CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

10th October 2019

TRANSLATION

Anthropology is the science/ study of mankind. On the other hand,

according to the Greek etymology of the word “anthropos”, which
stands for “man” and “logos”, which stands for “talk”, anthropology is
the “speech about man”. Anthropology is the opposite of cosmology (the
science of the universe) and theology (the science of the nature of God).
In order to understand the meaning of modern anthropology in regard
with the old connotations of the word, in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
the people engaging in gossip and unnecessary chatter were called
“antropologoi”, which alluded to the fact that they were tacky.
Nowadays, anthropologists try to synthetize information about ‘man’ at
the highest level of educational standards and try to modernize these
concepts through different methods, by combining a vast range of
disciplines such as: archeology (or paleontology), biology, history,
sociology, language studies and philosophy from which they acquire the
vision, as well as the methods. Their overly-comparative and
encyclopedic discourse makes anthropologists “primi inter pares” (“a
senior member”) by putting the pieces of knowledge and
representations of “man” back together in an essential and specific
manner, through the form of holistic and eclectic discourse. It shouldn’t
come as a shock that Thierry de Duve begins his study of the arts at the
end of the XX’s century (“In the name of art: for modernist archeology”)
with an allegorical anecdote about the descent to Earth of an
extraterrestrial anthropologist who attempts to define art by explaining
the way it is a result of a fundamental need of human beings; and that is
anthropology as a discipline: the one that paints the picture of the
structure and the basic profile of “man”, from the same perspective that
an omniscient being from outer space would have, if that were to be
possible.

Nonetheless, general anthropology currently entails physical

anthropology (paleontological anthropology, raciology, human genetics,
etc.), as well as cultural anthropology (ethnography/ethnology as the
study of human groups and primitive/peripheral institutions, or studies
of complex societies referring to aesthetical, ethical, socio-political and
economical, educational, jurisdictional, religious anthropology; or,
minding the models of philosophical language, what is globally known
as structural anthropology in the European tradition), basic
anthropology is used by specialists to convey physical anthropology
alone, which derives from the natural sciences and follows the biological
union and evolution of human beings on Earth in a scientific way, at
least in contrast with the considerations of the “ontological” entity of
humanity, for example, in regard with the divinity that was created to be
similar to God and free to form itself in agreement with God. These
considerations refer to theological anthropology.
Physical anthropology is opposite to cultural anthropology in its
narrowness of ethnology and ethnography. From a larger perspective,
general anthropology implies a diversity of systematical,
anthropological. On one hand, they are structured by what Kant
considers to be the speculation of “human physiology” (with a passive
tone, implying what nature does to “man”). On the other hand, they are
structured by what Kant named the “practical perspective”, or what the
Lycans today refer to as the “perspective of ‘man’ as an active subject of
the plot, or the discourse”.
Amongst the objects of discourse, anthropology is part of the following:
“homo biologicus” – gradual, in all of its instances, all the way to the pre-
historical human (the hominids of the Homo sapiens species), or,
opposingly, the contemporary and evolved man called “homo faber”,
“homo simbolicans” (the ‘man’ who can create or express his own
significance), “homo economicus/ homo politicus, and lastly, if ‘man”
can succeed in maintaining his unaltered authenticity as a being with its
own purpose, through art, he is “homo autenticus”.
Leaving aside official definitions, one could make the distinction
between the studies that Anthropology covers by, on one hand,
referring to the entirety of studies that surround ‘man’ in his daily life,
including his own, self-adjusted environment, but only if the deterrent is
passed onto man in a passive manner. On the other hand, cultural
anthropological studies that are circumscribed to material creations and
to the human spirit, culture, therefore the ones that are a product of
active social interaction among human civilization.