Core themes in anthropology notes
Lecture 1 | introduction: anthropology as a distinctive discipline
What makes anthropology a distinctive science?
- Comparative study of culture
- View of interlocutors (listening to and observing the researched group of people)
- Ethnographic eldwork (participant observation)
- Holism (making connections between different aspects of a society)
- Contextualisation (analyse data bound to its context on a societal scale)
- Every culture in the world is equally interesting
- Critical attitude
- Solidarity with marginalized people
Four elds of anthropology
- Cultural anthropology
- Physical anthropology
- Archaeology
- Linguistic anthropology
De nition of anthropology
Anthropology is about how different people can be, but it also tries to nd out in what sense it can be said
that all humans have something in common.
De nition of culture
A preliminary conceptualisation of culture are those abilities, notions and forms of behaviour persons have
acquired as members of society. Culture refers to the acquired, cognitive and symbolic aspects of existence.
(Eriksen, 2023)
Culture is learned, shared human behaviour and ideas, which can and do change with time (Balee, 2026). It
is what a person needs to know as a competent member of a particular social group to be able to act
adequately.
Caveats
- People are often unaware of culture
- Culture is context speci c
- Culture is not deterministic
- Culture is not bounded
- Culture is not integrated
- The term culture means something different to anthropologist and politics
De nition of society
society refers to the social organisation of human life, patterns of interaction and power of relationships.
Lecture 2 | History and Theory
Comparison is important in anthropology. It is comparative and empirical, its most important method of data
collection is ethnographic research. It may be inappropriate to speak of politics and kinship when referring to
societies which themselves lack concepts of ‘politics and ‘kinship’.
Emic and etic terms
Emic terms: terms in local vernacular
Etic terms: analytical terms for cross-cultural comparison
Both terms are needed to draw a coherent comparison between societies.
Ethnocentrism and cultural relativism
Ethnocentrism means evaluating other people from one’s own vantage point and describing them in one’s
own terms (Eriksen).
1
fi fi fi fi fi
,Cultural relativism is the doctrine that societies or cultures are qualitatively different and have their own
unique inner logic, and that it is therefore scienti cally absurd to rank them on a scale (Eriksen).
Both cultural relativism and ethnocentrism can be used to practise ethnographic research by being aware of
the extent in which ethnocentrism in uences the perspective of the researcher. In that way cultural relativism
is supported by the biased foundation laid by ethnocentrism.
Limits to cultural relativism
As an ethical principle, however, cultural relativism is probably impossible in practice since it seems to
indicate that everything is as good as anything else. Taken to its extreme cultural relativism would lead to
nihilism.
The importance of theory
No factual observation without an interpretative framework. Theory is a supposition or a system of ideas
intended to explain something, especially based on general principles independent of the thing to be
explained.
Levels of theory
- Etic concepts
- Middle-range processes
- Grand theories
The function of theory is to communicate with other scholars and to better understand and explain the
empirical phenomena we are studying.
Theoretical paradigms (era)
A theoretical paradigm is a coherent approach to anthropology, consisting of assumptions about the nature of
society, a theoretical core, examples of key texts, a name for the paradigm, and a sense of membership
among the followers.
Examples of paradigms
- Evolutionism (Burnett Tylor & Morgan)-> all societies go through the same evolutionary stages.
- Historical particularism (Boas & Benedict)-> the view that all societies or cultures have their own, unique
history (four elds anthropology)
- Cultural and personality school (Boas) -> explain observed psychological differences across societies, by
cultural differences
- Structural functionalism and colonialism (Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard) -> social and
cultural phenomena could be seen as functional in the sense that they contributed to the maintenance of
the overall social structure. British anthropologists developed a strong interest in local politics among
peoples often subjected to indirect rule from the colonial of ce
- Structuralism (Levi-strauss & Douglas) -> views culture as a system analogous to language, governed by
underlying, universal mental structures
- Transactionalism (Barth, Leach, Eriksen) -> the social status of a person never de nes their entire eld of
agency. This is partly because a status never entails exact, detailed rules concerning how to behave in
every situation. The notion of agency implies that people know they act, even if they do not necessarily
know the consequences of their acts. In other words, it is always possible to do something different from
what one is doing now.
- Postmodernism (Foucault & Said) -> society held together through discourse: society is a series of
narratives. Such discourses are set within power relationships and are re ective of them. Discourses
promote ways of understanding and interpreting the world to the favour or disfavour of individuals or
groups.
Decolonizing anthropology: 19th century, early 20th century
British, French and Dutch anthropology in colonies. Examples: van Vollenhoven on common law in Indonesia
and Rattray on Golden Stool in Ashantie.
Anthropology comes home
- Tribal communities
- Peasant societies
- Urban, industrial societies in Europe and USA
2
fi fl fi fi fl fi fi
, - Anthropology in Global South (second largest in Brazil)
- Reversed anthropology (anthropologist from the Global South researching Europe and North
America)
Lecture 3 | Fieldwork
Ethnographic research distinguishes anthropology from other social sciences.
Participant observation is a research technique in which the anthropologist tries to observe everyday
activities of the researched people and to ask open questions to the observed participants. It’s a formalized
curiosity.
Why would you practice participant observation?
- Observing routines that are dif cult to describe
- Hearing the use of terms in context
- Seeing social organization in action
- Building trust to prepare for interviews
- Seeing discrepancies between what people say they do and actually do
How does participant observation work? It can take a few months, a year or a couple of years to gather data
on the researched group. An ideal research duration is a year. In this year the researcher gets to know the
people, understands the language and observes the society throughout the seasonal changes. The presence
of the anthropologist must be considered natural by the permanent residents, although they will to some
extent remain strangers.
Positionality
The anthropologist is the most important ‘scienti c instrument’ used, investing a great deal of his or her own
personality in the process. The gender, age, ‘race’ and class of the anthropologist inadvertently in uence the
experience of eldwork.
The multiple crisis in anthropology of the 1980s
- Quality of seminal works questioned
- Opening of black box of eldwork
- Male bias
- The right to represent others
- Role in counter insurgency
- Is objective knowledge possible?
Postmodernism in anthropology
- Deconstruction of concepts (example: illegal/undocumented immigrants)
- Self-re ective turn and positionality
- Interlocutors (suggest equality that’s not there)
- Polyvocality
- Literary turn in anthropology
Strengths and weaknesses of ethnographic research
Weaknesses
- Investment of time
- Not a random sample
- Risk of going native
- Lack of objectivity
Strengths/criteria
- Some scale of objectivity
- Large numbers
- Rapport
- Re exivity
- Ethnographic depth
3
fl fifl fi fi fi fl
, Far from being neutral and objective descriptions and analysis of other people’s customs and cultural
systems, anthropological writings are shaped by each authors biography, literary style and rhetoric, as well
as by the historical period in which they were written. Anthropological texts are usually written in the present
tense. Many of the most in uential monographs were nevertheless written half a century ago or more, and in
all cases, societies have changed radically since eldwork took place.
Lecture 4 | The social person
Research ethical dilemmas in anthropology
- Informed consent (inform host about research)
- Keeping secrets of participants (crimes for example)
- Ambivalent relationship with interlocutors
- Inequality in power vis a vis your interlocutors
- Power con icts between participants (neutrality is impossible)
For humans to survive in society, they depend on several shared social conventions or implicit rules for
behaviour.
The value of participant observation lies in the quality of the empirical data collected not in the number of
close friends one has acquired.
Three roles of anthropologist in con ict
- Accomplice
- Partisan
- Broker
Reasons for anthropology at home
- Globalized world: boundary between home and away has become blurred
- Analyses of small-scale societies applied to large-scale societies
- Lack of funding
- Dif cult access to countries in the global south
- Fundamental questions are relevant anywhere
- Anthropology without ying
Nature-nurture
All behaviour has a social origin. Human beings are biological creatures with certain unquestionably innate
needs (food/sleep), but there are always socially created ways of satisfying these needs.
Despite recent advances in cognitive science, the general trend in contemporary social and cultural
anthropology is nevertheless to give priority to nurture over nature, and to emphasize the enormous variation
generated under differing circumstances.
There is only a tiny proportion of genetic variation in the world. The classi cation of humanity into races,
based on physical appearance, is arbitrary and thus belongs to the anthropology of power and ideology, not
to the area of cultural variation.
‘The inborn genetic variation between human groups is incapable of explaining the enormous cultural
variation in the world [...] anthropologists would rather argue that dimensions of existence which seem
inborn, such the differences between the genders, or even aggression and emotions commonly seen as
genetically determined, must be understood as social and cultural products’ (Eriksen 2023: 60).
The smallest entity studied by social anthropologists is not an individual, but a relationship between the two.
Conceptual toolkit for understanding local organization
- Status -> a status is a socially de ned aspect of a person which de nes a social relationship and
entails certain rights and duties in relation to others. One person typically is the incumbent of a
great number of statuses.
- Ascribed and achieved status -> ascribed statuses cannot be opted out of
4
fi fl fl fl fl fi fi fi fi
Lecture 1 | introduction: anthropology as a distinctive discipline
What makes anthropology a distinctive science?
- Comparative study of culture
- View of interlocutors (listening to and observing the researched group of people)
- Ethnographic eldwork (participant observation)
- Holism (making connections between different aspects of a society)
- Contextualisation (analyse data bound to its context on a societal scale)
- Every culture in the world is equally interesting
- Critical attitude
- Solidarity with marginalized people
Four elds of anthropology
- Cultural anthropology
- Physical anthropology
- Archaeology
- Linguistic anthropology
De nition of anthropology
Anthropology is about how different people can be, but it also tries to nd out in what sense it can be said
that all humans have something in common.
De nition of culture
A preliminary conceptualisation of culture are those abilities, notions and forms of behaviour persons have
acquired as members of society. Culture refers to the acquired, cognitive and symbolic aspects of existence.
(Eriksen, 2023)
Culture is learned, shared human behaviour and ideas, which can and do change with time (Balee, 2026). It
is what a person needs to know as a competent member of a particular social group to be able to act
adequately.
Caveats
- People are often unaware of culture
- Culture is context speci c
- Culture is not deterministic
- Culture is not bounded
- Culture is not integrated
- The term culture means something different to anthropologist and politics
De nition of society
society refers to the social organisation of human life, patterns of interaction and power of relationships.
Lecture 2 | History and Theory
Comparison is important in anthropology. It is comparative and empirical, its most important method of data
collection is ethnographic research. It may be inappropriate to speak of politics and kinship when referring to
societies which themselves lack concepts of ‘politics and ‘kinship’.
Emic and etic terms
Emic terms: terms in local vernacular
Etic terms: analytical terms for cross-cultural comparison
Both terms are needed to draw a coherent comparison between societies.
Ethnocentrism and cultural relativism
Ethnocentrism means evaluating other people from one’s own vantage point and describing them in one’s
own terms (Eriksen).
1
fi fi fi fi fi
,Cultural relativism is the doctrine that societies or cultures are qualitatively different and have their own
unique inner logic, and that it is therefore scienti cally absurd to rank them on a scale (Eriksen).
Both cultural relativism and ethnocentrism can be used to practise ethnographic research by being aware of
the extent in which ethnocentrism in uences the perspective of the researcher. In that way cultural relativism
is supported by the biased foundation laid by ethnocentrism.
Limits to cultural relativism
As an ethical principle, however, cultural relativism is probably impossible in practice since it seems to
indicate that everything is as good as anything else. Taken to its extreme cultural relativism would lead to
nihilism.
The importance of theory
No factual observation without an interpretative framework. Theory is a supposition or a system of ideas
intended to explain something, especially based on general principles independent of the thing to be
explained.
Levels of theory
- Etic concepts
- Middle-range processes
- Grand theories
The function of theory is to communicate with other scholars and to better understand and explain the
empirical phenomena we are studying.
Theoretical paradigms (era)
A theoretical paradigm is a coherent approach to anthropology, consisting of assumptions about the nature of
society, a theoretical core, examples of key texts, a name for the paradigm, and a sense of membership
among the followers.
Examples of paradigms
- Evolutionism (Burnett Tylor & Morgan)-> all societies go through the same evolutionary stages.
- Historical particularism (Boas & Benedict)-> the view that all societies or cultures have their own, unique
history (four elds anthropology)
- Cultural and personality school (Boas) -> explain observed psychological differences across societies, by
cultural differences
- Structural functionalism and colonialism (Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard) -> social and
cultural phenomena could be seen as functional in the sense that they contributed to the maintenance of
the overall social structure. British anthropologists developed a strong interest in local politics among
peoples often subjected to indirect rule from the colonial of ce
- Structuralism (Levi-strauss & Douglas) -> views culture as a system analogous to language, governed by
underlying, universal mental structures
- Transactionalism (Barth, Leach, Eriksen) -> the social status of a person never de nes their entire eld of
agency. This is partly because a status never entails exact, detailed rules concerning how to behave in
every situation. The notion of agency implies that people know they act, even if they do not necessarily
know the consequences of their acts. In other words, it is always possible to do something different from
what one is doing now.
- Postmodernism (Foucault & Said) -> society held together through discourse: society is a series of
narratives. Such discourses are set within power relationships and are re ective of them. Discourses
promote ways of understanding and interpreting the world to the favour or disfavour of individuals or
groups.
Decolonizing anthropology: 19th century, early 20th century
British, French and Dutch anthropology in colonies. Examples: van Vollenhoven on common law in Indonesia
and Rattray on Golden Stool in Ashantie.
Anthropology comes home
- Tribal communities
- Peasant societies
- Urban, industrial societies in Europe and USA
2
fi fl fi fi fl fi fi
, - Anthropology in Global South (second largest in Brazil)
- Reversed anthropology (anthropologist from the Global South researching Europe and North
America)
Lecture 3 | Fieldwork
Ethnographic research distinguishes anthropology from other social sciences.
Participant observation is a research technique in which the anthropologist tries to observe everyday
activities of the researched people and to ask open questions to the observed participants. It’s a formalized
curiosity.
Why would you practice participant observation?
- Observing routines that are dif cult to describe
- Hearing the use of terms in context
- Seeing social organization in action
- Building trust to prepare for interviews
- Seeing discrepancies between what people say they do and actually do
How does participant observation work? It can take a few months, a year or a couple of years to gather data
on the researched group. An ideal research duration is a year. In this year the researcher gets to know the
people, understands the language and observes the society throughout the seasonal changes. The presence
of the anthropologist must be considered natural by the permanent residents, although they will to some
extent remain strangers.
Positionality
The anthropologist is the most important ‘scienti c instrument’ used, investing a great deal of his or her own
personality in the process. The gender, age, ‘race’ and class of the anthropologist inadvertently in uence the
experience of eldwork.
The multiple crisis in anthropology of the 1980s
- Quality of seminal works questioned
- Opening of black box of eldwork
- Male bias
- The right to represent others
- Role in counter insurgency
- Is objective knowledge possible?
Postmodernism in anthropology
- Deconstruction of concepts (example: illegal/undocumented immigrants)
- Self-re ective turn and positionality
- Interlocutors (suggest equality that’s not there)
- Polyvocality
- Literary turn in anthropology
Strengths and weaknesses of ethnographic research
Weaknesses
- Investment of time
- Not a random sample
- Risk of going native
- Lack of objectivity
Strengths/criteria
- Some scale of objectivity
- Large numbers
- Rapport
- Re exivity
- Ethnographic depth
3
fl fifl fi fi fi fl
, Far from being neutral and objective descriptions and analysis of other people’s customs and cultural
systems, anthropological writings are shaped by each authors biography, literary style and rhetoric, as well
as by the historical period in which they were written. Anthropological texts are usually written in the present
tense. Many of the most in uential monographs were nevertheless written half a century ago or more, and in
all cases, societies have changed radically since eldwork took place.
Lecture 4 | The social person
Research ethical dilemmas in anthropology
- Informed consent (inform host about research)
- Keeping secrets of participants (crimes for example)
- Ambivalent relationship with interlocutors
- Inequality in power vis a vis your interlocutors
- Power con icts between participants (neutrality is impossible)
For humans to survive in society, they depend on several shared social conventions or implicit rules for
behaviour.
The value of participant observation lies in the quality of the empirical data collected not in the number of
close friends one has acquired.
Three roles of anthropologist in con ict
- Accomplice
- Partisan
- Broker
Reasons for anthropology at home
- Globalized world: boundary between home and away has become blurred
- Analyses of small-scale societies applied to large-scale societies
- Lack of funding
- Dif cult access to countries in the global south
- Fundamental questions are relevant anywhere
- Anthropology without ying
Nature-nurture
All behaviour has a social origin. Human beings are biological creatures with certain unquestionably innate
needs (food/sleep), but there are always socially created ways of satisfying these needs.
Despite recent advances in cognitive science, the general trend in contemporary social and cultural
anthropology is nevertheless to give priority to nurture over nature, and to emphasize the enormous variation
generated under differing circumstances.
There is only a tiny proportion of genetic variation in the world. The classi cation of humanity into races,
based on physical appearance, is arbitrary and thus belongs to the anthropology of power and ideology, not
to the area of cultural variation.
‘The inborn genetic variation between human groups is incapable of explaining the enormous cultural
variation in the world [...] anthropologists would rather argue that dimensions of existence which seem
inborn, such the differences between the genders, or even aggression and emotions commonly seen as
genetically determined, must be understood as social and cultural products’ (Eriksen 2023: 60).
The smallest entity studied by social anthropologists is not an individual, but a relationship between the two.
Conceptual toolkit for understanding local organization
- Status -> a status is a socially de ned aspect of a person which de nes a social relationship and
entails certain rights and duties in relation to others. One person typically is the incumbent of a
great number of statuses.
- Ascribed and achieved status -> ascribed statuses cannot be opted out of
4
fi fl fl fl fl fi fi fi fi
