Table of Contents
Notes By-
Sachin Gupta
Cleared UPSC 2017 with AIR-3
INTRODUCTION
SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY: NATURE AND SCOPE
1.1 INTRODUCTION
This unit will trace the emergence of social anthropology and its scope. It is important
to know the development and scope of social anthropology as a subject. We know
social anthropology today has many stages of development. The subject has not
obtained today’s form overnight. It has many theoretical debates since its emergence
and till today all the matters of debate have not come to an end. So, it is very much
important to the students of anthropology to understand these issues and also to
know the history related to the subject.
1.2 SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY: A BRANCH OF ANTHROPOLOGY
To understand the emergence of social anthropology as a branch of Anthropology,
we need to explore the historical facts related to the debates between social
anthropology and cultural anthropology. The term social anthropology has a historical
background in the field of anthropology. We need to explore to some extent the
theoretical framework as well to trace the emergence of the term social anthropology.
Along with this the term cultural anthropology would also come in our discussion, as
these two terms have a close interpretation. Sometimes these two terms overlap in
the fields of practice.
Though we have subjective debate over the term social anthropology and cultural
anthropology, sometimes we find interchangeable use of these two terms. People use
the term socio-cultural anthropology to replace these two terms. But historically there
is a debate over the ideology of these two terms and as a student of anthropology
we need to know these issues.
Anthropology basically has two dominant schools of thought. One is British school
of thought and the other is American school of thought. British school of thought
braches out Anthropology into three basic branches
1) Biological or physical anthropology.
2) Social anthropology.
3) Archaeology.
American school defines four branches of Anthropology:
1) Physical anthropology
2) Cultural anthropology.
3) Archaeology
4) Linguistic anthropology.
Thus, we see that there are many issues related to the terminology. It is surrounded
with many historical debates. We will try to unfold these debates in our next sections.
1.2.2 Cultural Anthropology
The split in socio-cultural Anthropology is not readily accepted all over the world.
We have already stated how Social anthropology has different terms of reference in
different countries. Likewise the term socio-cultural Anthropology has also different
domain of practice in different countries. Cultural anthropology is a term of reference
popular in America. In America, the stress on cultural anthropology is laid with the
objective that man is more than merely organic man, but a cultural being also. Culture
of a particular society helps us to understand civilisation irrespective of time and
space. The American cultural anthropology also includes Archaeology. Stress on
culture study created a specialty to American school of thought which resulted into
the creation of ethnology – the science of people.
Anthropology as knowledge about ‘cultivated human’ that is, knowledge about those
aspects of humanity which are not natural, but which are related to that which is
acquired. According to Herskovits, Cultural Anthropology is to study the ways man
has devised to cope up with his natural settling and has social milieu and how bodies
of customs are learned, retained and handed down from one generation to the next.
The term ‘culture’ itself is a complex one. Culture has been defined by different
anthropologists differently. The most accepted and briefed definition of culture can
1.3 NATURE AND SCOPE OF SOCIALANTHROPOLOGY
Generally speaking, social anthropology aims to study human society as a whole. It
is a holistic study necessarily and covers all parts related to human society. Culture
comes naturally under this, as it is an integral part of human society. So, the basic
aim of social anthropology is to study human being as a social animal. Thus, to fulfill
its aim it explores, in a broad area, covering almost every aspects of human social
life.
The aim of modern social anthropology is just not to study human society but also
to understand the complex issues of modern human life. As primitive people have
been the focus of anthropological study, the problems faced by these people in the
process of development in modern days become very important for the anthropologists
to study. Anthropologists not only deal with the study of these problems but also try
to find out a solution for this. Developmental anthropology and Action anthropology
etc. are the specialised fields within social anthropology which deal with such problems.
Therefore, we can say that the scope and aim of social anthropology go together;
one influences the other. As much as the scope increases a new aim comes out of
it
UNIT 2 PHILOSOPHICAL ANDHISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY
2.1 INTRODUCTION
In this unit we shall introduce the students to the philosophical roots of the subject
of anthropology, especially social anthropology, and show how every form of
knowledge can be contextualised into a historical condition. Human thinking does not
grow in a vacuum but is triggered by the intellectual climate, the cultural heritage and
historical circumstances that make possible a way of thinking as well as its condition’s
acceptable. It is seen that some ideas may come that are premature for their times
and therefore face rejection or even persecution, like the classic case of Galileo.
2.2 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE POSSIBILITY OF ASCIENTIFIC STUDY OF SOCIETY
Society, for a long period of time, was not considered to be an object of study,
simply because it was taken for granted that society and human beings in it were
God’s or a Divine creation and the only explanations of the origin of the world and
the people and other existing animate and inanimate things was to be found in religion
and mythology. It was indeed a great transformation in intellectual thinking when
some 16th and 17th century European scholars began to think about society as a
human and not a divine creation. By this century in the West, the intellectual 20 climate
was moving towards a break away from the Church and its controlling ritualism
towards a greater faith in the human capacity for rational thinking. The human mind
was seen as a superior endowment that privileged human beings above all others and
could dominate over nature and also over women who in this frame of reference
were equated with nature. Society was seen as a creation not of nature or of God
but of humans as creatures of reason and society was now opposed to a state of
nature and the foundation was laid for a nature, culture opposition that had far
reaching ramifications for later theory.
It was with the philosophical thinking of scholars such as David Hume, John Locke,
Thomas Hobbes and Jean Jacques Rousseau that the scholarly thinking began to
debate upon the human origins of the kind of society in which the then Europeans
lived. Society became a self imposed discipline to which human beings subjected
themselves in order to escape a state of anarchy. Some like Rousseau romanticised
on a blissful state of nature from which humans had entered into a state of slavery
to customs, while others like Hobbes viewed a state of nature as savage and the
state of society as harmonious and desirable. It was at this point that individuals were
seen as opposed to society or the collectivity and a tension between the two became
a point of concern of western views about society.
By the seventeenth century onwards the Europeans had been thrown into close
contact with the non-European world through colonisation, conquest and trade, at
the same time there were genuine thinking about a unified vision of humanity that
encompassed even those most remote from the western civilisation. Scholars were
now faced not only with the task of explaining human social origins but also social
diversity.
2.2.1 Montesquieu and Social Diversity
The French philosopher Montesquieu has often been regarded as the first to have
a systematic theory about society as described in his work The Spirit of the Laws.
In true spirit of having a science of society, he worked on the basic premise that the
seemingly endless diversity is reducible to coherence by looking for some underlying
principle of causation. In other words, if we can find out what causes diversity, we
have a classification and explanation of varieties of social formations. A second
premise was again based upon that of finding a scientific explanation, namely of
creating a typology of societies. Thus two fundamental processes of a scientific
explanation, namely, to establish causal relationships and to arrange diversity into a
typology in order to gain insight, were applied by Montesquieu to the study of
society. Firstly he divided societies into three types of governments; republic, monarchy
and despotism. Secondly he tried to establish some causative factors for the
development of each of these types. A republic was where the government was
vested in either a part of a society (aristocracy) or in all the people (democracy);
while in both monarchy and despotism it was vested in an individual the difference
being that the monarchy is run on principles and law (Montesquieu had the British
monarchy as an example in front of him) and despotism follows no such rules. To
Montesquieu, each form of government was not just a political principle but was a
particular kind of society which was also founded upon a particular type of basic
sentiment. We can compare the concept of sentiment with what much later Ruth
Benedict had called ethos, in describing different types of cultures (Benedict, 1934).
Thus the predominant kind of sentiment in case of a republic was virtue in the sense
of what today we would call ethics, adherence to laws and a sense of collective
order, in case of monarchy, it was honour again this was in reference to rank and
2.2.2 Comte and a Positivist View of Society
The French Revolution and the beginnings of industrialisation in Europe gave a
different perspective to the social philosophy of Auguste Comte who concentrated
upon transformation of society from one type to another rather than upon the coexistence
of a diversity of social types, like Montesquieu. As Comte saw it, the
society based on military power and religion was being replaced by one based on
science and industry. Thus instead of looking at a horisontal diversity, he looked upon
a vertical transformation. Hence, to him science or rational study of society would
be one in which one would be able to explain how society is transforming. Thus to
an intellectual analysis of society, he gave the nomenclature, sociology and to the
method of analysis, the term positivism.
Comte distinguished between an analytic and a synthetic analysis; an analytic method
can be applied only in material sciences where any two things can be linked without
consideration to context, but in social analysis context is essential or in other words,
he applied the organic analogy where no part has existence outside of the whole.
Therefore, social phenomenon can only be understood in context of the associated
aspects including history. Thus while material phenomenon can be understood as
elements, society only exists as an entity. This was the beginning of an organic
analogy and the holistic method later taken up by the structural functionalists. But
2.3 THE STUDY OF HUMAN EVOLUTION
The concept of evolution was formally established by Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)
the author of the book Progress: Its’ Laws and Causes published in 1857. Spencer
believed that evolution was a feature of all phenomena; organic, inorganic or super
organic. He, like other evolutionists to follow, believed that evolution goes through
uniform stages always towards progress that he defined in terms of greater
differentiation as well as integration, in other words greater complexity. Spencer
believed that those of superior ability have greater advantage in survival, an idea
expressed in the cliché “survival of the fittest”, variously misused over the period
His view of the early stages of human society was that they were close to nature and
materialistic. In some ways his views reflect the general conceptualisation of the
primitive societies as based on instinct rather than reason, as lacking higher spirituality
and crude in their mental makeup; in this sense the transition from mother right to
patriarchy is also synonymous with ethical and moral upliftment.
The reasons for transformation of societies reflect both a Hegelian dialectics and
Montequieu’s contextualisation, thus each system produces contradictions leading to
reactions. The fundamental change is in the way people think about good and bad
or the right and the wrong; once these change all aspects of society change. He
believed in the power of ideas to change society. To a very large extent he was
Eurocentric in that in his opinion the conquest of the East by the West was a major
step towards higher civilisation and embodied the victory of non-material over material,
reason over feeling and maleness over femaleness. Thus he follows the western
philosophy of equating the feminine with passivity, instinct, nature and the base
qualities of life while masculinity is equated with, reason, culture and the higher
qualities of life. He gave his idea about masculine and feminine in the broad universal
categorisation of everything in the universe in his matriarchal mosaic and patriarchal
mosaic. To him these were two different cultural types albeit hierarchical.
Henry Maine too was a lawyer whose major work Ancient Law was published in
1861. He derived his intellectual inspiration from Montesquieu, Jeremy Bentham
and John Austin. He linked the laws of people with their social heritage and rejected
the idea of laws of society being homologous to laws of nature or in other words
the possibility of having universal laws. According to Maine there are three fundamental
aspects of any law, its origin in a command, an obligation imposed by the command
and a sanction to enforce the obligation. These aspects are derived from the works
of John Austin and Jeremy Bentham. However he did not accept Jeremy Bentham’s
main thesis of utility that each individual should get from society what they contribute
to it. The Benthamite principle takes as the main fundamental unit of law, the individual
whereas most non-western systems see the individual as embedded in social
relationships. There can also be a debate as to the assessment of utility, how does
one define or find any universal standard for it. However, Maine’s work was based
on the detailed study of ancient legal systems, notably that of ancient Rome, Islamic
law and the Brahmanical laws as encoded by Manu. In this way Maine focused upon
higher civilisations and came up with the proposition that patriarchy was the first form
of the family. In this way he opposes both Bachofen and McLennan, who were for
the model of evolution of human societies from matriarchy/matriliny to patriarchy/
patriliny.
His main contribution lies in putting forward the thesis that societies evolve from
status to contract, in other words from a stage where social personhood is defined
by a person’s social relationships or ascriptive status to one where social personhood
is determined by rational legal characters
UNIT 3 RELATIONSHIP OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY WITH ALLIED DISCIPLINES
3.1 INTRODUCTION
Social anthropology is that branch of anthropology which deals with human culture
and society emphasising cultural and social phenomena including inter personal and
inter group relations especially of non literate people. All social sciences study human
behaviour, but the content, approach and the context of sociology and social
anthropology are very different from other disciplines. Apart from studying the internal
characteristics of the society, social anthropology also studies the external
characteristics of the population and rate and stage of its progress. The problems of
the society are explained using these factors. Secondly, it also studies institutions like
– political, economic, social, legal, stratification, etc. It studies the features that these
institutions share and the features that are different. Their degree of specialisation and
level of autonomy are also studied. Durkheim, one of the pioneers of social
anthropology called social anthropology as the study of social institutions. Thirdly,
social anthropology is the study of social relationships. By social relationship we
mean the interactions between individuals. Interactions between individuals are mediated
by norms and values of the society and are intended to achieve goals.
3.2 RELATIONSHIP OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY WITH OTHER SOCIAL SCIENCES
The social and cultural anthropologists include a broad range of approaches derived
from the social sciences like Sociology, Psychology, History, Economics, Political
Science, Social Work, Cultural Studies, Literature, Public Health, Policy and
Governance Studies, Management, etc. Social anthropology is, thus, able to relate
all of these disciplines in its quest for an understanding of human behaviour, and
draws upon all of them to interpret the way in which all biological and social factors
enter to depict man’s culture and behaviour in totality.
3.2.1 Social Anthropology and Sociology
Social anthropology usually has been defined as the study of other cultures, employing
the technique of participant observation and collecting qualitative data. Social
anthropology is similar to but not identical with sociology, at least in terms of how
each discipline has developed since the last century. Social anthropology has focused
on pre-industrial societies, sociology on industrial societies; anthropologists conducted
their research in other cultures, employed the technique of participant observation
(collecting qualitative data), and advocated comparative (especially cross-cultural)
analysis; sociologists did research in their own societies, used questionnaires (collecting
quantitative data), and rarely attempted to test their generalisations cross-culturally.
Of course, there have been many exceptions to these patterns with the result that
sociologists have sometimes resembled anthropologists in their labours, and vice
versa (Barrett, 2009).
However, another way of examining the relationship between these two disciplines
is by finding out the important differences. The first major difference is that while
sociology is by definition concerned with the investigation and understanding of social
relations and with other data only so far as they further this understanding, social
anthropologists although they share the concern with sociologists, are interested also
in other matters, such as people’s beliefs and values, even where these cannot be
shown to be directly connected with social behaviour. Social anthropologists are
interested in their ideas and beliefs as well as in their social relationships and in recent
years many social anthropologists have studied other people’s belief systems not
simply from a sociological point of view but also as being worthy of investigation in
their own right.
part of his/her task is usually to understand the language and ways of thought of the
people he studies, which may be and probably are very different from his own. This
is why, in anthropological fieldwork, a sound knowledge of the language of the
community being studied is indispensable for a people’s categories of thought and the
forms of their language are inextricably bound together. Thus questions about meanings
and about the interpretation of concepts and symbols usually demand a larger part
of the attention of social anthropologists than of sociologists. Never the less, sociology
is social anthropologists’ closest companion discipline and the two subjects share a
great many of their theoretical problems and interests. Social anthropologists are
sociologists as well, but they are at once something less, because their actual field
of investigation has on the whole been more restricted and something more, because
although they are concerned with social relationships, they are concerned with other
aspects of culture as well. However, the top scholars in both social anthropology and
sociology spend very little time in worrying whether what they are doing is sociology
or social anthropology.
3.2.2 Social Anthropology and Psychology
The study of mind and human behaviour is called Psychology. Psychologists investigate
a diverse range of topics through their theories and research.These topics includethe
relationship between the brain, behaviour and subjective experience; human
development; the influence of other people on the individual’s thoughts, feelings and
behaviour; psychological disorders and their treatment; the impact of culture on the
individual’s behaviour and subjective experience; differences between people in terms
of their personality and intelligence; and people’s ability to acquire, organise, remember
and use knowledge to guide their behaviour.
Thus for the psychologists the focus of study is upon all aspects of human behaviour:
and its personal, social and cultural dimensions which will never be complete without
having the knowledge of social anthropology. Therefore, for understanding the social
processes and meanings in the world around us one has to study social anthropology.
Both Social Psychology and Social Anthropology deals with the manifold relations
between individuals on the one hand and groups, communities, societies and cultures
on the other hand.
According to Barrett (2009:135) British social anthropology has historically been
quite opposed to psychology. Another way of stating this is to say that social
anthropology has been anti-reductionist, which means opposed to reducing the
explanation of social life to other disciplinary levels such as psychology. This perspective
can be traced back to Durkheim, who declared that any time a psychological
explanation is provided for a social phenomenon we may be certain that it is wrong.
American cultural anthropology has been much more receptive to psychology,
especially the focus on the individual. Boas was interested in the relationship between
the individual and society, and eventually there was the culture and personality school,
with its emphasis on modal personality. In more recent years a distinct approach
called psychological anthropology has emerged, with a focus on attitudes and values,
and child-rearing practices and adolescence (Bourguignon 1979).
The only line of difference is that social anthropology examines the group, psychology
the individual. Social anthropologists specialise in social structure or culture
psychologists in the personality system, and in mental process such as cognition,
perception, and learning, and emotions and motives. Social anthropologists take
personality system as constant and look for variation in the social structure as the
3.2.3 Social Anthropology and History
Historians are chiefly interested in the past, whether remote or recent, their study is
to find out what happened and why it happened. On the whole, they are more
interested in particular sequences of past events and their conditions, than they are
in the general patterns, principles or laws which these events may exhibit. In both of
these respects their concern is little from that of social anthropologist. For social
anthropologists are centrally (though not exclusively) interested in understanding the
present condition of the culture or community which they are studying. But although
the disciplines are different, social anthropology has a very close relationship with
history in two important ways. First an anthropologist who aims to achieve a complete
understanding as possible of the present condition of the society he is studying can
hardly fail to ask how it came to be as it is. That is not withstanding that his central
interest is in the present, not in the past for its own sake, but often the past may be
directly relevant in explaining the present. A difficulty has been that many of the
societies which social anthropologists have studied have no histories, in the sense of
documented and verifiable accounts of the past or at least they had none before the
often very recent impact of western culture. In such societies, the past sometimes is
thought of as differing from the present only in respect of the individuals who occupy
the different statuses which are institutionalised in the society.
But history may be important to social anthropologists in another sense, that is, not
only as an account of past events leading up to and explaining the present, but also
as the body of contemporary ideas which people have about these events what an
English Philosopher Collingwood aptly called “encapsulated history” people’s ideas
about the past are an intrinsic part of the contemporary situation which is the
anthropologists immediate concern and often they have important implications for
existing social relationships. Also, different groups of people involved in the same
social situation may have very different ideas about the ‘same’ series of historical
events. Myths and traditional histories may sometimes give important clues about the
past events. History is part of the conscious tradition of a people and is operative
in their social life. It is the collective representation of events as distinct from events
themselves. Evans-Pritchard in his work Social Anthropology and Other Essays,
(1950) had stated that the functionalist anthropologists regard history in this sense,
usually a mixture of fact and fancy, as highly relevant to a study of the culture of
which it forms part. Neglect of the history of institutions prevents the functionalist
anthropologist not only from studying diachronic problems but also from testing the
very functional constructions to which he attaches most importance, for it is precisely
history which provides him with an experimental situation.
It is true that some of the early anthropologists such as Radcliffe-Brown denied that
history had any relevance for anthropology, mainly because they thought history dealt
with unique events, and that a scientific study of the past was not possible. But
3.2.4 Social Anthropology and Economics
As we know economics focuses on a particular institution, and is concerned about
the production, consumption, and distribution of economic goods, and with economic
development, prices, trade, and finance. In anthropology there is an area of
specialisation called economic anthropology. It is a precious fact that an institutionalised
kind of economics first appears in anthropology in direct relation to the field research
among exotic societies. Anthropology has a substantial overlap with economics,
considered as the production and distribution of goods. While not all societies have
a fully developed monetary economy, all societies do have scarce goods and some
means of exchange.
Social anthropologists are interested in exploring the range of production and
distribution systems in human societies and in understanding the particular system in
the society being studied at a given time. Most social anthropologists are not
scientifically interested in the operation of the economy of one’s own society; the
typical non-anthropological economist, on the other, hand is extremely interested in
the operation of one’s own economy. He will not ordinarily show much interest in
the operation of greatly different economic systems. Social anthropology under the
name of “formalist” vs “substantivist” interpretations of the primitive economics, bring
with these terms the following option between the ready-made models of western
economic science, especially the micro-economics taken as universally valid and
therefore applicable to the primitive societies and the necessity – supposing the
formalist position unfounded – of developing a new analysis more appropriate to the
historical societies in question and to the intellectual history of anthropology.
Professional anthropologists started using the concept of folk medicine in the early
twentieth century. They used this concept to differenciate between magical practices,
medicine and religion. In addition, they also applied this concept to explore the role
and the significance of popular healers and their self-medicating practices. The
professional anthropologists looked at popular medicine as specific cultural practice
of some social groups which were distinct from the universal practices of biomedicine.
Thus, it may be assumed that every culture has its own specific popular medicine
based on its general cultural features.
Under this concept, medical systems are seen as the specific product of each ethnic
group’s cultural history. Scientific biomedicine is regarded as another medical system
and therefore a cultural form is studied as such.
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