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Clitoridectomy, the surgical removal of the clitoris is one of the worst types of violence against women. This type of female genital mutilation performed by a midwife, a tribal practitioner, or a doctor typically without anesthesia is common in African societies in countries such as Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Sudan, Egypt, and especially in Ethiopia and Somalia.  The practice is known to exist in certain cultural groups in other nations around the world. Among members of these highly patriarchal societies, husbands demand that their wives be
 virgins at marriage and remain sexually
 faithful thereafter. The point of female genital mutilation is to eliminate sexual feeling, which, people assume, makes the girl less likely to violate sexual norms and thus be more desirable to men.  In about one-fifth of all cases, an even more severe procedure, called infibulation, is performed, in which the entire external genital area is removed and the surfaces are stitched together, le...

Culture can mean different things to different people. Some people, such as microbiologists, will consider a culture to be some form of Petri dish colony while others will consider it the same as religious identity. However, anthropologists define culture in a very different and intellectually more rigorous way. They do this by analysing the spectrum of patterns that have helped human societies to flourish. One of the founders of modern anthropology, Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917), once commented that culture was “ the complex whole ”, and it would be this totality in his observation that has fascinated anthropologists ever since.   Making a Society for the youth Prior to Tylor, how we developed cultural identities was considered a biological trait that was inherited from one generation to the next. It would be a shift toward looking at patterns of behaviour, toward a psychological account, that would prove to be the most academically profitable in explaining patterns of behaviou...

Karl Marx was born in Germany but spent much of his professional life in London, working and writing in collaboration with Friedrich Engels. Two of Marx and Engels’s most influential treatises are Das Kapial and The Communist Manifesto. Das Kapital, a massive multivolume work published in 1867, 1885, and 1894, is critical of the capitalist system and predicts its defeat by a more humane and more cooperative economic system:socialism.  The Communist Manifesto is a 23-page pamphlet that was issued in 1848 and has since been translated into more than 30 languages . The  Manifest o includes these famous lines: “The workers have nothing to lose but their chains; they have a whole world to gain. Workers of all countries, unite.”  Marx sought to analyze and explain conflict , the major force that drives social change. The character of conflict is shaped directly and profoundly by the means of production, t...

The fundamental theoretical premises of British social anthropology and structural -functionalism are based upon Emile Durkheim's apothesis of social solidarity.The theories of structural-functionalism have everything in common with Durkheim's approach to socio-cultural phenomena via the conditions of social cohesiveness or social solidarity. The structural -functionalists basic assumption is that social system maintain themselves for significant intervals of time in a steady stat during which a high degree of cohesion and solidarity characteristics the relationship among its members.The only difference between Radcliffe Brown and Durkheim in this regard is that Radcliffe- Brown substituted the terms unit,harmony and consistency for Durkheim's solidarity.

Ethnographers of the early 20th century tried to explain the social phenomena in terms of the societies studied.Publications arising out of these efforts came to be known as ethnographic monographs.As an early example of this approach H Junod's The Life of a South African Tribe published in 1912-13,Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific published in 1922 can be considered as the examples of the scientific study of a primitive society.This book analyses the kula system of exchange of gifts among the Trobrinaders. Professional research in Africa was initiated by the visit of Seligman and his wife to the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in 1909-10.Later intensive field studies of tribal societies in Africa were made by L A Schapera among the Bechuana,Meyer Fortes among Tallensi of the Gold Coast , S F Nadel among the Nupe of Nigeria,Hilda Kuper among the Swazi and by Evans Prichard among the Nuer of Southern  Sudan.All these studies were among the small-scale political groups. All the ...

Folklore is regarded as prehistory of a society.The folklore researches which were at the level of spordic collection of tribal songs and taken to be included in the monograph received a systematic treatment with Verrier Elwin to begin  with under the influence of F Boas and E B Taylor.With the passage of time social elements hidden in folklore were unearthered by few anthropologists  and also by several scholars  of literature.Now days anthropologists  are attempting to collect information on folksongs,balled,folk tales,folk belief,folk traditions,folk music and folk medicine,plays,proverbs etc under broad subject of folklore to explore folk culture of an area or region.

Sir James George Frazer wrote articles on totem and taboo for Encyclopedia Britannica which appeared in 1888.For him these articles were beginning of a systematic application to anthropology and study of backward race of men.Frazer gave his reason for concentrating on savagery than on civlilization :  Civilization is extremely complex,savagery is comparatively simple.Savagery is undoubtedly the source from which all civilization has been ultimately derived by a slow process of evolution.It seemed to me therefore that if we are to understand the complex product  we must begin by studying the simple elements out of which it has been gradually compounded.In other words  we must try to understand savagery before we can hopefully to comprehand civilisation. In his article on totemism and taboo Frazer has given a general idea about social origins which became the guiding principle for much of his work. That from irrational beginning ,system of great adaptative value for society...