Barcelona, Spain

Social and Cultural Anthropology

Antropología Social y Cultural

Bachelor's
Language: SpanishStudies in Spanish
Subject area: social
University website: www.ub.edu/
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humans and human behaviour and societies in the past and present. Social anthropology and cultural anthropology study the norms and values of societies. Linguistic anthropology studies how language affects social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the biological development of humans.
Social
Living organisms including humans are social when they live collectively in interacting populations, whether they are aware of it, and whether the interaction is voluntary or involuntary.
Anthropology
Anthropology has reached that point of development where the careful investigation of facts shakes our firm belief in the far-reaching theories that have been built up. The complexity of each phenomenon dawns on our minds, and makes us desirous of proceeding more cautiously. Heretofore we have seen the features common to all human thought
Franz Boas (1898/1975) Facial paintings of the Indians of northern British Columbia. p. 4
Anthropology
Cultural anthropology is not valuable because it uncovers the archaic in the psychological sense. It is valuable because it is constantly rediscovering the normal.
Edward Sapir Cultural Anthropology and Psychiatry (1932), p. 515
Anthropology
Economics and cultural anthropology … have as their clear presuppositions one or the other of the two states of nature. Locke argued that man’s conquest of nature by his work is the only rational response to his original situation. … Economics comes into being as the science of man’s proper activity, and the free market as the natural and rational order. … Rousseau argued that nature is good and man far away from it. So the quest for those faraway origins becomes imperative. … What economists believe to be things of the irrational past—known only as underdeveloped societies—become the proper study of man, a diagnosis of our ills and a call to the future. … Economists teach that the market is the fundamental social phenomenon, and its culmination is money. Anthropologists teach that culture is the fundamental social phenomenon, and its culmination is the sacred. Such is the confrontation—man the producer of consumption goods vs. man the producer of culture, the maximizing animal vs. the reverent one.
Allan Bloom (1987) The Closing of the American Mind. p. 361-363
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