1. The meaning of social anthropology
Raymond Firth
ZELİHA UYURCA
ID 501 - Advanced Project Development in Industrial Design

2. The meaning of social anthropology
The social anthropology intend to make a comparative analysis
of how people behave or act in social circumstances.

3. The meaning of social anthropology
• The problem that social anthropologist face:
– That raw material is disappearing in due course.
– Most are not evaporating but they have been changing the way
of their lives that is the special work areas of social anthropologists.
• For example,
Head-hunting, cannibalism and human sacrifice had
disappeared.
Totemism, exogamy, polygamy and couvage have been modified.

4. The meaning of social anthropology
• This loss or threaten for loss of tradition enforce the social
anthropologist to adopt themselves in different ways. Such
as;
– The study of social impact and change,
– Special problems of race relations,
– Vanishing primitives,
– The study of contemporary Western society,
– How society and psyche meet in the field of personal development.

5. The meaning of social anthropology
• Main work of social anthropologist in this article:
– What social anthropologist studies
– What methods social anthropologist uses
– What result social anthropologist gets
– How valid the result of studies

6. The meaning of social anthropology
• Social anthropology studies human social process
comparatively.
• Life of animals and plants can be useful for drawing
fundamentals of what life in a society must consist of in
respect to social process.
• Anthropological generalization about human society are
collaborative not definitive.

7. The meaning of social anthropology
• Sociology, psychology share its general field of work and
History as well.
– History, in a different way, has interest in social process, it is not
personal events but supply documents in time perspective on society.
Sociology, gives massive structure of concepts and data collected by
observation of Western society. Psychology has interest in analyzing
the social as in individual and classifying the individual act in types.
• Where does social anthropologist involve?
– its traditional role is regional complement to sociology. And
historically, it studies process in society of people who are far from us
in their lives and not familiar with us in their traditions.

8. The meaning of social anthropology
• What anthropologists studies:
– Social anthropologist never cut the touch with Western society. He
studies family, kinship, magic, religion, mythology and morality.
– The purpose of the anthropological researches is pay attention to
general characteristic underlying all societies. The social
anthropologist studies with customs of people to reveal the general
questions about the nature of society and of social process.
– Most anthropologist study at one time or among communities those
are small. Study among the small groups also helps to understand or
conceptualize of the society as a whole. Different from other social
scientist, he is used to understand how people really do and behave in
different social environment and try to find out common factor and
variant in their conduct.

9. The meaning of social anthropology
• What anthropologists studies:
– In another perspective, social anthropologist has to put a clear line
between basic social situations and a wide variety of human
circumstances.
• Philosophy, literature and social sciences try to observe the
different kinds of human experiences and come to conclusion with
their own characteristics.
• Literature perform in imaginary way, philosophy in scepticism way
and the social sciences perform in acceptance and analysis. So
that, in particularly, social anthropology is comparative.

10. The meaning of social anthropology
• Difficulties that social anthropologist faces
– Firstly, social anthropologist seeks for the widest possible range of
experience against foreigner background. Experience is must be
meaningful to be susceptible of regularity. The aim of the social
anthropology is to draw regularities from alien, obscure of experience
express them in more general principle and tendencies of familiar.
– The second difficulty is finding sufficient regularities among the
conduct of the member of the group to generalize adequately.
• Change of human society caused by technological and
economic activities or etc. result in social difficulties and
anthropologic problems because change has never been
succeeded smoothly.

11. The meaning of social anthropology
• Criticism, defense, either of activities or of value system
behind them cannot be placed in social anthropology. They
would be only factors in total situation that social
anthropologist is concerned.
• Provinces of Social Anthropologists:
– Social anthropologist has wider province than small scale primitive
and preliterate peasant culture. Most studies are related to those but
boundaries are neither technological nor geographical.
– American anthropologists has newly tendency to study on personality
and character formation in civilized countries or communities in
addition to primitives ones.

12. The meaning of social anthropology
• Closeness to other Social sciences:
– The anthropologist approach to study of contemporary civilization
must be awareness of contribution of other social sciences to
problems.
– For example, American social scientists used the anthropologic
methods to understand Irish rural life and collect the material

13. The meaning of social anthropology
• Features that distinguishes the social anthropology from other
disciplines.
– Firstly, its intensive detailed characteristic for systematic observation is
to examine the conduct of people in group relation. What people
actually do is the concern area for anthropologist.
– Secondly, it is holistic implication. Any particular item selected for
observation is always regarding to its place in total phenomena in the
life of human group.
– Third characteristic is comparison that is given by social anthropologist
for emphasis. Comparison is performed between items of behavior in
different major social units and identification of the major scale
unit, and items selection base on the abstraction.

14. The meaning of social anthropology
• Validity of methods used by social anthropologist in terms of
considering problems.
– Problem of observation
– Problem of assignment of meaning
– Problem of expression

15. The meaning of social anthropology
• Problem of observation
– Social anthropologists should observe the environment of the human.
He has to hear what people say, he has to see what people do.
– Observer-effect is important for observation and his senses can give
the correct data, interpretation. He has to put the intuitional
comprehension, empathy, existential thinking a side and pay attention
to the relevant field of observation
– Memory-factor for reproduction of what is observed.

16. The meaning of social anthropology
• Problem of assignment of meaning
– In the study of behavior, he has to work by contextualization. If he
understands the context adequately, he can understand the meaning
of behavior.
– Research is a process of learning and practicing new modes of
personal behaviors. If he infers wrong scientific meaning, he gets
practical difficulties.
– Another aspect of the author to meaning problem is relevance.
Meaning of item of behavior could be founded by contextualization
and item selection is still questioning.

17. The meaning of social anthropology
• Problem of expression
– Expression of the result of the study is served by set of theoretical
concepts in which scientific observation of phenomena and attribution
of meaning to them can be done.

18. The meaning of social anthropology
• Society, culture and community is most frequently used term
in the description and the analyses of group of life of human
beings. Each one expresses the idea of totality.
– if society is considered as an organized set of individual with given way
of life, so culture is that way of life. If, society is regarded as total of
social relations, so culture is the content of those relations.
– Community stresses space-time component and consist of
recognition, derived from experiences and observation.

19. The meaning of social anthropology
• In studying a field of social relations, notion of society and
culture and community is being used and they can be
distinguished by their structure, their function and the
irorganization.
– At the structure, the principles that their form depend on. From
functional aspect, the way that they serve in given ends and from
organization, directional activity which maintain their form and serves
their ends.
• The concept of social structure is a analytic tool designed to
serve the anthropologists in understanding how human
behave in their social life.

20. The meaning of social anthropology
• Social structure:
– must be regarded with the ordered relation of parts to a whole, with
arrangement in which the elements of social life are linked together.
– The concept of social structure is a analytic tool designed to serve the
anthropologists in understanding how human behave in their social
life.
– Social structure might consist of critical or basic relationship from a
class system based on the relation with soil. Other aspect author
assumes, aspect of social structure increase through membership of
kinds of persistent group, such as clans, castes secret societies.

21. The meaning of social anthropology
• Social function:
– means the relation between social action and the systems of which
the action is a part, alternatively, as the result of social action.
– From A.N. Whitehead point of view, function of a social action or
relation is “concern” which action or relation has for all other
elements in social system.

22. The meaning of social anthropology
• Social organization:
– Social organization generally is considered as same with social
structure. Concept of organization is that people doing things with
planned action. This is a social process, the arrangement of actions in
sequence with conformity with selected social end.
– There has to be some common significance for the group of people in
the action. Significance need to be identical or similar for all them.
Social organization put the diverse element into common relation
together by degree of unification.

23. The meaning of social anthropology
• Constant problem of Social Anthropolgy:
– Time is also a factor to develop the implication decision and
consequent action. A person can choose consciously or unconsciously
what he will follow. This affects the future structure of society. Social
structure is continuity principles of society but social organization is
variation or change principle by ensure the evaluation of situation and
entry of individual choice.