Medical anthropology

Anthropology is the study of mankind, especially of its societies and customs. While medical anthropology is a subfield of anthropology.

Much medical anthropology focuses on what people do when they fall ill. In all cultures the household is the key unit in therapy-seeking; members influence each others’ care either directly through resource allocation and care provision or indirectly through examples set and modalities recommended.

Precisely, medical anthropology is the science which deals with the knowledge, attitudes and practices with regards to their illness, cure and health in ever changing context of increasing awareness of modern medicare and excessive contacts of different populations.
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Medical anthropologists are engaged in using and expanding many if anthropology’s core concepts in an effort to understand what sickness is; hot is it understood and directly experienced and acted on by sufferers their social networks and healers; and how health-related beliefs and practices fit within and shaped by encompassing social and cultural systems and social and environmental contexts.
Medical anthropology

Nutritional anthropology

The early history of nutritional anthropology dates back to studies of food and social organization in non-industrial societies. The British anthropologist Audrey Richards (1939) is often described as the first one who explicitly focused on food.

The emergence of nutritional anthropology in the 1970s has tended to replicate the ‘two cultures’ of an anthropology divided methodologically and by theories into social and biological sciences.

In nutritional sciences, food is mainly viewed in terms of its nutrient composition and effects upon the body’s metabolic processes and health status. In 1976, Freedman has defined nutritional anthropology as ‘the study of the interrelationship between diet and culture and their mutual influence upon one another’.

It is methodologically both processual and scientific because it explores the processes by which humans use of food to meet requirements of biological and behavioral functioning and science that’s studies the chemical processing and biological use of food.

Primary interest include food and culture connections, variation for optimal diets, disease variations and the social patterns, culture and roles within food-getting and distribution behaviors that determine access to food.

Nutritional status is one of the major contributing variables affecting health and disease thus nutritional anthropology and medical anthropology overlap significantly.
Nutritional anthropology

Holism in anthropology

Holism refers to ‘the whole’ the entirety. Each particular culture is and must be approached as a whole, not just as a single trait or as disconnected bundle of traits.

The idea of holism is not new in anthropology but has been integral to the discipline since E. B Taylor’s 1871 definition of culture as ‘that complex whole which includes knowledge belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.

Holism in anthropology is the attempt to get the whole picture, to put it all together, and to apply knowledge from many different fields to the understanding of any aspect of behavior. Anthropology is holistic to the extent that it studies all varieties of people whenever they may be found, from East Africans pastoralists to Korean factory workers.

It is this holistic approach, more than anything else, that distinguishes anthropology from other social sciences. And it is this approach that makes an anthropological study so difficult to carry out and at the same time so rewarding.

Anthropology as a discipline was similarly comprehensive from the start, embracing biological, linguistic, material, social and cultural aspects of human life and the inter-relations between them.
Holism in anthropology

The Meaning of Anthropology

The Meaning of Anthropology
Anthropology is a science of humanity and its society. It is a scientific study of humanity, the similarities and diversity of cultures, and attempts to present an integrated picture of humankind.

Anthropology studies the biological, social and cultural development of humankind and seeks answers to why people are different and how they are similar. It has subdivisions linked by unifying themes. One can glean the vastness of the subject matter of anthropology by looking into its serious fields such as the following:

1. Biological or physical anthropology
2. Archeology
3. Cultural anthropology
4. Linguistics
5. Applied Anthropology

Biological or physical anthropology
This studies the evolution of man and biological variations or diversity within the species. Biological anthropologists are concerned with how biological changes occur and how all these are related to the natural and social environments of the subjects.

The study the biological processes of humans and their primate relatives in their natural and social environments.

A knowledge of human variation is important in understanding human adaptation.

ArcheologyArcheology studies and reconstructs events of the past since the beginning of the culture through such cultural remains as tools, buildings and pot shards (broken pieces of pottery.)

The focus is on the discovery of people and looking into how cultures change occurs. Archeologists do this by excavating sites.
The Meaning of Anthropology

The trademark of Anthropology: Holism

It is worth to point out that anthropology , as distinct from all other social sciences is an integrated approach.

It is includes the study of the physical nature of the human species, our past, unique capabilities as well as our limitations, and the tremendous variety and startling similarities among different cultures.

The anthropological approach is sometimes described as holistic because it integrates so many different area of concern.

It is not just the study of economic behavior or the structural relations between social groups.

It tries to understand all human behavior in all contexts, in all places and at all times.

And it does this by drawing from many different disciplines as well as from the four subfields of anthropology.

The anthropologist brings to his or her study a wide background.

Biology and physiology required for graduate students in physical anthropology; geology, geography, ancient history and sometimes even architecture are needed by the archeologists; and cultural anthropologist have come from all walks of life.

To study peasant society cross culturally we have to now something about agriculture ; to study personality cross culturally he must have a background in psychology; and so on for every possible area of study within cultural anthropology.
The trademark of Anthropology: Holism

Sociology and anthropology

Sociology and anthropology
One important difference between these two fields is that sociology is concerned with the study of our own society, while anthropology is a comparative discipline that focuses in all societies at all times.

Sociology is interested mainly in the present anthropology deals just as much with the past.

However, these contrasts are growing less valid every day as anthropologists adopt sociological methods and sociologists adopt the comparative approach of anthropology.

Another way of looking at the difference between sociology and anthropology is to note that sociology tends to be quantitative, while anthropology tends to be qualitative.

What this means is that the sociologists generalizes from broad surveys of large numbers of people and the anthropologists relies on close knowledge of a few members of a group to form impressions.

Although these impressions might not be valid for the society as a while (quantitative), there are valid in greater depth for the small sample studied (qualitative).

The anthropologists may spend weeks finding the answer to particular question, mainly out of intense personal involvement in the study.

The sociologists, on the other hand, cannot, afford to become badly deeply involved in surveying a larger simple of the society.

The major difference between anthropology and sociology –probably lies in the methods used. Anthropology uses intensive methods of study; sociology tend to employ broader, more extensively methods.
Sociology and anthropology

Anthropology and relationship with other subject

Other social sciences have the same goal as anthropology in that they attempt to understand human behavior.

What makes cultural anthropology different? Perhaps the most obvious difference is that the scope of anthropology is much broader than that of any other social science. Economics deals only with economic behavior and political science focuses on political behavior.

Cultural anthropology, on the other hand is concerned with these and other areas from a comparative perspective and especially with the interrelationship among all areas of behavior in any particularly society.

Its overlap every other social science in at least some areas, yet it retains its individuality.

The distinction between history and anthropology was a subject of intense debate for many years.

Is anthropology, after all merely the study of human history in all its various forms?

Although this debate has subsided, one cannot truthfully say that it has been completely resolved.

No anthropologists can work without awareness in the past, of the sequence of events that led to the situation being studied.

In describing another culture or comparing aspects of two cultures, the anthropologist cannot ignore history.

But there is no doubt that history and anthropology are separate. For one thing, historians focus on past events, and their study of values, motivations and behaviors is directed toward explaining why things occurred the way they did.

Anthropology seeks to generalize from such explanations. It is not enough to say that history is more of an art and anthropology more of a science, or that anthropologist use history more than historians use anthropology.

Indeed, it is often hard to tell history from anthropology, although it helps to note that historians focus on past events, in contrast to the cultural anthropologist’s emphasis on contemporary events.
Anthropology and relationship with other subject

Anthropology of War

War has been a sensational topic. Warfare concentrates and intensifies some of our strongest emotions; courage and fear, resignation and panic, selfishness and self-sacrifice, greed and generosity, patriotism and xenophobia.

The stimulus of war has incited human beings to prodigies of ingenuity, improvisation, cooperation, vandalism and cruelty.

It is the riskiest field on which to match wits and luck: no peaceful endeavor can equal its penalties for failure, and few can exceed its rewards for success.

It remains the most theatrical of human activities combining tragedy, high drama, melodrama, spectacle, action, farce and even low comedy.

War displays the human condition in extremes.

It is thus not surprising that the first recovered histories, the first written accounts of the exploits of mortals, are military histories.

War is an interaction in which two or more militaries have a “struggle of wills.”

A civil war is a dispute between parties within the same nation. War is not considered to the same as occupation, murder or genocide. Because of the reciprocal nature of the violent struggle, and the organized nature of the units involved.

A proxy war is a war that results when two powers use third parties as substitutes for fighting each other directly.

The earliest Egyptian hieroglyphs record the victories of Egypt’s first pharaohs, the Scorpion King and Narmer.

The first secular literature or history recorded in cuneiform recounts the adventures of the Sumerian warrior king Gilgamesh.

The earliest written part of the Books f Moses, the “J-strand”, culminate in the brutal Hebrew conquest of Canaan.

The annals of the Chinese, Greeks, and Roman are concerned with wars and warrior king.

Most Mayan hieroglyphic texts are devoted to the genealogies, biographies and military exploits of Mayan kings.

Wars happen when a group of people or an organization perceives the benefits that can be obtained to be greater than the cost. This can happen for a variety of reasons:
1. To protect national pride by preventing the loss of territory.
2. To protect livelihood by preventing the loss of resources or by declining independence.
3.To inflict punishment of the “wrongdoer”, especially when one country is stronger than the other and can effectively deal out the punishment.

Anthropology of War

Cultural Anthropology

In a strict sense, we could include archeology and anthropological linguistics under cultural anthropology for they are both concerned with culture.

But since these subfields are generally considered separate from the major focus of cultural anthropology, it is better to treat them separately.

Cultural anthropology, as the term is commonly used today. Generally refers to the study of existing peoples.

Further it takes a comparative approach; that is, its aim is to understand and appreciate the diversity on human behavior, and develop a science of human behavior through comparison, of different people throughout the world.

In the United States they often distinguish between two areas of cultural anthropology; ethnology and ethnography.

Ethnology is the comparative study of culture and the investigation theoretical problems using information about –different groups.

Ethnography is simply the description of the one culture; it is not a comparative study.

In other words, an ethnological study is based on two or more ethnographies; the latter provide the raw material for the former.

Thus the word of the cultural anthropologists consists of two main tasks: to describe the culture of other peoples and to compare them.

These tasks are not easy, since putting something from another cultural context into the concepts and works available in the English language is not always possible.

In fact, it might consider an anthropologist’s description of a foreign culture to be cultural translation.
Cultural Anthropology

Theory of Cultural Anthropology

Cultural anthropology is the field study of living beings. Cultural anthropology’s principal method is field work, the way do natural history.

The field refers to the areas in space in which cultural anthropologists find living population to study.

It is the ‘interacting field’ for various forces propelled by human activities. The field need not have a hard boundary, it may not even be a single geographical area, but all told, a particular ethnographic field is usually some form of community.

Natural history method distinguishes cultural anthropology from the other social sciences. This method is founded on meticulous observation. First is to isolate a field of interacting people. Then observe them interact over natural time cycles (days, seasons, years, generations, a life-time).

These observation is controlled and cross check by repeating them and by questioning – interviewing – our subjects for information about past activities. In this way, by patient, repetitive charting and cross checking of human events, patterns and processes can be distinguishes.

These in turn, with some certainty, to arrive at conclusions that are theories – statements of order, limits, probability and natural law – derived from the field itself, seen as part of nature.

Theories may be descriptive, relational, prescriptive or predictive. Natural history theories are above all descriptive and relational. They are sometimes prescriptive, especially in applied anthropology: they can indicate a recommended area of conduct. But anthropologists seldom make predictions on the basis of their theories. It is important to realize that a prediction is not the only test of a theory.

A theory, then, is a statement of the apparent relationship among observed facts.

Facts originally referred to deeds, events observed in the past. Toady facts refer to givens accepted as true, but they bear the connotation of deeds or event. However, emotional states or feeling can also be facts. To be accepted, both facts and theory must have been verified by repeated observations, often by several observers.
Theory of Cultural Anthropology

What is Ecological Anthropology?

Ecological anthropology focuses upon the complex relations between people and their environments.

Human populations, socially organized and oriented by means of particular cultures, have ongoing contact with and impact upon the land, climate, plant and animal species and other humans in their environment and these in turn have reciprocal impacts.

Ecological anthropology directs our attention to the ways in which a particular population purposely or unintentionally shapes its environment, and the ways in which its relations with the environment shape its culture and its social, economic and political life.

There are several basic points upon which ecological anthropologists agree: any particular population is not engaged with the total environment which surrounds it, but rather with certain selected aspects and elements, which may be called its habitat, and the particular place which it occupies in that environment may be labeled its niche.

Each population has its own particular orientation, or adaptation, to the wider environment, institutionalized in the culture of the group, particularly in its technology, which includes established knowledge of plants and animals, weather and minerals, as well as tools and techniques of extracting food, clothing and shelter.

Furthermore, a population’s adaptation is often influenced by the socio cultural environment constituted by other human populations, their cultures and adaptations.  
What is Ecological Anthropology?

Anthropology Linguistics

The study of language from an anthropological viewpoint is one of branch of modern anthropology. Anthropologists who specialize in linguistics today are concerned with relationship between language and cultural behavior.

They ask question about language from the point of view of the human species, rather than trying to describe the language or its structure. The central focus is still on people, and language is viewed as part of the social world.

One are of anthropological linguistics is the study of the origin of language. This could just as well be a question for physical anthropologists.

At present there is an important controversy over which of the fossil hominids was the first with the capacity for speech. Another area of interest is the role of language in social behavior.

This is a fairly new field known as sociolinguistics, and it is concerned with the way people use language people speak or various forms of it.
Anthropology Linguistics

Cultural Anthropology as Natural History

The scientific method that most distinguishes cultural anthropology from the other social sciences is the natural history method.

In philosophy natural history is an example of induction – that is, reasoning from a set of observations to arrive at general principles.

Thus, for anthropology the facts always come first, and the principles – inferred from the facts – come second. Cultural anthropology always goes from particular to the general.

Moreover the principles (conclusions and, statements of order or “law”) vary according to the framework shaping any particular set of facts.

The principles, for example, that governed our emergence as a species were primarily those of adaptive value of physical traits (speech and a larger brain) in relation to a new ecological niche, hunting and gathering.

As another example, the transition from bands to the tribal level of sociocultural organization reflected the pressures of human population that had filled that niche over the entire world. Principles shift their levels of generality as the focus or spotlight on particular sets of facts shifts.

In its widest framework, evolution proceeds from the situational ability of apparently random events, such as genetic mutations or behavioral patterns, to solve some problem, such as the movement of a group of living beings into a new habitat.

The result is ever more complex biological and social “designs”. Living system exhibit over time, population growth, escalation in scale and increasing specialization of functional subparts. All living systems, whether a single biological organism or a larger social group, are self regulating, responding to exterior conditions in the environment from which they must derive and transform matter, energy, and momentum in the process of reproducing both the species and the group.

They also engage in a characteristics array of activities or actions to process that matter and energy, which are propelled by momentum. These activities form cycles, in the sense that they characteristically go through a “round” and start over again with the same sequence of behaviors.

Living species group themselves into “breeding populations,” or communities. Their characteristics activities also form natural, observable divisions in their behavior, which are the basis for what can be called ‘institutions’, or sets of more or less discrete activities that, taken together, solve some problem and perform some function for the benefit of the individual and the group.

Thus, the cluster of activities that surround a chimpanzee mother’s nurturing and raising of her infants and juveniles form a coherent social complex of activities that calls the “mother-offspring family.” One way to look at human social and cultural evolution is through the successive emergence, or “factoring out’” of human institutions. That is, when an institution has fully emerged, human beings have given it a name and attached names or labels to the “roles” one must play in them.

Thus, the human “family” has the roles of “mother” and “son” or “daughter,” as well as “husband” and “father,” two roles not present in the chimpanzee family prototype.
Cultural Anthropology as Natural History

Cultural Anthropology: Source of Knowledge

Cultural Anthropology had very different origins from those of other subfields of anthropology, but it was almost a foregone conclusion that they would eventually come together. Cultural anthropology studies the similarities and differences in the behavior of various groups of people. It grew out of people’s natural curiosity about the ways of observed in groups other than their own. The farther wary these groups are, the more different they are likely to be.

Early accounts of their cultures came form a limited number of sources – soldiers who conquered the peoples of other continents, traders who brought home the riches of other lands, and missionaries who set out to convert the “heathen” to Christianity. But as Europe gained greater control over other societies, the way was opened for scholars interested in learning about societies and studying them in a more scientific way.

Increased knowledge about human cultural diversity led to attempts to systematize these differences. The outcome was a theory of cultural revolution that paralleled the theory of biological evolution. Evolutionary theory proved to be link that tied the four subfields of anthropology together in the early days of the discipline. Cultural anthropology applied an evolutionary model to contemporary societies in an attempt to set up a scale on which to rank all known cultures. From this scale they reconstructed the evolutionary history of human society, from its earliest and most primitive stages up to the preset level of civilization.
Cultural Anthropology: Source of Knowledge

Anthropology and Archeology

Early investigations suffered from the problems that were common to all scientific fields in 19th century.

Their measurements were crude at best, and their knowledge of human anatomy and physiology was limited. But with each new discovery, another piece was added to the puzzle.

Anthropologist became more aware of the relationships between human beings and other animals.

They began to understand some of the obvious differences among human populations: they learn how physical features like skin color or how hair type or even height and general body structure were tied in with the environments in which people had lived for very long period.

Without evidence of past, there could be no anthropology. The evidence was provided by archeology.

Although in the nineteenth century archeology was not considered a branch of anthropology, its subject matter was of crucial important to physical anthropologists. Archaeologists are concerned primarily with prehistory – the period of human existence prior to the keeping of written records or historical accounts.

Their aim is to reconstruct the origins and spread of culture by examining any remains of past societies that we are fortunate enough to find.

Although archeology is best known for its dramatic discoveries of ancient cities, and the “great” civilizations of the past, it also provides us with vast amount of information about ancient people and their customs.
Anthropology and Archeology

Anthropology and people ll

In Western Europe the age of exploration and discovery that followed the decline of the middle ages created greater interest in the variety of peoples and customs on other parts of the world.

European explorers, adventurers, missionaries, and travelers came into contact with societies whose people behaved on ways that the Europeans found very strange.

In letters and journals they described these societies in the utmost details. The more contact they had with different cultures, the more information was collected and published, creating even greater interest in the study of other people.

Although some of the early attempts at scientific analysis of foreign customs and peoples of radically different appearance were quite naive – still they were the first step toward development of anthropology as a science.

Are these strange peoples in the far corners of the earth related to each other and to us? How do their customs compare with ours?

And how can we explain such a wide range behavior? These were the kind of questions asked by early anthropologists.
Anthropology and people ll

Anthropology and people

While the scientific study of anthropology is relatively recent, this cannot be said of interest in anthropology matters.

People have always been curious about themselves and have always asked anthropological questions and sought answers to those questions in the spirit in which anthropologists conduct research today.

Of course, we have no written records to take us back dawn of the human species, but for as far as we do have records, they indicate that people had an interest in human nature and in the diversity of the world around them.

Herodotus (484-424 B.C) the Greek historian who is sometimes called the father of history, might also be called an anthropologist.

In writing about the events in his time, he raised a number of questions about the differences who lived in surrounding areas.

He believed that the people encountered by the Greeks in the Persian Wars represented and earlier stage of Greek society.

Unfortunately, Herodotus , like many of his contemporary, felt that if you weren’t Greek, you were ”savage” or “barbaric”.

Nevertheless, it is from his writings, based on observations and interviews, that later scholar were able to get picture of what life in Egypt at that time.

A later historian, Thucydides (460-400 BC) in his accounts of Peloponnesian War, made an even stronger statement of the notion that the “barbarians” represented a stage through which Athenian culture had already passed in its rise to civilization.

Thus he was not only comprising different groups, but also analyzing the differences, trying to understand what caused them and explain the current state of his own society.
Anthropology and people

Definition of Cultural Anthropology

The word anthropology is derived from two Greek words, anthropos (man) and logos (study).

Anthropologists study the similarities and differences in how people looks, how they talk, and how they talk, and how they behave, both in the past and in the present.

They are interested in all aspects of the human species and human behavior, in all places and at all times, from the origin and evolution of the species to the way people live today.

Only in the last hundred years has the anthropology been recognized as a separated area of formal study.

The first academic position in anthropology was held by Edward Taylor in Oxford, England.

Four years later Franz Boaz become the first professor of anthropology in the United Sates at Clark university in Massachusetts.
Definition of Cultural Anthropology

The Meaning of Anthropology

The Meaning of Anthropology
Anthropology is a science of humanity and its society. It is a scientific study of humanity, the similarities and diversity of cultures, and attempts to present an integrated picture of humankind.

Anthropology studies the biological, social and cultural development of humankind and seeks answers to why people are different and how they are similar. It has subdivisions linked by unifying themes. One can glean the vastness of the subject matter of anthropology by looking into its serious fields such as the following:

1. Biological or physical anthropology
2. Archeology
3. Cultural anthropology
4. Linguistics
5. Applied Anthropology

Biological or physical anthropology
This studies the evolution of man and biological variations or diversity within the species. Biological anthropologists are concerned with how biological changes occur and how all these are related to the natural and social environments of the subjects.

The study the biological processes of humans and their primate relatives in their natural and social environments.

A knowledge of human variation is important in understanding human adaptation.

Archeology
Archeology studies and reconstructs events of the past since the beginning of the culture through such cultural remains as tools, buildings and pot shards (broken pieces of pottery.)

The focus is on the discovery of people and looking into how cultures change occurs. Archeologists do this by excavating sites.
The Meaning of Anthropology

The Beginning of Anthropology and Sociology

The Beginning of Anthropology and Sociology
The beginnings of anthropology go back to the period of discovery and exploration, from the nineteenth centuries.

Sources of facts are the accounts of early Western explorers, missionaries, soldiers, and colonial official regarding the strange behavior and beliefs as well as exotic appearance of people they had come in contact with.

Discoveries of flint tools and other artifacts in Europe in the early nineteenth century gave evidence of the existence of human beings a million years ago.

These discoveries happened at a time when advances in physics and chemistry were made, arousing an interest in scientific inquiry.

In the nineteenth century anthropology began to take shape as a separate field of study that had its root in the natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities.

Edward Tylor was the first professor of anthropology in Oxford, England. In United States, it was Franz Boas of Clark University, Massachusetts.

From 1980, ethnographers approached the study of local culture as embedded within regional and tribal forces.

Another change in the approach of ethnographers is their focus on only one topic of interest avoiding the holistic approach. Still another trend is the expanded interest in history.

Sociology is a separate field of study has its roots in Europe, particularly in France at the time of the Industrial Revolution.

Social problems attended these social upheavals.

The pioneers were Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) and Auguste Comte (1798-1857).

Comte, a French philosophers, believed that the methods and techniques of the natural science could be fruitfully applied to the study of society.

He coined the term “sociology.” Other early sociologists were Herbert Spencer, Ferdinand Toennies, and Karl Marx.

Marx contribute ideas about class conflict and social change.

After World War II, there were changes in the balance of political power, this led to comparative and international themes.

Sociology had to adapt to these changes and to those of the globalizing world. The American sociologists working in Europe and North America were excited about the fresh possibilities of societies other than their own getting interested in sociology.

Among them were Barrington Moore, Clark Kerr, Talcott Parsons, Andre Gunder Frank, a German scholar, and Peter Worsley, an English sociologist.