Goals of Cultural Anthropology

By now, you should have read at least the first two chapters in the text as well as all previous lessons. Hopefully you have gained a good idea of what anthropology is and the four major branches of anthropology: cultural anthropology, archaeology, physical or biological anthropology, and linguistics. You should also understand critical concepts like culture, ethnocentrism, cultural relativism, and the emic and etic perspectives. For review, read the required brief article What is Anthropology?on the website of the American Anthropological Association--it has neat quotes, among other things! If your interested, explore the AAA website for information on various careers in anthropology.

My version of the goals of cultural anthropology is quite brief, but very complex. (These are goals of cultural anthropology as a whole; not all of them apply to ethnography, the branch concerned with actual fieldwork. See below.)

1. To understand each and every culture, both emically and etically.
2. To understand each and every culture as a unique adaptation.
3. To understand cultural similarities and differences.
4. To understand cultural change.

Comments

"Understand" is the key word here. There is nothing in these goals about evaluating cultures, or about changing them.

In anthropological terms every culture is unique, the result of a complex history of adaptation to a changing physical, biological and social environment. A militarily and technologically powerful country like the United States is worthy of study, but so are the few thousand Yanomamo in Venezuela and Brazil. Both represent the human experience and both can contribute to our understanding of what it means to be human.

Yanomamo when first studied in the early 1970's

The goals are very idealistic. There are many human cultures and subcultures, studying even one is a tremendous task, culture's change constantly, and there are relatively few anthropologists!

Branches of Cultural Anthropology

Of the four goals listed above, the first two are of particular interest to ethnography. Ethnography is the data collecting branch of cultural anthropology. Ethnographers are the people who do the fieldwork, who go out to a different culture, participate in and observe the culture, and come back with the information. An ethnography is also the written or video account of the individual culture.

Every cultural anthropologist is expected to do ethnography as part of obtaining the necessary graduate degree. Since even a numerically small culture is incredibly complex, some ethnographers study the same culture for their entire professional lives. Others have more of an interest in the last two goals, which compare cultures in order to find general rules of culture which can explain cultural differences, similarities, and change. These people are practicing ethnology, the second branch of cultural anthropology.

Many cultural anthropologists would add a fifth goal, and a third branch, to cultural anthropology. The fifth goal would be to use knowledge of an individual culture and of cultural processes to assist in cultural change. This could mean anything from encouraging the Chinese to drink more Diet Coke to setting up a democratic government in Afghanistan. This branch of cultural anthropology is called applied anthropology. (If interested see the mission statement and goals of the Society for Applied Anthropology.)

Applied anthropology is somewhat controversial within cultural anthropology, as some see it as conflicting with the principle of cultural relativism.