IGNOU BA Anthropology Study Material
Source : Anthropology– eGyanKosh
IGNOU MA Anthropology Notes PDF
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ABSTRACT
Definitions of culture given by scholars and Anthropologists
McIver -“society means likeness”
Malinowski, 1944:1 – “instrumental reality, and apparatus for the satisfaction of the biological and derived need”. It is the integral whole consisting of implements in consumers’ goods, of constitutional characters for the various social groupings, of human ideas and crafts, beliefs and customs”
Eriksen – social anthropology does not remain restricted to primitive people and it also studies any social system and the qualification of such a social system is that it is of a small scale, non-industrial kind of society.
Kluckhohn and Kelly, 1945: 78 – “…Culture in general as a descriptive concept means the accumulated treasury of human creation: books, paintings, buildings, and the like; the knowledge of ways of adjusting to our surroundings, both human and physical; language, customs, and systems of etiquette, ethics, religion and morals that have been built up through the ages”
Evans-Pritchard in his seminal work Social Anthropology and Other Essays (1950) stated that the functionalist anthropologists regard history in this sense as it is usually a mixture of fact and fancy and also as highly relevant to a study of the culture of which it forms part.
Herskovits, 1948:17 – “Culture is refers to that part of the total setting of human existence which includes the material objects of human manufacture, techniques, social orientations, points of view, and sanctioned ends that are the immediate conditioning factors underlying behavior” or in simple terms he says culture is the “Man made part of the environment”
Evans-Pritchard in his seminal work Social Anthropology and Other Essays (1950) stated that the functionalist anthropologists regard history in this sense as it is usually a mixture of fact and fancy and also as highly relevant to a study of the culture of which it forms part.
Gary Ferraro, 1992:18-19 – “The concept of culture as everything that people have, thinks, and does as members of a society. This definition can be instructive because the three verbs correspond to the three major components of culture. That is, everything that people have refers to material possessions; everything that people think refers to those things they carry around in their heads, such as ideas, values, and attitudes; and everything that people do refers to behavior patterns. Thus all cultures comprise of material objects, ideas, values, and attitudes, and patterned ways of behaving” .
On Associations and Organizations
MacIver and Page (1952: 209) – “an association is an organisation deliberately formed for the collective pursuit of same interest or set of interests, which its members share.”
Parsons (1960: 9) – “organisations are social units that are deliberately constructed and reconstructed to pursue specific goals.”
On modernisation
Eisenstadt (1966) – “from a historical viewpoint modernisation is the process of change towards those
types of social, economic, and political systems which were developed in Western Europe and North America from the 17th to 19th century and after that spread over to South America. Asia, and Africa during the 19th and 20th centuries”.
S.C Dube (1988) – “an attractive feature of the concept was that it showed an apparent concern for the cultural sensitivities of both the elites and the masses of the third world. The term modernization was much less value loaded than it’s predecessor westernization”.
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