Identity (Post 6 – Anthropology summary before moving on to Psychology) no comments
As I have spent the majority of my reading time so far on a single book, I have decided to extract and list the key points from my previous blog posts, and then cross-examine these with the content of Cultural Anthropology: A Contemporary Perspective by Keesing and Strathern. This should hopefully help to identify the most common areas which both books cover, and this in turn should indicate what the key fundamental areas of anthropology revolve around.
Topics blogged about previously:
- Ethnocentrism
- Cultural realism
- History:
- Diffusionism
- Globalisation
- Ethnography
- Emic and Etic
- The Social Person/Human Existence
- Statuses and Roles – Goffman
- The Self – Brian Morris (1994)
- Socialisation
- Anomie
- Social systems and social structures
- Habitus (Bourdieu)
The topics in bold are those I believe Keesing and Strathern cover to complement Hylland Eriksen. A couple of interesting points that I also noticed while skimming through Cultural Anthropology are that Anthropology is a lot less scientific than other social sciences – it is difficult to apply questionnaires, experiments etc when carrying out an anthropological study so research techniques have fallen back on how to “learn, understand and communicate”. Scientific method is often inappropriate – as there is “nothing to measure, count, or predict”.
This post was really just about summarising what I have covered in Anthropology so far, as I would now like to move on to Psychology having not touched it so far. I think a lot of the basic theories and ideas have strong links to sociology, but there is a definite cultural twist on them. I aim to cover the basic principles of psychology in the next couple of weeks, and then relate both disciplines to Identity once I have this understanding.