INTRODUCTION

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 483.

Social Theory as Enquiry. French Pluralism?

May 16 – The demise of social scientists expertise

Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social. Oxford University Press

May 22 – Social theory as collective enquiry

Latour, Bruno. Enquiry on the Modes of Existence. Harvard University Press.

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May 24 – Final essay due

Anthropology is the study of humankind, past and present, that draws and builds upon knowledge from the social sciences and biological sciences, as well as the humanities and the natural sciences.[1]

Since the work of Franz Boas and Bronisław Malinowski in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, anthropology in Great Britain and the US has been distinguished from ethnology and from other social sciences by its emphasis on cross-cultural comparisons, long-term in-depth examination of context, and the importance it places on participant-observation or experiential immersion in the area of research. Cultural anthropology in particular has emphasized cultural relativism, holism, and the use of findings to frame cultural critiques.This has been particularly prominent in the United States, from Boas's arguments against 19th-century racial ideology, through Margaret Mead's advocacy for gender equality and sexual liberation, to current criticisms of post-colonial oppression and promotion of multiculturalism. Ethnography is one of its primary methods as well as the text that is generated from anthropological fieldwork.[2]

French ethnology under the influence of Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss and their successors emphasized the study of culture, or society, as a total system with a definite “structure” consisting of elements that “functioned” both to adapt to changing circumstances and to reproduce its integral structure. The total system approach influenced British social anthropology in the form of Malinowski's functionalism and Radcliffe-Brown's attention to the dynamics of social structure. British structural-functionalism became influential, even in the United States, as a countercurrent to the cultural emphasis of American anthropology. In part this emphasis is present because, after World War II, many American anthropologists did ethnographic fieldwork in Africa, South Asia, and the Pacific, where British-trained social anthropologists were the pioneers. The emphasis on the study of whole cultures and on cultures as systems in American cultural anthropology, often called holism, also showed both French and British influence.

Although it began in the study of social structures, “structuralism” aimed at understanding the universals of mental structures. It was mainly developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss, who was much influenced by Durkheim and Mauss as well as by structural linguistics. Structuralism affected American cultural anthropology.[3]