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  The source of modern structuralism and its strongest bastion to this day is linguistics. The work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) stands out in the development of structural linguistics and, ultimately, structuralism in various other fields. Of particular interest  is Saussure’s differentiation between langue and parole , which was to have enormous significance.  Langue is the formal, grammatical system of language. It is a system of phonic elements whose relationships are governed, Saussure and his followers believed, by determinate laws. Much of linguistics since Saussure’s time has been oriented to the discovery of those laws. The existence of langue makes parole possible. Parole is actual speech, the way speakers use language to express themselves. Although Saussure recognized the significance of people’s use of language in subjective and often idiosyncratic ways, he believed that the individual’s use of languag...

There are many fields in anthropology, namely; archaeology, linguistics, physical anthropology and social anthropology. Although, anthropology has been regarded as the study of early (primitive) cultures, and sociology ofthe more contemporary society. This distinction is no longer valid.  Many of the early village studies in India have been done by social anthropologists. The tribal communities in India have, by and large, been studied by anthropologists, in both their physical and social aspects. There is, hence, some overlap between the areas of study of sociology and anthropology, particularly, social anthropology. Culture and social organisations are concepts studied in both these disciplines. 

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 ...