Ethnology

From Free net encyclopedia

Image:COTWnew.png This is a candidate to be a collaboration of the week.
Please see this page's entry to support or comment on the nomination.

Ethnology (Greek ethnos: people) is a genre of anthropological study, involving the systematic comparison of the folklore, beliefs and practices of different societies. Compared to ethnography, the study of single groups through direct contact with the culture, ethnology is seen as more scholarly because it takes the research that ethnographers have compiled and then compares and contrasts different cultures to develop textbooks or research papers.

Among its goals are the reconstruction of human history, and the formulation of cultural invariants, such as the alleged incest taboo and culture change, and the formulation of generalizations about "human nature", a concept which has been criticized since the 19th century by various philosophers (Hegel, Marx, structuralism, etc.).

In some parts of the world (like the USA and Great Britain) it is also referred to as cultural anthropology, however ethnology is not only a single part of cultural anthropology. Ethnology has been considered as a scientific discipline since the late 18th century but can be generally applied to any comparative study of human groups.

The 15th century "discovery of America" had an important role in the new Occidental interest toward the Other, often qualified as a "savages", which was either seen as a brutal barbarian or as a "noble savage". Thus, civilization was opposed in a dualist manner to barbary, a classic opposition constitutive of the even more commonly-shared ethnocentrism. The progress of ethnology, for example with Claude Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology, led to the criticism of conceptions of a linear progress, or the pseudo-opposition between "societies with histories" and "societies without histories", judged too dependent on a limited view of history as constituted by accumulative growth.

Lévi-Strauss often referred to Montaigne's essay on anthropophagy as an early example of "ethnology". Lévi-Strauss aimed, through a structural method, at discovering universal invariants in human society, which he thought was the prohibition of the incest. However, the claims of such universal cultural invariants have been criticized by various 19th and 20th century thinkers, among whom Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault, Althusser or Deleuze.

Contents

[edit]

List of scholars of ethnology

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.
[edit]

References

[edit]

See also

[edit]

Websites relating to ethnology

be:Этналёгія da:Etnologi de:Ethnologie es:Etnología fr:Ethnographie he:אתנולוגיה it:Etnologia ja:文化人類学 ms:Etnologi sk:Etnológia sv:Etnologi uk:Етнографія zh:民族学


Template:Ethno-stub

Retrieved from "http://www.netipedia.com/index.php/Ethnology"