The scientific study of the origin, the behavior, and the physical, social, and cultural development of humans. Colonialism is the practice by which a powerful country directly controls less powerful countries and uses their resources to increase its own power and wealth….the bitter oppression of slavery and colonialism. It is interesting to reflect why European colonialism ended.
Anthropology emerged from the colonial expansion of Europe. Colonialism structured the relationship between anthropologists and the people they studied and had an effect on methodological and conceptual formulations in the discipline. For example, the role of “objective outsider” with its resultant professional exploitation of subject matter can be viewed as an academic manifestation of colonialism. Some of the biases inherent in this role are examinated. With the liberation of formerly colonized peoples, the traditional role of the anthropologist has been undermined.
This has resulted in an impasse between anthropologists and many of the people they formerly studied. The postcolonial era clearly calls for new roles for anthropologists and a more relevant set of methodologies and concepts. Colonialism is, or was, a negative term applied to governments that gave preferred trading status between themselves. The stronger trading partner often did end up controlling trade to its benefit rather than the partnership. The weaker partner was often labeled a colony. The British Commonwealth was often cited as an example of Colonialism. Anthropology is something completely different.
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Anthropology is the study of various aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology and cultural anthropology, study the norms and values of societies. Linguistic anthropology studies how language affects social life. Biological or physical anthropology, studies the biological development of humans.Colonialism is like anthropology’s awkward goth phase that she would rather forget about.
On a more serious note, anthropology as a discipline was born amidst colonialism because the colonial power on foreign ground provided both field, for fieldwork, and access, because local populations were in an ill-position to refuse the presence of an anthropologist sent by the colonial power. Anthropologists were provided access in exchange for information about the natives, that would eventually be used to further the control of colonial powers on said populations. Eventually, anthropologists grew more and more uncomfortable with the part they played in colonialism and many distanced themselves from these practices.
Analyze the functionalism in the file of Anthropology
The social theory which holds that a society’s beliefs, behavior, social structure, etc. are interrelated and function as a means to achieve its common goals and protect its social values
The roots of functionalism are found in the work of sociologists Herbert Spencer and Émile Durkheim. Functionalism considers a culture as an interrelated whole, not a collection of isolated traits. Like a human being has various organs that are interconnected and necessary for the body to function correctly, so society is a system of interconnected parts that make the whole function efficiently. The Functionalists examined how a particular cultural phase is interrelated with other aspects of the culture and how it affects the whole system of the society; in other words, cause and effect.
The theory of Functionalism emerged in the 1920s and then declined after World War II because of cultural changes caused by the war. Since the theory did not emphasize social transformations, it was replaced by other theories related to cultural changes. Even so, the basic idea of Functionalism has become part of a common sense for cultural analysis in anthropology. Anthropologists generally consider interconnections of different cultural domains when they analyze cultures, e.g., the connections between subsistence strategies and family organization or religion.The method of functionalism was based on fieldwork and direct observations of societies. Anthropologists were to describe various cultural institutions that make up a society, explain their social function, and show their contribution to the overall stability of a society. At the same time, this functionalist approach was criticized for not considering cultural changes of traditional societies. In the structural functionalism approach, society, its institutions and roles, was the appropriate thing to study. Cultural traits supported or helped to preserve social structuresFunctionalists assumed that all social institutions or cultural traits, no matter how obscure, were somehow integral to maintaining the society or culture within the ecological and social contexts in which it existed. Methodologically, this contributed to the development and refinement of anthropological relativism, the belief that all cultures and societies, as well as their constituent traits and institutions, must be looked at in their own context rather than judged by the values and norms of the anthropologist.
The synchronic method of analysis contributed many advancements in the field, such as the abandonment of historical speculation, later anthropologists began to seek ways to combine the strengths of synchrony with historical, or diachronic, views and to include change in their theoretical models. In addition, functionalism’s belief in the possibility of a scientific, objective study of human societies and cultures has likewise caused later anthropologists to turn away from its somewhat mechanistic models and assumptions and toward more interpretive, humanistic, phenomenological, and “postmodern” approaches. At the same time, the functionalist imperatives of primary fieldwork, holism, and the “anthropological present” have continued to be cornerstones of most social and cultural anthropological research and writing to this day.
