Introduction
Cultural Anthropology is one of the domains that have provoked and grabbed the interests of anthropologists for centuries. Anthropologists have strived to understand the impact of cultural identities, relationships, etc. on the development of civilizations and nations. Considering this impact, cultural anthropologists have tried to study race, ethnicity, religion, etc. as a part of cultural identity and its development. The respective paper has briefly developed a genealogical lineage of cultural anthropologists about their inspirations and common objectives. A brief overview of the contributions and inspirations of these anthropologists will be discussed in this paper.
Theoretical Genealogy
The paper will start with Margaret Williamson Huber[1] As a recent anthropologist. She was a student of Rodney Needham and was inspired by the works of Ward Goodenough. Rodney Needham’s cultural anthropological works were inspired by Evans-Pritchard and Malinowski. On the other hand, the works of Goodenough were also inspired by Malinowski. However, the objectives of his works were more common and compared to Peter Riviere and Edmund Leach. Both of these cultural anthropologists were also inspired by the theories of Bronislaw Malinowski.
- Margaret Williamson Huber
Margaret Williamson Huber[2] is the first and recent most anthropologist from whom this lineage will initiate. Margaret Williamson Huber is currently serving as the Professor Emerita of Anthropology. She has received her D.Phil. Degree in social anthropology from Oxford University. She is currently a faculty member at the University of Mary Washington where she is teaching the subjects of cultural importance including gender, native North American history, Oceania, religion, Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, etc. However, her most valuable contribution in the field of anthropology is her book titled Powhatan Lords of Life and Death[3] which was published in 2003 by the University of Nebraska Press. She was a direct student of Rodney Needham and was inspired by the cultural theories and works of Ward Goodenough.
Rodney Needham
Rodney Needham was a standout amongst the most recognized social anthropologists of the recent century. His concept of social anthropology as the near colossal investigation of the human creative ability set him apart among western anthropologists, as well as gave his work a general extension going long way past the breaking points of a particular scholarly train.
Needham’s exceptional perseverance in getting the truths right, his thoroughness in dissecting them, and his forces of annihilating sloppy and mistaken intuition were likewise qualities that were valued by his expert associates and were a model for his understudies.
Needham unequivocally concurred with Evans-Pritchard[4] that British social anthropology could profit from the thoughts of Durkheim, Mauss, Hertz, and others of the Année Sociologique school. He took the main part in interpreting and presenting this and furthermore deciphered some work of German and Dutch researchers into English.
In any case, the most well-known researcher whose work he interpreted was the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss[5]. In the same way as other individuals at the time, Needham was at first captivated by structuralism which, roused by phonetics, endeavored to clarify the diversities of human culture by a couple of essential and all-inclusive structures of the cerebrum.
He trusted that the global correlations made by social anthropologists uncover that there are just extremely constrained quantities of courses in which connection frameworks and marriage principles can be constituted. So as well, fundamental to all the assorted qualities of myth, custom, and social association there are a genuinely set number of what Needham called “essential components”; these are discovered everywhere throughout the world, if not in each society then paying little mind to dialect or verifiable associations.
These hypothetical concerns prompted significant books[6], one on the way of conviction, another on parallel restriction, and an altered volume on left and right. A number of Needham’s books were accumulations of expositions, or of addresses given on his many visits to America. These have a supreme style – wary, provocative, loaded with inquisitive and arcane learning, and regularly with the philosophical reason for unsettling our smug suppositions that the world is the thing that it is by all accounts.
E.E. Evans-Pritchard
Evans-Pritchard was a huge figure in British anthropology, whose work prompted the advancement of social anthropology both in that nation and around the world. He was a teacher of social anthropology at the University of Oxford from 1946 to 1970 and is viewed as one of the establishing “progenitors” of anthropological reviews there.
His view that anthropology ought not to be restricted to logical techniques, but rather ought to utilize strategies utilized by history specialists, together with his emphasis on understanding the religious parts of different cultures, are huge commitments to the relationship of anthropological research to information all in all. In 1950 he broadly denied the regularly held view that anthropology was a characteristic science, contending rather that it ought to be gathered among the humanities, particularly history. He contended that the principal issue confronting anthropologists was one of interpretation—figuring out how to make one’s very own interpretation musings into the universe of another culture and along these lines figure out how to come to comprehend it, and afterward to decipher this comprehension back in order to disclose it to individuals of one’s culture.
In 1965, he distributed the very compelling work Theories of Primitive Religion[7], contending against the current theories of what at the time was called “primitive” religious practices. Contending along the lines of his theoretical work of the 1950s, he asserted that anthropologists were rarely prevailing with regards to entering the psyches of the general population they considered, thus credited to them inspirations which all the more firmly coordinated themselves and their particular culture, not the one they are examining. He likewise contended that devotees and non-adherents moved toward the investigation of religion in limitlessly distinctive routes, with non-devotees being faster to think of natural, sociological, or mental theories to clarify religion as a hallucination, and adherents will probably concoct theories clarifying religion as a technique for conceptualizing and relating to reality.
Bronislaw Malinowski
A standout amongst essential and most prominent anthropologists of the twentieth century who is broadly perceived as an author of social anthropology and mainly associated with field investigations of the people groups of Oceania.[8]
Malinowski was dynamic in supporting investigations of social and cultural change and partook vivaciously in instructive projects for chairpersons, ministers, and social laborers. In the 1930s he turned out to be quite keen on Africa; was nearly associated with the International African Institute; went to understudies working among Bemba, Swazi, and different tribes in eastern and southern Africa; and composed the prologue to Jomo Kenyatta’s book Facing Mount Kenya (1938), arranged as a recognition postulation under his watch.
His showing vocation amid those last years was less surprising than some time recently, yet he could think about worker advertisements in Mexico in 1940 and 1941 and had plans for an investigation of social change in the Mexican-Indian people group. An awesome adherent to opportunity, he had additionally been effectively related to the Polish divided in the war.
Ward Goodenough
Ward Goodenough was one of the twentieth century’s driving cultural anthropologists. Amid his long and profitable vocation, Goodenough propelled a phonetically based model of how cultures work; he grew experimentally through ethnographic techniques to record the structures through which particular cultures worked. His way to deal with cultural anthropology was experimentally based on serious hands-on work in Oceania, particularly in the Chuuk Islands of Micronesia and in New Britain.
Goodenough additionally made real commitments to the field of connected anthropology, to Oceanic phonetics and dialect history, and to a phylogenetic approach in chronicled anthropology. Amid his showing profession at the University of Pennsylvania, Goodenough impacted a few eras of anthropologists. Notwithstanding his scholarly achievements, Goodenough was a genuine renaissance man, familiar with a few dialects, an artist given to work, and a performer who spent significant time in console fugues.
Goodenough’s enthusiasm for utilizing correlation with reconstructing cultural histories in Oceania was first communicated in his exemplary paper on the Malayo-Polynesian social association, in which he demonstrated that the association of drop gatherings in Oceania could change after some time about the accessibility of agricultural arrive little islands. In later work, he exhibited that Oceania, with its phylogenetically related cultural conventions and dialects, was a particularly reasonable range for directing efficient correlations of “structurally homologous customs.”[9]
Peter Riviere
Dwindle Rivière was in post at the Institute from 1971 until 2001, resigning as Professor of Social Anthropology and Fellow of Linacre College.
His exploration has focused on Lowland South America, an area which he initially went to in 1957-8 as an individual from a joined Oxford and Cambridge Expedition. His hands-on work among Native Peoples of Amazonia has concentrated on the Trio of Surinam and Brazil outskirt, on which he has distributed widely, including the monograph Marriage among the Trio (1969)[10]. He extended this to comparative investigations of the area, best shown by Individual and Society in Guiana (1984). He additionally worked with Brazilian farmers in the State of Roraima, about whom he composed The Forgotten Frontier (1972)[11]. All the more as of late his interests have turned more recorded about the wilderness question between Great Britain and Brazil, and he altered for the Hakluyt Society two volumes of Robert Schomburgk’s Guiana travels in 1835-44 (2006).
His contributions have been the historical backdrop of anthropology, in particular, that of the transformative period. He altered for the University of Chicago reprints of the Victorian works of art by John McLennan and John Lubbock. He has likewise been included, on a willful and easygoing premise, with different undertakings at the Pitt Rivers Museum managing the establishing accumulation of the museum given to the University by General Pitt-Rivers.
Edmund Leach
Edmund Leach became well known in a region that he had not considered as an undergraduate.
Leach’s fieldwork took him to different areas in Asia, including Botel Tobago, Kurdistan, Burma, and Ceylon. His enthusiasm for mechanical science is obvious in his point-by-point field notes and outlines.
Leach invested a lot of energy in Burma, including a period of filling in as a warrior in the Burmese jungle[12]. It is his book ‘Political Systems of Highland Burma: a Study of Kachin Social Structure’ (1954) for which he is best known. The book had an effect that was to a great extent because of his utilization of inventive techniques for tending to social and political change, by concentrating on expansive and different zones, as opposed to concentrating on a solitary society or tribe.
References
Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan. Right & left: essays on dual symbolic classification. Edited by Rodney Needham. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.
Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan. Theories of primitive religion. Oxford University Press, 1965.
Goodenough, Ward H. Description, and comparison in cultural anthropology. Vol. 1968. CUP Archive, 1980.
Leach, Edmund R. “Political Systems of Highland Burma: a study of Kachin social structure.” (2004).
Leach, Edmund. Claude Lévi-Strauss. University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An account of native enterprise and adventure in the archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. Routledge, 2002.
Needham, Rodney. “Belief, language, and experience.” (1972).
Riviere, Peter. “Marriage among the Trio.” Marriage among the Trio (1969).
Riviere, Peter. The Forgotten Frontier: Ranchers of Northern Brazil. Stanford University, 1972.
Williamson, Margaret Holmes. “Powhatan Lords of Life and Death.” (2003).
- http://www.worldcat.org/identities/lccn-no2012082771/ ↑
- University of Mary Washington. Faculty. http://cas.umw.edu/sociologyanthropology/about-the-department/meet-the-faculty/#huber (2017) ↑
- Williamson, Margaret Holmes. “Powhatan Lords of Life and Death.” (2003). ↑
- Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan. Right & left: essays on dual symbolic classification. Edited by Rodney Needham. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. ↑
- Leach, Edmund. Claude Lévi-Strauss. University of Chicago Press, 1989. ↑
- Needham, Rodney. “Belief, language, and experience.” (1972). ↑
- Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan. Theories of primitive religion. Oxford University Press, 1965. ↑
- Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An account of native enterprise and adventure in the archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. Routledge, 2002. ↑
- Goodenough, Ward H. Description, and comparison in cultural anthropology. Vol. 1968. CUP Archive, 1980. ↑
- Riviere, Peter. “Marriage among the Trio.” Marriage among the Trio (1969). ↑
- Riviere, Peter. The Forgotten Frontier: Ranchers of Northern Brazil. Stanford University, 1972. ↑
- Leach, Edmund R. “Political Systems of Highland Burma: a study of Kachin social structure.” (2004). ↑
