A History of Anthropology as a Holistic Science by Custred Glynn;

Author:Custred, Glynn;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Widening Scope of Anthropological Inquiry

The focus of early anthropological study was small scale, preliterate face-to-face communities represented by the few hunter-gatherer bands that could still be found and the tribal societies of Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific islands. As these social groups changed with the spread of modernization, some anthropologists looked to Europe where there still existed in some rural regions communities with traits similar to primitive communities; primitive in the sense of being primary, the kind of social arrangements and cultural forms from which more elaborated societies were derived.

In 1937, Conrad Arensberg wrote The Irish Countryman, an anthropological study of the peasant population of Western Ireland, in which he describes the family structure and the household and the way of life and the labor of the rural population. He also describes their deep religious commitment and the persistence, on the folk level, of beliefs and practices that go back to the Middle Ages and in some cases perhaps back to prehistoric times.

In 1954, Julian Pitt-Rivers published The People of the Sierra, a study of the social structure of a rural community in Andalusia in which he applied the principles and methods of social anthropology to determine the nature of European peasant society in that country. He studied the roles of the mayor, the physician, and the priest, as well as smugglers and bandits and the Gypsy population on the margins, and the still common belief in witches. His study was relevant for students in several disciplines not only in Europe but Latin America as well.

In the 1930s, Robert Redfield began a long range study of the rural population of Mexico which he called folk societies, by comparing four peasant communities in different stages of their engagement with modernization. He also drew a wider picture of traditional agrarian society in general, in terms of two interacting levels. At its base was the majority of the peasant population which he called the folk stratum and at the top was a small elite which lived in cities and which held economic and political power. The two formed what Redfield called the folk-urban continuum, and their different but interacting cultures he called the Little and the Great traditions. Among his books on those subjects are The Primitive World and its Transformation (1953), The Little Community (1955), and Peasant Society and Culture (1956).

Milton Singer, student of the civilization of India, was another anthropologists who in the 1950s and 1960s studied a traditional society undergoing change. He was especially interested in the modern period and conducted field interviews to ascertain how those people were, then working in the industrial sector had made the transition from village and small town life to that of large cities, and from commerce to industry. He found that they had done so without abandoning their traditional institutions and that their successful careers had been influenced by Indian culture. In 1974, he summed up his approach in When a Great Tradition Modernizes: an Anthropological Approach to Indian Civilization. In

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.