ANTH5107 Anthropology — Unit 1: Introduction

Unit 1: Introduction

Syllabus coverage in this unit
1.1 Meaning, Definition, and Nature and Scope of Anthropology · 1.2 Branches/Subdivisions of Anthropology · 1.3 Origin and Development of Anthropology in the World and in Nepal · 1.4 Relationship of Anthropology with other Social Sciences: Sociology, History, Economics, Political Science, Psychology, and Law

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1.1 Meaning, Definition, Nature and Scope

Etymology: anthropos (Greek: human) + logos (study) = the study of humanity — the whole human, everywhere, everywhen: the discipline’s own motto calls it “the most humanistic of sciences and the most scientific of the humanities.”

Definitions (the classic one plus the working one):

• The four-field classic: anthropology is the comprehensive study of humankind — biological and cultural, past and present — of all people in all places (Kroeber’s “science of man and his works” tradition).
• Working definition (for exams): anthropology is the holistic, comparative, fieldwork-based study of human beings — their origins, biological variation, cultures, languages, institutions and transformations — with a signature attention to small-scale societies and the insider’s point of view.

Nature — the anthropological perspective (four signatures, the exam’s core):

1. Holism — the whole context: kinship with economy, ritual with politics, no institution alone;
2. Comparison — the comparative method across cultures: making the familiar strange and the strange familiar;
3. Cultural relativism — understanding each culture in its own terms (the methodological discipline — not the moral surrender; Sociology Unit 2.2’s distinction);
4. Fieldwork — long residence, the local language, participant observation (Unit 9’s method): knowledge earned on the ground, not in the library.

Scope: everything human — from hominin evolution to the anthropology of the internet; from the !Kung band to the World Bank; from Newar ritual to Nepali migrant life in Qatar. Where sociology (your last course) studied one’s own industrial society through its institutions, anthropology classically studied other societies through their wholes — the two lenses now converging.

1.2 Branches/Subdivisions of Anthropology

The classic four-field architecture (memorise the table):

Branch	Studies	Nepal examples
Biological/physical anthropology	human origins and evolution (paleoanthropology — the fossil record); human variation and genetics; primatology; forensic anthropology (identification of remains — the branch courts meet)	high-altitude adaptation studies of Himalayan populations
Archaeology (anthropological archaeology)	past societies through material remains — from stone tools to historical sites	Lumbini’s excavations; the old hill forts (dunga); Sinja Valley’s Khasa-era remains
Linguistic anthropology	language in cultural context: structure, history, social use, language and worldview	Nepal’s 120+ languages: Tibeto-Burman and Indo-Aryan families; language shift and revitalisation
Socio-cultural anthropology	living societies: kinship, religion, economy, politics, law — ethnographically	the dominant Nepali branch: Newar, Tharu, Limbu, Sherpa, Dalit ethnographies

(Plus the applied wings worth naming): development anthropology (Unit 7’s core), medical anthropology, environmental anthropology, legal anthropology (Unit 9’s sibling field), visual anthropology, urban anthropology.

1.3 Origin and Development of Anthropology

A. In the world — four phases

1. The proto-phase: travel writing and the “other” (Herodotus to Ibn Khaldun to the missionaries) — data without method.
2. The armchair phase (c. 1860–1900): the Victorian evolutionists — Tylor (religion’s origin in animism; culture’s classic definition — Sociology Unit 2.2’s quote), Morgan (the unilinear ladder: savagery → barbarism → civilization; kinship’s terminology — Engels’ source), Frazer (The Golden Bough) — grand schemes built on others’ reports: the “armchair” nickname earned.
3. The fieldwork revolution (c. 1900–40): Franz Boas — the historic particularist who demolished racial evolutionism (culture learned, not bred — the four-field American tradition’s founder; cultural relativism’s patron); Bronislaw Malinowski — the Trobriand exile (WWI’s accident) birthing participant observation and functionalism; A.R. Radcliffe-Brown — structural-functionalism (social structure as organism — Unit 2.3 of this course); Margaret Mead — Samoa and the culture-personality school (gender roles as cultural — Unit 6.4’s founding text).
4. The modern phases: Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism (kinship and myth’s deep logics); the interpretive turn (Geertz — culture as text — Unit 2.4); the postmodern crisis (Unit 2.5 — representation, reflexivity, “writing culture”); and today’s plural, applied, decolonising discipline.

B. In Nepal

1. The pre-history: Hodgson’s mid-19th-century ethnographies (the first serious records of Nepal’s peoples — an outsider administrator-scholar); the census (from 1911) as proto-ethnography.
2. The foreign-research era (1950–80s): the opened country studied by the world’s anthropologists — village and ethnic studies (the classic monographs on Sherpa, Thakali, Newar, Limbu, Chhetri, and the Dalit experience; Dor Bahadur Bista — the Nepali pioneer: People of Nepal (1967), Nepal’s first systematic ethnography, and Fatalism and Development (1991) — Sociology Unit 1.4’s text).
3. Institutionalisation: the Central Department of Sociology and Anthropology, TU (1981 — the combined department, Sociology Unit 1.4’s story), degrees, journals (the SASON tradition; the Dhaulagiri Journal in your reference list), the Nepal Studies Association network.
4. The present: Nepali anthropology’s turn to its own questions — caste/ethnicity and exclusion, migration, development (Unit 7), federalism and identity (Unit 8) — and the “native anthropology” debate (studying one’s own society: privilege and bias both) — with names such as Om Gurung, Krishna Bhattachan, Ganesh Man Gurung carrying the discipline’s Nepali generation.

1.4 Relationship with the Other Social Sciences

(The syllabus’s list — for each: shared ground + the anthropological difference. Cross-reference Sociology Unit 1.3’s table: the sister course taught the mirror image.)

Discipline	Shared ground	The anthropological difference
Sociology	social institutions, stratification, change; in Nepal born as twin departments	sociology: one’s own society, survey and statistic; anthropology: the holistic, comparative, fieldwork view of any society (small-scale especially)
History	reconstructing the human past; ethnohistory as shared method	history: documents and events; anthropology: the deep time of evolution and the everyday past of non-literate societies (oral tradition)
Economics	production, exchange, consumption	anthropology: economies embedded in kinship and ritual (Polanyi; the gift — Unit 5.4) — the market as one institution among many
Political Science	power, order, the state	anthropology: politics without the state — acephalous orders, feud, ritual authority (Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer — Unit 2.3); the state seen from the village
Psychology	the person, development, identity	anthropology: the self as culturally constituted (Mead’s culture-and-personality; Unit 4’s enculturation vs the nature-nurture debate)
Law	normative order, dispute, sanction	legal anthropology: law’s anthropology asks how order exists where no state is — custom, lineage, oaths, ordeals, mediation (Malinowski’s Crime and Custom; Llewellyn & Hoebel’s Cheyenne Way); in Nepal: guthi, badghar, kipat, mukhiya — the living-law scholarship (Jurisprudence Unit 2.3.3 and Sociology Unit 3’s Nepal paragraphs) — and the practical field of customary-law recognition, legal pluralism and indigenous rights

The closing line for exams: anthropology is the social sciences’ generalist and comparativist — the discipline that insists every claim about “society” or “law” be tested against the whole range of human ways of living; for a lawyer, it is the professional antidote to assuming the Code is the world.

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Model Questions

Short-answer questions

1. Define anthropology and name its four classic fields.
2. What was the “armchair” phase, and what ended it?
3. State the four signatures of the anthropological perspective.
4. Name Dor Bahadur Bista’s two major works and their arguments in one line each.
5. What is legal anthropology’s founding question?

Long-answer questions

1. “Anthropology makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar.” Discuss meaning, nature and scope.
2. Trace the discipline’s development from Tylor’s armchair to Geertz’s interpretation — and its naturalisation in Nepal since 1950.
3. “For every social science there is an anthropological shadow.” Discuss the relationships, with special attention to law.

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📚 Get the complete notes: Download the full Anthropology PDF (all units) — Law Info Nepal Original Notes Series.