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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.

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 .

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Political Anthropology

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Political Anthropology by Ajantha Subramanian LAST REVIEWED: 11 January 2012 LAST MODIFIED: 11 January 2012 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0018

Political anthropology emphasizes context, process, and scale. The field has been most concerned with the contextual specificity of political processes and the mechanisms through which localities are differentially incorporated into larger scales of social, economic, and political life. Whereas political anthropology inhabits much of the same analytical ground as political science in considering phenomena such as state formation, democracy, citizenship, rights, and development, political anthropologists challenge normative assumptions of what counts as “politics” by illuminating connections between formal and informal political arenas, and among cultural, social, and political processes. There is a key internal distinction that has marked political anthropology virtually from the outset: that between a structuralist approach emphasizing the systemic nature of power and the role of political behavior and institutions in social reproduction, and a processual approach that highlights conflict, contradiction, and change. Significantly, political anthropology has been distinguished from other fields of anthropology by its relative lack of preoccupation with “culture” as an analytical category; most political anthropologists focus instead on social inequality, institutional dynamics, and political transformation. To put it differently, political anthropologists typically think of their research sites relationally and dynamically, and not in terms of enduring difference from a purported mainstream.

Several volumes provide overviews of work in political anthropology, and together they mark shifts in the themes and approaches of the field. Swartz, et al. 1966 marks a shift from an older structuralist analysis to a focus on political processes, highlighting in particular the role of conflict, authority, ritual, and boundary-making in the politics of decolonization. Vincent 1978 also elaborates a processual approach to politics but draws attention to interest, strategy, and the role of individuals within wider political dynamics. Lewellen 1992 offers a comprehensive survey of 20th-century trends in political anthropology, whereas Vincent 1990 situates Anglophone anthropological work on politics in its broader historical context. Finally, Vincent 2002 and Nugent and Vincent 2004 are masterful collections of essays that convey the breadth of political anthropological scholarship, including the thematic continuities and shifts that comprise the field.

Lewellen, Ted C. 1992. Political anthropology: An introduction . Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.

Very useful and comprehensive overview of the history of political anthropology that illuminates shifting trends in context, from structural-functionalism, through process theory, to the impact of theoretical work on postmodernism and globalization.

Nugent, David, and Joan Vincent, eds. 2004. A companion to the anthropology of politics . Oxford: Blackwell.

Follows Vincent 2002 , offering essays on central themes in political anthropology by leading anthropologists. Themes include citizenship, cosmopolitanism, development, feminism, globalization, hegemony, identity, and postcolonialism.

Swartz, Mark, Victor Turner, and Arthur Tuden, eds. 1966. Political anthropology . Chicago: Aldline.

Essays documenting the shift from a structuralist to a processual approach to political analysis, with a particular focus on contexts of decolonization.

Vincent, Joan. 1978. Political anthropology: Manipulative strategies. Annual Review of Anthropology 7:175–194.

DOI: 10.1146/annurev.an.07.100178.001135

Review essay that highlights work on strategy, interest, and individual agency in wider political processes.

Vincent, Joan. 1990. Anthropology and politics: Visions, traditions, and trends . Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press.

Wide-ranging critical review of Anglophone political anthropology from 1879 to the present, situating it in national and international contexts of production, and considering how intellectual, social, and political conditions have influenced the field. Also examines reasons for the survival of particular schools of thought and the influence of certain individuals and departments.

Vincent, Joan, ed. 2002. The anthropology of politics: A reader in ethnography, theory, and critique . Oxford: Blackwell.

A masterful collection of essays that includes key Enlightenment texts whose ideas continue to find resonance within anthropological work on politics, classics in political anthropology, and contemporary works organized under imperialism and colonialism, and under cosmopolitics. Also includes an extremely useful introduction by Vincent on trends, continuities, and ruptures in political anthropology.

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

• Archaeology

• 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.

• An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
• An Introduction to Medical Anthropology
• What Is Ethnomusicology? Definition, History, and Methods
• Anthropology Defined
• Introduction to Sociology
• Definition of Idiographic and Nomothetic
• An Overview of Qualitative Research Methods
• Biography of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologist and Social Scientist
• Immersion Definition: Cultural, Language, and Virtual
• An Introduction to Visual Anthropology
• What Is Participant Observation Research?
• Conducting Case Study Research in Sociology
• What Is Ethnography?
• The Sociology of Gender
• What You Can Do With a Degree in Sociology
• Understanding Functionalist Theory

• 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.

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.

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2.1 Sociology as a Social Science

Learning objectives.

• Explain what is meant by saying that sociology is a social science.
• Describe the difference between a generalization and a law in scientific research.
• List the sources of knowledge on which people rely for their understanding of social reality and explain why the knowledge gained from these sources may sometimes be faulty.
• List the basic steps of the scientific method.

Like anthropology, economics, political science, and psychology, sociology is a social science. All these disciplines use research to try to understand various aspects of human thought and behavior. Although this chapter naturally focuses on sociological research methods, much of the discussion is also relevant for research in the other social and behavioral sciences.

When we say that sociology is a social science, we mean that it uses the scientific method to try to understand the many aspects of society that sociologists study. An important goal is to yield generalizations —general statements regarding trends among various dimensions of social life. We discussed many such generalizations in Chapter 1 “Sociology and the Sociological Perspective” : men are more likely than women to commit suicide, young people were more likely to vote for Obama than McCain in 2008, and so forth. A generalization is just that: a statement of a tendency, rather than a hard-and-fast law. For example, the statement that men are more likely than women to commit suicide does not mean that every man commits suicide and no woman commits suicide. It means only that men have a higher suicide rate, even though most men, of course, do not commit suicide. Similarly, the statement that young people were more likely to vote for Obama than for McCain in 2008 does not mean that all young people voted for Obama; it means only that they were more likely than not to do so.

A generalization regarding the 2008 election is that young people were more likely to vote for Barack Obama than for John McCain. This generalization does not mean that every young person voted for Obama and no young person voted for McCain; it means only that they were more likely than not to vote for Obama.

Wikimedia Commons – CC BY 2.0.

Many people will not fit the pattern of such a generalization, because people are shaped but not totally determined by their social environment. That is both the fascination and the frustration of sociology. Sociology is fascinating because no matter how much sociologists are able to predict people’s behavior, attitudes, and life chances, many people will not fit the predictions. But sociology is frustrating for the same reason. Because people can never be totally explained by their social environment, sociologists can never completely understand the sources of their behavior, attitudes, and life chances.

In this sense, sociology as a social science is very different from a discipline such as physics, in which known laws exist for which no exceptions are possible. For example, we call the law of gravity a law because it describes a physical force that exists on the earth at all times and in all places and that always has the same result. If you were to pick up the book you are now reading—or the computer or other device on which you are reading or listening to—and then let go, the object you were holding would definitely fall to the ground. If you did this a second time, it would fall a second time. If you did this a billion times, it would fall a billion times. In fact, if there were even one time out of a billion that your book or electronic device did not fall down, our understanding of the physical world would be totally revolutionized, the earth could be in danger, and you could go on television and make a lot of money.

People’s attitudes, behavior, and life chances are influenced but not totally determined by many aspects of their social environment.

redjar – Cheering – CC BY-SA 2.0.

For better or worse, people are less predictable than this object that keeps falling down. Sociology can help us understand the social forces that affect our behavior, beliefs, and life chances, but it can only go so far. That limitation conceded, sociological understanding can still go fairly far toward such an understanding, and it can help us comprehend who we are and what we are by helping us first understand the profound yet often subtle influence of our social backgrounds on so many things about us.

Although sociology as a discipline is very different from physics, it is not as different as one might think from this and the other “hard” sciences. Like these disciplines, sociology as a social science relies heavily on systematic research that follows the standard rules of the scientific method. We return to these rules and the nature of sociological research later in this chapter. Suffice it to say here that careful research is essential for a sociological understanding of people, social institutions, and society.

At this point a reader might be saying, “I already know a lot about people. I could have told you that young people voted for Obama. I already had heard that men have a higher suicide rate than women. Maybe our social backgrounds do influence us in ways I had not realized, but what beyond that does sociology have to tell me?”

Students often feel this way because sociology deals with matters already familiar to them. Just about everyone has grown up in a family, so we all know something about it. We read a lot in the media about topics like divorce and health care, so we all already know something about these, too. All this leads some students to wonder if they will learn anything in their introduction to sociology course that they do not already know.

How Do We Know What We Think We Know?

Let’s consider this issue a moment: how do we know what we think we know? Our usual knowledge and understanding of social reality come from at least five sources: (a) personal experience; (b) common sense; (c) the media (including the Internet); (d) “expert authorities,” such as teachers, parents, and government officials; and (e) tradition. These are all important sources of our understanding of how the world “works,” but at the same time their value can often be very limited.

Personal Experience

Let’s look at these sources separately by starting with personal experience. Although personal experiences are very important, not everyone has the same personal experience. This fact casts some doubt on the degree to which our personal experiences can help us understand everything about a topic and the degree to which we can draw conclusions from them that necessarily apply to other people. For example, say you grew up in Maine or Vermont, where more than 98% of the population is white. If you relied on your personal experience to calculate how many people of color live in the country, you would conclude that almost everyone in the United States is also white, which certainly is not true. As another example, say you grew up in a family where your parents had the proverbial perfect marriage, as they loved each other deeply and rarely argued. If you relied on your personal experience to understand the typical American marriage, you would conclude that most marriages were as good as your parents’ marriage, which, unfortunately, also is not true. Many other examples could be cited here, but the basic point should be clear: although personal experience is better than nothing, it often offers only a very limited understanding of social reality other than our own.

Common Sense

If personal experience does not help that much when it comes to making predictions, what about common sense? Although common sense can be very helpful, it can also contradict itself. For example, which makes more sense, haste makes waste or he or she who hesitates is lost ? How about birds of a feather flock together versus opposites attract ? Or two heads are better than one versus too many cooks spoil the broth ? Each of these common sayings makes sense, but if sayings that are opposite of each other both make sense, where does the truth lie? Can common sense always be counted on to help us understand social life? Slightly more than five centuries ago, everyone “knew” the earth was flat—it was just common sense that it had to be that way. Slightly more than a century ago, some of the leading physicians in the United States believed that women should not go to college because the stress of higher education would disrupt their menstrual cycles (Ehrenreich & English, 1979). If that bit of common sense(lessness) were still with us, many of the women reading this book would not be in college.

During the late 19th century, a common belief was that women should not go to college because the stress of higher education would disrupt their menstrual cycles. This example shows that common sense is often incorrect.

Steven Depolo – Female Black College Graduates Cap Gown – CC BY 2.0.

Still, perhaps there are some things that make so much sense they just have to be true; if sociology then tells us that they are true, what have we learned? Here is an example of such an argument. We all know that older people—those 65 or older—have many more problems than younger people. First, their health is generally worse. Second, physical infirmities make it difficult for many elders to walk or otherwise move around. Third, many have seen their spouses and close friends pass away and thus live lonelier lives than younger people. Finally, many are on fixed incomes and face financial difficulties. All of these problems indicate that older people should be less happy than younger people. If a sociologist did some research and then reported that older people are indeed less happy than younger people, what have we learned? The sociologist only confirmed the obvious.

The trouble with this confirmation of the obvious is that the “obvious” turns out not to be true after all. In the 2008 General Social Survey, which was given to a random sample of Americans, respondents were asked, “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days? Would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” Respondents aged 65 or older were actually slightly more likely than those younger than 65 to say they were very happy! About 40% of older respondents reported feeling this way, compared with only 30% of younger respondents (see Figure 2.1 “Age and Happiness” ). What we all “knew” was obvious from common sense turns out not to have been so obvious after all.

Figure 2.1 Age and Happiness

Source: Data from General Social Survey, 2008.

The news media often oversimplify complex topics and in other respects provide a misleading picture of social reality. As one example, news coverage sensationalizes violent crime and thus suggests that such crime is more common than it actually is.

Wikiemedia Commons – CC BY-SA 2.0.

If personal experience and common sense do not always help that much, how about the media? We learn a lot about current events and social and political issues from the Internet, television news, newspapers and magazines, and other media sources. It is certainly important to keep up with the news, but media coverage may oversimplify complex topics or even distort what the best evidence from systematic research seems to be telling us. A good example here is crime. Many studies show that the media sensationalize crime and suggest there is much more violent crime than there really is. For example, in the early 1990s, the evening newscasts on the major networks increased their coverage of murder and other violent crimes, painting a picture of a nation where crime was growing rapidly. The reality was very different, however, as crime was actually declining. The view that crime was growing was thus a myth generated by the media (Kurtz, 1997).

Expert Authorities

Expert authorities, such as teachers, parents, and government officials, are a fourth source that influences our understanding of social reality. We learn much from our teachers and parents and perhaps from government officials, but, for better or worse, not all of what we learn from these sources about social reality is completely accurate. Teachers and parents do not always have the latest research evidence at their fingertips, and various biases may color their interpretation of any evidence with which they are familiar. As many examples from U.S. history illustrate, government officials may simplify or even falsify the facts. We should perhaps always listen to our teachers and parents and maybe even to government officials, but that does not always mean they give us a true, complete picture of social reality.

A final source that influences our understanding of social reality is tradition, or long-standing ways of thinking about the workings of society. Tradition is generally valuable, because a society should always be aware of its roots. However, traditional ways of thinking about social reality often turn out to be inaccurate and incomplete. For example, traditional ways of thinking in the United States once assumed that women and people of color were biologically and culturally inferior to men and whites. Although some Americans continue to hold these beliefs, these traditional assumptions have given way to more egalitarian assumptions. As we shall also see in later chapters, most sociologists certainly do not believe that women and people of color are biologically and culturally inferior.

If we cannot always trust personal experience, common sense, the media, expert authorities, and tradition to help us understand social reality, then the importance of systematic research gathered by sociology and the other social sciences becomes apparent.

The Scientific Method

As noted earlier, because sociology is a social science, sociologists follow the rules of the scientific method in their research. Most readers probably learned these rules in science classes in high school, college, or both. The scientific method is followed in the natural, physical, and social sciences to help yield the most accurate and reliable conclusions possible, especially ones that are free of bias or methodological errors. An overriding principle of the scientific method is that research should be conducted as objectively as possible. Researchers are often passionate about their work, but they must take care not to let the findings they expect and even hope to uncover affect how they do their research. This in turn means that they must not conduct their research in a manner that “helps” achieve the results they expect to find. Such bias can happen unconsciously, and the scientific method helps reduce the potential for this bias as much as possible.

This potential is arguably greater in the social sciences than in the natural and physical sciences. The political views of chemists and physicists typically do not affect how an experiment is performed and how the outcome of the experiment is interpreted. In contrast, researchers in the social sciences, and perhaps particularly in sociology, often have strong feelings about the topics they are studying. Their social and political beliefs may thus influence how they perform their research on these topics and how they interpret the results of this research. Following the scientific method helps reduce this possible influence.

Figure 2.2 The Scientific Method

As you probably learned in a science class, the scientific method involves these basic steps: (a) formulating a hypothesis, (b) measuring and gathering data to test the hypothesis, (c) analyzing these data, and (d) drawing appropriate conclusions (see Figure 2.2 “The Scientific Method” ). In following the scientific method, sociologists are no different from their colleagues in the natural and physical sciences or the other social sciences, even though their research is very different in other respects. The next section discusses the stages of the sociological research process in more detail.

Key Takeaways

• As a social science, sociology presents generalizations, or general statements regarding trends among various dimensions of social life. There are always many exceptions to any generalization, because people are not totally determined by their social environment.
• Our knowledge and understanding of social reality usually comes from five sources: (a) personal experience, (b) common sense, (c) the media, (d) expert authorities, and (e) tradition. Sometimes and perhaps often, the knowledge gained from these sources is faulty.
• Like research in other social sciences, sociological research follows the scientific method to ensure the most accurate and reliable results possible. The basic steps of the scientific method include (a) formulating a hypothesis, (b) measuring and gathering data to test the hypothesis, (c) analyzing these data, and (d) drawing appropriate conclusions.

For Your Review

• Think of a personal experience you have had that might have some sociological relevance. Write a short essay in which you explain how this experience helped you understand some aspect of society. Your essay should also consider whether the understanding gained from your personal experience is generalizable to other people and situations.
• Why do you think the media sometimes provide a false picture of social reality? Does this problem result from honest mistakes, or is the media’s desire to attract more viewers, listeners, and readers to blame?

Ehrenreich, B., & English, D. (1979). For her own good: 150 years of the experts’ advice to women . Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

Kurtz, H. (1997, August 12). The crime spree on network news. The Washington Post , p. D1.

Sociology Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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The significance of studying anthropology, sociology, and Political…

• ➢ Anthropology broadens your horizon and changes your perspectives.
• ➢ Anthropology is relevant.
• ➢ Anthropology is useful
• ➢ Anthropology helps us to deal with complexity
• ➢ Anthropology is interesting
• ➢ Sociology makes you a different person from the rest.
• ➢ Sociology helps us understand that individuality and in dependence are highly valued in our society.
• ➢ As a discipline, Sociology involves the description and explanation of social structures and processes.
• ➢ Sociological research also reveals the multifaceted nature of social reality, its multiple causes and multiple effects.
• ➢ By studying Sociology, we can become aware of underlying social dimensions in political, economic and legal systems.
• ➢ Understanding social behavior and social processes are important in a democratic country.
• ➢ Sociology tell us that health is a human right.
• ➢ Sociology tell us that religion and technology are also human forms of expressions.
• ➢ Sociology tell us that education contributes to the development of individual’s capacities for active participation in community life.
• ➢ Sociology provides valuable information about race and its impact to p-resent
• ➢ Political science deepens knowledge and understanding of students in the field of government and politics.
• ➢ Political science trains students to develop critical skills.
• ➢ Political science helps students to obtain practical knowledge and insights on political issues. It has been called “Queen Of the science.”
• ➢ Political science helps the students to understand why people behave the way they do politically.

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

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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.

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?

• 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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• Introduction
• Rubrics for Grading