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A. R. Radcliffe-Brown
(1881–1955)Radcliffe-Brown was one of the most influential of the founding figures of social anthropology, through his teaching in universities in England, North America, South Africa, and Australia. ...
Annales School
[Th]A French school of historical thought, established by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in the late 1920s and developed by Fernand Braudel in the 1950s and 1960s, which focuses on the idea of the ...
anomie
The state of a person or group of people who lack any ethical or social guidance to regulate their behaviour. Lawlessness.
anthropology
In philosophical usage, a general theory of human nature, sometimes thought to be the necessary foundation of history and all social sciences. The philosophy of anthropology considers such issues as ...
anti-urbanism
An intellectual current and strand of social science writing which is critical of the city as a social form. Negative attitudes to urbanization—and the ‘pastoral myth’ of the countryside—predate the ...
Arnold Van Gennep
(1873 –1957)Born in Germany and educated in France, van Gennep was an anthropologist and folklorist with a strong interest in linguistics and comparative religion. His early work focused on ...
Auguste Comte
(1798 –1857)A French philosopher who, with Claude-Henri Saint-Simon, founded positivism as a philosophy of science, an ideology of progress, and a humanist religion. Comte also coined the term ...
Bronislaw Malinowski
(1884–1942)Polish-born British anthropologist who developed the functionalist approach to social anthropology, which sought to explain social phenomena in terms of their functional ...
Celestin Charles Alfred Bouglé
(1870–1940)A close associate of Émile Durkheim who undertook studies of egalitarianism, democracy, socialism, a general study of social values (The Evolution of Values, 1922), and a review of ...
classification
[Th]The ordering of archaeological data into groups (e.g. categories, classes, types) using various ordering systems. Monothetic classification is based on all the defined attributes being present ...
Claude Lévi-Strauss
(1908– )French anthropologist and structuralist. Educated in law, Lévi-Strauss received a doctorate in philosophy at the Sorbonne. He was appointed to a French university mission to Brazil, serving ...
collective conscience
Defined by Émile Durkheim as ‘the body of beliefs and sentiments common to the average of members of a society’, it comprised a form and content which varies according to whether society is ...
collective representations
The ideas, beliefs, and values elaborated by a collectivity and that are not reducible to individual constituents. They are central to Émile Durkheim's search for the sources of social solidarity. ...
commonsense knowledge
The routine knowledge people have of their everyday world and activities. Different sociological approaches adopt different attitudes to commonsense knowledge. The concept is central to Alfred ...
communitarianism
n. an approach to ethical problems that rejects excessive emphasis on the individual and focuses instead on social cohesion and community interests, arguing that every single person is embedded ...
community
Many sociological and anthropological definitions exist, but most tend to privilege some combination of small-scale, relative boundedness, strong affective ties, traditionalism, and face-to-face ...
comparative method
A method of testing hypotheses about causal relationships, or establishing social types and classes, by looking at the similarities and differences between phenomena, societies or cultures. It could, ...
comparative sociology
All sociology is implicitly comparative, since social phenomena are invariably held in some way to be typical, representative, or unique, all of which imply appropriate comparison. Émile Durkheim was ...
conscience collectif
A term, meaning ‘collective conscience’, used by Émile Durkheim to define the beliefs and feelings that are common to members of a society. The collective conscience of a people or population is ...
contingency theory
Suggests that the effectiveness of an organization is dependent upon managers taking into account various factors that can impact in a negative or positive manner on the organization—the main ...
