Title: The Anthropological Perspective what Makes it Unique | Actforlibraries.org
Headings: The Anthropological Perspective what Makes it Unique
The Anthropological Perspective what Makes it Unique
Content: This emphasis also makes anthropology unique among the social sciences. Unlike sociologists, psychologists, economists and political scientists, anthropologists look beyond the confines of our own society and compare it to the beliefs and practices of other societies, past and present. Where a sociologist, for example, may attempt to explain social organization with reference only to their own society, an anthropologist would almost invariably go on to compare and contrast our own patterns of social organization with other societies. This comparative emphasis is important. It helps anthropologists to avoid equating “human nature,” for example, with the peculiarities of our own contemporary society. Quite simply, just because we all take some belief or style of behavior for granted in the present, does not mean human beings everywhere, or throughout human history, would have agreed. As John Bodley (1999) puts it, an examination of the wide diversity of other societies encourages anthropologists “to view their own culture through an outsider’s eyes.” In other words, studying other cultures with very different understandings of the world, very different customs and styles of life, leads to what anthropologists refer to as “defamiliarization.” Defamiliarization refers to the process through which you develop an ability to look at our own culture as though it were a foreign culture through the study of other societies. That is, extensive cross-cultural study allows one to think more critically about one’s own culture, and to understand that many aspects of one’s own beliefs or ways of doing things, which we all take for granted on a daily basis, are actually not only completely arbitrary, but also far from universal throughout human history, or even in the present day in many cases.