HISTORICAL TRENDS IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL THOUGHT
Anthropological thought deals with theories developed and contributions made by different anthropologists. Literature available suggests that the man, his culture and society, have been subject of study right from the time of Herodotus, a Greek traveler and philosopher (c.484 B.C.-425 B.C.).
Evolutionary school on the basis of old and new doctrines put forth by its followers, can be divided into two: Classical Evolutionary School and Neo-evolutionary School. When evolutionary theory emerged in anthropology, many schools came into being; this began to claim themselves as anti-evolutionary schemes. The major critics were diffussionists. They were not convinced by progress, concept of physic unity, and parallel development of culture or cultural parallelism. They were of view that culture not only developed but it is also degenerated.
Both schools of evolution and diffussion were historically-oriented. They explained cultural growth which had taken place in past, but could not explain why and how development .took place. Malinowski, a British anthropologist, criticized both evolutionists and diffussionists. According to him, no cultural traits were functionless. They consist of a’ body of institutions related to the current adaptive needs of man. Malinowski developed the theory of functionalism to explain social phenomenon.
He was more interested in the study of present and now, than past and then. Radcliffe-Brown, another British anthropologist and contemporary of Malinowski, developed the concept of social structure deals with the study of status and role of person within an institution. In other words, it deals with network of social relations within an institutional framework.
Julian Steward pleaded for multilinear evolutionism, which establishes sequences of parallel developments that could be investigated in empirical reality. It was Steward's thesis that societies, within similar technology existing in similar environment, would parallel one another in their forms of social and political organization.
Various new approaches to the study of evolution called attention to the question, how to combine particulars with generals, or how the study of individual cultures could yield meaningful information about culture writ large. The issue became sharpened by the writings of Marvin Harris, who emphasized upon Radcliffe-Brown's earlier distinction between nomothetic and ideographic approaches to the study of culture. Harris has dealt with contrast between 'etic' and 'emic' approaches in his book, Rise of Anthropological Theory (1968). These termed were coined by the linguist Kenneth Pike, utilizing the last part of the words 'phonetic' and 'phonemic'. In linguistics, phonetics is description of all speech sounds as produced by human speech organs, while phonemics is the sorting out of these sounds in order to arrive at their distinctive differences.
Now-a-days several anthropological sub-fields have developed, stressing a separate and specific cultural aspects, and all using the prefix 'ethno' to indicate their alliances with culture, such as ethno-science, ethno-musicology, ethno-botany, ethno-zoology, ethno-medicine, ethno-psychology, ethno-ecology, ethno-folklore and so forth. Ethno science, thus accounts for cultural relationships in terms of the information used by members of a culture in their linguistic categories.
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