SOCIOANTHROPOLOGY: DEFINITION, CHARACTERISTICS AND SCOPE - CULTURE VOCABULARY - 2024

The socioatropología is the anthropological branch that studies the human being from the individual itself to forms of interpersonal and social relations. Studying man, his culture and interaction with others has been a question of the social sciences that has been analyzed since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

For this reason, disciplines such as psychology, anthropology, archeology and sociology emerged, which diagnose the individual and social behavior of people with empirical data, ideologies, geography, socioeconomic context, among other factors.

Socioanthropology vs sociology

Sociology, founded by the positivist philosopher Aguste Comte, places more emphasis on the statistical characteristics of human society, such as the number of population, voters, immigrants or the gross domestic product of a country.

Instead, socio-anthropology gives preponderance to the cultural aspect (religion, art, morality, etc.) of human societies.

The so-called social anthropology studies man by observing him in his social fabric. That is, how institutions are ordered and built that respond to their social needs.

The precursors of this discipline were Edward Burnett Tylor and James George Frazer with their works at the end of the 19th century. These researchers underwent changes in their methodology and theory during the period between 1890 and 1920.

These authors were interested in field work and holistic studies, for several years, of social behavior in spaces, especially natural ones.

The youngest social science

Socioanthropology is the newest of the social sciences according to the British anthropologist Godfrey Lienhardt, author of the book Social Anthropology.

His colleague and compatriot, EE Evans-Pritchard, defines the social anthropologist as one who "directly studies primitive peoples living among them for months or years, while sociological research is generally carried out on the basis of documents, especially statistics."

The interest of anthropology has been the study of cultures that grew up without having a tradition of writing or technology. That is, what for historians and sociologists is a problem, since they are based on tangible material to work with.

Faced with such difficulty, social anthropologists try to solve the matter, studying more complex societies, although for EE Evans-Pritchard it is best to start with those simpler to gain experience.

The importance of the people and the environment for socio-anthropology

Socio-anthropology is interested in knowing man from different magnitudes. There are many peoples with unique environmental conditions that require special analysis to understand their type of organization, religion, culture, etc. That is where this discipline gains strength.

Lienhardt argues that no matter how easy it is to describe a society, if you leave out its natural environment and geographic location, the result will be an incomplete analysis that leaves out one aspect of reality.

In accordance with this perspective, many social anthropologists study topographical and geographical matters of a specific people to obtain greater precision in their investigations.

Some rather primitive peoples can be affected by changes or natural catastrophes because they do not have technologies to counteract them. Some Amazonian jungle tribes, African or Asian, fit into this category.

To illustrate this, Lienhardt gives an example: 'A year of late rains, ruining crops and causing famine, can mean the dispersal of an entire community, forcing its members to live scattered among more fortunate neighbors and relatives, or to put themselves at the mercy of foreigners' (Lienhardt, 1994: 62).

Human ecology

This discipline is also interested in knowing the connection of man with his ecosystem. Hence arises the so-called human ecology.

Lienhardt brings up, in his book Social Anthropology, the Arab Bedouin people, who live in the desert, depend on camels and interact with other tribes in the area. The environment, in this case, establishes limits for the ways of life by the policy they apply.

Ultimately, the ideal of the social anthropologist is to understand the adaptation of a people to its surrounding nature and how it evolves in this relationship over time, as a result of its own social interaction. Godfrey Lienhardt gives the following example with the reasoning of an Eskimo:

"The bears have not come because there is no ice, there is no ice because there is no wind and there is no wind because we have offended the powers." This phrase clearly exemplifies how a community understands why natural phenomena occur.

Political reality

For this current, knowing how a people is organized politically is of utmost importance, since it defines the ideological sphere in which it operates.

"Men do not have pleasure, but on the contrary, a great deal of regret, in keeping company, when there is no power capable of intimidating them all" (Lienhardt, 1994: 87).

The author alludes to the need for a people to organize politically. Social anthropologists have delved into the kinds of political mixes that exist and have tried to understand their internal and external relationships.

Many hunter and gatherer tribes are small groups that are united by kinship, marriage, or specific rituals that they practice. Some of them survive in Africa.

"In most current anthropological writings, the term 'tribe' is used to refer to a larger political and territorial division, of a larger ethnic group." (Lienhardt, 1994: 97).

Socio-economic links

On the other hand, socio-anthropology also analyzes the social and economic reality of the peoples it investigates.

Lienhardt argues that at the time of the change from the subsistence economy to the monetary one, the need arose to know the concept of individual and collective “purchasing power” of the peoples to understand them anthropologically.

The author mentions a town to exemplify the above. He says he was found among the Indians on the shores of British Columbia, a group of people who had a form of economy based on great celebrations, competitions and parties.

The collective recreation was aimed at ensuring a kind of social stability and recognizing the attributes to have more prestige in a meeting, which the author calls "Plotatch" (or ceremony of giving).

People gave each other gifts and were forced to accept them so as not to suffer social discredit.

"Helen Codere has shown that the 'Plotatch', from the European point of view, is a form of madness, but it was the basis of a complex social organization, which could not have been maintained without it" (Lienhardt, 1994: 134).

Family relationship

For socio-anthropology, the core of society remains the family. In it, kinship plays a fundamental role expressed in nepotisms, typical of ancient peoples of or tribes that do not share the canons of Western societies.

Lienhardt believes that kinship is one of the pillars of good social organization. It is the basis for the study of all forms of social activity, according to him.

In this regard, the anthropologist points out: «Mating is a biological fact, marriage is only a creation of human society. Similarly, the family, and more broadly the kinship, are non-biological social conceptions ”(Lienhardt, 1994: 153).

In England, for example, the basic family nucleus is made up of father, mother and children, which anthropologically would be the animal simile of male, female and offspring.

Anthropologists have also seen patriarchal societies, where man is a social being and responsible for his children and wife, whom he supports and gives sustenance.

Finally, we have the values ​​and belief systems of the peoples, with their rituals, ideologies, clothing, arts, language, etc. Aspects that, added to the above, make up the social fabric that socio-anthropology seeks to explain as a modern social science based on the complete understanding of peoples.

Characteristics of socio-anthropology

Below you can find some of the traits that stand out in this social science:

-This discipline provides a holistic vision that understands man individually and socially, in addition to framing him in his cultural and political context of complex reality.

-A more comprehensive view of the human body is obtained, since it is studied in its sociocultural context, the pathologies that affect it and its fashions.

-Ecology is understood more thoroughly and points to the degree and mode of adaptation of a social system or people to its environment.

-The social structure is understood as the organization of man in the community, since sociocultural systems require a certain institutional arrangement to ensure that it functions in a stable manner.

-It focuses on the ideology that houses a community, which refers to the customs, beliefs, and mental traits that groups have.

-It contains conceptual tools that contribute to understanding the diversity, complexity of human beings and their interaction with nature.

-It serves to understand collective aggressive behaviors, determining causes and consequences such as terrorism.

-Analyze reality by making a methodological reading of how society acts, which allows it to predict future social trends of behavior or preferences.

-Understand concepts such as rapid diagnosis and people's life stories.

-It is a discipline that becomes interlocutor between the scientific knowledge of health and the local knowledge of a particular people or community.

References

1. "Sociocultural anthropology and its methods" (2003). Gomez, Eloy. Department of Anthropology. University of Cantabria, Santander, Spain.
2. "Contribution of gender studies to the social sciences" (2014). Revista Antropológica del Sur, Nª1. Rebolledo, Loreto, Temuco, Chile.
3. "Introduction to social and cultural anthropology" (2010). Barañano Acensión Cid. Department of Social Anthropology. Complutense University of Madrid, Spain.
4. "Providential democracy" (2004). Schneider, David M. Essay on Contemporary Equality. Buenos Aires, Argentina.
5. "Social Atropology" (1994). Godfrey Lienhardt, Editorial Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico.
6. "History of Anthropological Thought" (1987). Evans-Pritchard, Edward, Editorial Cátedra Teorema, Mexico.
7. Lienhardt, 1994. monographs.com.