[MUSIC] Hi, in this module, I'm going to introduce you to the discipline of anthropology. Anthropology began in the 19th century as an effort to systematically understand the origins of humans and the origins of social and cultural organization among humans. Essentially, in the 19th century, people were aware that society was changing very rapidly, is the to the result economic growth, industrialization, and there was an effort to understand where modern society had come from, and what the origins of social organization work many centuries previously. So researchers in particular sought to understand life in the pre-modern age. That is, before recorded history began. Initial focus in anthropology was on non-western or pre-modern societies. The idea was that these societies represented what perhaps society in the west might have looked like hundreds or thousands of years ago. And so, there were probably speaking too major approaches, one was ethnography where researchers immerse themselves in distant places for extended periods of times to try to understand the local cultures. So this is the origin of the idea that anthropologists might spend months, maybe in years living in a village in a distant country, perhaps in the South Pacific or somewhere in Africa in order to understand the ways that those societies worked. Another important tool was archaeology. Essentially, you're covering the relics of early cultures and then examining these relics. Could be buildings, could be pottery for clues about the way that society was organized, the way that culture worked, millennia ago. So there was certainly some very important early figures in anthropology. I'll just mention a few of them and give you some examples of what they did. One who was particularly influential in the United States was Franz Boas who introduced the notion of cultural relativism, the idea that different cultures might have different ways of thinking about what was good or what was bad. And that there's hard to come up with a single measure according to which you could rank cultures. He was one of the first anthropologist to begin studying Contemporary Western populations as opposed to the more exotic locations that had been studied by many other anthropologists. Another major figure was Alfred Radcliffe-Brown who emphasized comparison. That is the systematic investigation of multiple different cultures, multiple different peoples in order to learn what they have in common and what is distinctive to each of them. He emphasized learning about the structure and functions through this investigations. Understanding the structure and the function of various cultural and social practices in the way that they essentially bound people together and help the society function. Another important figure, Bronislaw Malinowski. He was famous for ethnography and carried out early studies of reciprocity and exchange. Actually much of his research was in the South Pacific on islands there. He studied peoples that were engaged in very elaborate rituals of gift giving and reciprocity. From this he tried to understand gift giving more generally in its role in human societies. Anthropology is divided into four major subfields and I'd like to introduce them to you now. One of the oldest and perhaps most recognizable, you'll certainly be aware of it, reading the news or by watching movies in television is archaeology. This is the effort to learn about past civilizations, past cultures through the examination of relics that they left behind, buildings, shards of pottery, any number of things that people left behind and perhaps have been buried for centuries. Another important area is sociocultural anthropology. Roughly speaking, this is the effort to understand how people attach symbolism in meaning to their daily activities, to their rituals that they carry out and engage in on a daily basis. Another important area is linguistic anthropology, so the study of culture through the analyses of language, differences in language across different settings and changes in language across time. Finally, there is biological and physical anthropology, which tends to be heavily quantitative. But often this makes use of evidence on say the remains of humans collected at archaeological sites, or insight into their well-being, their health and so forth in past times. There's also a strong link in biological and physical anthropology to evolutionary theory. People draw upon evolutionary theory to try to think about or understand how especially early human society may have evolved and what legacy duch evolution has for contemporary society. So these are the four major subfields of anthropology. If you are going for postgraduate in anthropology, you will almost certainly focus on one of these. But hopefully, you'll have an opportunity to study in some of other areas as well.
