Monroe Community College

Anthropology, History, Political Science, & Sociology

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Exploring the World Around You

Anthropology , History , Political Science , and Sociology are among a collection of associated disciplines devoted to the study of society and the manner in which people influence, and are influenced by, the world around them. These disciplines inform us about the world beyond our immediate experience and help explain human behavior and institutional structures, through space and time.

Courses in Anthropology, History, Political Science, and Sociology are housed in the School of Social Science and Global Studies . Our courses may be taken to satisfy general education and transfer requirements in a variety of transfer programs, including: Anthropology, History, Political Science, Sociology, Global Studies/International Studies, African-American Studies/Ethnic/Cultural Studies, American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Urban Studies, and Interdisciplinary Studies.

The world is a complex and diverse place in need of problem solvers. Expand your understanding of the world and acquire the skills needed to become a problem solver by taking a class in Anthropology, History, Political Science, and Sociology.

Location & Contacts

Brighton Campus Building 5, Room 322 (585) 292-3260

Course Listings

  • Anthropology
  • Political Science

essay about anthropology sociology and political science

  • Interdisciplinarity Now

A Reflection on Anthropology and Inter/Cross/Multidisciplinarity

Drawing on her recent book Anthropological Conversations , Caroline Brettell discusses the history of anthropology’s connections to other disciplines. Through examples of how anthropologists have collaborated with, influenced, and been influenced by historians, geographers, and psychologists, she traces intellectual exchanges that have been productive in understanding culture and difference.

In Memory of Sidney Mintz

Clifford Geertz, in his autobiographical volume After the Fact , 1  Geertz, Clifford. 1995. After the Fact: Two Countries Four Decades One Anthropologist . Harvard University Press. Pgs.   96, 98 suggests that the idea of discipline does not fit anthropology very well, finally labeling the field an “indisciplined discipline.” Geertz points to the “big tent” character of a scholarly field that Eric Wolf (supposedly drawing from Alfred Kroeber) once characterized as the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities. Even Margaret Mead, in her presidential address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science argued that an understanding of what it means to be human derives from both a humanistic ability to engage with others with introspection and empathy, as well as a more scientific stance of objectivity in the face of the physical and animate world.

That these three heavyweights of anthropology have reflected on the complexity of their discipline should come as no surprise. Margaret Mead, as we know, frequently turned to other disciplines—to engineering, to art, and particularly to psychology and psychiatry—to open herself to ideas that might help her develop her understandings of other people and other cultures. Early in his career, Geertz was involved in an ambitious interdisciplinary project on the transformation of “old societies” into “new states.” Writing about this project forty years later, Geertz described the exuberance of the period after World War II when anthropologists were drawn into government service. He observed that “what had been an obscure, isolate, even reclusive, lone-wolf sort of discipline, concerned mainly with trial ethnography, racial, and linguistic classifications, cultural evolution and prehistory, changed in the course of a decade into the very model of a modern, policy-conscious, corporate social science.” 2 Geertz, Clifford. 2002. An Inconstant Profession: The Anthropological Life in Interesting Times. Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 1-19. The result was multi-, inter-, or cross-disciplinary research projects carried out by teams of social scientists. Geertz notes in his reflection that, while he was at Harvard pursuing his doctorate, there were any number of collaborative and interdisciplinary teams of researchers and it was as part of such a team that he went to Java to conduct ”first fieldwork.” While the exuberance of this period faded away in the context of postcolonialism and postmodernism, it is nevertheless important to remember it as a time when anthropologists were part of multidisciplinary research projects.

Eric Wolf was also part of a collaborative and comparative research project as a young field researcher—a project that involved several other young anthropologists, including Sidney Mintz in whose memory I offer this reflection, who were working under the mentorship of Julian Steward. The result was the book The People of Puerto Rico , 3 Steward, Julian H., Robert A. Manners, Eric R. Wolf, Elena Padilla Seda, Sidney W. Mintz, and Raymond L. Scheele. 1956  The People of Puerto Rico: A Study in Social Anthropology . Urbana: University of Illinois Press. a volume that still merits reading today. However, of more interest is Wolf’s consideration of the rise of the social sciences in the opening pages of his masterful Europe and the People Without History . 4 Wolf, Eric R. 1982. Europe and the People Without History . Berkeley: University of California Press. Pg. 7  He describes what he considers to have been a “false and fateful turn” in the middle of the nineteenth century “when inquiry into the nature and varieties of humankind split into separate and unequal specialties and disciplines.” This split, he argued, “led not only forward into the intensive and specialized study of particular aspects of human existence, but turned the ideological reason for that split into intellectual justification for the specialties themselves.” Thus, he points out, the social, studied by sociologists, was set apart from the political, ideological, and economic context. And anthropology, at least as cultural anthropology, got the rest of the world which they studied with a microscopic lens rooted in field research.

In its broadest terms (as a four subfield discipline composed of archaeology, physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology), anthropology brings together those interested in the past with those interested in the present, as well as those interested in the cultural dimensions of being human with those interested in the biological dimensions. However, today the discipline, like many other “disciplines” has become increasingly specialized, something reflected in the multitude of subsections that now exist under the umbrella of the American Anthropological Association and in the labels that anthropologists use to describe themselves—medical anthropologist, environmental anthropologist, urban anthropologist, psychological anthropologist, political anthropologist, etc.

Gone, some argue, are the days of the generalists (people like Alfred Kroeber and Franz Boas) who drew on data derived from across the four subfields. But in their place is perhaps less an “indisciplined” discipline than a scholarly project that is inherently interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary, importing from other fields and conversely exporting to them as well. Those who affiliate with the subspecializations mentioned above may be talking less to linguistic anthropologists, or physical anthropologists, or archaeologists, but they are often engaged with psychologists, neuroscientists, geographers, ecologists, urban planners, and architects.

It is this process of cross-disciplinary engagement, and of the importing and exporting of ideas, that I have recently explored in my book Anthropological Conversations: Talking Culture across Disciplines . 7 Brettell, Caroline. 2014. Anthropological conversations: talking culture across disciplines . Rowman & Littlefield. This book tracks six cross-disciplinary conversations that reflect interests in time and in space, in science and the humanities, and in the individual and the group as units of analysis. Many of these conversations are ones in which I have personally engaged as a scholar of migration, past and present. Here I mention three; those that have brought anthropologists into interactions with several of the other disciplines within the social sciences.

One such conversation is that which occurred between historians and anthropologists that is perhaps best epitomized by the “conversations” between Clifford Geertz and Robert Darnton at Princeton during the 1980s. This so-called historic turn led anthropologists into “fieldwork in the archives”, into an exploration of the presence of the past in the present, to an interrogation of the meaning of the past in the present, and perhaps most importantly to the study of the impact of colonialism (and hence of the inherent power dynamics between colonizers and colonized) on societies that had for decades been the object of the anthropological gaze. An additional trend was the work that anthropologists such as David Kertzer, William Douglass, and myself, all of us inspired by the emerging fields of historical demography and social science history, did tracing changes in family and household structure and patterns of marriage and fertility over time—particular among European populations for whom there were a wealth of historical records that could help to write history from the bottom up. It is worth noting that this turn occurred precisely at the time that the Social Science History Association, a venue for cross-disciplinary conversation and interdisciplinary research, was founded.

A second conversation is that between anthropologists and geographers that was at the foundation of a spatial turn. Granted, the connections between these two fields are quite deep (German geography and ethnographer Friedrich Ratzel conceived of a discipline of “anthropolo-geography”), but they took on new dimensions during the last decade of the twentieth century and into the present whereby space and place became critical to sociocultural theory. Writing about the rapprochement between anthropology and geography, Margaret Rodman argues that anthropologists can learn a good deal by exploring how geographers bring together issues of location (“the spatial distribution of socioeconomic activity”), sense of place or attachment to place, and locale (“the setting in which a particular social activity occurs, such as a church”) to develop a better understanding “of places as culturally and socially constructed in practice.” 8 Rodman, Margaret C. 2003. Empowering Place: Multilocality and Multivocality. In The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture , Setha Low and Denise Lawrence-Zuniga, exds., pp. 203-223. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Pg. 207. Many anthropologists have found the geographical concept of scale helpful in conceptualizing the relationships and processes that both integrate and divide people across space and time in the context of globalization. Others have turned to feminist geographers for inspiration on how to theorize the relationships among space, power, and difference, including gendered difference.

The inter/cross/multidisciplinarity of the perhaps “indisciplined” (but certainly still “big tent”) field of anthropology is very much a work in progress. What Talal Asad identified as a trend over thirty-five years ago has been perpetuated into the present but in distinct ways. Among those who are more scientifically-oriented, there is a decided biocultural turn (such as Alan Goodman’s “ Bringing Culture into Human Biology and Biology Back into Anthropology ” 10 Goodman, Alan H. 2013. Bringing Culture into Human Biology and Biology Back into Anthropology. American Anthropologist 115 (3): 359-373. ) that has generated interesting new approaches in the study of kinship, medical anthropology, human behavioral ecology, and Science, Technology, & Society (STS) studies. There is equally a literary turn (see Waterston and Vesperi’s Anthropology Off the Shelf: Anthropologists on Writing 11 Waterson, Alisse and Maria D. Vesperi (eds.). 2011. Anthropology Off the Shelf: Anthropologists on Writing.  Oxford, UK: Wiley Blackwell. in particular) among the more humanistically-inclined anthropologists who engage with fields like cultural studies and with the craft of writing. And there are many anthropologists, like myself, who as scholars of migration must read the work of economists, political scientists, sociologists, geographers, and demographers. When anthropologists engage with the work of those in other fields, or collaborate within the border zones between disciplines, a wealth of exciting new ideas and perspectives are often the result.

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Caroline Brettell

Caroline Brettell is University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Ruth Collins Altshuler Director of the Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute at Southern Methodist University. She has written extensively on topics related to migration in Europe and the United States as well as on topics in the anthropology of gender. She has served as President of the Social Science History Association and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe. She has also served on various SSRC committees.

essay about anthropology sociology and political science

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1.2: Anthropological Perspectives

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Anthropologists across the subfields use unique perspectives to conduct their research. These perspectives make anthropology distinct from related disciplines — like history, sociology, and psychology — that ask similar questions about the past, societies, and human nature. The key anthropological perspectives are holism, relativism, comparison, and fieldwork. There are also both scientific and humanistic tendencies within the discipline that, at times, conflict with one another.

Anthropologists are interested in the whole of humanity, in how various aspects of life interact. One cannot fully appreciate what it means to be human by studying a single aspect of our complex histories, languages, bodies, or societies. By using a holistic approach, anthropologists ask how different aspects of human life influence one another. For example, a cultural anthropologist studying the meaning of marriage in a small village in India might consider local gender norms, existing family networks, laws regarding marriage, religious rules, and economic factors. A biological anthropologist studying monkeys in South America might consider the species’ physical adaptations, foraging patterns, ecological conditions, and interactions with humans in order to answer questions about their social behaviors. By understanding how nonhuman primates behave, we discover more about ourselves (after all, humans are primates)! By using a holistic approach, anthropologists reveal the complexity of biological, social, or cultural phenomena.

Anthropology itself is a holistic discipline, comprised in the United States (and in some other nations) of four major subfields: cultural anthropology, biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology. While anthropologists often specialize in one subfield, their specific research contributes to a broader understanding of the human condition, which is made up of culture, language, biological and social adaptations, as well as human origins and evolution.

Definition: Holism

The study of the whole of the human condition: past, present, and future; biology, society, language, and culture (Kottak, 2012, p. 2).

CULTURAL RELATIVISM

The guiding philosophy of modern anthropology is cultural relativism—the idea that we should seek to understand another person’s beliefs and behaviors from the perspective of their culture rather than our own. Anthropologists do not judge other cultures based on their values nor do they view other ways of doing things as inferior. Instead, anthropologists seek to understand people’s beliefs within the system they have for explaining things.

The opposite of cultural relativism is ethnocentrism, the tendency to view one’s own culture as the most important and correct and as a measuring stick by which to evaluate all other cultures that are largely seen as inferior and morally suspect. As it turns out, many people are ethnocentric to some degree; ethnocentrism is a common human experience. Why do we respond the way we do? Why do we behave the way we do? Why do we believe what we believe? Most people find these kinds of questions difficult to answer. Often the answer is simply “because that is how it is done.” People typically believe that their ways of thinking and acting are “normal”; but, at a more extreme level, some believe their ways are better than others.

Ethnocentrism is not a useful perspective in contexts in which people from different cultural backgrounds come into close contact with one another, as is the case in many cities and communities throughout the world. People increasingly find that they must adopt culturally relativistic perspectives in governing communities and as a guide for their interactions with members of the community. For anthropologists, cultural relativism is especially important. We must set aside our innate ethnocentric views in order to allow cultural relativism to guide our inquiries and interactions such that we can learn from others.

Anthropologists of all the subfields use comparison to learn what humans have in common, how we differ, and how we change. Anthropologists ask questions like: How do chimpanzees differ from humans? How do different languages adapt to new technologies? How do countries respond differently to immigration? In cultural anthropology, we compare ideas, morals, practices, and systems within or between cultures. We might compare the roles of men and women in different societies, or contrast how different religious groups conflict within a given society. Like other disciplines that use comparative approaches, such as sociology or psychology, anthropologists make comparisons between people in a given society. Unlike these other disciplines, anthropologists also compare across societies, and between humans and other primates. In essence, anthropological comparisons span societies, cultures, time, place, and species. It is through comparison that we learn more about the range of possible responses to varying contexts and problems.

Anthropologists conduct their research in the field with the species, civilization, or groups of people they are studying. In cultural anthropology, our fieldwork is referred to as ethnography , which is both the process and result of cultural anthropological research. The Greek term “ethno” refers to people, and “graphy” refers to writing. The ethnographic process involves the research method of participant-observation fieldwork: you participate in people’s lives, while observing them and taking field notes that, along with interviews and surveys, constitute the research data. This research is inductive: based on day-to-day observations, the anthropologist asks increasingly specific questions about the group or about the human condition more broadly. Often times, informants actively participate in the research process, helping the anthropologist ask better questions and understand different perspectives.

Image of Author Katie Nelson conducting ethnographic fieldwork

The word ethnography also refers to the end result of our fieldwork. Cultural anthropologists do not write “novels,” rather they write ethnographies, descriptive accounts of culture that weave detailed observations with theory. After all, anthropologists are social scientists. While we study a particular culture to learn more about it and to answer specific research questions, we are also exploring fundamental questions about human society, behavior, or experiences.

In the course of conducting fieldwork with human subjects, anthropologists invariably encounter ethical dilemmas: Who might be harmed by conducting or publishing this research? What are the costs and benefits of identifying individuals involved in this study? How should one resolve the competing interests of the funding agency and the community? To address these questions, anthropologists are obligated to follow a professional code of ethics that guides us through ethical considerations in our research. [6]

SCIENTIFIC AND HUMANISTIC APPROACHES

As you may have noticed from the above discussion of the anthropological sub-disciplines, anthropologists are not unified in what they study or how they conduct research. Some sub-disciplines, like biological anthropology and archaeology, use a deductive, scientific approach. Through hypothesis testing, they collect and analyze material data (e.g. bones, tools, seeds, etc.) to answer questions about human origins and evolution. Other subdisciplines, like cultural anthropology and linguistic anthropology, use humanistic and/or inductive approaches to their collection and analysis of nonmaterial data, like observations of everyday life or language in use.

At times, tension has arisen between the scientific subfields and the humanistic ones. For example, in 2010 some cultural anthropologists critiqued the American Anthropological Association’s mission statement, which stated that the discipline’s goal was “to advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all its aspects.” [7] These scholars wanted to replace the word “science” with “public understanding.” They argued that some anthropologists do not use the scientific method of inquiry; instead, they rely more on narratives and interpretations of meaning. After much debate, the word “science” remains in the mission statement and, throughout the United States, anthropology is predominantly categorized as a social science.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kottak, Conrad P. Mirror for Humanity: A Concise Introduction to Cultural Anthropology . New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012.

  • See the American Anthropological Association’s Code of Ethics: http://ethics.americananthro.org/category/statement/ ↵
  • See the American Anthropological Association Statement of Purpose: https://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=1650 ↵

Adapted From

"Introduction to Anthropology" by Lara Braff, Grossmont College and Katie Nelson, Inver Hills Community College. In Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology , 2nd Edition, Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges, 2020, under CC BY-NC 4.0 .

The Writing Center • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Anthropology

What this handout is about.

This handout briefly situates anthropology as a discipline of study within the social sciences. It provides an introduction to the kinds of writing that you might encounter in your anthropology courses, describes some of the expectations that your instructors may have, and suggests some ways to approach your assignments. It also includes links to information on citation practices in anthropology and resources for writing anthropological research papers.

What is anthropology, and what do anthropologists study?

Anthropology is the study of human groups and cultures, both past and present. Anthropology shares this focus on the study of human groups with other social science disciplines like political science, sociology, and economics. What makes anthropology unique is its commitment to examining claims about human ‘nature’ using a four-field approach. The four major subfields within anthropology are linguistic anthropology, socio-cultural anthropology (sometimes called ethnology), archaeology, and physical anthropology. Each of these subfields takes a different approach to the study of humans; together, they provide a holistic view. So, for example, physical anthropologists are interested in humans as an evolving biological species. Linguistic anthropologists are concerned with the physical and historical development of human language, as well as contemporary issues related to culture and language. Archaeologists examine human cultures of the past through systematic examinations of artifactual evidence. And cultural anthropologists study contemporary human groups or cultures.

What kinds of writing assignments might I encounter in my anthropology courses?

The types of writing that you do in your anthropology course will depend on your instructor’s learning and writing goals for the class, as well as which subfield of anthropology you are studying. Each writing exercise is intended to help you to develop particular skills. Most introductory and intermediate level anthropology writing assignments ask for a critical assessment of a group of readings, course lectures, or concepts. Here are three common types of anthropology writing assignments:

Critical essays

This is the type of assignment most often given in anthropology courses (and many other college courses). Your anthropology courses will often require you to evaluate how successfully or persuasively a particular anthropological theory addresses, explains, or illuminates a particular ethnographic or archaeological example. When your instructor tells you to “argue,” “evaluate,” or “assess,” they are probably asking for some sort of critical essay. (For more help with deciphering your assignments, see our handout on understanding assignments .)

Writing a “critical” essay does not mean focusing only on the most negative aspects of a particular reading or theory. Instead, a critical essay should evaluate or assess both the weaknesses and the merits of a given set of readings, theories, methods, or arguments.

Sample assignment:

Assess the cultural evolutionary ideas of late 19th century anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan in terms of recent anthropological writings on globalization (select one recent author to compare with Morgan). What kinds of anthropological concerns or questions did Morgan have? What kinds of anthropological concerns underlie the current anthropological work on globalization that you have selected? And what assumptions, theoretical frameworks, and methodologies inform these questions or projects?

Ethnographic projects

Another common type of research and writing activity in anthropology is the ethnographic assignment. Your anthropology instructor might expect you to engage in a semester-long ethnographic project or something shorter and less involved (for example, a two-week mini-ethnography).

So what is an ethnography? “Ethnography” means, literally, a portrait (graph) of a group of people (ethnos). An ethnography is a social, political, and/or historical portrait of a particular group of people or a particular situation or practice, at a particular period in time, and within a particular context or space. Ethnographies have traditionally been based on an anthropologist’s long-term, firsthand research (called fieldwork) in the place and among the people or activities they are studying. If your instructor asks you to do an ethnographic project, that project will likely require some fieldwork.

Because they are so important to anthropological writing and because they may be an unfamiliar form for many writers, ethnographies will be described in more detail later in this handout.

Spend two hours riding the Chapel Hill Transit bus. Take detailed notes on your observations, documenting the setting of your fieldwork, the time of day or night during which you observed and anything that you feel will help paint a picture of your experience. For example, how many people were on the bus? Which route was it? What time? How did the bus smell? What kinds of things did you see while you were riding? What did people do while riding? Where were people going? Did people talk? What did they say? What were people doing? Did anything happen that seemed unusual, ordinary, or interesting to you? Why? Write down any thoughts, self-reflections, and reactions you have during your two hours of fieldwork. At the end of your observation period, type up your fieldnotes, including your personal thoughts (labeling them as such to separate them from your more descriptive notes). Then write a reflective response about your experience that answers this question: how is riding a bus about more than transportation?

Analyses using fossil and material evidence

In some assignments, you might be asked to evaluate the claims different researchers have made about the emergence and effects of particular human phenomena, such as the advantages of bipedalism, the origins of agriculture, or the appearance of human language. To complete these assignments, you must understand and evaluate the claims being made by the authors of the sources you are reading, as well as the fossil or material evidence used to support those claims. Fossil evidence might include things like carbon dated bone remains; material evidence might include things like stone tools or pottery shards. You will usually learn about these kinds of evidence by reviewing scholarly studies, course readings, and photographs, rather than by studying fossils and artifacts directly.

The emergence of bipedalism (the ability to walk on two feet) is considered one of the most important adaptive shifts in the evolution of the human species, but its origins in space and time are debated. Using course materials and outside readings, examine three authors’ hypotheses for the origins of bipedalism. Compare the supporting points (such as fossil evidence and experimental data) that each author uses to support their claims. Based on your examination of the claims and the supporting data being used, construct an argument for why you think bipedal locomotion emerged where and when it did.

How should I approach anthropology papers?

Writing an essay in anthropology is very similar to writing an argumentative essay in other disciplines. In most cases, the only difference is in the kind of evidence you use to support your argument. In an English essay, you might use textual evidence from novels or literary theory to support your claims; in an anthropology essay, you will most often be using textual evidence from ethnographies, artifactual evidence, or other support from anthropological theories to make your arguments.

Here are some tips for approaching your anthropology writing assignments:

  • Make sure that you understand what the prompt or question is asking you to do. It is a good idea to consult with your instructor or teaching assistant if the prompt is unclear to you. See our handout on arguments and handout on college writing for help understanding what many college instructors look for in a typical paper.
  • Review the materials that you will be writing with and about. One way to start is to set aside the readings or lecture notes that are not relevant to the argument you will make in your paper. This will help you focus on the most important arguments, issues, and behavioral and/or material data that you will be critically assessing. Once you have reviewed your evidence and course materials, you might decide to have a brainstorming session. Our handouts on reading in preparation for writing and brainstorming might be useful for you at this point.
  • Develop a working thesis and begin to organize your evidence (class lectures, texts, research materials) to support it. Our handouts on constructing thesis statements and paragraph development will help you generate a thesis and develop your ideas and arguments into clearly defined paragraphs.

What is an ethnography? What is ethnographic evidence?

Many introductory anthropology courses involve reading and evaluating a particular kind of text called an ethnography. To understand and assess ethnographies, you will need to know what counts as ethnographic data or evidence.

You’ll recall from earlier in this handout that an ethnography is a portrait—a description of a particular human situation, practice, or group as it exists (or existed) in a particular time, at a particular place, etc. So what kinds of things might be used as evidence or data in an ethnography (or in your discussion of an ethnography someone else has written)? Here are a few of the most common:

  • Things said by informants (people who are being studied or interviewed). When you are trying to illustrate someone’s point of view, it is very helpful to appeal to their own words. In addition to using verbatim excerpts taken from interviews, you can also paraphrase an informant’s response to a particular question.
  • Observations and descriptions of events, human activities, behaviors, or situations.
  • Relevant historical background information.
  • Statistical data.

Remember that “evidence” is not something that exists on its own. A fact or observation becomes evidence when it is clearly connected to an argument in order to support that argument. It is your job to help your reader understand the connection you are making: you must clearly explain why statements x, y, and z are evidence for a particular claim and why they are important to your overall claim or position.

Citation practices in anthropology

In anthropology, as in other fields of study, it is very important that you cite the sources that you use to form and articulate your ideas. (Please refer to our handout on plagiarism for information on how to avoid plagiarizing). Anthropologists follow the Chicago Manual of Style when they document their sources. The basic rules for anthropological citation practices can be found in the AAA (American Anthropological Association) Style Guide. Note that anthropologists generally use in-text citations, rather than footnotes. This means that when you are using someone else’s ideas (whether it’s a word-for-word quote or something you have restated in your own words), you should include the author’s last name and the date the source text was published in parentheses at the end of the sentence, like this: (Author 1983).

If your anthropology or archaeology instructor asks you to follow the style requirements of a particular academic journal, the journal’s website should contain the information you will need to format your citations. Examples of such journals include The American Journal of Physical Anthropology and American Antiquity . If the style requirements for a particular journal are not explicitly stated, many instructors will be satisfied if you consistently use the citation style of your choice.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Scupin, Raymond, and Christopher DeCorse. 2016. Anthropology: A Global Perspective , 8th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall.

Solis, Jacqueline. 2020. “A to Z Databases: Anthropology.” Subject Research Guides, University of North Carolina. Last updated November 2, 2020. https://guides.lib.unc.edu/az.php?s=1107 .

University of Chicago Press. 2017. The Chicago Manual of Style , 17th ed. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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essay about anthropology sociology and political science

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book: Anthropology and Political Science

Anthropology and Political Science

A convergent approach.

  • Myron J. Aronoff and Jan Kubik

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  • Language: English
  • Publisher: Berghahn Books
  • Copyright year: 2012
  • Audience: Professional and scholarly;
  • Main content: 368
  • Keywords: Theory and Methodology ; Political and Economic Anthropology
  • Published: November 1, 2012
  • ISBN: 9780857457264

Anthropology vs. Sociology: What's the Difference?

  • Archaeology

essay about anthropology sociology and political science

  • Ph.D., Ethnomusicology, University of California Berkeley
  • M.A., Ethnomusicology, University of California Berkeley
  • B.M., Music, Barnard College

Anthropology is the study of humans and the ways they live. Sociology studies the ways groups of people interact with each other and how their behavior is influenced by social structures, categories (age, gender, sexuality), and institutions.

While both fields study human behavior, the debate between anthropology vs. sociology is a matter of perspectives. Anthropology examines culture more at the micro-level of the individual, which the anthropologist generally takes as an example of the larger culture. In addition, anthropology hones in on the cultural specificities of a given group or community. Sociology, on the other hand, tends to look at the bigger picture, often studying institutions (educational, political, religious), organizations, political movements, and the power relations of different groups with each other.

Key Takeaways: Anthropology vs. Sociology

  • Anthropology studies human behavior more at the individual level, while sociology focuses more on group behavior and relations with social structures and institutions.
  • Anthropologists conduct research using ethnography (a qualitative research method), while sociologists use both qualitative and quantitative methods.
  • The primary goal of anthropology is to understand human diversity and cultural difference, while sociology is more solution-oriented with the goal of fixing social problems through policy.

Definition of Anthropology 

Anthropology studies human diversity. There are four primary sub-fields: archaeology , biological anthropology, cultural anthropology , and linguistic anthropology . Archaeology focuses on the objects humans have made (often thousands of years ago). Biological anthropology examines the ways humans adapt to different environments. Cultural anthropologists are interested in how humans live and make sense of their surroundings, studying their folklore, cuisine, arts, and social norms. Finally, linguistic anthropologists study the ways different cultures communicate. The primary method of research anthropologists utilize is called ethnography or participant observation, which involves in-depth, repeated interactions with people.

A defining feature of anthropology that makes it unlike many other fields is that many researchers study cultures that are not "their own." Thus, people pursuing PhDs in anthropology are required to spend a lengthy period of time (often a year) in a foreign country, in order to immerse themselves in a culture to become knowledgeable enough to write about and analyze it.

Early in the field's history (the late 19th/early 20th centuries), anthropologists were almost all Europeans or Americans who conducted research in what they considered to be "primitive" societies that they believed were "untouched" by western influence. Because of this mindset, the field has long been critiqued for its colonialist, condescending attitude toward non-western people and its inaccurate representations of their cultures; for example, early anthropologists often wrote about African cultures as static and unchanging, which suggested that Africans could never be modern and that their culture did not undergo change, as western cultures do. In the late 20th century, anthropologists like James Clifford and George Marcus addressed these misrepresentations, suggesting that ethnographers be more aware of and upfront about the unequal power relations between themselves and their research subjects.

Definition of Sociology 

Sociology has several principal tenets: individuals belong to groups, which influence their behavior; groups have characteristics independent of their members (i.e., the whole is larger than the sum of its parts); and sociology focuses on patterns of behavior among groups (as defined by gender, race, class, sexual orientation, etc.). Sociological research falls into several large areas , including globalization, race and ethnicity, consumption, family, social inequality, demography, health, work, education, and religion.

While ethnography was initially associated with anthropology, many sociologists also do ethnography, which is a qualitative research method. However, sociologists tend to do more quantitative research —studying large data sets, like surveys—than anthropologists. In addition, sociology is more concerned with hierarchical or unequal power relations between groups of people and/or institutions. Sociologists still tend to study "their own" societies—i.e., the U.S. and Europe—more than those of non-western countries, although contemporary sociologists conduct research all over the world.

Finally, an important distinction between anthropology and sociology is that the former's goal is to understand human diversity and cultural differences, while the latter is more solution-oriented with the goal of fixing social problems through policy.

Anthropology majors pursue a wide variety of careers, as do sociology students. Either of these degrees can lead to a career as a teacher, public sector employee, or academic. Students who major in sociology often go on to work at non-profit or governmental organizations and the degree can be a stepping stone to a career in politics, public administration, or law. While the corporate sector is less common for sociology majors, some anthropology students find work conducting market research.

Graduate school is also a common trajectory for both anthropology and sociology majors. Those who complete a PhD often have the goal of becoming professors and teaching at the college level. However, jobs in academia are scarce, and over half of people with a PhD in anthropology work outside of academia . Non-academic careers for anthropologists include public sector research at large, global organizations like the World Bank or UNESCO, at cultural institutions like the Smithsonian, or working as freelance research consultants. Sociologists who have a PhD can work as analysts in any number of public policy organizations, or as demographers, non-profit administrators, or research consultants.

  • Introduction to Sociology
  • Definition of Idiographic and Nomothetic
  • Sociology of Work and Industry
  • Definition of Cultural Materialism
  • An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
  • How Sociology Can Prepare You for a Career in Business
  • An Introduction to Medical Anthropology
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  • Processual Archaeology
  • Understanding Diffusion in Sociology
  • What Is Ethnomusicology? Definition, History, and Methods
  • The History of Sociology Is Rooted in Ancient Times
  • Anthropology Defined
  • Cultural Ecology
  • The Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
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The Oxford Handbook of Political Participation

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6 Anthropology and Political Participation

Julia M. Eckert, University of Bern

  • Published: 18 August 2022
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From an anthropological perspective, political participation can be defined as all action that attempts to have part in deciding upon one’s collective circumstances. It encompasses all practices that engage with the order of things to impact on it, also those not usually identified with participation in a political system. Anthropologists consider historically changing ways of how membership in polities is formed and study diverse imaginations of political community that are articulated in practices of political participation, not only those of the nation state or its parts, nor only small-scale local ones, but addressing at times the political order of world society. Political participation for anthropologists is thus defined not by its method or its addressee; nor is it restricted to formal citizenship; rather, it is all action in respect to power, which lays claim to the promise of self-determination, and the power to define that very “self”.

The study of political participation in anthropology has engendered a concept of politics that provides for the possibility to examine the constitution of political order and of a polity through diverse and divergent forms of participation. Anthropology has responded to what has been identified as the crisis of contemporary democracy, a post-democratic ( Crouch 2005 ) or even post-political ( Rancière 1999 ) era with an insistence that we are observing an intensely political time ( Postero and Elinoff 2019 ). The analysis of contemporary impossibilities to participate emerging in the neoliberal age has been the subject of many anthropological enquiries into contemporary politics (e.g., Li 2019 ); they have acknowledged a crisis of formal institutions of democracy in many places, and enquired into their de-politicizing dynamics ( Ferguson 1994 ; Coles 2004 ; Muehlebach 2012 ), as well as their employment as instruments of hegemony ( Li 2007 ). Anthropology has treated this observation as a call to take into view the diverse strategies and struggles of people to recuperate participatory possibilities, assert participatory rights, and negotiate and expand the norms that define legitimate participation.

Anthropologists focus on the modes and practices in which people attempt to realize participatory rights, and to deepen or expand the possibilities of participation in situations in which people perceive to have lost participatory possibilities. They have found political participation to rely on diverse forms of practices, including those not usually identified with participation in a political system. They observe how such participatory practices address all sorts of relations of power, not only those with the agencies of government. Moreover, they find such practices of political participation to engage with diverse imaginations of political community, not only those of the nation state or its parts, nor only small-scale local ones, but addressing at times the political order of world society.

For anthropology, political participation could be defined as all action in respect to a political order which lays claim to the promise of taking part in deciding upon one’s collective circumstances. There are other forms of relating to a political order than participation: Indifference, dependence, subjection or devotion, all form part of the repertoire of “politics.” Some of them also aim at making authorities more respondent to one’s needs, and often coexist side by side with participatory forms of relating to authorities. One could argue, furthermore, that most of these ways of relating to political authority entail aspects of participation, an observation much discussed in anthropology, but this is not my focus here. Rather, I will explore those anthropological approaches to political participation that have examined how the promises of political participation capture the imaginations and aspirations of people in the most different circumstances, and which have sought to explore the tension arising between these participatory desires and their ever-failing realization. In these anthropological perspectives, political participation appears to be driven by the attempts to realize its promises; it is a form of voice, an immanent critique, that (re-) creates and criticizes at the same time and is realized only in practice. It is the stuff of politics.

This perspective has moved three questions to the center of anthropological engagements with political participation. First is the question of in what ways people participate politically, and what makes the practices of participating in a political order “political.” Anthropologists, who take into account how the political is shaped by economic action, religious belief, or social intimacies (and vice versa), and who have therefore dissolved the boundaries between the private and the public erected by liberal conceptions of politics, pay attention to the ways in which seemingly “non-political” practices are employed as political means; or when overtly political ones change in their meaning, as when electoral experiences are significant not for their impact on electoral outcomes, but for collective identity, self-worth, or a sense of possibility. For anthropologists thus, many forms of participation make “politics”: they are quintessentially political in their projective character, seeking to impact on the order of things.

The second question that anthropologists have engaged with when they have discussed political participation in its diverse forms, is, what difference it makes that people do participate—to them, and to the order that they participate in. Anthropologists have debated whether political participation, even in their encompassing understanding, reinforces the hegemonic dynamics of an existing order or can actually effect change. Does participation merely reproduce a political order?

The third question central to anthropological explorations of political participation is who (and what) are subjects of political participation; and, related, how we need to think the constitution of the body politic. Anthropologists have in recent years developed a more processual understanding of the polity, one that reflects the practices of bordering political communities. Thus, anthropologists have explored participatory practices for their expression of “insurgent” norms of legitimate participation. The central question that emerges today is thus that of the relation between participation and membership, that is, the question whether participation is confined to members of a given polity, or whether it is itself constitutive of the polity that one participates in.

In the following, I will explore these three questions, around which anthropological perspectives on political participation have centered. I will begin with the many faces of the political that early political anthropology identified, which necessitated, or rather: enabled an encompassing concept of the political. For subsequent studies this opened up the possibility of a perspective on political participation to be identified in various acts and practices of the everyday. Moving from the observation of “different” practices and norms of participation in non-Western political orders, anthropologists came to take into view the myriad ways of participating in all political orders.

Second, I will focus on the anthropological studies which came to focus on the expressive aspects of participatory practice and the contestations over norms of legitimate participation. This brought to the fore the question of the very constitution of the polity that people participate in. Thirdly, and in order to take up this question on the constitution of the polity through participation, I will turn to the debate on the effects of participation, that is, the question whether political participation merely reproduces a political order or actually transforms it, a question that arises, on the one hand, in relation to the anthropological skepticism towards the possibilities of the subaltern to speak, but equally, on the other hand, in relation to the discipline’s presumptions about the prefigurative effects of subaltern projective practice.

The Many Faces of the Political

Political anthropology from the very beginning set out to explore norms and practices of political participation. The early political anthropologists of functionalist or structural functionalist orientation examined the rules which regulated political participation in non-state political systems (e.g., Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940 ; Leach 1954 ). They identified the ways that social position and aspects of the person determined participatory forms, rights, and obligations. Examining diverse ways of political participation and the specific conceptualizations of the person that underlay norms of political participation in different political orders produced a sensibility towards conceptualizations of political personhood and the way that shapes political participation. A concept of participation adequate to these diverse norms regulating participation was needed to provide for conceptual possibilities to conceive of political participation not as a right, but also as an obligation, a duty, an aspect of a specific phase of life, or of a specific subject position. Therefore, political anthropology had to employ a notion of politics that was not confined to specific practices or “methods” of participation; nor to an idea of rationality, deliberation, or voluntarism; one, furthermore, not focused on specific addressees of participatory practices or claims, such as “government.” Rather, their comparative project attended to the multivalent aspects of politics they found in different political orders. They needed to take into account in their concept of the political how different orders reflected all: the fundamental sociality of being underlying any politics ( Pina-Cabral 2018 ) and the communitas of political practice ( Turner 1969 ), as well as the “stratagems and spoils” ( Bayley 1969 ) of political negotiation and maneuvering.

The successors of the early political anthropologists in the 1960s and early 1970s often explored the egalitarian “participatory ethos” that they found in the political norms and institutions of polities without a state (e.g., Barth 1959 ; Clastres 1974 ; Sigrist 1967 ). Some explicitly countered the teleologies of modernization theory. They employed the Boasian assertion of the equal value of diverse cultural forms as a critical instrument for modernity, considering those alternative political institutions as evidence of the possibility of an “otherwise.”

For contemporary exploration of political participation from an anthropological perspective taking account of these diverse systems of political participation is thus not a matter of “difference” as such. Rather, the exploration of such different logics of organizing, normatively legitimizing, and understanding political participation necessitated anthropologists to develop a broader concept of political participation that they could employ also for understanding political participation in contemporary liberal democracies and other political systems (e.g., Hage 2015 ). Observing institutions of political participation that highlighted aspects of social obligation pertaining to people with specific capacities or in specific age groups, or understanding rituals of political participation to enact particular conceptualizations of both the person and the polity, and particularly the relation of both, provided conceptual tools to explore these aspects also in polities organized as democratic states. The holism characteristic of the anthropological endeavor made anthropologists consider the specific delineations of “the political,” that is the distinctions that different systems made between what issues and concerns pertained to the realm of the political and which did not. Thus, political anthropology developed a perspective, which paid attention to the polyvalent aspects of different forms of political participation; and which could explore the constitution of specific notions of “the political agent” through institutions of political participation, and, vice versa the constitution of political community through acts, practices, and rituals of participation.

Norms of Legitimate Participation

For anthropology, seeking to trace the expression of political norms and aspirations in such diverse forms of political participation is also a result of the long-standing predominance in the discipline to “study down,” 1 that is, to explore precisely the realities of those whose voices go mostly unheard, and whose normative orientations remain unrepresented. Paying attention to the diverse strivings to participate has been of interest to anthropologists because they are one form in which “the subaltern can speak” ( Spivak 1988 ).

Systemic impossibilities of political participation go far beyond the denial of formal participatory rights. Differential obstacles to participation in relation to class, caste, race, gender, ethnicity, legal status, sexual orientation, “ability,” or others, have always been the norm (e.g. Inda 2005 ; Nuijten and Lorenzo 2009 ; see also Chapters 33 , 34 , 35 this volume). The counter-publics ( Negt and Kluge 1972 ; Warner 2002 ) that form around systemic impossibilities of participation, create the grounds from which people begin to participate, either in order to delineate a space of autonomy, or to claim access and recognition. For anthropologists, thus, political participation appears as a promise that people strive to realize when they feel excluded in whatever way or threatened by political decisions that affect them but that they cannot influence.

When attention moved to the impact of colonialism and imperialism on political institutions, political anthropology focused on the re-definition and re-constitution of political authority that colonialism had effected (e.g., Mamdani 1996 ) and that shaped post-colonial polities. One form of political participation prominently discussed in political anthropology was patron–client relations and similar arrangements. “Clientelism” was discussed as a form of political participation because it was a predominant form of accessing the political system and the resources of states, particularly in situations shaped by high socioeconomic inequality, where access to the resources and services of states were mediated by “brokers.” For “the politics of the governed” ( Chatterjee 2004 ) brokers in state administrations and government authorities might forge particular relations with clients, that are not based on rights but rather on bio-political forms of “assistance” to life, thereby potentially continuing their exclusion from what Chatterjee (2004) called “civil society.” There has always been the observation that in many places where people suffer from insufficient infrastructures and services, votes are exchanged for immediate material benefits, be they simply money, or be it electricity connections, the paving of roads, or access to municipal waterpipes. Given the absence of many state provisions for large segments of the population of many states, however, such strategic exchanges of votes for palpable material benefits appear as immediately rational. More importantly, such transactions can be understood as a form of participation in as much as they involve negotiations, in which voters’ needs and expectations are articulated to relevant political authorities.

Often it is precisely in people’s discourses about states’ failures to fulfill people’s demands and expectations, such as in talk of corruption ( Gupta 1995 ; Parry 2000 ), that norms of rights and duties are shaped. Rather than considering such relations mainly as determined by a lack of inclusion into formal institutions of representation, however, anthropologists have analyzed them also for their productive aspects. Harri Englund (2008) and James Ferguson (2013) , for example, have both suggested, that we should re-think the (negatively connoted) concept of dependence (on patrons or “the state”) as articulations by “dependents” of norms entitling them to care, and attributing an obligation onto their patrons. Thus, relations of dependence can be conceived of as a form of political participation in as much as they are often the site in which norms of obligation are negotiated. As Veena Das (2011) has argued, rights wax and wane, and they are negotiated for in everyday interactions in which people constitute themselves as citizens, articulating their ideas of the state and their relationships to it (see also Das 2011 ; Gupta 1995 ; Harriss 2005 ; Eckert 2011 ). Such politics of negotiating relations with political authority are not necessarily properly understood when considering them simply as enactments of “traditional” forms of political relations, or as rooted in stable norms of reciprocal obligations. These are forms of political participation. They assert the right and entitlement to what they claim ( Eckert 2011 ), thereby advancing their own understandings of the norms and values that should govern the polity.

It is such attention to the articulations of the norms that should govern political relations in the diverse forms of political participation, which have put the aspirational expressiveness at the center of anthropological analyses of political participation in recent years. Anthropologists studying democracy (see e.g., the contributions in Paley 2008 ), for example, have often observed the embrace of electoral rights in diverse situations ( Edelman 1985 ; Spencer 2007 : 93; Coburn and Larson 2009 ). Voting, they have found, is valued, because it is the one moment when the promise of equality inherent in democratic ideals becomes real (e.g., Banerjee 2011a ; Carswell and de Neve 2014). It is less the idea that one’s vote actually has an impact on the future of one’s government; rather, it is the enactment of the equality of all through the equality of all votes, which is central to this particular form of political participation. In anthropologists’ exploration of voting, the ritual of elections is a symbol of that ever-unfulfilled idea of equality, and a symbolic assertion of its validity. Such an ideal of equality can refer to the individual, but also to a particular community aspiring for greater self-determination and the possibility of having power as a group ( Michelutti 2007 ; Witsoe 2011 ; see also Chapter 47 this volume). Aspirations to equality are enacted in elections also through the experience of “communitas” that such ritual enables (Banerjee 2011b; see also Chapter 38 this volume). From an anthropological perspective, to speak of elections as “mere” ritual is thus misguided, since it is precisely the ritual that is of significance ( Spencer 2007 : 77), both as the moment of communitas, and in terms of the expression of political values and norms, of hopes, aspirations, and expectations.

Such expressive aspects have often been studied in relation to the projects of social movements. While anthropology has its own rich literature on social movements (e.g., Edelman 2001 ; Nash 2005 ; Susser 2016 ), it has not confined the exploration of such expressive aspects to these. Rather, anthropologists have analyzed “pre-ideological” ( Bayat 2010 : 19) everyday struggles for “social citizenship” (e.g., Holston 2007 ; 2011 ; Das 2011 ) and “acts of citizenship” ( Isin 2008 ) for such expressions of goals and desires “unrepresented” and before their articulation within the framework of a particular vision of social and political change. They have assumed the immediate needs of marginalized people to give rise to the articulation of new norms of legitimate participation, evident in multitudinous squatting of urban land (e.g., Bayat 2000 ), the unregulated construction of homes (e.g., Holston 2007 ), the assertion of access to public space (e.g., Bayat 2010 : 96–114; Göle 2006 ), and the mass mobilities that demand freedom of movement and the right to “be there” (e.g., De Genova 2009 ; Mezzadra 2006 ).

We observe also legal challenges to governmental agencies, international organizations, or multinational corporations (e.g., Eckert 2006 ; Santos and Rodríguez-Garavito 2006 ), to be employed for such expressive goals: The “juridification of protest” ( Eckert et al. 2012 ), while often charged with de-politizing at base political struggles (e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 2006 ), is increasingly a means to express political objectives and projects and advance alternative or novel understandings of legal norms ( Eckert 2021 ). These all are ways in which the subaltern not only claim and appropriate access to specific goods, but through which they express their ideas of justice and injustice and formulate norms of legitimate participation.

Imagining the Polity

Since the social struggles explored by anthropologists are at base about defining the polity in terms of legitimate participation, questions about the constitution of the polity and its boundaries moved center stage. The struggles observed by anthropologists proposed new grounds for claiming membership: People referred to their labor ( Eckert 2011 ), or to their shared humanity ( Das 2011 ). Holston (2011) has pointed to “contributor rights,” that particular legitimation of claims based on the labor and consumption of everyday existence that creates the polity in all its circumstance, and that in turn is grounds for participatory rights. The practical claims to participation that redefine the polity express visions of possibilities, ideas of oneself “(and others) as subjects of rights” ( Isin 2009 , 371) and ways of realizing them. These attempts to define legitimate participation in effect expanded the boundaries of political communities through the participation of people who had but insecure rights and possibilities of formal participation or who were denied them altogether. The central question that emerges for political anthropology today is that of the relation between participation and membership.

Anthropology had had no difficulties in conceptualizing polities without “states” and “acephalous orders” (e.g., Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940 ; Sigrist 1967 ). However, it has proven more difficult to leave behind other essentialized notions, such as those of unified cultural communities. While the specific limitations of participatory rights with their discriminations in terms of gender, age, caste, and class were paid attention to, anthropological ideas of membership nonetheless often left unquestioned the processes by which the actual polities of which membership was negotiated, were constituted. Hence, membership and community were not, for a long time, problematized in anthropology: they were often defined by the assumedly given ethnic or kin belonging or national citizenship. The very term “culture,” particularly in its plural form “cultures,” which anthropology propagated, suggested units integrated by some given commonalities, be that language, history, blood, or even simply the cultural “text” and its collective reading. The critiques of such ideas of a unity of community constituted by “shared culture” began early (e.g., Barth 1969 ), but methodological nationalism ( Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002 ) shaped the design of fields for research in anthropology as much as in other social sciences for long (and continues to do so). While systemic limits to participation were thus considered, they were perceived as internal to a given polity, whether exploring membership in national polities or in sub-national communities, anthropologists thus focusing on the impossibility to participate of those who had whatever kind of given membership status.

The fact that practices of participation often seek to define and redefine the very borders of political communities by suggesting alternative grounds for claims to legitimate participatory possibilities, was theorized only when the easy identifications of membership and ascribed identities of national–territorial or ethnic belonging was undermined by the emergence of more processual concepts of culture and identity in anthropology. They paved the way also for more processual approaches to the understanding of belonging and membership, and thus for taking into view the ways in which political participation itself constitutes political communities and their boundaries. Leaving behind seemingly pre-defined notions of a polity that people are members of to participate in, anthropologists have moved towards more pragmatic notions of polity, in the sense of examining the very constitution of political communities through multifarious practices of participation, bordering, “encroachment” ( Bayat 2000 ) and appropriations ( Eckert 2015 ).

Anthropologists have thus found political participation to articulate diverse imaginations of political community, often unaligned with jurisdictional boundaries, sometimes more expansive than membership in an “imagined community” of a nation-state, and operating across multiple scales such as the local, transnational, and transversal (see Holston 2019 ; Çağlar and Glick Schiller 2018 ; for the transnational see also Chapter 50 this volume). Anthropologists have in recent years addressed more centrally also the ways in which polities have been conceptualized “otherwise,” paying attention particularly to more egalitarian and participatory forms, and those polities that in their institutions reflect human and non-human cohabitation in the Anthropocene ( Blaser 2019 ; Youatt 2020 ). They thus not only appropriate existing notions of membership in some form of pre-constituted collectivity, but radically rework ideas of membership ( McNevin et al. 2021 ).

Political participation then is about being effective in shaping one’s own circumstances in relation to others one is connected to through the multifarious entanglements of existence in our contemporary world. A “politics of presence” in a particular locality—the sheer fact of being there—carries a conceptualization of participatory rights that are currently tried out in those initiatives that experiment with “urban citizenship” (e.g., Glick Schiller and Çağlar 2009 ; Hess and Lebuhn 2014 ). They conceive of participatory rights as arising from coexistence or cohabitation in a locality or within a particular social situation.

Focusing on the diverse forms of political participation that people engage in thus makes it possible to conceive of a polity, not as already constituted by an apparatus of institutions that distinguishes between members and non-members, but as actually always created by politics, that is, greater or lesser degrees of participation. This Arendtian conception of politics as participation ( Arendt 1993 : 15), that is, the very definition of politics as participation, enables us to rethink political participation in a manner that overcomes the methodological nationalism ( Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002 ) inherent in conceptions of polity as a pre-constituted collectivity. Unlike Arendt, who upheld a specific delineation between the public and the private founded in Greek political theory, politics therein residing exclusively in the public, and taking only specific forms considered appropriate and civil, anthropology, with its holistic attention to the myriad ways the political takes expression in the seemingly non-political, overcomes both the division between the public and the private, and the exclusion of some forms of political expression from what is (conceptually) admitted to the realm of the political. Anthropologists can thus contribute to a nuanced perspective on the actual processes of drawing such distinctions and delineating both the political and the polity.

Beyond Hegemony: The Effects of Participation

Anthropologists differed as to the question what difference it makes that people do participate—to them, and to the order that they participate in. They have been skeptical towards the potential of political participation to actually build and shape state institutions, and the institution building capacities of political participation have mostly been observed in relation to the development of institutions alternative to established ones. Many considered participation (also) a form of obedience to the order people were scrambling to participate in, a form of disciplinary method that brought people to strive for what reproduces the order of things, a means of hegemony, or of ideology ( Edelman 1985 ).

The suggestion inherent in Rancière’s proposition that all forms of “successful participation” are already incorporated into the realm of “police,” “politics” residing in rupture rather than participation, points us to the question in how far participation is obedient to the constraints a political system imposes on it, and thus actually potentially effective in shaping that very system. Anthropologists have often considered the formation of subjectivities through the governmental colonization of minds and bodies (e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 1991 ), the effect of state categories and classifications (e.g., Mitchell 1999 ; Collier et al. 1995 ). Following a pessimistic reading of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and Michel Foucault’s notion of subjectivation, the discipline has paid attention to how social orders are reproduced through practice shaped by the habitual dispositions of agents, the mimetic elements ( Gupta and Sharma 2006 ), and the bio-political governmentality articulated in democratic participation ( Li 2007 ). Particularly, anthropologists studying the participatory standards in development “cooperation” and their rhetoric of “ownership,” have dissected such obligations to participate as a method of hegemony, a disciplinary tool that trains people into the desires and goals, procedures, and norms of a political order ( Ferguson and Gupta 2002 ; Li 2007 ).

Anthropologists have thus considered obedience in relation to political orders and the ways they are reproduced through people actively—intentionally or inadvertently—obeying their rules. A particularly precise study of such political participation is Emma Tarlo’s, who, in her ethnography of the emergency rule of the government of Indira Gandhi in India from 1973 to 1975, examined how state oppression was perpetuated by the active participation by many of those targeted by various programs ( Tarlo 2003 ). Obedience is thus an important form of participation, the striving of the marginalized to be part of the system of marginalization proving the latter’s hegemonic force. It has often been the very unfulfillment of the normative promises of a political system that are the driving force of claims and demands for political inclusion; they are ubiquitous as the universalist claims of most modern orders have nowhere fulfilled their promises to all they promised participation ( Holston 2007 ; Ong 2005 ). In short, any striving for inclusion indicates a valuation of the goods that the status quo could offer if one were included in it in a more privileged position, and thus also a limit to the political imagination.

However, anthropologists have equally observed how precisely the limits imposed triggered the political imagination for an “otherwise.” Despite the frequent reading of Bourdieu as deterministic, his practice theoretical position also enabled anthropologists to examine the “break with the doxa” (1985: 734) and to explore the struggles between agents to impose their worldview by the “work of representation”: “The truth of the social world is the stake in struggle between agents very unequally equipped to achieve absolute, i.e. self-fulfilling, vision and forecasting” ( Bourdieu 1985 : 732). In his text on social space and the genesis of groups (1985), Bourdieu insists that we have “to integrate the agents’ representation of the social world; more precisely [we] must take account of the contribution that agents make towards constructing the view of the social world, and through this, towards constructing this world ( … )” ( Bourdieu 1985 : 727). While subaltern visions of political participation are often shaped by the aspirations founded in the very legitimating grounds that a political order entails, these promises are interpreted in ways that mesh moral or ethical and future imaginations possibly stemming from realms other than the dominant normative order. Interpretations of norms and of practices contain projects that are socially situated, grounded in past experience, the myths and rumors ( Hansen and Stepputat 2006 , 296) about the state as well as by normative assumptions about what ought to be.

Attention to this interpretative and representational work has elucidated the creative and innovative use of existing political institutions that people engage in. They are creative in as much as they put forth specific interpretations of norms and act upon them in order to shape institutions accordingly. Isin, for example, sees “acts of citizenship” precisely in those actions that break with habitual practice, and allow for new norms to be enacted, distinguishing “between justice and injustice, between equal and unequal and between fair and unfair” ( Isin 2012 : 123). In this light, struggles for political participation could be considered a form of prefigurative politics in the sense of David Graeber, who argued that “the structure of one’s own act becomes a kind of microutopia, a concrete model for one’s vision of a free society” (2009: 210).

The corrosion of the status quo that often goes along with its partial affirmation in the practices of participation that anthropologists have studied often lies in incremental transformations. (See also Chapter 46 this volume.) It consists first and foremost in slow and sometimes contradictory changes of the norms of what is “normal.” The slow and small transformations in the ideas about the acceptable and the right way of governing can add up to rather substantive changes in the relations of domination. These practices and forms of action constitute social change: They “succeed” when they affect what is considered “normal,” “standard,” and legitimate practice, or even shift the line between legal and illegal.

In their attention to such “prefigurative” dimensions of participatory practice, anthropologists, however, have often neglected theoretical reflection on the “political neutrality” of a concept of prefigurative politics. Examining how participatory practices re-define the boundaries of polities, for example, needs to take into view all those struggles that strive for a prerogative of participatory rights, and seek to define polities in more narrow ways. Participatory rights are rights to membership in a polity, and such rights are more often than not asserted as the prerogative of specific identity groups. The “politics of the public square” ( Graeber 2013 ) can enact all sorts of imaginations of polities. There, in the gathering, a self-constitution of “we, the people’s” ( Butler 2015 ) claims to be legitimate members have more often than not turned into claims to be more legitimate than others, and to exclude those others who are not deemed to be “the people.” Nationalist and fascist mobilisation build precisely on the concomitance of participatory promises and exclusion of “others” ( Eckert 2003 ).

Popular political participation can take the form of the “mob” ( Tazzioli et al. 2021 ) and it is fascist politics that has often reverted to a politics of “direct action” and thereby provided (and provides) possibilities for public action and political participation, claiming public space through violent confrontations ( Eckert 2003 ). Such aspects of prefiguration within political participation appear as particularly relevant and worthy of attention in times of a perceived crisis of political participation (see Giugni and Grasso 2019 ). Hence, attention to participatory prefigurations does not lead inevitably to a theory of democratization. (Unfortunately), the end to which political participation is put is open.

Precisely because anthropologists consider the political dimension of many of the practices, acts, rituals, and relations they study, there is no unified position on political participation in anthropology, not even an integrated debate on it. The one position anthropologists would probably share is that if one wants to enquire into political participation in any way, be that in relation to its effects on a political order, be that into its reverberations in “the private,” insights can be found in all fields of existence.

From identifying different forms of organizing participation in non-Western political systems, anthropology moved to analyzing the multivarious forms of participating they observed in the everyday; from studying the norms regulating how different subject positions determined legitimate participation, anthropologists came to study how different subject positions were differently restricted to participate—and how they struggled to overcome these impediments. The attention to the diverse but specific limits of and exclusions from political participation, when freed from its structural functionalist underpinnings, engendered attention to the multifarious ways in which those excluded or hindered from participation strove to overcome such limitations, and produced relations to political authorities beyond those formally instituted.

These shifts in perspective from studying plurality, to studying inequality so to say, or: the concatenation of plurality and inequality ( Eckert 2016 ) provided for the possibility of anthropology to perceive the many ways of political participation, from the extraordinary in “acts of citizenship” to the everyday negotiations of membership. The focus on the struggles to overcome impediments to participation, to realize, expand, or deepen one’s participatory possibilities were analyzed as to their constitutive role of the political order in question. Thus, thirdly, anthropologists came to conceive of the polity as constituted (and delineated) by participatory practice. The attention to diverse forms of participation, and particularly those practices that strive to overcome forms of exclusion from the polity, be they ideological, legal, economic, or other, necessitates for anthropology a concept of political participation that considers it to come before membership, yes, to constitute membership. This has also opened the way in recent years for new notions of the polity: as constituted by the participatory practices of those present. Political anthropology thus, from studying mostly non-state polities, but with a largely unreflected notion of the constitution of political community, and through studying myriad ways of participating politically, has moved to radically different concepts of both politics ( Postero and Elinoff 2019 ) and the polity ( McNevin et al. 2021 ), which leave behind the methodological nationalism of earlier, and consider participation as constitutive of political community. In fact, in the anthropological perspective on political participation, politics comes to be tantamount to participation, and the polity can be perceived as delineated by diverse participatory struggles.

This “prefigurative” perspective has had a slant, often overlooking those movements that struggled to narrow participatory possibilities to a specific group, or to limit the role of participation. Notwithstanding this bias, the anthropological perspective can enrich a tradition of theorizing the polity as constituted and delineated by participation. The question whether and how political participation is transformative of a political order, redefining political institutions, can then enquire into the differential possibilities of diverse practices to initiate processes of change. This is the contribution of anthropology.

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Eckert, Julia.   2003 . The Charisma of Direct Action: Power and Politics of the Shivsena . Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Eckert, Julia.   2006 . “ From Subjects to Citizens: Legalisation from Below and the Homogenisation of the Legal Sphere. ” Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 38 (53-54): 45–75.

Eckert, Julia.   2011 . “ Introduction: Subjects of Citizenship. ” Citizenship Studies 15 (3-4): 309–317.

Eckert, Julia.   2015 . “Practice Movements: The Politics of Non-sovereign Power.” Pp. 567–577 in Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements. Oxford Handbooks in Politics & International Relations. Cary, NC: Oxford University Press, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199678402.013.46 .

Eckert, Julia. 2016. “Beyond Agatha Christie: Relationality and Critique in Anthropological Theory. ” Anthropological Theory 16 (2-3) (September): 241–248.

Eckert, Julia.   2021 . “Entangled Hopes: Towards the Relational Coherence of Law.” Pp. 399–423 in Nico Krisch (ed.), Entangled Legalities Beyond the State . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Eckert, Julia , Brian Donahoe , Christian Strümpell , and Zerrin-Özlem Biner . 2012 . “Introduction: Laws Travels and Transformations.” Pp. 1–22 in Julia Eckert , Brian Donahoe , Christian Strümpell , and Zerrin Özlem Biner (eds.), Law against the State: Ethnographic Forays into Laws Transformations . Cambridge Studies in Law and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Edelman, Marc.   1985 . The Symbolic Use of Politics . Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Edelman, Marc.   2001 . “ Social Movements: Changing Paradigms and Forms of Politics. ” Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (1): 285–317.

Englund, Harri.   2008 . “ Extreme Poverty and Existential Obligations: Beyond Morality in the Anthropology of Africa. ” Social Analysis 52 (3): 33–50.

Ferguson, James.   1994 . The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ferguson, James.   2013 . “ Declarations of Dependence: Labour, Personhood, and Welfare in Southern Africa. ” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (2): 223–242.

Ferguson, James , and Akhil Gupta . 2002 . “ Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality. ” American Ethnologist 29 (4): 981–1002.

Fortes, Meyer , and Edward E. Evans-Pritchard (eds.). 1940 . African Political Systems . London: Oxford University Press.

Giugni, Marco , and Maria Teresa Grasso . 2019 . Street Citizens: Protest Politics and Social Movement Activism in the Age of Globalization . New York: Cambridge University Press.

Glick Schiller, Nina , and Ayşe Çağlar . 2009 . “ Towards a Comparative Theory of Locality in Migration Studies. Migrant Incorporation and City Scale. ” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 35 (2): 177–202.

Göle, Nilüfer.   2006 . “Islamic visibilities and Public Sphere.” Pp. 3–43 in Nilüfer Göle and Ludwig Ammann (eds.), Islam in Public: Turkey, Iran and Europe . Istanbul: Bilgi University Press.

Graeber, David.   2009 . Direct Action: An Ethnography . Oakland, CA: AK Press.

Graeber, David.   2013 . The Democracy Project . New York: Spiegel & Grau.

Gupta, Akhil.   1995 . “ Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State. ” American Ethnologists 22 (2): 374–402.

Gupta, Akhil , and Arandhana Sharma . 2006 . “Introduction: Rethinking Theories of the State in an Age of Globalisation.” Pp. 1–42 in Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta (eds.), The Anthropology of the State: A Reader . Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Hage, Ghassan.   2015 . Alter‐politics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imagination . Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

Hansen, Thomas Blom , and Finn Stepputat . 2006 . “ Sovereignty Revisited. ” Annual Review of Anthropology 35: 295–315.

Harriss, John.   2005 . “ Political Participation, Representation, and the Urban Poor: Findings from Research in Delhi. ” Economic and Political Weekly 40 (11): 1041–1054.

Hess, Sabine , and Henrik Lebuhn . 2014 . “ Politiken der Bürgerschaft: Zur Forschungsdebatte um Migration, Stadt und citizenship. ” sub\urban. Zeitschrift für Kritische Stadtforschung 2 (3): 11–34.

Holston, James.   2007 . Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Holston, James.   2011 . “ Contesting Privilege with Right: The Transformation of Differentiated Citizenship in Brazil. ” Citizenship Studies 15 (3-4): 335–352.

Holston, James.   2019 . “ Metropolitan Rebellions and the Politics of Commoning the City. ” Anthropological Theory 19 (1): 120–142.

Inda, Jonathan Xavier (ed.). 2005. Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality and Life Politics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Isin, Engin.   2008 . “Theorizing Acts of Citizenship. ” Pp. 15–43 in Engin Isin and Greg Nielsen (eds.), Acts of Citizenship . London: Macmillan.

Isin, Engin.   2009 . “ Citizenship in Flux: The Figure of the Activist Citizen. ” Subjectivity 29: 367–388.

Isin, Engin.   2012 . “ Citizens without Nations. ” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30 (3): 450–467.

Leach, Edmund.   1954 . Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Li, Tania.   2007 . The Will to Improve . Durham: Duke University Press.

Li, Tania.   2019 . “ Politics, Interrupted. ” Anthropological Theory 19 (1): 29–53.

Mamdani, Mahmoud.   1996 . Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism . Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton University Press.

McNevin, Ann , Nicholas De Genova , Julia Eckert , and Nandita Sharma . 2021 . “Membership.” Pp. 7–14 in Nicholas De Genova and Martina Tazzioli (eds.), Minor Keywords of Political Theory: Migration as a Critical Standpoint . Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space .

Mezzadra, Sandro.   2006 . Diritto di fuga: Migrazioni, cittadinanza, globalizzazione . Verona: ombre corte.

Michelutti, Lucia.   2007 . “ The Vernacularisation of Democracy: Popular Politics and Political Participation in North India. ” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13 (3): 639–656.

Mitchell, Timothy.   1999 . “Society, Economy, and the State Effect.” Pp 76–97 in George Steinmetz (ed.), State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Muehlebach, Andrea.   2012 . The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy . Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Nader, Laura.   1969 . “Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained from ‘Studying Up’.” Pp. 284–311 in Dell Hymes (ed.), Reinventing Anthropology . New York: Random House.

Nash, June (ed.). 2005 . Social Movements: An Anthropological Reader . Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Negt, Oskar , and Alexander Kluge . 1972 . Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung . Frankfurt a.m.: Suhrkamp.

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Ong, Aihwa.   2005 . “Graduated Sovereignty in South-East Asia.” Pp. 83–104 in Jonathan X. Inda (ed.), Anthropologies of Modernity . Malden: Blackwell.

Paley, Julia (ed.). 2008 . Democracy: Anthropological Approaches . Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.

Parry, Jonathan.   2000 . “‘The Crisis of Corruption’ and the ‘Idea of India’: A Worm’s Eye View.” Pp. 27–56 in Italo Pardo (ed.), The Morals of Legitimacy: Between Agency and System . Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Pina-Cabral, Joao.   2018 . “ Modes of Participation. ” Anthropological Theory 18 (4): 435–455.

Postero, Nancy , and Eli Elinoff . 2019 . “ Introduction: A Return to Politics. ” Anthropological Theory 19 (1): 3–28.

Rancière, Jacque.   1999 . Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Santos, Boaventura de Sousa , and César A. Rodríguez-Garavito . 2006 . “Law, Politics and the Subaltern in Counter-Hegemonic Gobalization.” Pp. 1–26 in Boaventura de Sousa and César A. Rodriguez-Garavito (eds.), Law and Globalisation from Below: Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sigrist, Christian.   1967 . “ Regulierte Anarchie: Untersuchungen zum Fehlen und zur Entstehung politischer Herrschaft in segmentären Gesellschaften Afrikas . ” Olten; Freiburg in Breisgau: Walter Verlag.

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Spivak, Gayatri.   1988 . “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Pp. 271–313 in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture . Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

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“Studying down” for long replaced studying “the other”; studying up ( Nader 1969 ) and studying “through” ( Wedel et al. 2005 ) have become important but have not informed explorations of political participation. See also Chapter 16 this volume on ethnographic methods.

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Understanding Culture, Society and Politics

Understanding culture, society and politics through the different lenses of social sciences.

  • Teaching Resources

What do you think about our modules? Please let us know by answering this short survey!

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In his book Politics , Aristotle posited that man is by nature a social animal and cannot be alone. According to him, human beings inherently seek interactions, which eventually leads to the formation of a society. However, it is a fact that society has also preceded the existence of man, and that the latter’s survival depends primarily on the social relationships embedded in society’s structures. It is this mutual dependence that allows both man and society to continue to exist.

The nature of a society can be seen in different components: (1) actions and interactions of human beings (social), (2) practices and traditions cultivated and maintained (cultural), and (3) power relations at play among actors (political) (Contreras, et.al.). Observing and analyzing society’s nature through these three components would enable us to better understand not only society, but more importantly, ourselves.

In this module, the learners will be acquainted with observing different social, cultural, and political phenomena happening around them. By introducing the key social science disciplines – Anthropology, Sociology, and Political Science – and their respective perspectives, the learners will be guided in approaching these phenomena as they serve as toolkits of understanding and analysis in discussing social issues concerning democracy, human rights, and social justice. Lastly, this first module will serve as a framework for the succeeding modules that will tackle Filipino culture and society and different Philippine national issues.

Module Standards

Most Essential Learning Competencies (MELCs):

  • Discuss the nature, goals, and perspectives in anthropology, sociology, and political science.

Content Standards:

By the end of this module, learners are expected to demonstrate an understanding of:

  • Human cultural variation, social differences, social change, and political identities;
  • The rationale for studying anthropology, political science, and sociology.

Performance Standards:

By the end of this module, learners are expected to:

  • Acknowledge human cultural variation, social differences, social change, and political identities;
  • Adopt an open and critical attitude toward different social, political, and cultural phenomena through observation and reflection; and
  • Appreciate the value of disciplines of Anthropology, Sociology, and Political Science as social sciences.

essay about anthropology sociology and political science

Lesson 1: Society and I

Lesson Objectives

At the end of the lesson, the student is expected to be able to:

  • Describe themselves according to their cultural, social, and political backgrounds;
  • Analyze how their backgrounds influence their identity (values, beliefs, behavior);
  • Recognize the concepts of culture, society, and politics and their respective elements; and
  • Examine how the cultural, social, and political phenomena happening around them continuously influence or change them as individuals.

Key Concepts

  • Agency – the power of an individual to change society or form a new one.
  • Beliefs – specific ideas that society holds to be true
  • Identity –  the set of perceived qualities that make an individual unique from the rest
  • Norms – rules and expectations by which a society guides the behavior of its members
  • Power – the ability to influence others
  • Symbols –  anything that carries a particular meaning recognized by people who share a culture
  • Values – culturally defined standards that people use to decide what is desirable, good, and beautiful

Self-Evaluation Form (Part 1)

Answer the following questions.

1.What do you already know about the lesson?

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

2.What do you want to know more about the lesson?

  • Shaping My Identity

Do we create our own identities?

  • Our identities are said to be socially-constructed.
  •  According to the social-constructionist view, one’s identity is formed through our interaction with others and in relation to social, cultural, and political contexts. In other words, our identities are influenced by our society (Rice, 2021). 
  • Biodata, resume, and curriculum vitae tell much about our personal information. It contains our given name (sense of identity), surname (lineage), gender/sex (roles we conform to), the names of our parents and their jobs (social interaction and socioecnomic status), educational attainment (social status and mobility), religion (religious practices), ethnicity (language and culture), and political beliefs (exercise of power and inclinations).

How does society influence individuals (identities)?

  • Social groups and norms – the social groups that an individual belongs to also affect one’s creation and maintenance of identity as social groups and their members practice specific norms (family, ethnolinguistic group, churches, schools, fraternal relationships, organizations)
  • Can you cite some historical events that influence individuals?
  • The intermarriage of Filipino and Americans
  • Trade laws which swamp Filipino markets with American goods 
  • Filipinos’ undying love for “imported goods” and Duty-Free 
  • The passing of the Anti-Terror Law
  •  Martial Law and People Power
  • Can you give other national political events that influence individuals?
  • Example 1: Lumads evacuating from their communities because of militarization and armed conflict. 
  • Example 2: New policies enacted by school administrators changing students’ level and practice of freedom—stricter regulations on uniforms, the creation of more student-led clubs and organizations, and the practice of academic freedom. 
  • Example 3: Barangay and SK officials involving the locals in policy-making through consultations, or electoral frauds and violence during local elections
  • Can you give other examples of local events that influence individuals?
  • Observing, Interacting With, and Changing Society

What can you say about Filipino culture and society?

  • Symbols – anything that carries a particular meaning recognized by people who share a culture, e.g. the national flag represents our sovereign nationhood, the red cross is a recognized symbol of medical services, the Star and Crescent represents Islam.
  • Language – system of symbols that allows people to communicate with one another, e.g.. Arabic, Bisaya, Filipino Sign Language (FSL).
  • Norms – rules and expectations by which a society guides the behavior of its members.
  • Mores – norms that are widely observed and have great moral significance, e.g. gender roles or the concept of pagkalalake and pagkababae, reverence for the dead.
  • Folkways – norms for routine or casual interaction, e.g. paggalang, pagmamano
  • Example 1: In bullying incidents at schools (bully, bullied, spectator)
  • Example 2: Woke culture in social media, political inclinations (Dilawan, DDS)
  • Example 3: Community organizing, mobilization, bandwagoning, siding with the oppressors, repression of other individuals (marginalized and minorities: poor, indigenous peoples, PWDs, LGBTQ, etc.)
  • How do you exercise your power as a child, a student, and a friend?
  • Example of individuals who changed their societies (for better or for worse): Albert Einstein, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Jose Rizal, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Mark Zuckerberg, Greta Thunberg, you (ourselves)  
  • How did these individuals change their societies? 
  • What are the reasons which drove them to be a catalyst of social change in their respective societies? 
  • What are the things that you will change in Philippine society?

Self-Evaluation Form (Part 2)

1.What have you learned from the lesson?

2.How will you apply the knowledge you have learned in this lesson in improving Philippine society?

essay about anthropology sociology and political science

  • List of Activities

Synchronous Activities (In-class)

Activity 1: #MeMeMe (Motivational Activity)

Instructions. This activity is a simple getting-to-know-each-other drill. This will help prompt the students to see how the lesson relates to their personal lives. This will also help the teacher know more about their students.

Guide Questions.

  • I am ________ (given and last name). (identity and lineage)
  • I live in  ________ (address) with ________    (household members). (culture at home and people they socialize with most of the time)
  • My father/mother/guardian works as a/an ________    (job). (socioeconomic status)
  • I am ________ (nationality/ethnicity). I practice ________   (religion). (cultural and religious upbringing)
  • If there is a hashtag to describe me, it would be # ________    . (values, beliefs, behavior).

Activity 2: Safe Space (Reflective Assessment)

Instructions. Share your experiences as prompted by the guide question, and reflect about the lessons you learned from them.

Note to the Teacher: Form groups of three to five and have them share their output to each other. You may not share some of your answers that you feel uncomfortable to open up about.

Sample Guide Questions:

  • What Filipino tradition/s have you and your family been observing for a long time? How does the practice of this tradition impact your life as a child and individual? (cultural)
  • In a barkada, there are people who have different personalities. For you, how do the backgrounds of your friends affect how they behave inside your social circle? Reflect on your own behaviors as well. (social)
  • What do you think of the Philippine government’s response to the COVID pandemic? How do the COVID-related policies of the government affect you as an individual? (political)
  • As a Filipino, what aspect of our culture and society do you want to change? Why do you want this to change? What can you do to ensure that this change will take place? (practice of agency)

Asynchronous Activities (Take-home)

Activity 1: Me Starter Pack (Creative Assessment)

Instructions. Create your own “(Your Name) Starter Pack.” Create a picture compilation of the things that best represent your identity based on your sociocultural and political background and the things you want to change in society.

 “The Grew Up in the 90s Starter Pack” in https://i.pinimg.com/originals/fa/90/93/fa9093ea64e3fb994622681a813ac7b5.jpg

Activity 2: Praxis Time! (Creative Assessment)

Instructions. Create a short comic strip or set of conversation bubbles depicting a story whereby people share their knowledge on understanding and changing society.

Activity 3: Anonymous

Instructions. This activity is a short online survey among students using the Mentimeter template. ( https://www.mentimeter.com/app/templates ). The teacher can ask questions to the students and post the questions on a Mentimeter slide. The teacher will give the code to the students, and the latter will go to www.menti.com and input the code to participate in the activity. Students will be anonymous in this activity. This activity will encourage students to voice their opinions (although anonymously) on the cultural and sociopolitical phenomena happening in their society.

Example Guide Questions:

  • If there is one word to describe Philippine politics, what is it?
  • How much do you like Filipino culture? 10 being the highest, 1 being the lowest.
  • What current social issues strike you the most or have been affecting you in some way?
  • What can you say about the current lives of Filipinos in general?
  • What do you think of the government’s and Filipinos’ response to the COVID pandemic?
  • What changes do you want to happen?
  • What will the Philippines be like 10 years from now?

Self-paced Learning (Optional Activity)

Activity 1: Mapping My Identity

  • If identities are socially-constructed, why don’t we try to trace the attitudes, beliefs, and values we have to the norms, cultures, social groups/structures that helped create our identities?
  • Instructions . Watch the video “How Our Identities are Socially Constructed” as the basis of this activity. Get a pen and paper and start mapping your identity. You can create a mindmap to better illustrate your map. Link: https://youtu.be/uIuJT1n2vRY  

Rubric for Discussions

Rubric for Creative Outputs

Lesson 2: How Social Sciences Equip Us in Understanding People and Society Better

 Lesson Objectives

  • Recognize the perspectives/lessons from the three key disciplines of Social Sciences – Anthropology, Sociology, and Political Science;
  • Differentiate the theories and methods employed by each discipline;
  • Determine how the theories/lessons from the Social Sciences can better equip them to understand people and society; and
  • Apply the lessons of the Social Sciences in their own praxis.
  • Anthropology – study of the human species, its immediate ancestors, and their cultures.
  • Moral Compass – signifies someone’s set of values and beliefs that guide them to what they believe as right or wrong in life. 
  • Political Science – study of governments and politics.
  • Praxis – an act of doing something or practice in relation to theory.
  • Social Sciences – the study of society, culture and politics based on social and political philosophy.
  • Sociology – the study of human interactions, social groups and institutions, whole societies, and the human world.

1,What do you already know about the lesson?

  • Broadening My Perspectives

Given that individuals also influence their society, how can they do that positively?

  • Do the best practices equipped with better understanding.
  • A better understanding of people and society would require for an individual to broaden their perspective.

How can individuals broaden their perspectives?

  • Social Sciences – the study of society, culture and politics based on social and political philosophy (Scott 2006, p.9; Retrieved from Lanuza and Raymundo), offer multitudes of disciplines with different perspectives about people and society — three key disciplines for UCSP: Anthropology, Sociology, and Political Science.

Why should we learn these lessons (suspending judgement, empathy, and understanding power)?

  • Moral compass – signifies someone’s set of values and beliefs to guide them to what they believe as right or wrong in life. These beliefs dictate their actions which directly influences others/society.
  • Our moral compass is heavily influenced by our cultural, social, and political backgrounds. Coupled with individual agency, these backgrounds do not serve as limits, but as initial grounds and definitely not the final ones in acting (praxis) as active agents of change.

What are the different kinds of changes?

  • “The only constant thing in the world is change”.
  • According to Panopio, changes in culture bring in society and human beings; likewise, changes in society and human beings bring change in culture and politics. This phenomena is called social dynamics .
  • Example: Rise of the ilustrados as the educated Filipino elite
  • Example: The kind of lifestyle adopted in the “new normal” brought by the Covid-19 pandemic
  • Example: The transition from dictatorial to a democratic government through the People Power Revolution in 1986

Can you effect change in society?

  • Students’ answers to the question.
  • Highlight agency and praxis.
  • Sub-lesson 2: Praxis and Methods of the Social Sciences

Praxis – an act of doing something or practice (application of knowledge) in relation to theory (knowledge), informed and committed action to the search for truth and promotion of everyone’s freedom. 

How will you be able to put the theories and perspectives of Social Sciences to praxis?

Do you need to be a social scientist to practice these methods?

  • No. Anyone who wants to exercise their power (agency) can realize the potential of being a social scientist. We may not be experts, but some of these practices are also things we do in school or in life.

As a student, how will you practice or use these theories and methods in your own life?

Do you think that learning these theories and methods would benefit you? How?

  • Critical thinking
  • Responsible citizenship
  • Knowing the self more
  • Being more open-minded or sensitive to different cultures, peoples, and behaviors

Activity 1: QuiSSbee

Instructions. This activity may serve as a motivational activity for the class. Give a reading material before the class that the students can study. It is suggested that this material contain facts about the history of the three key disciplines of the Social Sciences. This activity will help you introduce the topic to them by going through the historical context of the topic. Material on this will be provided to the teacher.

Example questions: 

  • Who is the father of sociology? 
  • Where did the discipline of Political Science originate from?

Activity 2: The Ultimate Test

Instructions . This activity will prompt students to think about scenarios or issues that are debatable. The teacher must introduce here the concepts of cultural relativism, sociological imagination, and understanding the exercise of power. The teacher will post the questions “What will you do if…” and the students may answer the question. After all the questions are answered, the teacher will facilitate a mini open-forum among the students whereby they can speak up their minds and share their opinions.

Activity 3: Wearing the Shoes of a Social Scientist

Instructions. Before the activity starts, ask the students to prepare the following materials: three pieces of bond paper, scissors, markers, and coloring materials. Ask the students to draw the shoes of the following people: anthropologist, sociologist, and political scientist. Ask the students if they can do the functions of the aforementioned people. Highlight the commonalities and differences among the three.

Activity 1: Pledge! (Reflective Assessment)

Instructions. Write a 300-500 word essay about the most remarkable theory you learned in class so far. Explain how you would want to turn this theory into praxis. At the end of the paper, write a pledge that would commit to fulfill the task.

Self-paced Learning (Optional Activities)

Contreras, Antonio, Arleigh Ross dela Cruz, Denis Erasga, Cecile Fadrigon. (2016) . Understanding Culture, Society and Politics. The Padayon Series. Quezon City: Phoenix Publishing House.

David, R. & Samson, L. (2017). Understanding Culture, Society, and Politics. Mandaluyong City: Anvil Publishing, Inc.

Heywood, Andrew. (2013). Politics. 4th Edition. Palgrave Macmillan.

Kottak, Conrad. (2008). Anthropology: The Exploration of Human Diversity. 13th Edition. McGraw- Hill.

Lanuza, Gerry & Raymundo, Sarah. (2016). Understanding Culture, Society and Politics. 1st Edition. Manila: Rex Book Store.

Macionis, John. (2019). Society: The Basics. 15th Edition. Pearson.

Scott, John. (2006). Social Theory: Central issues in sociology. London: Sage

Learning Materials

Gerry Lanuza & Sarah Raymundo. (2016). Lesson 1:The Birth and Growth of the Social Sciences. 

Understanding Culture, Society and Politics. First Edition. Manila: Rex Book Store (pp.2-15).

Heywood, Andrew. (2013). Politics. 4th Edition Palgrave Macmillan.

Macat. (2016, April 14). An introduction to the discipline of Anthropology [Video]. YouTube. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5aglbgTEig  

Macat. (2016, April 14). An introduction to the discipline of Sociology [Video]. YouTube. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32KG_ba_NJc  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzIcWW3FWSQ  

Panopio, I. & Rolda, R. (2007). Society and Culture, Introduction to Sociology and Anthrophology. 

Quezon City:  Katha Publishing Co., Inc.

BBC Ideas. (2019, June 6). Relativism: Is it wrong to judge other cultures? | A-Z of ISMs Episode 18 – 

BBC Ideas [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=518FR6SbY_k  

Crash Course. (2017, March 28). Sociology & the Scientific Method: Crash Course Sociology #3 

[Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIwyNIdgJBE  

Ted Talks. (2014, April 23). The wisdom of sociology: Sam Richards at TEDxLacador [Video]. YouTube. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWD6g9CV_sc  

The School of Life. (2016, December 30). Why You Can Change The World [Video]. YouTube. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxiYsgyn1yU  

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essay about anthropology sociology and political science

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    essay about anthropology sociology and political science

  2. Introduction to anthropology sociology and political science

    essay about anthropology sociology and political science

  3. POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

    essay about anthropology sociology and political science

  4. Difference between Anthropology and Sociology With their Comparisons

    essay about anthropology sociology and political science

  5. Lesson 3 Anthropology, Political Science and Sociology

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  2. Anthropology Optional Answer Sheet Evaluation: Impact of Feminism on Family

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  4. Defining Religion: An Anthropological Discussion

  5. Anthropology, Sociology, Political Science

  6. ANTHROPOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY AND POLITICAL SCIENCE (Group 3)

COMMENTS

  1. Understanding the Foundations of Anthropology, Sociology, and Political

    Anthropology, Sociology and Political Science - Read online for free. ...

  2. Anthropology, Sociology, and Political Science

    4. Fields of Social Science Anthropology Sociology Political Science. 5. Anthropology A systematic study of the biological, cultural, and social aspects of man. From two Greek words, Anthropos, meaning "MAN"; and Logos, meaning "STUDY". 6. Fields of study and areas of interests: Social Anthropology - studies how social patterns and ...

  3. Anthropology

    anthropology, "the science of humanity," which studies human beings in aspects ranging from the biology and evolutionary history of Homo sapiens to the features of society and culture that decisively distinguish humans from other animal species. Because of the diverse subject matter it encompasses, anthropology has become, especially since the middle of the 20th century, a collection of ...

  4. Anthropology, History, Political Science, & Sociology

    Anthropology, History, Political Science, and Sociology are among a collection of associated disciplines devoted to the study of society and the manner in which people influence, and are influenced by, the world around them. These disciplines inform us about the world beyond our immediate experience and help explain human behavior and institutional structures, through space and time.

  5. Anthropology and Sociology: Three Common Problems

    This essay addresses three major issues that currently confront anthropology and at the organizational level as well as at the disciplinary level: decline in status of and both fields; continuing discrimination on the basis of sex and race, in spite of limited professional associations and academic departments to reduce it; and inability of ...

  6. A Reflection on Anthropology and Inter/Cross/Multidisciplinarity

    Talal Asad, in his critique of anthropology's historical relationship with colonialism, "Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter," 5 Asad, Talal. 1979. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. In The Politics of Anthropology: From Colonialism and Sexism Toward a View from Below, edited by Gerrit Huizer and Bruce Mannheim, pp. 85-93. The ...

  7. Political Anthropology

    Urban Studies: Overview. R. LeGates, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001 Urban studies is the interdisciplinary field concerned with understanding cities. Scholars from the social and behavioral science disciplines of history, sociology, geography, economics, political science, and anthropology and the professional fields of urban planning, architecture ...

  8. 1.2: Anthropological Perspectives

    1.2: Anthropological Perspectives is shared under a CC BY-NC license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts. Anthropologists use unique perspectives to conduct their research. This section looks at the perspectives that make anthropology distinct from related disciplines — like history, sociology, and ….

  9. Anthropology

    Anthropology is the study of human groups and cultures, both past and present. Anthropology shares this focus on the study of human groups with other social science disciplines like political science, sociology, and economics. What makes anthropology unique is its commitment to examining claims about human 'nature' using a four-field approach.

  10. Anthropology and Political Science: A Convergent Approach

    Focusing on the influence of anthropology on political science, the book examines the basic assumptions the practitioners of each discipline make about the nature of social and political reality ...

  11. Anthropology and Political Science

    What can anthropology and political science learn from each other? The authors argue that collaboration, particularly in the area of concepts and methodologies, is tremendously beneficial for both disciplines, though they also deal with some troubling aspects of the relationship. Focusing on the influence of anthropology on political science, the book examines the basic assumptions the ...

  12. Anthropology vs. Sociology: What's the Difference?

    Anthropologists conduct research using ethnography (a qualitative research method), while sociologists use both qualitative and quantitative methods. The primary goal of anthropology is to understand human diversity and cultural difference, while sociology is more solution-oriented with the goal of fixing social problems through policy.

  13. Anthropology, sociology, and political science

    34. POLITICAL SCIENCE. 36. The learning objective Discuss the nature, goals and perspectives in/ of anthropology, sociology and POLITICAL SCIENCE. 37. POLITICAL SCIENCE •It is an academic discipline that deals with the study of government and political processes, institutions, and. 38. The Evolution of Political Movement BEFORE NOW.

  14. Anthropology and Political Participation

    From an anthropological perspective, political participation can be defined as all action that attempts to have part in deciding upon one's collective circumstances. It encompasses all practices that engage with the order of things to impact on it, also those not usually identified with participation in a political system.

  15. Connection Between Anthropology, Political Science, and Sociology

    Connection between Anthropology, Political Science, and Sociology - Read online for free. Understanding culture society and politics

  16. PDF Sociology anSodcio lAogny atndh Arnothrpopoololgoy gy 1

    900 Renaissance Park [email protected]. Sociology and cultural anthropology provide the critical perspective needed for studying the social and cultural arrangements in which people live, for understanding how societies function, for investigating the conditions under which people change their institutions, and for describing the modes ...

  17. Culture, politics and being more equal than others in COVID-19: some

    The COVID-19 pandemic changed how we view the world, human behaviour, and societal structures and institutions. The emerging subdiscipline of psychological anthropology is well placed to provide a perspective on the way individuals and communities are affected by and respond to the pandemic, as well as the fallout from government responses and prevention strategies.

  18. Anthropology, Sociology and Political Science

    2. Based on etymology,comes from the greek words Anthropos which means "man" and logos which means "science or study of.". ANTHROPOLOGY A discipline of infinite curiosity about human beings.They seek to discover when, where, and why humans appeared on earth.They look at how humans have changed since then. Has been defined as that branch ...

  19. Anthropology, Sociology and Political Science: Inquiry and ...

    ANTHROPOLOGY-SOCIOLOGY-AND-POLITICAL-SCIENCE - Read online for free.

  20. Amongst the disciplines: Anthropology, sociology, intersection and

    Katharine Tyler is Lecturer in Social Anthropology in the Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Exeter. She was previously Lecturer in Race and Ethnicity in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey. Tyler's work is founded upon reflexive, multi-sited, residential ethnographic fieldwork within urban, suburban and semi-rural locales of Britain.

  21. Understanding the Foundations of Culture, Society and Politics: A

    This document provides an introduction to understanding culture, society, and politics through three social science disciplines: anthropology, sociology, and political science. It defines key concepts in sociocultural phenomena like cultural variation and social differences. Examples are given of social behaviors and how they demonstrate cultural and political changes in societies. The ...

  22. Differences of Sociology, Anthropology, and Political Science

    Differences and similarities of anthropology, sociology, and political science. Differences. Anthropology 1. A systematic study of knowledge that aims to discuss the biological, cultural, and social aspects of man. 2. One of its goals is to understand humans' origin through evolution. 3.

  23. Understanding Culture, Society and Politics through the Different

    Anthropology: Sociology: Political Science: Substantive Definition: Study of human species, its immediate ancestors, and their cultures (Conrad Kottak) ... Write a 300-500 word essay about the most remarkable theory you learned in class so far. Explain how you would want to turn this theory into praxis. At the end of the paper, write a pledge ...