Discuss the emergence of modern social anthropology.

Social anthropology is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and Commonwealth and much of Europe (France in particular), where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology.

In the United States, social anthropology’s commonly subsumed within cultural anthropology (or under the relatively new designation of sociocultural anthropology).

In contrast to cultural anthropology, culture and its continuity (including narratives, rituals, and symbolic behavior associated with them have been traditionally seen more like the dependent variable by social anthropology, embedded in its historical and social context, including its diversity of positions and perspectives, ambiguities, conflicts, and contradictions of social life, rather than the independent (explanatory) one.

Topics of interest for social anthropologists have included customs, economic and political organization, law and conflict resolution, patterns of consumption and exchange, kinship and family structure, gender relations,

childbearing and socialization, religion, while present-day social anthropologists are also concerned with issues of globalism, ethnic violence, gender studies, transnationalism and local experience, and the emerging cultures of cyberspace, and can also help with bringing opponents together when environmental concerns come into conflict with economic developments.

Social anthropology has historical roots in a number of 19th-century disciplines, including ethnology, folklore studies, and Classics, among others.

Its immediate precursor took shape in the work of Edward Burnett Taylor and James George Frazer in the late 19th century and underwent major changes in both method and theory during the period 1890-1920 with a new emphasis on original fieldwork, long-term holistic study of social behavior in natural settings, and the introduction of French and German social theory.

Bronislaw Malinowski, one of the most important influences on British social anthropology, emphasized long-term fieldwork in which anthropologists work in the vernacular and immerse themselves in the daily practices of local people.

This development was bolstered by Franz Boas’s introduction of cultural relativism arguing that cultures are based on different ideas about the world and can therefore only be properly understood in terms of their own standards and values.

Museums such as the British Museum weren’t the only site of anthropological studies: with the New Imperialism period, starting in the 1870s, zoos became unattended “laboratories”, especially the so-called “ethnological exhibitions” or “Negro villages”.

Thus, “savages” from the colonies were displayed, often nudes, in cages, in what has been called “human zoos”. 

For example, in 1906, Congolese pygmy Ota Benga was put by anthropologist Madison Grant in a cage in the Bronx Zoo, labeled the missing link” between an orangutan and the “white race”-Grant, a renowned eugenicist, was also the author of The Passing of the Great Race (1916).

Such exhibitions were attempts to illustrate and prove in the same movement the validity of scientific racism, which the first formulation may be found in Arthur de Gobineau’s An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853-55).

In 1931, the Colonial Exhibition in Paris still displayed Kanaks from New Caledonia in the “indigenous village”; it received 24 million visitors in six months, thus demonstrating the popularity of such “human zoos”.

Anthropology grew increasingly distinct from natural history and by the end of the 19th century the discipline began to crystallize into its modern form–by 1935, for example, it was possible for T.K. Penniman to write a history of the discipline entitled A Hundred Years of Anthropology.

At the time, the field was dominated by “The Comparative Method”. It was assumed that all societies passed through a single evolutionary process from the most primitive to most advanced.

Non-European societies were thus seen as evolutionary “living fossils” that could be studied in order to understand the European past.

Scholars wrote histories of prehistoric migrations which were sometimes valuable but often also fanciful. ynesian migrations across the Pacific Ocean for instance although some of them believed it originated in Egypt

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