Ethnology

The word ethnology comes from the Greek words ethnos, meaning “people” and logia, meaning “study of.” Franz Boas said the goal of ethnology was first to describe and explain culture, and then formulate laws about it. While some anthropologists use this term as synonymous with sociocultural anthropology, more often, it means one of the two branches of sociocultural anthropology, the other being ethnography. While ethnography deals with a society in depth, ethnology uses a comparative approach to analyze culture (because of this, in much of the 20th century, social anthropologists concentrated most on ethnography, while cultural anthropologists concentrated most on ethnology). Two current popular ways anthropologists have classified societies is in terms of different modes of production and political organization. In terms of mode of production, one such classification would be in terms of foraging societies, agricultural societies, pastoral societies, traditional states, and industrial societies. In terms of political organization, one such classification would be in terms of band, tribe, chiefdom, and state. Ethnology looks at how people relate to their environment and to other people around them. Ethnologies also do not only describe but also attempt to explain something about culture. While in the past, ethnologists, under the direction of Franz Boas, tried to look at all aspects of culture, many ethnologists today focus on issues of their own specific concern to explain similarities and differences between cultures. Ethnologists often concentrate on specific subfields of anthropology, like psychological anthropology, anthropology of religion, economic anthropology, political anthropology, gender studies, folklore, and the study of kinship.

Three types of ethnology are evolutionary ethnology, comparative ethnology, and historical ethnology. The first anthropologists of the19th century thought cultures evolved from simpler, more primitive forms to more complex advanced forms. They drew diagrams to show the evolutionary development of societies in terms of things like how people evolved from prerational to scientific, and from magic to religion to science. They also classified societies from least developed to most developed. A chart might then be made of least developed to most developed in this way: Aboriginals, Africans, American Indians, Chinese,Japanese, and English. Two of the most important of the evolutionary ethnologists were Edward Tylor (1832–1917) and Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881). Tylor talked about the evolution of religion from animism to polytheism to monotheism, but he said that more advanced civilizations retained primitive features in the form of [Page 858]survivals. He wrote that all societies could evolve in the same way because of a psychic unity of mankind. This meant that all people would find the same answers to problems independently. Morgan talked about the evolution of the family from promiscuity to monogamy. While evolutionary ethnology remains popular in anthropology, particularly archaeology, which looks at typologies of cultural development such as the band, tribe, chiefdom, and state example, most anthropologists reject the idea of progressive evolution where societies evolve from inferior societies to superior ones. They say people who live in bands may have some advantage over people who live in states.

One of the most important early ethnologies was Ruth Benedict'sPatterns of Cultures, written in 1934. She wrote about cultures as having a particular psychological character in terms of the United States, Zuni, Dobu, and Kwakiutl. Similarly,Margaret Mead looked at Samoa and New Guinea in part to deal with issues in the United States. Malinowski had also done ethnology by showing how Freud's oedipal complex could vary across cultures. In the 1950s, many anthropologists used the Human Relations Area Files to do ethnology, in what is called “holocultural comparison.” Other types of ethnology included the structuralism made popular by Claude Lévi-Strauss and regional and local-level comparison among cultural ecologists, ethno-scientists, and some functionalists. In recent years, anthropologists have used ethnology to deal with issues of how to understand “big men” in Melanesia.

...