Examples
Examples of areas where cultural inventions may take place include:
- Languages
- Legal systems
- Political systems
- Scientific method
- Sports
- Social institutions
- Belief systems
A cultural invention is any innovation developed by people. [1] Cultural inventions include sets of behaviour adopted by groups of people. They are perpetuated by being passed on to others within the group or outside it. They are also passed on to future groups and generations. [2] Sources of cultural invention can either come from outside a specific group or from within that group.
Allan Hanson, a postmodern anthropologist, believed that the analytical purpose of studying cultural inventions was not to uncover which portions of a culture's belief systems are invented, but rather to study how cultural inventions become accepted as authentic within groups. [3] This notion has been met with criticism from within the anthropological community as well as from outside sources, and has been referred to as both politically revisionist and anti-native. [4] The fear is that viewing cultural invention as a process which leads to something authentic and widely accepted may undermine indigenous people's traditions in addition to questioning the authority they have over their own culture. [5]
Examples of areas where cultural inventions may take place include:
One way that cultural inventions can be spread is through cultural transmission, the means by which culturally specific ideas and patterns of behavior are shared and become cultural reality. [6] According to Marc J. Swartz, people of status within society play an important role in deciding what is understood as cultural reality. [7] Such people have the correct kinds of skills and knowledge within society to help transmit ideas in such a way that they are accepted by society at large, which is one method by which cultural inventions can become cultural realities. [8]
Allan Hanson proposed that several aspects of Maori culture had been invented by European scholars who were accustomed to analytical frameworks focused on long-distance migration and diffusion. Because of this, he believed that European scholars constructed the notion that a "Great Fleet", headed by a man named Kupe from, a neighboring island was responsible for the initial discovery and peopling of New Zealand. Although Maori ancestors most likely arrived in canoes from nearby islands, Hanson believed that the account of the Great Fleet was created to simplify various Maori traditions into a single tradition. [9]
Additionally, to make the Maori seem more elevated in European eyes, scholars may have invented a cult to the named Io, who was thought to be a supreme being that controlled all the other gods in the Maori pantheon. The story of Io creating the world is so similar to that of the Book of Genesis in the Bible, that it is believed to have been a European invention. [10] Hanson asserted that those and other elements of Maori tradition were incorporated and taken to be true by the Maori and that they have been passed down through generations by way of oral tradition. According to Hanson, "Io and the Great Fleet have been incorporated into Maori lore and are passed down from elders to juniors in storytelling, oratory, and other Maori contexts". [11]
Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, and societies, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behaviour, while cultural anthropology studies cultural meaning, including norms and values. Linguistic anthropology studies how language influences social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the biological development of humans. Visual anthropology, which is usually considered to be a part of social anthropology, can mean both ethnographic film as well as the study of "visuals", including art, visual images, cinema etc. Oxford Bibliographies describes visual anthropology as "the anthropological study of the visual and the visual study of the anthropological".
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of a posited anthropological constant. The umbrella term sociocultural anthropology includes both cultural and social anthropology traditions.
Ethnocentrism in social science and anthropology—as well as in colloquial English discourse—means to apply one's own culture or ethnicity as a frame of reference to judge other cultures, practices, behaviors, beliefs, and people, instead of using the standards of the particular culture involved. Since this judgement is often negative, some people also use the term to refer to the belief that one's culture is superior to, or more correct or normal than, all others—especially regarding the distinctions that define each ethnicity's cultural identity, such as language, behavior, customs, and religion. In common usage, it can also simply mean any culturally biased judgment. For example, ethnocentrism can be seen in the common portrayals of the Global South and the Global North.
Franz Uri Boas was a German-born American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the movements known as Historical Particularism and Cultural Relativism.
George Peter ("Pete") Murdock, also known as G. P. Murdock, was an American anthropologist. He is remembered for his empirical approach to ethnological studies and his study of family and kinship structures across differing cultures.
Clark David Wissler was an American anthropologist.
Napoleon Alphonseau Chagnon was an American cultural anthropologist, professor of sociocultural anthropology at the University of Missouri in Columbia and member of the National Academy of Sciences. Chagnon was known for his long-term ethnographic field work among the Yanomamö, a society of indigenous tribal Amazonians, in which he used an evolutionary approach to understand social behavior in terms of genetic relatedness. His work centered on the analysis of violence among tribal peoples, and, using socio-biological analyses, he advanced the argument that violence among the Yanomami is fueled by an evolutionary process in which successful warriors have more offspring. His 1967 ethnography Yanomamö: The Fierce People became a bestseller and is frequently assigned in introductory anthropology courses.
In cultural anthropology and cultural geography, cultural diffusion, as conceptualized by Leo Frobenius in his 1897/98 publication Der westafrikanische Kulturkreis, is the spread of cultural items—such as ideas, styles, religions, technologies, languages—between individuals, whether within a single culture or from one culture to another. It is distinct from the diffusion of innovations within a specific culture. Examples of diffusion include the spread of the war chariot and iron smelting in ancient times, and the use of automobiles and Western business suits in the 20th century.
Political anthropology is a subfield of sociocultural anthropology, but like anthropology as a whole, it remains immune to precise delimitation. The core of political anthropology is the comparative, fieldwork-based examination of politics in a broad range of historical, social, and cultural settings.
History of anthropology in this article refers primarily to the 18th- and 19th-century precursors of modern anthropology. The term anthropology itself, innovated as a New Latin scientific word during the Renaissance, has always meant "the study of man". The topics to be included and the terminology have varied historically. At present they are more elaborate than they were during the development of anthropology. For a presentation of modern social and cultural anthropology as they have developed in Britain, France, and North America since approximately 1900, see the relevant sections under Anthropology.
Phillip H. McArthur is a folklorist and anthropologist. His work in the Marshall Islands and elsewhere in Micronesia closely examine social power and indigenous epistemologies in Micronesia, the Pacific Islands, and indeed the Marshallese's tumultuous relationship with the United States. Dr. McArthur has spent much of his career documenting and analyzing Marshallese narratives, mythology, songs, performances, etc.
Donald Edward Brown is an American professor of anthropology (emeritus).
Feminist anthropology is a four-field approach to anthropology that seeks to transform research findings, anthropological hiring practices, and the scholarly production of knowledge, using insights from feminist theory. Simultaneously, feminist anthropology challenges essentialist feminist theories developed in Europe and America. While feminists practiced cultural anthropology since its inception, it was not until the 1970s that feminist anthropology was formally recognized as a subdiscipline of anthropology. Since then, it has developed its own subsection of the American Anthropological Association – the Association for Feminist Anthropology – and its own publication, Feminist Anthropology. Their former journal Voices is now defunct.
Psychological anthropology is an interdisciplinary subfield of anthropology that studies the interaction of cultural and mental processes. This subfield tends to focus on ways in which humans' development and enculturation within a particular cultural group—with its own history, language, practices, and conceptual categories—shape processes of human cognition, emotion, perception, motivation, and mental health. It also examines how the understanding of cognition, emotion, motivation, and similar psychological processes inform or constrain our models of cultural and social processes. Each school within psychological anthropology has its own approach.
Sir John Rankine Goody (1919–2015), known as Jack Goody, was an English social anthropologist. He was a prominent lecturer at Cambridge University, and was William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology from 1973 to 1984.
Andrew P. Vayda is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Ecology at Rutgers University.
Clinical ethnography is a term first used by Gilbert Herdt and Robert Stoller in a series of papers in the 1980s. As Herdt defines it, clinical ethnography
is the intensive study of subjectivity in cultural context...clinical ethnography is focused on the microscopic understanding of sexual subjectivity and individual differences within cross-cultural communities. What distinguishes clinical ethnography from anthropological ethnography in general is (a) the application of disciplined clinical training to ethnographic problems and (b) developmental concern with desires and meanings as they are distributed culturally within groups and across the course of life.
Robert Leonard Carneiro was an American anthropologist and curator of the American Museum of Natural History. His Circumscription Theory explains how early political states may have formed as a result of interactions between environmental constraints, population pressures, and warfare.
Reo Franklin Fortune was a New Zealand-born social anthropologist. Originally trained as a psychologist, Fortune was a student of some of the major theorists of British and American social anthropology including Alfred Cort Haddon, Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown. He lived an international life, holding various academic and government positions: in China, at Lingnan University from 1937 to 1939; in Toledo, Ohio, USA from 1940 to 1941; in Toronto, Canada, from 1941 to 1943; in Burma, as government anthropologist, from 1946 to 1947; and finally, at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom from 1947 to 1971, as lecturer in social anthropology specialising in Melanesian language and culture.
Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behaviour in human societies and cultures. It is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and Commonwealth and much of Europe, where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In the United States, social anthropology is commonly subsumed within cultural anthropology or sociocultural anthropology.
