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This is the policy of deliberate agnosticism, or indifference, towards the dictates, prejudices, methods and practices of sociological analysis as traditionally conceived (examples: theories of "deviance", analysis of behavior as rule governed, role theory, institutional (de)formations, theories of social stratification, etc.).
Anthropologists began conducting ethnographic research in the mid-1800s to study the cultures people they deemed "exotic" and/or "primitive." [15]: 6 Typically, these early ethnographers aimed to merely observe and write "objective" accounts of these groups to provide others a better understanding of various cultures.
Clifford Geertz, considered a founding member of postmodernist anthropology, [1] advocates that, “anthropological writings are themselves interpretations, and second and third order ones to boot” [2] In the 21st century, some anthropologists use a form of standpoint theory; a person's perspective in writing and cultural interpretation of ...
Psychological anthropology is an interdisciplinary subfield of anthropology that studies the interaction of cultural and mental processes.This subfield tends to focus on ways in which humans' development and enculturation within a particular cultural group—with its own history, language, practices, and conceptual categories—shape processes of human cognition, emotion, perception ...
While ethnography ("ethnographic writing") was widely practiced in antiquity, ethnography as a science (cf. ethnology) did not exist in the ancient world. [10] There is no ancient term or concept applicable to ethnography, and those writers probably did not consider the study of other cultures as a distinct mode of inquiry from history. [ 11 ]
An 'etic' account is a description of a behavior or belief by a social analyst or scientific observer (a student or scholar of anthropology or sociology, for example), in terms that can be applied across cultures; that is, an etic account attempts to be 'culturally neutral', limiting any ethnocentric, political or cultural bias or alienation by ...
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.
In the social sciences and related fields, a thick description is a description of human social action that describes not just physical behaviors, but their context as interpreted by the actors as well, so that it can be better understood by an outsider.