Assignment Code: BANC-133/ASST/TMA/July 2022 and January 2023

Course Code: BANC-133

Assignment Name: Fundamentals of Social and Cultural Anthropology

Year: 2022-2023

Verification Status: Verified by Professor

Total Marks: 100

There are three Assignments. All questions are compulsory.

Assignment – A

Answer the following in about 500 words each. 2X20= 40

a) Discuss the British and American Schools of Anthropology with reference to their key research areas.

Ans) The evolution of the field in its British iteration and the creation of what became known as the American Cultural Tradition both make clear the inherent connection between anthropology and colonisation. The French school of sociology member Durkheim's functionalism served as the intellectual foundation for the British structural-functional school. According to the structural-functional school, each society has a structure in the form of social ties, and each component of this structure has a functional logic that contributes to the structure as a whole.

The fundamental tenets of structural functionalism were founded on the axiom of cultural relativism, according to which each culture was a functional whole and not just a greater or lower manifestation of the same culture. Each culture was interconnected, similar to how different parts of a living thing work together to form the whole. A society needed to be studied in its entirety and depth, with the functional relationship between its parts being established through close and intimate interaction with the people involved. This is because one could not study components of cultures, such as religion and kinship, by using the comparative method, as was done in classical evolutionary theory.

The majority of the colonies had functional studies conducted by British and French anthropologists, who were frequently hired by the colonial administrations to assist the administration by providing knowledge about the populace so that they might be better managed and ruled. Similar to what happened in India, many administrators who conducted fieldwork among the people they were expected to rule turned themselves anthropologists in a way. However, there was bias present in these administrators' and ethnographers' studies. However, anthropologists frequently opposed state policy due to their extended stays and close contact with the subjects they were hired to study, despite the fact that they were frequently initially paid by the state and obligated to promote the state's purpose of colonisation.

The situation was very different in America. When anthropologists started studying the Native Americans in this area, many tribes and groups had almost no survivors left and had not only been dispersed and their societies destroyed. First of all, because they had to examine remnants of peoples' lives—myths, folklore, material culture, and stories of ways of living that had vanished or were about to vanish—rather than functioning societies, they had to concentrate on the notion of culture rather than that of society.

The doyen of American anthropology and direct disciple of Boas, Kroeber, supplied the renowned definition of culture as something that could be studied even if the culture bearers were no longer alive: "super-organic, supra-individual." Anthropologists who noted that early childhood experiences were ingrained in culturally distinctive methods of child upbringing and that culture was consequently a major driver of personality formation revised Freud's theory of early personality formation. This thesis gave rise to the idea of national culture, which became very well-liked.

The American school, which had its roots in historical particularism, also extended out into ecological, economic, medical, and historical anthropology in addition to psychological subjects. The distinction between the two traditions, however, nearly vanished after the 1950s when more modern theories took the place of structural functionalism and historical particularism.

b) Define marriage. Discuss marriage as a social institution and the changing dynamics in the present.

Ans) Marriage is the union of a man and a woman in which the children born to the woman are acknowledged as the legitimate progeny of both partners. Essentially, marriage is a societal sanction that permits a man and a woman to establish a romantic connection and grants them the sanctity necessary to conceive or adopt children. Man and woman are admitted to family life through the institution of marriage. It is a steady relationship in which a man and a woman are able to coexist in society without suffering any social repercussions. Marriage has an impact on the entire society as well as future generations, not just the married pair.

Present Changes in the Marriage and Family Structure in India

Along with an increase in literacy rates, the marriage age has changed. Women who marry later tend to live with their parents longer and pursue higher education to improve their marriage's prospects. Some people start working. Numerous family- and marriage-related behavioural patterns have been impacted by this transformation. Although the prevalence of premarital mating is unknown, it is generally accepted that it is increasing. A popular film diva from South India caused a sensation when she said something in favour of this behaviour, sparking a national discussion. In addition to the urban educated population's rising marriage age, child marriages are nevertheless prevalent in rural areas and small towns.

The endogamous frontier has expanded, and inter-caste and interreligious marriages are becoming more often.

1. Scout for partners using public media (newspaper advertisements).

2. Love marriages—which frequently become inter-caste unions with the parents' approval—are unions that are formally arranged.

Marriage customs, including the celebration phase, have been drastically reduced, yet conspicuous consumerism has also increased noticeably. Rich dinners, elaborate farmhouse decorations, celebratory videotaping, and lavish gifts are now commonplace. The number of requests for dowry is increasing, and the items offered as dowry are frequently changing. It is also significant to note that daughters today often pressure their parents to increase wedding expenses and provide a hefty dowry. While the bridegroom's family is frequently held responsible for the threat posed by dowry, the reality is that daughters frequently place unreasonable demands on their parents.

Newer varieties of family crises have also been produced by the new tendencies. For instance, dowry-related deaths, brides refusing to wed when excessive dowry demands are made, even reporting such cases to the police, marriage delays, debt, suicides, divorces, domestic violence, and, occasionally, riots in the community in opposition to interfaith love marriages.

Both fertility behaviour and family planning strategies are changing. The continued preference for male offspring has resulted in medical negligence. Private clinics secretly perform sonographic tests to determine the embryo's gender, which has led to an increase in doctor-assisted abortion instances. Feticide against women is a very unsettling phenomena.

Assignment – B

Answer the following in about 250 words each. (Write Short Notes) 3X10=30

a) Diffusionism

Ans) The theory of "diffusionism" places more emphasis on how civilizations spread from their points of origin than it does on how related qualities have evolved simultaneously. In contrast to evolution, it is more prone to the deterioration of civilizations with time and their distance from their place of origin. They contend that unique ideas are uncommon, and that dissemination is to blame for any similarities between cultural features.

According to diffusionism, copying behaviour would have been far easier to do than independent discovery. As a result, different cultures will follow distinct growth paths. Communities might further pick behaviours that were more appropriate to their environment as repetition and innovation were introduced. The concept of cultural hierarchy as held by evolutionism was rejected by diffusionism. Instead, they promoted cultural relativism. According to cultural relativism, it is desirable to study concepts, traditions, practises, and technologies from the culture in which they are present.

Cultural anthropology has been significantly impacted by the rise of diffusionism, which emerged as a response to the evolutionist study of culture. Cultural relativism gained acceptance thanks to diffusionism, which also provided new resources for the empirical study of culture. The German School of Diffusionism embraced the innovation of behaviour to a lesser extent than the British School, which only concentrated on duplication.

The American School of Diffusionism used invention, innovation, and duplication to varied degrees and represented a comprehensive viewpoint. Diffusionism, however, was unable to explain the stratification of culture on its own. The American School seemed too regional, while the British School was thought to be too generic. Additionally, the effect of the introduction of new cultural features on pre-existing qualities was not covered. As a result, anthropologists began to focus on acculturation around the beginning of the 20th century, which is the study of how societies change when they encounter other civilisations.

b) Discuss fieldwork traditions in anthropology its history and growth.

Ans) Following the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, anthropology had a rapid expansion. The anthropologists were motivated to investigate how society and culture developed over time. As a result, the evolutionary approach to anthropology was the first method used. It focused on the evolution of society, its institutions, and their forms, providing answers to issues such why these institutions were created and what phases they went through to arrive at their current form.

Beginning in the fourteenth century, people started travelling to remote regions of the earth. These visits began to grow in quantity over time, and the number of travel accounts also rose, thanks to advancements in travel facilities. These resources were used by past anthropologists to develop their origin and evolution ideas.

In other words, they didn't conduct any in-person research within these groups. The development of museums began in the second part of the nineteenth century. A department on human ethnology was added to each of these museums. Numerous expeditions were planned and sent to the tribal areas in order to acquire pieces of material culture that could be displayed in museums. Their duties included not just gathering the tangible items but also writing up each one as they were gathered. This led to the emergence of some sort of fieldwork under the guise of museum outings.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the evolutionary technique had come in for harsh criticism for depending on trip narratives rather than really gathering the facts. Because of the criticisms of the evolutionary theory's data dearth, it was necessary to get first-hand information regarding cultural facts. All of these elements contributed to a significant change in the anthropologists' methodology. The anthropologist preferred to do a first-hand study of the people and learn about the culture as it was led and understood by its bearers rather than relying solely on travelogues. Once fieldwork was established, it quickly became recognised as the cornerstone of anthropological research.

c) Auto ethnography

Ans) Fieldwork in anthropological studies has changed significantly over time as a result of social and political shifts. Today, the term "field" no longer connotes embarking on an adventure to a remote location or residing among the locals. The field itself is evolving quickly. Rarely would we encounter a society in its ideal state or existing in complete isolation in this age of globalisation. Despite being primarily interested in the less well-known societies, anthropologists are Despite focusing mostly on less well-known societies, anthropologists also take into account developed and developing nations. Many native anthropologists have restudied and studied their own communities as a result of the ethical problems that have come up in the work of the colonial fieldworkers.

As a result, anthropologists today also do research among their own population. Because so many human behaviours are being performed online, anthropologists are also concerned about the virtual world. Thus, anthropologists now study in the virtual environment. Multi-site fieldwork is another option. In a multi-sited field study, the researcher gathers data at various locations where the subjects can be found. Taking into mind the Hijras who live in several regions of India, Serena Nanda's research on the Hijras in India is a prime example of multi-sited fieldwork. Auto-ethnography, or the study of the "self," is a recent development in anthropological fieldwork when the fieldworker recounts his or her own personal experiences.

Assignment – C

Answer the following questions in about 150 words each. 6X5=30

a) Neo-evolutionism

Ans) Human civilizations are too complicated to be handled in such a crude way. However, White was able to clearly distinguish between history and evolution and demonstrate how the classical evolutionists had erred by conflating the two. He changed the idea of culture from being uniform or having all cultural elements distributed equally to being layered, with a core and a peripheral. His theory is frequently referred to as the Cultural Ecology theory.

In order to create a model of culture where the core was in a functional interdependent relationship with certain habitat aspects, he integrated the functional model with the cultural historical one. Thus, this core was described in terms of a culture's techno-economic components. Since there are few distinct types of adaptations of societies in the globe, one might develop a typology of the fundamental components of a culture. Since every culture is distinct from the others, this particular nature of a culture results from its history, which gives the culture's ancillary elements a distinctive character for every culture.

b) Feminist approach in anthropology

Ans) Gender is seen as a place of struggle for legitimacy, power, and control in feminist study. An evolution in anthropological thinking took place, with feminist researchers playing a major role in challenging the conventions that regulate the kinship, family, and marital structures that confine women to the home and other "private" spaces as "muted subjects." In light of this, a feminist approach to the study of culture fundamentally requires locating gender as a concept that permeates practically all social structures rather than as a discrete category.

In this case, studying gender as a distinct and residual category will not produce the intended results for a feminist endeavour aimed at exposing the power structures in the spheres of social institutions. Henrietta Moore and Sherry Ortner, two feminist anthropologists, contested the prevailing view that knowledge about gender is constructed as a residual substance. This strategy suggests conducting a micro-level examination into how men and women with particular roles access, participate in, and act in those roles in a particular culture.

c) Genealogy

Ans) Tracing the line of descent is made easier through genealogy. Given that it links the past to the present, it is an essential component of anthropological fieldwork. Studies on genealogy have also exposed the myths and precepts related to ancestors and ancestor worship. For instance, it was discovered during a genealogical study in a Karbi village that many members of the family had the same names.

A family's new-born child could only be given the name of an ancestor for whom the chomangkan rite had been done, according to the genealogy. The Karbis have almost completely stopped performing the chomangkan ceremony because it costs so much money and resources. The last chomangkan in the village was held around 20 years ago, in the late 1990s, when the study was being performed. The practise of genealogy is universal and can be found in many cultures and eras in a variety of forms, from the very simple to the quite complicated.

d) Cultural relativism

Ans) As a result of studying and comprehending other people's cultures, cultural relativism was born. The purpose was to examine a specific culture in light of the time and place in which it existed. For instance, a researcher's own society may seem incompatible with polyandry in a particular society. Instead of condemning this practise, the researcher needs to comprehend how such a system works in that society.

Every culture has its own history and distinctive characteristics, which must be understood in the context of the cultural totality because every society is unique and its traditions depend on other cultural factors like environment, population, etc. However, cultural relativism has come under fire for many of the same reasons that many cultural practises in many societies are in violation of human rights. Female infanticide, which is performed in some countries, or preventing women from entering a woman's property are two examples of this. The fact that most cultures promote patriarchy in the name of tradition has drawn special ire from feminists.

e) Data analysis

Ans) Data that is qualitative and quantitative must be classified individually because their analysis procedures differ. Sequencing and analysing quantitative data with a variety of analytical methods is necessary. Previously, it was done manually with the creation of graphs and the use of statistical methods. But in the modern era of computers, we have software for data analysis like Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, which reduces manual work and saves time.

The writing of qualitative data, such as case studies and personal histories, must be based on interviews and discussions with the informants. Most of the time, we rely on the discussions and observations we record and capture as correctly but in a descriptive manner for qualitative data. It is highly natural to need to analyse and evaluate qualitative material, and many anthropologists may frequently come up with diverse conclusions. However, one must also expressly justify their interpretation in order to eliminate what is known as subjective bias.

f) Interview schedule

Ans) An organised strategy is required in order to conduct an interview. In an interview, questions are designed to help the researcher get the necessary information from the informants. The researcher follows an interview schedule when conducting interviews. According to the needs of the research, various interview schedules and instructions are produced. There are two types of interview schedules: scheduled and unstructured. The researcher creates either an unstructured interview guide or a structured interview schedule for direct interviews.

A structured interview schedule, which is typically used for conducting surveys or obtaining quantitative data, contains a predefined format of questions that the researcher utilises while conducting an interview. Typically, formal, predetermined interview schedules are used to obtain census data. In the majority of circumstances, compiling, tabulating, and analysing such quantitative data is necessary. The researcher employs a set framework of questions when using a structured interview schedule to conduct an interview. The researcher fills out the information on the page, and the interviewer manages the schedule themselves while out in the field.