Week 3 assignment

MENSAH MAXWELL
BACS22215
GROUP 1



FOUNDING FATHERS OF ANTHROPOLOGY AND THEIR CONTRIBUTIONS
Anthropology - Anthropology, ‘the science of humanity,’ which studies human beings in aspects ranging from the biology and evolutionary history of Homo sapiens to the features of society and culture that decisively distinguish humans from other animal species.

To start with,

Franz Boaz - Established the academic discipline of anthropology as we know it today. He is also the source of some of anthropology’s oldest truths, like the cultural (rather than biological) nature of race and the very notion of culture as a whole.

Clifford Geertz - one of the most influential modern anthropologists, who helped to develop and promote the notion of symbolic anthropology. Added to Malinowski's ideas of participant observation the idea of “thick description” .

"Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning."

• Clifford Geertz

Bronislaw Malinowski - Advanced and clarified the processes of participant observation that are the very basic tools used by anthropologists even today. Before Malinowski, most anthropology was done from an armchair in a nice study or library. He popularized the notion that in order to understand a people, you must go to them and live among them.

He, like a lot of older anthropologists, was pretty problematic. Still, his ideas laid the groundwork for the important and relevant studies conducted by later anthropologists in an effort to understand this thing we call humanity.

In conclusion, They contributed to our understanding of human culture in general as well as aboriginal cultures. They also contributed indirectly to the fields of sociology, archeology, history, human evolution, psychology, and many other fields. For instance, in the 1930’s, anthropologist Julian Steward developed a theory that he called cultural ecology. According to this theory, cultural traits are ecological adaptations to the different physical environments of different societies. His theory therefore could be a big help today’s natural preservationists who are concerned with environmental pollution, species extinctions, and global warming.