Anthropology key concepts

Agency is the capacity of human beings to act in meaningful ways that affect their own lives and those of others. Agency may be constrained by class, gender, religion, and other social and cultural factors. This term implies that individuals have the capacity to create, change and influence events.

Traditionally, it referred to geographically bounded groep of people in face-to-face contact, with a shared system of beliefs and norms operating as a socially functioning whole. Communities existed within a common social structure and government. More recently, communities have also been defined as interest groups accessed through space, as in internet communities or communities of taste. With the advent of globalism and global studies that often question the stability of territories, space and place, community is now a highly contested concept.

Anthropologist strive to capture the diversity of social action and its predictability by focusing on the way in which particular aspects of society and culture are organized similarly and differently across groups. While social action is frequently innovative, there are limits to its diversity, and patterns identified in one group resemble patterns identified in another.

For anthropologists, cultural relativism is a methodological principle that emphasizes the importance of searching for meaning within the local context. Non-anthropologists often interpret cultural relativism as a moral doctrine, which asserts that the practices of one society cannot be judged according to the moral precepts and evaluative criteria of another society. In its extreme form, this version of cultural relativism can lead to a non-analytical position that is contrary to the critical commitments of the discipline.

Culture refers to organized systems of symbols, ideas, explanations, beliefs and material production that humans create and manipulate in the course of their daily lives. Culture includes customs by which humans organize their physical world and maintain their social structure. While many anthropologists have thought of culture simply as shared systems of experience and meanings, more recent formulations of the concept recognize that culture may be the subject of disagreement and conflict within and among societies.

Anthropology places considerable emphasis on its empirical foundation based on a direct engagement with particular people and their social and cultural context. Ethnographic materials are usually gathered through participant observation. Ethnographically grounded anthropology can be contrasted with 19th century “armchair'“ anthropology conducted by scholars with no first-hand acquaintance with the societies they analysed, and with “common sense” or journalistic accounts of a particular society.

Meaning is both constructed and transmitted through cultural categories. These attribute particular significance to persons, relations, objects, places, and events. This enables people to make sense of, and give order to, their experiences, which may in turn reinforce or change meaning. The analysis of meaning is a principal focus of contemporary anthropological thinking.

Social process is what humans actually do, including human action that may work against social structure. Social process is the dynamic counterpoint of social structure. Anthropologists who focus on processes emphasize the possibility of change over time and the importance of human agency, that is, the ability to challenge existing structures and create new structures. Process is linked to role, the dynamic counterpart of status, consisting of the behaviour associated with a person’s status.

The data that anthropologists gather during fieldwork comes in many forms because anthropologists are trying to capture the complexity and diversity of social life. This data may be textual(oral or written), observational, or impressionistic, or may take the form of images or sounds. Much of the data cannot be reduced to quantitative forms without losing the essence of the material as perceived from an anthropological viewpoint.

Social reproduction is the concept that, over time, groups of people reproduce social structure and patterns of behaviour. This includes not only the enculturation of individual human beings but also reproduction of cultural institutions, and material means of production and consumption. Social reproduction may be contested, leading to social change.

Society refers to the way in which humans organize themselves in groups and networks. Society is created and sustained by social relationships among persons and groups. The term “society” can also be used to refer to a human group that exhibits some internal coherence and distinguishes itself from other such groups.

For anthropologists, cultural relativism attempts to recognize and address the problem of ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is the tendency to evaluate the practices of others in terms of one’s own criteria. Generally, ethnocentrism has the effect of giving greater worth to the social or cultural context of the evaluator than to the context being evaluated, and hinders understanding across social boundaries.