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4.5 Anthropology

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Social Science Approaches to the Study of Chinese Society Part 1

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

4.4 (15 ratings) | 1.6K Students Enrolled

This course seeks to turn learners into informed consumers of social science research. It introduces concepts, standards, and principles of social science research to the interested non-expert. Learners who complete the course will be able to assess evidence and critically evaluate claims about important social phenomena. It reviews the origins and development of social science, describes the process of discovery in contemporary social science research, and explains how contemporary social science differs from apparently related fields. It describes the goals, basic paradigms, and methodologies of the major social science disciplines. It offers an overview of the major questions that are the focus of much contemporary social science research, overall and for China. Special emphasis is given to explaining the challenges that social scientists face in drawing conclusions about cause and effect from their studies, and offers an overview of the approaches that are used to overcome these challenges. Explanation is non-technical and does not involve mathematics. Statistics and quantitative methods are not covered. Explore the big questions in social science and learn how you can be a critical, informed consumer of social science research. Course Overview video: https://youtu.be/QuMOAlwhpvU After you complete Part 1, enroll in Part 2 to learn how to be a PRODUCER of Social science research. Part 2: https://www.coursera.org/learn/social-science-research-chinese-society

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Aus der Unterrichtseinheit

The Social Science Disciplines

In Week 4, we will focus on The Social Science Disciplines. By the end of this week, you should have a better understanding of the emphases of each of the major social science disciplines, and the differences between the disciplines.

4.1 Overview1:35

4.2 Sociology15:12

4.3 Political Science14:51

4.4 Economics13:27

4.5 Anthropology6:33

4.6 Other disciplines5:26

4.7 Summary1:53

Unterrichtet von

Cameron Campbell
Professor of Social Science

Skript

[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.

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