sandr010

In an attempt to trace cultural evolution it was Morgan who developed the sequence of savagery-barbarism -civilization in which civilization represented the most advanced state of culture.The most developed form of societies with the most advanced state of culture are labelled as modern or urban.Such urban societies are characterized by the presence of cities. The main characteristics of civilizations have been outlined by many anthropologists Due to greater agricultural productivity there was the presence of higher concentration of population in the same area. These populations clustered in cities which became the nerve centres of commerce,government,religion and defence. Each such city did not exist in isolation but had several satellite communities with which it mainly had economic and trade linkages. Managerial skills were developed to handle separately and efficiently several institutions such as economy and military. Merchant classes were working within a highly developed exchang...

The sacred includes everything that is regarded as extraordinary and that inspires in believers deep and absorbing sentiments of awe, respect, mystery, and reverence.  Sacred things may include objects , living creatures i.e cows, elements of nature i.e mountains, places i.e mosques, states of consciousness (, holy days, ceremonies  and other activities like pilgrimages. The profane encompasses everything that is not considered sacred, including things opposed to the sacred and things that stand apart from the sacred. Believers often view contact between the sacred and the profane as being dangerous and sacrilegious, as threatening the very existence of the sacred, and as endangering the fate of the person who makes or allows such contact. Consequently, people take action to safeguard sacred things. 

Ethnography was initially developed in anthropology in the early twentieth century. It generally involved the researcher living with a group of people for an extended period, perhaps a year or several years, in order to document their distinctive way of life, beliefs and values. Ethnography has been influenced by a range of methodological and theoretical movements. Within anthropology, it was shaped by German ideas about the distinctive character of history and the human sciences, by Wundt’s folk psychology, and even by positivism.  Subsequently, in the form of the casestudy approach of the Chicago School, it was also influenced by philosophical pragmatism, while recently Marxism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, structuralism, critical theory, feminism, and poststructuralism have all informed its character.  

Ethics in fieldwork draws on the perspectives of philosophy, law, and psychology to guide moral decisions. Field researchers make ethical decisions whenever they gather, interpret, or present their data. However, ethical practice in fieldwork cannot simply rely on the guidelines for laboratory research. Informed consent has been the core of ethical review.  Ethical decisions call for analyzing the local situation as well as global principles. Fieldworkers can start by examining the researcher and the researched – how each is constructed, their roles, and their relationships. The researcher may range from traditional ‘‘outsider’’ to ‘‘participant observer’’ to ‘‘insider.’’ Moving along the continuum foregrounds certain ethical issues while resolving others.  Ethical review of fieldwork is more (not less) complex than what is mandated for laboratory experiments, calling for dialogue among insiders and outsiders.  

Jean Baudrillard developed his analysis of symbolic exchange from a critical reading of Mauss, John K. Galbraith and Thorstein Veblen. Symbolic exchange for Baudrillard was a way to escape the consumer society and the political economy of the sign.  He demonstrated in his early writings how the code of consumption and the system of needs had completed the system of production. The use value of the commodity provided an ‘‘alibi’’ to exchange value.  Consumers were even more alienated in their private lives than they were at work. They were unconscious of the process of semiosis that led through their acts of consumption of commodities with their coded differences to the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production.  The only way out of this system was a return to symbolic exchange where the accumulation of wealth and power was impossible and where exchanges were reciprocal and reversible.  Baudrillard, J. (1988) Symbolic Exchange and Death. ...

Symbolic exchange is the organizing principle, the cellular structure, of the earliest forms of society. The exchanges that take place within and between clans, within and between tribes and between chiefs and other members of the tribe are more than economic exchanges as we know them in modern societies, and their circulation integrates the members of these societies.  Marcel Mauss conceptualizes these exchanges as a form of gift giving, and the gift is a ‘‘total social phenomenon.’’ They are multi-dimensional- economic, moral, religious, mythological, juridical, political, aesthetic and historical. Mauss created his concept from the work of nineteenth and early twentieth century anthropologists in Melanesia, Polynesia, and northwest America. He  wanted to demonstrate the social basis for exchanges as a refutation of the utilitarian notion that individual interests were the foundation for the creation of market relations. There was no natural economy that had preceded politic...

Anthropologist George Murdock (1945) distinguished between cultural universals and particulars. Cultural universals are those things that all cultures have in common. Every culture has natural resources such as trees, plants, and rocks that people put to some use. In addition, every culture has developed responses to the challenges of being human and living with others. Those challenges include the need to interact with others, to be mentally stimulated, to satisfy hunger, and to face mortality. In every culture, people have established specific ways of meeting these universal challenges. Cultural particulars include the specific practices that distinguish cultures from one another. For example all people become hungry but the potential food sources defined as edible vary across cultures. That is what is appealing to eat in one society may be considered repulsive or simply unavailable in another.