Social and Cultural Anthropology

Arctic (Anthropology)

The term ‘Arctic’, before it was applied to a geographical region and its inhabitants, first had an astronomical meaning for the ancient Greeks. It signified the apparent trajectory of the Great Bear (‘bear’ is arctos in Greek) around the celestial North Pole. This celestial landmark was then projected onto the terrestrial sphere where it was […]

Art (Anthropology)

Anthropology has had a long and continuing engagement with art and some of the major figures in the history of anthropology from "Haddon and Boas to "Firth and Levi-Strauss have written significant works on art. However, it is perhaps the case that anthropologists have in general failed to capitalize on the opportunities that art provides […]

Asia: Central (Anthropology)

Central Asia is most commonly understood to include the five former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyr-gyzstan and Tajikistan, as well as China’s northwestern province of Xinjiang. The languages of the indigenous populations predominantly belong to the Turkic group of languages or are varieties of Persian, but the history of Russian Tsarist, Soviet and […]

Asia: East (Anthropology)

The Far East, as an expression, suggests a great distance from the West, but it may as well evoke a total disconnection with the familiar. China, Japan, and North and South Korea are the dominant nation-states in what is also called, less ethnocentrically, East Asia. Since the end of World War II, and particularly in […]

Asia: South (Anthropology)

South Asia includes the modern republics of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka — all formerly under British colonial rule — and the kingdom of Nepal. Although the foundations of modern South Asian anthropology lie in the systematic ethnographic reportage begun during the colonial period, the work of post-independence fieldworkers has had the greatest impact […]

Asia: Southeast (Anthropology)

The term ‘Southeast Asia’ has come to cover all Asian countries south of China and east of India, an area of some 4.5 million square kilometres. As of 1985, this region was estimated to have a population of 404 million, of whom 243 million lived in Island Southeast Asia (including peninsular Malaysia) and 160 million […]

Avunculate (Anthropology)

The term ‘avunculate’ evokes two related images. First, there is the social institution that the term designates. Second, there is the complex of theories which have been thought up to explain that insitution where it occurs. In the first sense, the avunculate is any institutionalized, special relationship between a mother’s brother (MB) and a sister’s […]

Belief (Anthropology)

Statements like ‘The X believe that … ‘ or ‘The Y believe in … ‘ used to abound in ethnography. Ethnographers regarded belief as an integral part of culture, with whole peoples being thought uniform and consistent in their sets of beliefs. Such an understanding of belief was characteristic of Durkheimian and functionalist writers; e.g. […]

Big Man (Anthropology)

The Big Man, the prototypical Melanesian leader, is a key figure in the ethnography of Melanesia. He stands at the centre of a complex of economic and political structures found generally across the region, although the model Big Man inhabits Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and, to a lesser extent, Vanuatu. He along with […]

Biological anthropology

The closest mammalian relatives of the human species are the apes (chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan, and gibbon), monkeys (the catarrhine cer-copithecoids in the Old World, and platyrrhines in the Americas), and prosimians. Together these form the Order of Primates. Biological anthropology is the study of the biology of human and other primate species from an evolutionary […]

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