ANTH 222 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Social Anthropology, Anti-Imperialism, Audrey Richards
Document Summary
Class 5: british social anthropology: order in the. Focus on the observation of the people"s habits and uses. Effort to document the lifeways of people on the margins of the british colonial power. Idea that the presence of missionaries was going to destroy the authenticity of these peoples. The loss for science of ways of life indicating something primordial/authentic. Observed an island society: he felt it to be a purer model of the origins of the human project. Major defect in the earlier thinking of the 19th century: even when they lacked knowledge about these societies, they engaged in imagination in order to understand what these peoples were thinking. Instead, malinowski proposed science: history, rigorous method, etc. It involved learning the language of the peoples observed, living as they lived (fishing, hunting, etc. ), talking about how they perceived things, how they organized their activities, how they regulated their social life, etc.