Who maintained that Social Anthropology is same as Comparative Sociology?
Answers
Sociology and Anthropology
After World War I, the newly formed League of Nations oversaw the relocation of refugees displaced by the war. The end of World War II witnessed a shift in this responsibility to the Displaced Persons Branch of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces. The lives, rights, and basic needs of refugees were thereafter protected by international law. In 1951, the responsibility for refugee oversight again shifted when the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) was created at the Geneva Refugee Convention. By the early 21st century, UNHCR was responsible for some 17 million refugees around the world, mostly from Africa and Asia. Many of the refugees under UNHCR protection are children unaccompanied by adults. These children present new challenges to cultural anthropologists who study them, as well as to the agencies responsible for their welfare.
After both World War I and World War II, a number of scholars in various disciplines turned their attention to refugee studies as they attempted to develop a framework of research that would affect policy decisions. In 1939, the publication of a special issue on refugees in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science served to focus attention on the legitimacy of refugee studies as a scholarly endeavor. In 1950, during the post–World War II years, the Association for the Study of the World Refugee Problem was founded in Liechtenstein, followed by the creation of UNHCR the following year.
In 1981, International Migration Review issued a call for comparative, interdisciplinary studies on refugees. Seven years later, the Journal of Refugee Studies was founded to provide a comprehensive forum for scholarly research in the field. Since its inception, 22.5% of the contributors to the Journal of Refugee Studies have been anthropologists, and 18% have been sociologists. That same year, in response to increased interest in refugee studies within anthropology, the American Archaeological Association established the Committee on Refugees and Immigrants as a subgroup of the General Antiquity Division. Over the next 6 years, the number of anthropologists involved in refugee studies increased significantly.
Social Anthropology
While anthropologists in the United States developed cultural anthropology, the British developed social anthropology. In the present, despite the fact that social anthropology departments still exist in Great Britain and in other parts of the world, social anthropology existed as a distinct discipline only from the early 1920s to the early 1970s. Historically, social anthropologists rejected evolutionary anthropology as speculative rather than scientific and tended to study a society at a particular moment in time. Social anthropologists focused on social organization, particularly on kinship. Until recently, they did not deal with history and psychology as much as cultural anthropologists did.
Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955) were the two main figures to develop social anthropology. Malinowski developed the functionalist approach, and Radcliffe-Brown developed structural functionalism. Influenced by French sociological thought, social anthropologists looked at social institutions. In particular, Emile Durkheim’s (1858-1917) organic view of society influenced social anthropology. This approach described society as an organism, in which the different parts of the society work to maintain the society. This led to a holistic approach, which said that you could not look at any institution in society in isolation from any other institution. Social anthropology took hold in the British Empire. It also developed as a specialized discipline in parts of the United States, particularly at the University of Chicago.
Malinowski developed the method of social anthropology, ethnography, during World War I, when he did intensive field research in the Trobriand Islands of Melanesia for 2 years. Intensive fieldwork, where the anthropologist lives among an exotic people, became a hallmark of social anthropology. Malinowski’s functionalism focused on human biological and social needs, ideas that followed those of W. H. R. Rivers (1864-1922). He said that people had primary needs for sex, shelter, and nutrition and that people produced culture to satisfy these needs and other needs that resulted from these primary needs. While his theory has lost popularity, his fieldwork method has become standard in anthropology. Malinowski wrote many books based on his fieldwork, the most famous of which is Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). Early works based on Malinowski’s approach included Raymond Firth’s We the Tikopia (1936) and Reo Fortune’s Sorcerer’s of Dobu (1937). Later scholars criticized such ethnographies because the better they explained a particular aspect of society in relation to the whole society, the harder it became to compare that aspect cross-culturally.
who maintained that social astrology is comparative sociology ?
social anthropology and comparative sociology is maintained by ...
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