Cultural Anthropology

Cultural anthropology is one of the four fields of anthropology, the holistic study of humanity. It deals with the study of culture and uses the methods and data of archeology , ethnography, ethnology, folklore, and linguistics to analyze the diverse peoples of the world. Let us have a discussion on the Cultural anthropology. Now we will see how different anthropologists define cultural anthropology. “Encarta Dictionaries” writes: “Study of human culture: the scientific study of human culture or the culture of specific societies, including social structure, language, religion, art, and technology” “Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia” comments: “It is the branch of anthropology that examines culture as a meaningful scientific concept.” “Merriam Webster’s Dictionary” says: “Anthropology that deals with human culture esp. with respect to social structure, language, law, politics, religion, magic, art, and technology compare physical anthropology” Conrad Phillip Kottak states: “Cultural anthropology is the study of human society and culture, the subfield that describes, and analyzes, interprets, and explains social and cultural similarities and difference.” Now we will discuss the characteristics of the Cultural anthropology in our following discussion. Actually cultural anthropologists study cultural variation among humans, collect thoughts, usually through participant observation called fieldwork and examine the impact of global economic and political process on local cultural realities.  They research how people make their livings, how people interact with each other, what beliefs people hold, and what institutions organize them in a society. Cultural anthropologists usually take part in two types of activities in order to study and interpret cultural variety; such as: 1.       Ethnography, based on field work 2.       Ethnology, based on cross cultural comparison Ethnography is a specific kind of written observational science which provides an account of particular human community, society or culture based mainly on fieldwork. Cultural anthropologists often live for months or years with the people they study and completely plunge themselves in their everyday life. This is called fieldwork. They commonly write book-length accounts of their fieldwork, known as ethnographies. On the other hand Ethnology takes the research of Ethnographers to compare and contrast different cultures. Ethnologists attempt to identify and explain cultural differences and similarities, to test hypotheses. Ethnology gets its data for comparison not just from anthropology but also from the other subfield especially from archaeological anthropology. Cultural anthropologists also often study a group’s folklore by collecting its oral story. Oral stories are constructed from a society’s poems songs myth proverbs and folk tales. Linguistics, the study of the history and structure of language, is very important to cultural anthropologists. Last of all, we must say the cultural anthropology helps us to understand when, where, and how humans evolve, how people adapt to different environments, how societies have developed and changed from the ancient past to the present. It teaches us ways to meet the present day needs of people all over the world and to plan how we might live in the future.

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