries. After, the era of so-called "village studies" in ethnography held sway from the 1950s through the 1960s. Anthropologists typically studied in ane village and so wrote an ethnography describing that village, again as a clearly bounded unit of measurement. Since the 1980s, the subject affair of ethnographies has changed in three major ways. First, ethnographies care for local cultures every bit connected to larger regional and global structures and forces; 2d, they focus on a topic of involvement and avoid a more holistic (comprehensive) approach; and 3rd, many are situated within industrialized/mail service-industrialized cultures.

As topics and sites take changed, so have research methods. 1 innovation of the late twentieth century is the adoption of multi-sited enquiry, or research conducted in more than one context such as two or more field sites. Another is the use of supplementary non-sited information collected in athenaeum, from Net cultural groups, or paper coverage. Cultural anthropologists are turning to multi-sited and non-sited research in social club to address the complexities and linkages of today's globalized cultural world. Another methodological innovation is collaborative ethnography, carried out equally a squad project between bookish researchers and members of the report population. Collaborative inquiry changes ethnography from study of people for the sake of anthropological knowledge to written report with people for the sake of knowledge and for the people who are the focus of the enquiry.

The second research goal of cultural anthropology is ethnology, or cross-cultural analysis. Ethnology is the comparative analysis of a particular topic in more than one cultural context using ethnographic fabric. Ethnologists compare such topics every bit spousal relationship forms, economic practices, religious beliefs, and childrearing practices, for example, in order to discover patterns of similarity and variation and possible causes for them. One might compare the length of time that parents sleep with their babies in different cultures in relation to personality. Researchers ask, for example, if a long co-sleeping period leads to less individualistic, more socially connected personalities and if a brusk flow of co-sleeping produces more individualistic personalities. Other ethnological analyses have considered the type of economy in relation to frequency of warfare, and the type of kinship organization in relation to women's status.

Ethnography and ethnology are mutually supportive. Ethnography provides rich, culturally specific insights. Ethnology, by looking beyond private cases to wider patterns, provides comparative insights and raises new questions that prompt time to come ethnographic research.

Cultural Relativism

Most people grow up thinking that their civilisation is the only and best way of life and that other cultures are strange or inferior. Cultural anthropologists label this attitude ethnocentrism: judging other cultures past the standards of i'due south own culture. The opposite of ethnocentrism is cultural relativism, the idea that each civilization must be understood in terms of its ain values and beliefs and non by the standards of another culture.

Cultural relativism may easily be misinterpreted as absolute cultural relativism, which says that whatever goes on in a particular culture must not be questioned or changed because no one has the correct to question any behavior or idea anywhere. This position tin can lead in unsafe directions. Consider the example of the Holocaust during World War Two in which millions of Jews and other minorities in much of Eastern and Western Europe were killed as part of the German language Nazis' Aryan supremacy entrada. The absolute cultural relativist position becomes boxed in, logically, to saying that since the Holocaust was undertaken according to the values of the culture, outsiders accept no business questioning it.

Critical cultural relativism offers an alternative view that poses questions about cultural practices and ideas in terms of who accepts them and why, and who they might be harming or helping. In terms of the Nazi Holocaust, a disquisitional cultural relativist would inquire, "Whose culture supported the values that killed millions of people on the grounds of racial purity?" Not the cultures of the Jewish people, the Roma, and other victims. Information technology was the culture of Aryan supremacists, who were one subgroup among many. The situation was far more than complex than a simple absolute cultural relativist statement takes into account, because there was non "one" civilization and its values involved. Rather, it was a case of cultural imperialism, in which one dominant group claimed supremacy over minority cultures and proceeded to change the situation in its own interests and at the expense of other cultures. Critical cultural relativism avoids the trap of adopting a homogenized view of complication. It recognizes internal cultural differences and winners/losers, oppressors/victims. It pays attention to dissimilar interests of diverse ability groups.

Practical Cultural Anthropology

In cultural anthropology, applied anthropology involves the utilize or application of anthropological noesis to aid prevent or solve problems of living peoples, including poverty, drug abuse, and HIV/AIDS. In the Us, practical anthropology emerged during World War II when many anthropologists offered their expertise to promote U.S. war efforts and post-state of war occupation. Following the end of the war, the United States assumed a larger global presence, specially through its bilateral aid arrangement, the U.S. Agency for International Evolution (USAID). USAID hired many cultural anthropologists who worked in a variety of roles, mainly evaluating evolution projects at the end of the project cycle and serving as in-land anthropologists overseas.

In the 1970s cultural anthropologists worked with other social scientists in USAID to develop and promote the use of "social soundness assay" in all regime-supported development projects. Equally divers past Glynn Cochrane, social soundness assay required that all development projects be preceded by a thorough baseline study of the cultural context and then potential redesign of the project based on those findings. A major goal was to prevent the funding of projects with picayune or no cultural fit. The Earth Banking concern hired its commencement anthropologist, Michael Cernea, in 1974. For three decades, Cernea influenced its policy-makers to pay more attention to project-affected people and their culture in designing and implementing projects. He promoted the term "development induced displacement" to bring attention to how big infrastructure projects negatively affect millions of people worldwide and he devised recommendations for mitigating such harm.

Many cultural anthropologists are applying cultural analysis to large-scale institutions (eastward.thou., capitalism and the media) particularly their negative social consequences, such equally the increasing wealth gap betwixt powerful and less powerful countries and between the rich and the poor within countries. These anthropologists are moving in a new and challenging direction. Their work involves the study of global—local interactions and change over time, neither of which were part of cultural anthropology's original focus. Moreover, these cultural anthropologists take on the office of advocacy and oftentimes work collaboratively with victimized peoples.

Anthropologists are committed to documenting, agreement, and maintaining cultural diverseness throughout the world as role of humanity'due south rich heritage. Through the iv-field approach, they contribute to the recovery and analysis of the emergence and development of humanity. They provide detailed descriptions of cultures as they have existed in the past, as they now be, and as they are changing in gimmicky times. Anthropologists regret the decline and extinction of dissimilar cultures and actively contribute to the preservation of cultural diversity and cultural survival.

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