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In sociology and anthropology, the concept created a backlash, pushing scholars to abandon cultural justifications and negative descriptions of poverty, fearing such analysis may be read as " blaming-the-victim. A Non-Communist Manifesto concentrates on the economic side of the modernization, and especially the factors needed for a country to reach "take-off" to self-sustaining growth. He argued that today's underdeveloped areas are in a similar situation to that of today's developed areas at some time in the past, and that therefore the task in helping the underdeveloped areas out of poverty is to accelerate them along this supposed common path of development, by various means such as investment, technology transfers, and closer integration into the world market.
Rostow's unilineal evolutionist model hypothesized all societies would progress through the same stages to a modernity defined by the West. The model postulates that economic growth occurs in five basic stages, of varying length: As should be clear from the subtitle of his book, Rostow sought to provide a capitalist rebuttal to the unilinear Marxist growth models being pursued in the newly independent communist regimes in the second and third world; an effort that would lead to the " Green revolution " to combat the " Red revolution ".
George Dalton applied the substantivist economic ideas of Karl Polanyi to economic anthropology, and to development issues. The substantivist approach demonstrated the ways in which economic activities in non-market societies were embedded in other, non-economic social institutions such as kinship, religion and political relations. He therefore critiqued the formalist economic modelling of Rostow. He was the author of "Growth without development: An economic survey of Liberia" , with Robert W. Clower and "Economic Anthropology and Development: Essays on Tribal and Peasant Economies" Dependency theory arose as a theory in Latin America in reaction to modernization theory.
It argues that resources flow from a "periphery" of poor and underdeveloped states to a "core" of wealthy states, enriching the latter at the expense of the former. It is a central contention of dependency theory that poor states are impoverished and rich ones enriched by the way poor states are integrated into the " World-system " and hence poor countries will not follow Rostow's predicted path of modernization.
Dependency theory rejected Rostow's view, arguing that underdeveloped countries are not merely primitive versions of developed countries, but have unique features and structures of their own; and, importantly, are in the situation of being the weaker members in a world market economy and hence unable to change the system.
Immanuel Wallerstein's "world-systems theory" was the version of Dependency theory that most North American anthropologists engaged with. His theories are similar to Dependency theory, although he placed more emphasis on the system as system, and focused on the developments of the core rather than periphery.
Wallerstein also provided an historical account of the development of capitalism which had been missing from Dependency theory. Women in development WID is an approach to development projects that emerged in the s, calling for treatment of women's issues in development projects. Later, the Gender and development GAD approach proposed more emphasis on gender relations rather than seeing women's issues in isolation.
Boserup's most notable book is The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: Development projects, however, were skewed towards men on the assumption they were "heads of households. A major critique of development from anthropologists came from Arturo Escobar's seminal book Encountering Development , which argued that Western development largely exploited non-Western peoples. Arturo Escobar views international development as a means for the Occident to keep control over the resources of its former colonies.
Gender, Agency and Change: Anthropological Perspectives - CRC Press Book. Series: European Association of Social Anthropologists. Routledge Published . donnsboatshop.com: Gender, Agency and Change: Anthropological Perspectives ( European Association of Social Anthropologists) (): Victoria Goddard: Books.
Development projects themselves flourished in the wake of WWII, and during the cold war, when they were developed to. Some scholars blame the different agents for having only considered a small aspect of the local people's lives without analyzing broader consequences, while others like dependency theory or Escobar argue that development projects are doomed to failure for the fundamental ways they privilege Western industry and corporations. Escobar's argument echos the earlier work of dependency theory and follows a larger critique more recently posed by Foucault an other poststructuralists.
One of the last of these new applied sciences was the "development apparatus", the post-world war extension of colonial rule after the independence of third world states. Ferguson sought to explore how "development discourse" works. That is, how do the language and practices used by development specialists influence the ways in which development is delivered, and what unintended consequences does it foster. He found that development projects which failed in their own terms could be redefined as "successes" on which new projects were to be modelled.
The net effect of development, he found, was to "de-politicize" questions of resource allocation, and to strengthen bureaucratic power. In his analysis of a development project in Lesotho South Africa between and , he examined the following discursive maneuvers. Ferguson points out that a critical part of the development process is the way in which the object of development is defined. In defining this object, it is severed from its historical and geographic context, and isolated as a "Less-Developed Country.
Not wanting to deal with the apartheid South African regime, development agencies isolated the "independent" Lesotho from the regional economy in which it was entrapped in their project rationales and reports. Artificially taken out of this larger capitalist context, Lesotho's economy was described as "isolated," "non-market" and "traditional" and thus a proper target for aid intervention. Ferguson underscores that these discourses are produced within institutional settings where they must provide a charter for governmental intervention.
Any analysis which suggests the roots of poverty lie in areas outside the scope of government are quickly dismissed and discarded since they cannot provide a rationale for state action. Ferguson writes that it is not enough to note development's failures; even the project managers initially recognized it as a failure. If that was all Ferguson had done, his book would not have had the influence it did. In other words, we should ask what NON-economic functions does development serve?
This creates a decentered network of self-regulating elements whose interests become integrated with those of the State. Work done by Arun Agrawal on local forest governance in India, is an example of this method of analysis. He illustrates how the production of specific types of expert knowledge the economic productivity of forests coupled with specific technologies of government local Forest Stewardship Councils can bring individual interest in line with those of the state.
This, not through the imposition of specific outcomes, but by creating frameworks that rationalizes behavior in particular ways and involve individuals in the process of problem definition and intervention. I call it the Green Revolution. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Part of a series on Economic , applied , and development anthropology Basic concepts. Hunting-gathering Pastoralism Nomadic pastoralism Shifting cultivation Moral economy Peasant economics. Original affluent society Formalist vs substantivist debate The Great Transformation Peasant economics Culture of poverty Political economy State formation Nutritional anthropology Heritage commodification Anthropology of development.
Archaeological Biological Cultural Linguistic Social. Actor—network theory Alliance theory Cross-cultural studies Cultural materialism Culture theory Diffusionism Feminism Historical particularism Boasian anthropology Functionalism Interpretive Performance studies Political economy Practice theory Structuralism Post-structuralism Systems theory.
Anthropologists by nationality Anthropology by year Bibliography Journals List of indigenous peoples Organizations. For example, burial practices are more likely to be called customs and not sharply differentiated from other ways of doing things. Early Homo sapiens for example, the Neanderthals at Krapina [now in Croatia] began burying their dead at least , years ago. And how and why have such practices changed over time? What might they have in common with the multitude of burial customs—known to be associated with differing conceptions of death and life—among people in the world today; for example, what might embalming practices in ancient Egypt and 19th-century Bolivia have in common with each other and with 21st-century embalming practices in North America?
How do these relate to secondary burials, involving the exhumation and reburial of the corpse or its bones, as in Madagascar and Siberia, or rituals of cremation, as in Japan, India, or France? Subsequent research has proved these assumptions to be wrong. As anthropology has grown to include the study of all humans on an equal footing and the field of anthropology is practiced throughout the world, anthropologists continue to confront their parochial biases.
So, what is religion from a comparative perspective? Contrary to their earlier expectations, anthropologists have documented the increasing role of religion in public life throughout the world. Rituals , socially prescribed acts once thought to be the hallmark of religious behaviour, are now recognized as shaping human relations in many social contexts.
Thus, the work of scholars like Arnold van Gennep , Victor Turner, Caroline Humphrey, and James Laidlaw on rites of passage and ritualization may apply much more widely. Anthropologists now characterize religion in more open-ended terms, stressing family resemblances rather than categorical identities. They often focus on worlds, powers, forces, agents or beings that stretch or defy what is taken to be human, or humanly verifiable, and they emphasize imagination and speculation.
They also originate in social forms—the division of labour , patterns of political hierarchy or equality, gender relations, and the like. Thus, whatever the ultimate reality of human suffering and death, anthropologists argue that moral insight and action derive from the efforts of human beings to understand their immediate reality in the shifting, ambiguous , contradictory, and conflictive patterns of the relationships in which they are involved and the larger order, or cosmos, in which these relations are set. The anthropology of religion thus entails a holistic approach, including attention to social-cultural, psychological, material, historical, and evolutionary dimensions of religious experience.
At the turn of the 21st century, topics at the forefront of anthropological research on religion included moral imagination , cognition , subjectivity, secularization, the changing relations of church and state, religion and science, religious pluralism , migration and pilgrimage, religion and ecology, ethics , and social justice.
Museums—defined as places for the organized collection, study, and display of objects—began long before anthropology developed as an academic discipline. Since the 6th century bc at Ur, the 3rd century bc in Alexandria, and the 13th century ad in China, museums have collected objects illustrating daily life in diverse cultures , past and present. Today many of these broadly based collections are associated with the discipline of anthropology, especially those that include osteological specimens human and prehuman remains providing evidence of human evolution and diversity, archaeological artifacts providing evidence of past cultures, and ethnographic artifacts illustrating the lifeways of living people.
The collecting of artifacts from distant lands and possibly disappearing cultures began about the 15th century, during the age of exploration, with the travels of Western explorers, missionaries, colonial administrators, soldiers, scholars, traders, and tourists. Anthropological collections grew significantly in the 19th century as European and North American museums acquired artifacts from colonized peoples around the world.
In the United States most ethnographic artifacts were incorporated into natural history museums. Once the idea of natural selection validated ideas of evolution , in the midth century, a theoretical justification developed for grouping the artifacts of anthropology with extinct animals and other natural history specimens. Before he began to devote all his time to work at Columbia University in , Boas managed to shift the paradigm of museum anthropology from an evolutionary approach, in which objects from many cultures were grouped according to the evolution of specific technologies, to a culture area approach that focused on local histories and environments.
While at the American Museum, Boas established a broad research agenda for museum anthropology, linking the study of artifacts to texts, photographs, musical recordings, and other nonmaterial aspects of culture. Over the next century, as museums with anthropological collections continued to develop as research institutions, many of the anthropologists who worked there turned away from collection-based work. Archaeologists and physical anthropologists continued to use collections for study, but, until a late 20th-century revival of interest in the history of anthropology and museums and in studies of material culture and the anthropology of art, few cultural anthropologists worked actively with collections.
Exhibits developed in the midth century continued to reflect the culture area approach of Boas or the structural-functional model that had developed in Britain, focusing on social institutions and using objects to illustrate abstract points. The last quarter of the 20th century witnessed great change in the practice of anthropology in museums. The civil rights and decolonization movements of the s increased awareness of the politics of collecting and representation.
Ethical issues that had been ignored in the past began to influence museum practices. By the turn of the 21st century, most anthropologists working in museums had understood the need to incorporate diverse points of view in exhibitions and collections care and to rely on the expertise of people from the cultures represented as well as museum professionals.
Anthropologists in museums also were concerned with issues such as the ethics of collecting, access to collections and associated data, and ownership and repatriation. Starting in the s, Western artists drew attention to the masks and carvings of non-Western cultures. These were admired not for their cultural meaning but for their form and aesthetic qualities. While museum anthropologists remain primarily concerned with the cultural context of artifacts, the boundary between art and artifact has begun to erode. Anthropology collections include the work of non-Western artists as well as artifacts from Western cultures.
Artifacts representing the interaction of cultures throughout the world—including things made of recycled industrial materials or objects made for sale to tourists—are also part of the legitimate subject of museum anthropologists. From its inception, anthropology has been concerned with the processes that transform an infant with indefinite potential into an adult with a particular role in a particular group family, society, class, nation.
To achieve adulthood, an infant must learn, and much of that learning depends on how the adults around them organize themselves. Thus, anthropologists investigate the psychological processes of enculturation and the social processes involved in ensuring that the various human roles that form the web of a complex society are reproduced over the generations. Learning is at the root of most definitions of culture. Without extensive and long-term interaction with adults, human infants cannot develop fully.
Human reproduction is not solely a genetic or psychological process; it is also a sociocultural one that produces people with particular abilities specialized for particular positions and often exhibiting particular disabilities when assuming positions to which they are not suited. Through these institutions complex societies reproduce their social organization. There are two vital issues in the field. The first is the need to clarify the processes through which children are placed in particular positions—who and what is involved in making some people janitors and others heads of corporations.
The second concerns how to understand how certain processes—particularly those grounded in school examinations and psychological testing—have become the main legitimate means through which people are placed in positions.
The democratic ideal that, through testing and examinations, personal merit can be identified and rewarded has seldom worked as hoped. Educational anthropologists point to the continuity between the education the children of the most prosperous receive at home and in their communities, the organization of schooling, and the pedagogical styles used in school. Other studies focus on the structuring of schooling to show how the very concern with measuring merit continually reproduces failure on an ever-expanding scale, thereby devaluing the contributions each individual makes to the welfare of society.
These debates continue, producing ever more careful descriptions of everyday lives in classrooms and schools that reveal hidden processes—including processes of resistance, appropriation, and co-option. Each new description confirms the usefulness of the core methodological choices of the field: This cultural comprehensiveness—a unique set of cultural characteristics perceived as expressing themselves in commonly unique ways across the sociocultural life of a population—characterizes the concept of ethnicity.
The concept of ethnicity contrasts with that of race , which refers to the perceived unique common physical and biogenetic characteristics of a population. The criteria used to characterize a group—whether comprehensive unique cultural characteristics or biogenetic ones—determine whether the group is regarded as an ethnic or a racial group. A minority group is a group whose unique cultural characteristics are perceived to be different from those characterizing the dominant groups in society.
In anthropology the term may refer to groups categorized by ethnicity, race, gender, or sexual orientation. The term is not without controversy: Anthropologists regard ethnicity, race, and minority groups as social and cultural constructs and not biological ones. In all cases the formation and perception of identities are to be explained as a result of the operation of specific social, cultural, political, and economic relationships over a long period of historical time.
Identity refers to both group self-awareness of common unique characteristics and individual self-awareness of inclusion in such a group. Self-awareness may be formulated in comprehensive cultural terms ethnic identity , in biogenetic terms racial identity , in terms of sexual orientation, and in terms of gender. Persons and groups often adhere to multiple and fluid identities, features of which may be selectively relevant in specific social situations. Much anthropology in this field demonstrates how identities have been and are invented and reinvented for political and other purposes, out of disparate historical and cultural experiences.
Identity in terms of ethnicity, race, minority group status, gender, and sexual orientation is often contrasted with class consciousness—group self-awareness in terms of belonging to the same socioeconomic group. These distinctions sometimes suggest that persons have to choose between uniting for social and political action primarily on the grounds of common membership in perceived ethnic, racial, minority, gender, sexual orientation, or environmental groups rather than on the grounds of membership in a similar socioeconomic group.
Identities owe their formation and position in society to the operation of social, economic, cultural, and political forces that are inseparable from the forces that create and maintain socioeconomic groups. In this view, rather than being opposed, identity politics and class politics, while distinct, have the potential to be allied actors in a common political process.
Urban anthropology is the study of cultural systems and identities in cities as well as the various political, social, economic, and cultural forces that shape urban forms and processes. Although anthropologists have studied the city since the s, the label urban anthropology became common only in the early s. Interest in urban issues was originally an extension of the anthropological interest in peasants and rural areas.
Anthropologists also debated the meanings of city and urban , which were initially informed by Western-biased knowledge. Unlike earlier views, which depicted the city as the site of fragmentation, alienation, and impersonal relationships, urban ethnography has been powerful in showing the strong friendships, kinship relations, and ethnic solidarities that may structure interactions in urban centres.
During the s, urban anthropologists also shifted attention from studies in the city i.
One common typology was based on a distinction between industrial and preindustrial cities. Within these two categories, other classifications were presented. Focusing on historical articulations between economic and political structures, Richard Fox , for example, distinguished among regal-ritual, administrative, mercantile, colonial, and industrial cities. Others have added types such as postcolonial, modernist, and postmodern cities. Research in cities posed several methodological and conceptual challenges to anthropology.
Requirements include a book review, a research paper and active participation in class discussion. Self-awareness may be formulated in comprehensive cultural terms ethnic identity , in biogenetic terms racial identity , in terms of sexual orientation, and in terms of gender. The examples also provide an account of how gendered discourses are deployed to convey new meanings, a new sense of place and time, confirming or challenging ideas of 'tradition' and 'modernity'. Webarchive template wayback links Articles to be expanded from March All articles to be expanded Articles with empty sections from March All articles with empty sections Articles using small message boxes. Women, as gatekeepers of household food provisioning, are not always able to control their own dietary intake. Gender, agency, and change:
In particular, urban anthropologists were pioneers in questioning emphasis on holism and synchronic analysis. Political economy became useful in analyzing historical and contemporary forces that produce inequalities within and between cities. In addition, urban anthropologists tried to find other methods such as network analysis and extended case studies to research the city.
By the early s they also drew on methods and theoretical insights from other fields to grasp the complexity of urban life and to account for the multiple actors that shape the city and its spaces. Current studies are careful not to homogenize urban types and are sensitive to diversity between and within cities.
Since the early s, urban anthropologists have been studying a broad range of practical and theoretical issues such as homelessness, spatial practices, popular culture, social movements and citizenship, gender and racial inequalities, global processes, and transnational connections. The new states gave rise to new questions in anthropology: What are the cultural dimensions of political movements in general? Do national movements, does nationalism , have particular cultural dimensions?
Are national movements constituted culturally? Modernization theory, however, was an intellectual project that developed in the shadow of the Cold War , and it was often more prescriptive of what might be than analytically descriptive of what was. Debates in later years focused on the shortcomings of the theory, and then the study of nationalism moved to the discipline of history, where the 19th-century roots of national movements were examined. The s then become a very productive time for the anthropological studies of nations.
Yet these studies were formulated around ideas of a national culture, and this concept, other scholars argued, needed to be questioned. Ranajith Guha and the anticolonial historiographers of the subaltern studies collective argued on the one hand that nonelite groups share neither the political space nor the cultural world of national elites, and other anthropologists argued on the other hand that the idea that culture could be tied to a place such as a country was conceptually flawed.
Arjun Appadurai, a pioneer in the latter argument, went on to develop in a series of influential essays the anthropological field of transnational studies, which is based on an idea of culture not tied to a place but rather in flow. This approach also enables new anthropological inquiries into a rather old phenomenon, that of diasporas. Interconnections in the 21st century work in new ways radically different from the old, and the study of diasporic groups and the countries they call home highlights for anthropologists another fascinating 21st-century question: What are the boundaries of the nation?
At first many studies of gender focused primarily on women since they had been underrepresented in the anthropological record, but the result was that gender came to stand for women. A primary question in these early studies was how and why women were subordinated in patriarchal social systems. Soon, however, the awareness that men, too, have gender sparked a much deeper analysis of the ways in which definitions of gender were mutually constructed.
Rather than assuming that gender is a natural given, therefore universal, based on an extension of animal mating behaviour, new studies demonstrated that, just as different societies produce a variety of religious, kinship, and economic systems, they also vary in terms of gender systems. While it was often assumed that sex was the natural given and gender the cultural definition built upon that natural base, some studies have raised questions about the relation between sex and sexual orientation and, thus, whether there might be more than two genders and whether sex itself may, to a large extent, be culturally constructed.
Studies of primates, long thought to hold the key to human behaviour , have shown that results depend to a significant extent on the theoretical lens through which scientists view their behaviour as well as on which primates are the object of study; this discovery has destabilized the ground on which many assumptions about gender were based. Another area creatively affected by the focus on gender is that of linguistic anthropology: And some have even asked about the notions of gender implicit in the idea of the anthropologist and the anthropological endeavour itself.
In short, the proliferation of anthropological studies of gender during the last quarter of the 20th century opened up new paths to yet unexplored areas in the 21st. While the intellectual and methodological roots of political anthropology can be traced to Montesquieu and Alexis de Tocqueville , who viewed politics and governance as cultural constructs, Elizabeth Colson dated the modern field of political anthropology to and the publication of African Political Systems , edited by Meyer Fortes and Edward Evans-Pritchard.
Max Gluckman made a singular contribution to the development of the field both as the founder of the influential Manchester school and through his focus on the role of conflict, which provided an explanation for political change within the dominant functionalist paradigm then prevailing in anthropology. The functionalist approach conceptualized societies as existing in a state of equilibrium. In Stratagems and Spoils , F.
Bailey illustrated an alternate approach, which applied game theory to the analysis of actor-driven politics. Problems of legitimacy are a central concern of political anthropology. In addition, the political role of symbols, myths , and rhetorical strategies are central foci of analysis. Self-reflexive critical analyses of traditional fieldwork methods and the concept of culture and theoretical influences from feminist, postmodern, critical legal, and cultural studies among others have had a considerable impact on the development of the field.
These trends are exemplified by PoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review ; published by the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, a unit of the American Anthropological Association and in several series focusing on the field that have been published by several major university presses. Among the many areas of interest to contemporary political anthropologists are the politics of collective identity class, gender, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and nationalism , collective memory invention of tradition, commemoration, and memorialization , civil society , collective action particularly political protest , democracy and democratization , globalization and localization, and legal studies among others.
Medical anthropology emerged as a special field of research and training after World War II, when senior American anthropologists were brought in as consultants on health care projects in Latin America , Asia, and Africa. In these countries—in stark contrast to countries with advanced economies—infectious diseases were the main cause of illness and death, and in many regions 50 percent or more of the infants born every year died before their fifth birthday.
From through the s, antibiotics were transforming the treatment of infectious diseases. Their use, combined with immunization of children, sanitation, and improved nutrition, was in the forefront of large-scale foreign aid programs. The physicians who planned and directed health care projects at that time were almost immediately confronted with failure when townspeople underutilized their clinics, ignored instructions to boil water, or in other ways failed to comply with professional advice.
Project workers were convinced that local cultural traditions formed a superstitious barrier to the rational behaviour that they advocated. In this early period the anthropologists they consulted usually accepted their formulation of the problem, but they encouraged a degree of cultural relativism by suggesting ways that programs could acknowledge local customs and use traditional concepts to explain desirable new practices. Paul , a collection of case studies first presented at the Harvard School of Public Health.
The volume became a basic text among teachers who in the s were encouraged, by private foundations and by the availability of research funding through the rapidly expanding National Institutes of Health , to initiate graduate programs in medical anthropology. These years were a time of political turmoil in which anthropology was criticized as an artifact of European and American colonialism.
Thus, students were alert to historical conflicts and injustice in the communities they studied, many of which were undergoing processes of decolonization. In addition, the tradition-modernity dichotomy , which then dominated research on cultural change, seemed to have little analytic value for understanding folk practitioners who were adding antibiotic injections to their repertoire of ritual curing and herbal remedies. Indeed, in their own society the rationality of modern Western medicine was challenged by scholars who faulted its epistemology—in particular, its positivist separation of mind and body, its dehumanizing focus on body parts, malfunctions, and lesions, and its treatment of pregnancy, birthing, and homosexuality as pathological rather than normal conditions.
The consulting work that originally focused anthropological attention on issues of health care was often ad hoc, but it did draw upon previous functionalist studies of acculturation. The second generation of scholars, who brought medical anthropology to maturity as a special field of research, considered functionalism to be a tautological and politically conservative set of theories. Their work, which began to be published in the s, was inspired by socialist thought, French structuralism , dynamic theories in psychological anthropology , and interpretive studies of cultural symbolism.
Americans took the lead in developing medical anthropology as a distinctive field of scholarship and practical work, but European scholars and practitioners have also founded specialist societies, journals, and monograph series. As the field expanded, subspecialties focused on issues such as infectious diseases, aging, and nutrition emerged.
The label critical medical anthropology was created by Marxist scholars who faulted much work in the field for neglecting inequities in the political economy. A textbook by Hans A. A Critical Perspective , presents the Marxist critique. An Anthropological Perspective Examinations of the topics of food, nutrition, and agriculture illustrate the intersection of different subfields of anthropology, particularly physical anthropology , archaeology, and social and cultural anthropology.
Anthropologists have contributed to the specialized fields of nutrition and agriculture a more holistic perspective based on the use of history, direct observation, and documentary accounts; the examination of nutrition and agriculture within households and communities; and the interconnections between different parts of the food system—including markets, cuisine, farming systems, international regulations, and trade, for example. The specialized field of nutritional anthropology was defined in North America in the mids, although anthropologists have been interested in food since the late 19th century.
Food is the foundation of every economy and plays a key part of the ethnographic description of every people, their society and culture. Both anthropologists and archaeologists have researched the evolution of subsistence systems and how farming emerged with many attendant changes in technology from food gathering about 10, years ago. Concern with the time and place of the first appearance of domesticated plants and animals has given way to questions about how domestication occurred under a variety of ecological conditions at different times and places.
Hunting and gathering, horticulture, pastoralism, and the development of agriculture demonstrate different ways in which people have adapted to their environment to feed themselves. The past hundred years have seen the rapid development of industrial agriculture and industrial food systems.