Anthropology

Conceptual Overview

Although understandings of the discipline have changed over time, and are not entirely unitary either, some core conceptions may be identified. Central to the discipline is the interest in human diversity. One of anthropology's major contributions at a general level has been to show that social organizations, forms of exchange, and assumptions underlying these are indeed diverse, variable, and subject to cultural influence across the world.

Another unifying dimension is a concern with culture, or cultures in the plural. In a very general sense, culture is taken to signify that which is learnt in social interaction, and hence subject to variation and diversity. While there is no unity with regards to definitions of the cultural, it is most commonly taken to refer to sets of meanings and their manifestation into meaningful forms, such as behavioral patterns, forms of [Page 58]sociability, materiality, and emotions. With time, the view of culture has changed toward the processual, the plural, and the dynamic, rather than stressing uniformity and stability. Culture continues to be a contested concept, and arguments around definitions of culture contribute to the intellectual liveliness of the discipline.

The notion of cultural translation is another defining feature of anthropological work, both in terms of methodology and as a theoretical approach. The anthropological approach has centered on making the ideas and expressions of one culture understandable in terms of another. The anthropologist attempts to make the specificities of one culture visible by way of “mirroring,” hence revealing the contingent, relative, and diverse nature of sociocultural forms. Anthopological knowledge has contributed to critically scrutinize Western social arrangements and habits of thought, and to destabilize taken-for-granted assumptions. Anthropological approaches can in this way serve the purpose of cultural critique, revealing underlying forms and structures of power, and dominant ideas and values, something that has gained increasing attention in recent times. Notions of cultural translation also point to the great interest in sociocultural change in contemporary anthropology. In a general sense, studies of modernity, processes of globalization, and varieties of transnational connectivity have given rise to a strong interest in emerging forms of cultural translation, conceptualized variably as hybridization or creolization.

A fourth unifying feature of anthropology is its emphasis on the value of close-up observation of the people, the sociocultural processes and structures studied. The anthropological notion of fieldwork has been taken to define much of what anthropology is all about. Ethnographic fieldwork allows for rich, detailed sets of empirical data and an “emic,” or inside understanding, often conveyed in lively, narrative, and reflexive representations of social processes. Although there is much to support such a view, by no means should anthropology be equalled with a particular methodological approach. There is today a great variety in what constitutes fieldwork, what “doing ethnography” actually means, and what forms of participant observation are seen as most suitable for the problem at hand. Moreover, anthropology as a discpline makes use of methodolocal approaches other than participant observation, such as surveys, statistics, discourse analysis, and documentary analysis. Likewise, the ethnographic method is used by scholars other than anthropologists, who share a general inclination toward in-depth qualitative research.

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