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. ...
E. E. Evans-Pritchard
(1902–73)A leading British social anthropologist who undertook ethnographic studies of a number of African societies. He viewed social anthropology as a humanistic rather than a scientific study of ...
ethnography
The scientific study of customs, habits, and behavior of specified groups of people, usually applied to tribes or clans of people in nonliterate societies.
exchange
1. The trading of goods, stocks, shares, commodities, paper currencies, or other financial instruments.2. The place in which such trading occurs, e.g. a stock exchange or commodities exchange. This ...
fieldwork
Research conducted by social scientists among specific groups or communities, although its classic and strongest reference is to long-term anthropological research in face-to-face settings. As the ...
function
Although the use of the concepts of function and functionalism is usually associated with the work of Talcott Parsons in modern sociology, there is a long tradition of functional explanation in ...
gift relationship
Social scientists usually regard a gift as an expression of the relationship between donor and recipient. In The Gift (1954) Marcel Mauss argued that gifts are widely obligatory and reciprocal. This ...
incest taboo
The custom or law in all societies prohibiting sex and marriage between members of the nuclear family, the universality of the taboo being notoriously difficult to explain. According to the ...
James George Frazer
(1854–1941)British anthropologist and classical scholar. He was knighted in 1914 and appointed to the OM in 1925.Frazer was born in Glasgow and took his MA at Glasgow University (1874) before winning ...
Jomo Kenyatta
(c. 1891–1978)Kenyan statesman, Prime Minister of Kenya in 1963 and President (1964–78). He was imprisoned from 1952 to 1961 for alleged complicity in the Mau Mau uprising. On his release he was ...
kula ring
A ceremonial gift exchange among tribes in the western Pacific, practised alongside normal trading, functioning to establish and maintain friendly relations between islands. [From Melanesian kula]
linguistics
For much of the early history of the social sciences, linguistics was a method within anthropology for investigating the social arrangements of different cultures through the particularities of ...
Marcel Mauss
(1872 –1950)One of the major figures of twentieth-century anthropology in spite of the fact that he never received a doctorate, had no regular teaching position for most of his ...
Meyer Fortes
(1906 –1983)One of the British social anthropologists responsible for the dominance of structural-functionalism and descent theory in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Fortes was born in South Africa and ...
participant observation
[Ge]A method of research widely used in sociology and anthropology in which the researcher takes part in the activities of a group or community being studied.
phatic communion
Bronislaw Malinowski's term for speech intended to create and maintain social relations, rather than to exchange useful information. Greetings, pleasantries, and chitchat generally fall into this ...
pragmatics
1. (linguistics) A branch of semantics concerned with the communicative use and functions of language in particular social contexts, especially in conversations: see also discourse analysis; ...
Raymond William Firth
(1901 –1999)A prominent British anthropologist whose career spanned much of the twentieth century. Firth was a wide-ranging ethnographer and theorist who made major contributions in the areas of ...
Siegfried Frederick Nadel
(1903 –1956)An anthropologist noted both for important contributions to the ethnography of African societies—particularly in Nigeria and the Sudan—and for theoretical work on social structure, ...
social anthropology
[Ge]An offshoot of the general discipline of anthropology which emphasized social and cultural factors in explaining human behaviour and material culture. The British equivalent of cultural ...
