sciences studying society, often based on observations of his contemporaries and compatriots.Thus, the researcher has the same scientific paradigm, such as the moral setting, culture and values, and that the object of his study.He lived in the same community, and watched him as if from the "inside", "view jeweler" isolating laws and levers that affect the people (members of society).
But the problem is incredibly complicated, when it came to other groups of people who are remote from the researcher cultural abyss.This included the study of contemporary Australian Aboriginal societies or primitive tribes, the ancient culture of the Greeks and Romans.Sometimes even the motivation of acts of medieval man seems to us incomprehensible.In this situation, a social anthropologist must temporarily "withdraw" from their community to know and understand those who live quite different laws and concepts.This approach can be called "learning from the desk chair."
Social Anthropology, whose founders are the Mauss and Emile Durkheim, the study of isolated communities and cultures, later divided into two main areas.The first can be described as "positivist evolyutsionalizm."Its main representatives - J. Fraser, E. Taylor and G. Morgan.They proceeded from the position of the society from lower to higher forms.Consequently, the "primitive people", other cultures have for them only a moment, a step, and sometimes the dead end of human development.
In the early twentieth century social anthropology has developed a fundamentally different approach - the neo-Kantian anti-scientism, whose authors (R.Loui and others) called the method predecessors' trip to the zoo. "This trend was continued in the "understanding", interpretive (E. Evans-Pritchard, Geertz), "symbolic" (B. Turner), "cognitive" anthropology (S. Thaler, Mary Douglas).In the study of "other" cultures researcher must reject "curve" of modern man, but keep the respect for the people he is studying.The fact that society has no concept of private property, individualism and career does not make the members of this society "nedolyudmi", some hominids or "Martians."Understand man of a particular time or culture - the main approach in this direction.
Social anthropology as a science about society and its impact on the individual greatly enriched, thanks to the work of Claude Levi-Strauss.He founded a humanitarian for this discipline as structuralism.Taking the specific temporary "cut", the scientist to isolate the "structure" - for example, women, attitudes toward people of other faiths and other similar "strata".Structural approach gave rise to gender studies (Mead), and allowed to study and certain "subculture" of our contemporary society of large cities (goths, punks, hippies and others).
Social Anthropology seeks not to study the structures and mechanisms, but to the knowledge of man in his social spatiality.If we approach the individual, as a blank slate on which society writes its own laws, we shall thus devalue it.The eternal struggle and harmony between man and the society in which he lives, the study of mechanisms of their interaction - these are the main objects of study in social anthropology.In today's society there is no "primitive peoples" as well as "strange freaks", but each culture deserves respect and tolerance.
