Re: No Anthropology here

Thomas Kavanagh (tkavanag@indiana.edu)
11 Sep 1995 14:22:10 GMT

ngazidja@jolt.mpx.com.au (Iain Walker) wrote:
>
>It's ["cultural anthropology"] also American. In the Franco-Scottish >tradition (in particular) we don't speak of cultural anthrop=
ology but we >do study social anthropology. There is a difference: cultural >anthropology could be considered a part of social anth=
ropology but not >vice versa.

It depends on how you delimit "cultural." If you limit it to the kinds of
"cultural" studies that the current crop of Post Mods are doing, then you
may be correct, but if you use the kind of broad based approach of say,
Fred Eggan, then the social aspects of human life are encompassed within
the scope of Cult. Anth.

I like to think of myself as a sociocultural anthro, concerned with the
social expressions of culture and the cultural dimensions of society.
There is no separate dimension of the "social" apart from "culture" and
there is no "cultural dimension" that does not have a social expression.

>The paradigms are different, ...

Ah so, true. But there are so many paradigms.

>the American cultural anthropologists often discuss things in terms >that are at best irrelevant to social anthropologists.

and so is the converse.

tk