University of Duhok

College of Humanities
Department of Sociology
2nd Year/ 4th Semester
Cultural Anthropology

Chapter One
11/Jan/2022
Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
------------------------------------------------------
Prepared By
Randi Jamal Sulaiman
B.Sc./ Sociology
M.Sc./ Social Work in Healthcare
Introduction

Anthropology is the scientific study of humans and their cultural, social,

biological, and environmental aspects of life in the past and the present. Cultural
anthropology is one of four areas of study in the broader field of anthropology
(archeology, physical or biological anthropology, and linguistics being the other
three).

Cultural anthropology is the study of human ways of life in the broadest

possible comparative perspective. Cultural anthropologists are interested in all
types of societies, from hunting and gathering bands to modern industrial states.

Cultural anthropologists study the similarities and differences among living

societies and cultural groups. Through immersive fieldwork, living and working
with the people one is studying, cultural anthropologists suspend their own
sense of what is “normal” in order to understand other people’s perspectives.
They make strange familiar and familiar strange. They make the exotic normal
and normal exotic. Beyond describing another way of life, anthropologists ask
broader questions about humankind: Are human emotions universal or
culturally specific? Does globalization make us all the same, or do people
maintain cultural differences? For cultural anthropologists, no aspect of human
life is outside their purview. They study art, religion, healing, natural disasters,
and even pet cemeteries. While many anthropologists are at first intrigued by
human diversity, they come to realize that people around the world share much
in common.

Definition: Cultural Anthropology is a branch of Anthropology that deals with

human culture, the term was originated in the United States. It specializes in the
study of culture and peoples’ beliefs, practices, and the cognitive and social
organization of human groups. It studies how people who share a common
cultural system organize and shape the physical and social world around them,
and are in turn shaped by those ideas, behaviors, and physical environments.

The Main Aims of Cultural Anthropology

 To document the full range of human cultural adaptations and

achievements.
 To discern in this great diversity the underlying covariant among and in
human ecology, institutions and ideologies.
2
The Scope of Cultural Anthropology

Cultural anthropology addresses broad questions about what it means to be

human in contemporary societies and cultures, as well as those of the recent
past. Cultural anthropologists systematically explore topics such as technology
and material culture, social organization, economies, political and legal systems,
language, ideologies and religions, health and illness, and social change.

Cultural Anthropology, Sociology/ Holistic Approach

There are similarities between cultural anthropology and its variants with
sociology, such as the systematic study of groups of people and how they relate
to the larger community. However, the disciplines developed independently of
one another. Cultural anthropology began by focusing first on those societies
that were deemed "primitive," in an attempt to understand how human society
developed. Sociology was initially interested in the structure of societies,
focusing on contemporary, industrialized society. As cultural anthropology
became more interested in the contemporary, urban society, the difference
remains that, as a main tenet all anthropological studies seek to aid the complete
understanding of humanity at all points in time, a broader approach than
sociology. Anthropologist Robert Gordon explains, “Whereas the sociologist or
the political scientist might examine the beauty of a flower petal by petal, the
anthropologist is the person that stands on the top of the mountain and looks at
the beauty of the field.”

The Main Sub-Fields of Cultural Anthropology

Cultural Anthropology has a long list of sub-disciplines/ sub-fields, we will

mention some of them only:

1. Ecological Anthropology: is the study of cultural adaptations to

environments as well as the relations among the population dynamics, social
organization, and culture of human populations and the environments in
which they live.
2. Economic anthropology: studies how human societies provide the material
goods and services that make life possible. In the course of material
provisioning and during the realization of final consumption, people relate to
each other in ways that convey power and meaning.
3
3. Anthropology of religion: is the comparative study of religions in their
cultural, social, historical, and material contexts.
4. Demographic Anthropology: is the systematic study of the size,
distribution and composition of human population, and their changes
resulting from fertility, mortality, and migration. Anthropological
demography uses anthropological theory and methods to offer a better
understanding of demographic fact in present as well as past populations.
5. Political Anthropology: it encompasses the analysis of power, leadership,
and influence in all their social, cultural, symbolic, ritual, and policy
dimensions. It includes the examination-in both state and stateless societies-
of forms of authority and domination, the dynamics of political identity,
social and political violence, nationalism, ethnicity, colonialism, war and
peace, and modes of political reconciliation and peace-building.
6. Medical Anthropology: is a subfield of anthropology that draws upon
social, cultural, biological, and linguistic anthropology to better understand
those factors which influence health and well-being (broadly defined), the
experience and distribution of illness, the prevention and treatment of
sickness, healing processes, the social relations of therapy management, and
the cultural importance and utilization of pluralistic medical systems.

The Methods of Cultural Anthropology

1- Ethnography: is a fieldwork in a particular culture; provides account of that

community, society, or Culture; often descriptive.

2- Ethnology: is a cross cultural comparison; the comparative study of

ethnographic data, of society and of culture.

As a research discipline, anthropology combines humanist and social science

strategies. The method that sets anthropology apart from other disciplines is
ethnography, the qualitative process of exploring in depth the whys and hows of
human culture, behavior, and expression. Using this ethnographic method,
anthropologists can uncover unexpected insights that are best gained by
studying a topic in person, in situ, over time, and from diverse perspectives.

The ethnographic method uses multiple data collection techniques including

participant observation, interviews, focus groups, and textual analysis to
construct a holistic and contextual view of the phenomena under study.
4
Conclusion

Cultural Anthropology is concerned with the cultural dimensions of the living

peoples and with the description and analysis of people’s lives and traditions. It
studies the symbolic or non-material and material lives of contemporary human
societies, taking the concept of culture central to its goal. Cultural
anthropologists conduct studies of living peoples, most often by visiting and
living among a particular people for an extended period of time, usually a year
or longer. They conduct fieldwork among the people they study and describe
the results of their investigations in the form of books and articles called
ethnographies. Cultural anthropology is also concerned with making
generalizations about, and seeking explanations for, similarities and differences
among the world's people. Those who conduct comparative studies to achieve
these theoretical goals are called ethnologists.

Thus, two important aspects of cultural anthropology are ethnography and

ethnology. The former is more of empirical study or description of the culture
and ways of lives of a particular group of people, while the latter is more of a
theoretical study of the similarities and differences among the human groups of
the world, past or present.

References

Brown N., McIlwraith T. (2020). An Open Introduction To Cultural

Anthropology. Second Edition. American Anthropological Association, 2300
Clarendon Blvd, Suite 1301 Arlington, VA 22201

Gordon R., William A. (2000). Anthropology. 9th Edition. Orlando: Harcourt.

Internet Websites:

https://anthropology.dartmouth.edu/undergraduate/courses/cultural-
anthropology

https://www.nps.gov/orgs/1209/what-is-cultural-anthropology.htm

https://pcmh.ahrq.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/anthropological-
approaches-brief.pdf