THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE ANTHROPOLOGISTS IN THE EXPANSION OF ANTHROPOLOGY
During a short visit to Chittagong Hill Tracts almost 50 years ago, the renowned French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss came to a conclusion that Anthropology has a very wider scope and research potential in Bangladesh. And subsequently, as part of his recommendation, Dhaka University opened a separate Department of Sociology where social scientists were assigned to teach anthropology at a very limited level at the universities.
Realizing the importance and significance of anthropological research further, Professor AK Nazmul Karim also reiterated the same view saying that Sociology in Bangladesh must be Social Anthropology in some years to come and accordingly, he suggested, for an incorporation of the anthropological data for the social investigation of the smallest rural communities of Bangladesh.
Being so influenced by his writings, several sociologists and social scientists in the country have thus employed the anthropological techniques in analyzing the socio-cultural dimensions of the smaller rural social system in Bangladesh.
However, anthropology as a separate academic discipline has started emerging quite late in the country due to several administrative and technical planning problems. It is only at the beginning of 1990, that the discipline received its institutional recognition as having been opened as separate departments in the universities in Bangladesh. But there is no denying of the fact that the discipline is still in its infantile stage having debates and controversies in its methodological expansion and development.
There are quite a number of anthropologists in the country whose research entirely depends on the qualitative ethnographic data, which however, were supplemented by a little use of some statistical information. In the last few decades, there has been a significant development in the methodologies of applied anthropology in Bangladesh.
The main idea of this changed procedure is to gather anthropological data at a comparatively shorter period of time; but, it has been refuted by many ethnographers today. The new- comers however, want to argue that too much dependence on traditional ideas of obsolete academic paradigm of anthropology in a sense hampers development-oriented research.
More from Article
The controlled use of fire, first achieved at least half a million years ago, is one of the great innovations in human culture.
Family is one kind of social micro unit. Most of the time when a person thinks of the definition of a family, the image of a mother, father and children is what comes into the mind. That is actually the definition of a nuclear family, which is parents, and one or more children.
It is the holistic emphasis of cultural anthropology that distinguishes it most clearly from other related disciplines. For example, an anthropologist may focus his or her research on a particular dimension of culture, such as religion or political organization, but that dimension will also be described in terms of its relationship to the "complex whole" of the local culture.
In modern sense, by ‘evolution’ is meant any change in the heredetary endowments. An understanding of the biological processes all for understanding the concept of ‘GENE’ which is vital to life process.
Symbolic interactionism developed from the same tradition and yielded several excellent sociological ethnographies, including Shared Fantasy by Gary Alan Fine, which documents the early history of fantasy role-playing games. But even though many sub-fields and theoretical perspectives within sociology use ethnographic methods, ethnography is not the sine of the discipline, as it is in cultural anthropology.