Concept of the Anthropological Research

Concept  of the Anthropological Research

Anthropology is the study of humans, past and present. To understand the full sweep and complexity of cultures across all of human history, anthropology draws and builds upon knowledge from the social and biological sciences as well as the humanities and physical sciences.

Anthropology is the study of people throughout the world, their evolutionary history, how they behave, adapt to different environments, communicate and socialise with one another.

“The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human            differences” 

Anthropologist Ruth Benedict (1887-1948)

The Concept of Anthropological Research:

Anthropological research is very different from laboratory-based experimental research. Anthropological research deals largely with qualitative aspects and focuses on the creation and transmission of meaning. Meaning is mediated through language and action and the best way of understanding this is through observation and engagement that is difficult through more 'traditional' research methods.

Anthropological Research look at cross-cultural, emic etic, outsider-insider, differences in social institutions, cultural beliefs, and communication styles. It often seek to promote understanding between groups by "translating" each culture to the other, for instance by spelling out common, taken-for-granted assumptions.

1.Emic and Etic:

The emic approach investigates how local people think, how they perceive and categorize the world, their rules for behavior, what has meaning for them, and how they imagine and explain things.

The emic method is used to research topics that don't have too much theory attached to them. Researchers disregard theories and concepts and focus on the actual data from participants and pay attention to the themes or patterns that appear.

The etic approach shifts the focus from local observations, categories, explanations, and interpretations to those of the anthropologist. In Etic Researchers focus on an existing theory and try to apply it to a new setting or population to see if the theory fits. Relying  heavily on the etic approach means discarding new or cutting-edge concepts. When using the etic approach, the ethnographer emphasizes what he or she considers important.

Emic and Etic approaches of understanding behavior and personality fall under the study of cultural anthropology

2.Outsider Insider:

Sociologists and qualitative researchers have engaged in an extensive debate about the benefits and drawbacks of researchers being from the communities they study.

Robert Merton (1972), for example, summarized two opposing views as the Outsider Doctrine and the Insider Doctrine. The Outsider Doctrine values researchers who are not from the communities they study as neutral, detached observers. Similar to Simmel’s portrayal of the stranger, outsider researchers are valued for their objectivity, “which permits the stranger to experience and treat even his close relationships as though from a bird’s-eye view.

The Outsider Doctrine challenges the ability of insider researchers to analyze clearly that of which they are a part. The Insider Doctrine, on the other hand, holds that outsider researchers will never truly understand a culture or situation if they have not experienced it. The Insider Doctrine further contends that insider researchers are uniquely positioned to understand the experiences of groups of which they are members.

3.Synchrony and diachrony:

Synchrony is the study of a language in a given time. It shows how language works at a given time. It play no attention to its past history of future destine. It is called synchronic and descriptive languet. It studies a language at a one period in time. It investigates the way people speak in a given speech community at a given point in time.

Diachrony is the study of a language through time. The study of how speech habits change from time to time is called diachronic or historical and Temporal linguistics. It studies the development of language through time. For example, it studies French and Latin have evolved from Latin or Gujarati, Hindi and other Indian language have evolved from Sanskrit. It also examines language changes. These two approaches have be kept clearly apart. According to C.F. Hockett: "The study of how a language works at a given time, regardless of its past history or future destiny, is called descriptive or synchronic linguistics.

4.Cross-Cultural comparisons:

Cross-Cultural comparison is a statistical cross- cultural comparisons can be used to discover traits shared between cultures and generate ideas about cultural universals. Cross-cultural analysts create hypotheses and consult data into order to draw statistical correlations about the relationships among certain cultural traits.

Cross-Cultural comparison is a specialization in anthropology  that uses field data from many societies to examine the scope of human behavior and test hypotheses about human behavior and culture. Cross -cultural studies is the third form of cross-cultural comparisons. The first is comparison of case studies, the second is controlled comparison among variants of a common derivation, and the third is comparison within a sample of cases.

Cross-cultural studies are applied widely in the social sciences, particularly in cultural anthropology and psychology.

5.Cultural relativism:

Cultural relativism means that while the anthropologist is in the field, he or she temporarily suspends their own esthetic and moral judgements . The aim is to obtain a certain degree of "understanding" or "empathy" with the foreign norms and tastes. Morally and politically, cultural relativism means that we respect other cultures and treat them as "as good as" one's own. During fieldwork one frequently discovers that this is not as easy as it may sound.

Cultural relativism is the principle that an individual person's beliefs and activities should be understood by others in terms of that individual's own culture. It was established as axiomatic in anthropological research by Franz Boas in the first few decades of the 20th century and later popularized by his students.

Cultural relativism is widely accepted in modern anthropology. Cultural relativists believe that all cultures are worthy in their own right and are of equal value. Diversity of cultures, even those with conflicting moral beliefs, is not to be considered in terms of right and wrong or good and bad. Today’s anthropologist considers all cultures to be equally legitimate expressions of human existence, to be studied from a purely neutral perspective.

6.Historical Particularism:

Historical particularism is widely considered the last American anthropological school of thought. Founded by Franz Boas, historical particularism rejected the cultural evolutionary model that had dominated anthropology up until Boas. It argued that each society is a collective representation of its unique historical past. Boas rejected parallel evolutionism, the idea that all societies are on the same path and have reached their specific level of development the same way all other societies have. Instead, historical particularism showed that societies could reach the same level of cultural development through different paths.

The term historical particularism refers to the idea that each culture has its own particular and unique history that is not governed by universal laws.

The evolutionary path used generalities and universal themes to explain cultural similarities, but Boas “contended that cultural traits first must be explained in terms of specific cultural contexts rather than by broad reference to general evolutionary trends”.

7.Holism:

The term "holism" is additionally used within social and cultural anthropology to refer to an analysis of a society as a whole which refuses to break society into component parts. One definition says: "as a methodological ideal, holism implies that one does not permit oneself to believe that our own established institutional boundaries necessarily may be found also in foreign societies."

Émile Durkheim developed a concept of holism which he set as opposite to the notion that a society was nothing more than a simple collection of individuals. In more recent times, Louis Dumont has contrasted "holism" to "individualism" as two different forms of societies. According to him, modern humans live in an individualist society, whereas ancient Greek society, for example, could be qualified as "holistic", because the individual found identity in the whole society. Thus, the individual was ready to sacrifice himself or herself for his or her community, as his or her life without the polis had no sense whatsoever.

8.Intensive Fieldwork:

In anthropology, field research is organized so as to produce a kind of writing called ethnography. Ethnography can refer to both a methodology and a product of research, namely a monograph or book. Ethnography is a grounded, inductive method that heavily relies on participant-observation. Participant observation is a structured type of research strategy.

It is a widely used methodology in many disciplines, particularly, cultural anthropology. Its aim is to gain a close and intimate familiarity with a given group of individuals (such as a religious, occupational, or sub cultural group, or a particular community) and their practices through an intensive involvement with people in their natural environment, usually over an extended period of time. The method originated in field work of social anthropologists. Traditional participant observation is usually undertaken over an extended period of time, ranging from several months to many years, and even generations. An extended research time period means that the researcher is able to obtain more detailed and accurate information about the individuals, community, and/or population under study.

Reference:

1.Merton, Robert. 1972. “Insiders and Outsiders: A Chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge.” American Journal of Sociology 78:9–47

2.Saussure, Ferdinand de. Coursen in General  Linguistics. Eds. Charles Bally and Albert  Sechehaye. Trans. Roy Harris. La Salle, Illinois

3. Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches by H. Russell Bernard  (Author)

4. Cross-Cultural Research Methods by Carol R. Ember  (Author), Melvin Ember (Author)

5. https:// en.wikipedia. org

6. https://www.questia.com/library/sociology-and-anthropology