Sociocultural anthropology is a term used to refer to social anthropology and cultural anthropology together. It is one of the four main branches of anthropology. Sociocultural anthropologists focus on the study of society and culture, while often interested in cultural diversity and universalism.
Sociocultural anthropologists recognise a change in the nature of the field and that a previous focus on traditional tribal perspectives has shifted to a contemporary understanding. Methodologies have altered accordingly, and the discipline continues to evolve with that of society. Globalisation has contributed to the changing influence of the state on individuals and their interactions.
Overview
The rubric cultural anthropology is generally applied to ethnographic works that are holistic in approach, are oriented to the ways in which culture affects individual experience, or aim to provide a rounded view of the knowledge, customs, and institutions of a people. Cultural anthropology focuses on how individuals make sense of the world around them using knowledge, beliefs, morals, arts, laws and customs of groups.
Social anthropology is a term applied to ethnographic works that attempt to isolate a particular system of social relations such as those that comprise domestic life, economy, law, politics, or religion, give analytical priority to the organizational bases of social life, and attend to cultural phenomena as somewhat secondary to the main issues of social scientific inquiry.
Sociocultural anthropology, which is understood to include linguistic anthropology, is concerned with the problem of difference and similarity within and between human populations. The discipline arose through the expansion of European colonial empires, and its practices and theories have been questioned and reformulated along with processes of decolonization. Such issues have re-emerged as transnational processes have challenged the centrality of the nation-state to theorizations about culture and power. New challenges have emerged as public debates about multiculturalism and the increasing use of the culture concept outside of the academy and among peoples studied by anthropology.
History
The synergy of sociology and anthropology was initially developed during the early 1920s by European scholars. Both disciplines shared a common search for a science of society. During the 20th century, the disciplines diverged further to as cultural studies were integrated, centralising geographical and methodological features.
1920s-50s
'Social' and 'cultural' anthropology was developed in the 1920s. It was associated with the social sciences and linguistics rather than the human biology and archaeology studied in anthropology. Specialists in the respective fields of social and cultural anthropology were elemental in the foundations of the later developed synergy. Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski marked the point of differentiation between social and cultural anthropology in 1930, evident in texts from this period. In the 1930s and 40s, an influx of monographs and comparative studies of 'tribal societies' emerged. Meyer Fortes and Edward Evans Pritchard described and classified African societies in African Political Systems (1940). Their comparative anthology aimed to provide a basis for sociological knowledge by classifying kin-based bans instead of relying on empirical observation.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, used structuralism as a way to analyse cultural systems in terms of their structural relations, including that of kinship. In 1949, he attempted to classify marriage systems from diverse locations. Structuralism was applied to anthropology by Lévi-Strauss to reaffirms the coexistence between the individual and society and categorise information about cultural systems by the formal relationships among their elements. Structuralism remains a central concept involved in the study of sociocultural anthropology.