2nd Lecture: Introduction to Anthropology

Arrange By: Muhammad Salman Rao

Email: salman.rao15@gmail.com
1st Semester: B S. Public Administration (2020-2024)
1st Semester: B S. Political Science (2020-2024)

Guiding Principles of Cultural Anthropology

For the past century, cultural anthropology has distinguished itself from other disciplines in the
humanities and social sciences by following several guiding principles. Although other
disciplines have adopted some of these major themes over the decades, they remain central to the
discipline of cultural anthropology.
1. Holism (Holistic/ Deep Approach)
A distinguishing feature of the discipline of anthropology is its holistic approach to the study of
human groups. Anthropological holism is evidenced in a number of important ways. First, the
anthropological approach involves both biological and sociocultural aspects of humanity that is,
people’s genetic endowment as well as what they acquire from their environment after birth.
Second, anthropology has the longest possible time frame, from the earliest beginnings of
humans several million years ago right up to the present. Third, anthropology is holistic to the
extent that it studies all varieties of people wherever they may be found, from East African
pastoralists to Korean factory workers. And, finally, anthropology studies many different aspects
of human experience, including family structure, marital regulations, house construction,
methods of conflict resolution, and means of livelihood, religious beliefs, language, space usage,
and art. In short holism a perspective in anthropology that attempts to study a culture by looking
at all parts of the system and how those parts are interrelated.
In the past, cultural anthropologists have made every effort to be holistic by covering as many
aspects of a culture as possible in the total cultural context. More recently, however, the
accumulated information from all over the world has become so vast that most
anthropologists have needed to become more specialized or focused. This is called a
problem-oriented research approach. To illustrate, one anthropologist may concentrate on
marital patterns whereas another may focus on farming and land-use patterns.
Regardless of the recent trend toward specialization, anthropologists continue to analyze their
findings within a wider cultural context. Moreover, when all of the various specialties within the
discipline are viewed together, they represent a very comprehensive or holistic view of the
human condition.
2. Ethnocentrism
 Example: While waiting to cross the street in Mumbai, India, an American tourist stood next to
a local resident, who proceeded to blow his nose, without handkerchief or tissue, into the street.
The tourist’s reaction was instantaneous and unequivocal: How disgusting! He thought. He
responded to this cross-cultural incident by evaluating the Indian’s behavior on the basis of
standards of etiquette established by his own culture. According to those standards, it is
considered proper to use a handkerchief in such a situation. But if the man from Mumbai were to
see the American tourist blowing his nose into a handkerchief, he would be equally repulsed,
thinking it strange indeed for the man to blow his nose into a handkerchief, and then put the
handkerchief back into his pocket and carry it around for the rest of the day. Both the American
and the Indian are evaluating each other’s behavior based on the standards of their own cultural
assumptions and practices.
This way of responding to culturally different behavior is known as ethnocentrism: the
belief that one’s own culture is superior to all others. In other words, it means viewing the
rest of the world through the narrow lens of one’s own culture.
It should be quite obvious why ethnocentrism is so pervasive throughout the world. Because
most people are raised in a single culture and never learn about other cultures during their
lifetime, it is only logical that their own way of life their values, attitudes, ideas, and ways of
behaving seems to be the most natural. Even though ethnocentrism is present in all cultures, it
nevertheless serves as a major obstacle to the understanding of other cultures, which is, after all,
the major objective of cultural anthropology. Although we cannot eliminate ethnocentrism
totally, we can reduce it. By becoming aware of our own ethnocentrism, we can temporarily
set aside our own value judgments long enough to learn how other cultures operate. [1]
3. Cultural Relativism
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the discipline of anthropology has led a vigorous
campaign against the perils of ethnocentrism. As cultural anthropologists began to conduct
empirical fieldwork among the different cultures of the world, they recognized a need for
dispassionate and objective descriptions of the people they were studying. Following the lead of
Franz Boas in the United States and Bronislaw Malinowski in Britain, twentieth-century
anthropologists have participated in a tradition that calls on the researcher to strive to prevent his
or her own cultural values from coloring the descriptive accounts of the people under study.
According to Boas, the father of modern anthropology in the United States, anthropologists can
achieve that level of detachment by practicing cultural relativism.
This is the notion that any part of a culture (such as an idea, a thing, or a behavior pattern)
must be viewed in its proper cultural context rather than from the viewpoint of the
observer’s culture.
Rather than asking, how does this fit into my culture?
The cultural relativist asks, how does a cultural item fit into the rest of the cultural system of
which it is a part?
This concept first formulated by Boas and later developed by one of his students, Melville
Herskovits (1972), cultural relativism rejects the notion that any culture, including our own,
possesses a set of absolute standards by which all other cultures can be judged. Cultural
relativity is a cognitive tool that helps us understand why people think and act the way they do.
 Example: When aging parents become too old to carry their share of the workload, they
are left out in the cold to die. If we view such a practice by the standards of our Pakistani
culture (that is, ethnocentrically), we would have to conclude that it is cruel and heartless,
hardly a way to treat those who brought you into the world. But the cultural relativist
would look at this form of homicide in the context of the total culture of which it is a part.

For Boas, cultural relativism was an ethical mandate as well as a strategic methodology
for understanding other cultures.

4. Emic versus Etic Approaches

Another feature of cultural anthropology that distinguishes it from other social science
disciplines is its emphasis on viewing another culture from the perspective of an insider.
Emic approach a paradigm in ethnography that uses the concepts and categories that are
relevant and meaningful to the culture under analysis.
Etic approach a viewpoint in ethnography that uses the concepts and categories of the
anthropologist’s culture to describe another culture.
For decades anthropologists have made the distinction between the emic approach and the etic
approach, terms borrowed from linguistics [2].
 The emic approach (derived from the word phonemic) refers to the insider view, which
seeks to describe another culture in terms of the categories, concepts, and perceptions of
the people being studied.
 By contrast, the etic approach (derived from the word phonetic) refers to the outsider
view, in which anthropologists use their own categories and concepts to describe the
culture under analysis.

According to some anthropologists in an attempt to obtain a more realistic understanding of

another culture, the ethno scientists insisted on the insider approach. More recently the
interpretive school of cultural anthropology has strongly supported the emic approach to
research. This school, represented by the late Clifford Geertz and others, holds that because
human behavior stems from the way people perceive and classify the world around them, the
only legitimate strategy is the emic, or insider, approach to cultural description.
Solving Societal Problems:
Anthropology, with its holistic, cross-cultural perspective, has contributed in a number of
important ways to the scientific understanding of humanity. Moreover, the study of anthropology
is important because it enables the individual to better comprehend and appreciate his or her own
culture.

[1]: Xenocentrism is the preference for the cultural practices of other cultures and
societies which can entail how they live, what they eat, rather than of one's own way of life. ...
Xenocentrism contrasts with ethnocentrism, the perceived superiority of one's own society to
others.
[2]: Linguistics is a scientific study of language and its structure, including the study of
grammar, syntax, and phonetics. Specific branches of linguistics include sociolinguistics,
dialectology, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, comparative linguistics, and structural
linguistics.

Reference:
Ferraro, G., & Andreatta, S. (2014). Cultural anthropology: An applied perspective. Cengage Learning.