The History of Cultural Anthropology

Beginnings of Interest in the Subject

In the 15th century, when people began coming to the "New World," an interest in other cultures started to rise. People began to write travel narratives to chronicle their discoveries and journeys. However, these were just the very beginnings of interest in other cultures. Cultural anthropology did not rise as a formal discipline until the 19th century, when Edward Burnett Tylor and James Frazer started to notice similarities amongst cultures.

Development of the Discipline

These two men founded the basis of early cultural anthropology. They wanted to know why people in the various parts of the world had beliefs and practices that were so similar to each other. This primary question was what allowed cultural anthropology to become its very own branch of anthropology, instead of just being lumped with other studies in the discipline.

A few different schools of thought rose in answer to this question:

Cultural traditions and such diffused from one culture to another.
Similar traits just developed independently.
These groups had passed through similar stages of cultural evolution, resulting in their similarities.

Beginnings of Ethnography

Instead of just creating theories about the answer to this cultural conundrum, people started to go into the field in order to obtain data. They would actually go to places, collect evidence, and then use what they had found to figure out these cultural patterns and similarities. This field of study was called ethnography.

Prominent scholars in this field included Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown. This process and field started in Britain following the end of World War I.

Brown and Malinowski were two prominent scholars in this British movement, and they had separate ideas about culture. Malinowski postulated that societies worked to fulfill individual needs, while Brown was more focused on the ways in which institutions in these various societies worked to create a balance and harmony for the people in them.

United States Studies

While Brown and Malinowski were focused on places such as the Andaman Islands, scholars in the United States looked to the traditions of the Native American peoples. Individuals such as Lewis Henry Morgan, John Welsey Powell, and Frank Hamilton Cushing looked to the religion, government, and other important components of tribes who had lived in the United States. Like other ethnographers of their time, they placed a great deal of emphasis on the local nature and context of the people that they studied.

Modern Cultural Anthropology

Some people still follow the ethnographic model for answering the questions and making the discoveries of cultural anthropology. However, there has been a strong movement toward looking at cultures in terms of the national or global context.

One method that combines the old practices with the new important components of this discipline is known as multi-sited ethnography. Anthropologists examine different cultures and societies in terms of a world model, to see how they have developed in similar and different ways over time. One notable cultural anthropologist from recent history is Nancy Scheper-Hughes.

A resource for this information is the New World Encyclopedia. YourDictionary also provides a glossary of key cultural anthroplogy terms.