Did every society climb the same ladder? Anthropologists found people skipping rungs
Victorian scholars pictured humanity marching in lockstep from savagery to civilisation. By the mid-twentieth century, so many communities had jumped from hunting and gathering to service jobs within a single generation that the tidy ladder collapsed, and cultural anthropology turned to understanding each culture on its own terms.
Cultural anthropology studies how and why human cultures differ. A key premise is that culture lets people adapt to their surroundings without genetic change, so groups in different environments tend to develop different ways of life. Its signature method is participant observation, better known as fieldwork, in which the researcher lives at the site for a long stretch, supplemented by interviews and surveys.
Edward Tylor offered one of the earliest anthropological definitions of culture, treating it as the whole bundle of knowledge, belief, art, morals, law and custom that a person absorbs as a member of society. Later, following V. Gordon Childe, culture became the umbrella word and civilisation just one particular type of culture.
Nineteenth-century ethnologists split over how similar customs arose in distant places. Grafton Elliot Smith and others argued for diffusion: traits must have travelled from group to group. Lewis Henry Morgan and the independent-invention camp said groups could arrive at the same ideas separately, and Morgan added that societies passed through fixed stages, since industrial farming could hardly precede simple farming. Researchers eventually agreed both processes happen, while noting that a borrowed trait often takes on a new meaning in its new home. Julian Steward proposed that parallels reflect similar adaptations to similar environments, and Claude Lévi-Strauss traced them to shared structures of human thought.
The field's name came from the circle around Franz Boas, who championed cultural relativism and historical particularism in the early twentieth century. Relativism holds that beliefs and behaviour make sense only within the culture where they occur. That stance grew partly out of discomfort with the colonial-era obsession with ranking peoples as primitive or civilised, a preoccupation that absorbed Freud and many of his contemporaries.
Source: Cultural anthropology
