Cultural anthropology: the subject of research and structure

This scientific discipline can not be unequivocally qualified, because the very subject of its investigation is ambiguous. That is why in modern interpretation cultural anthropology is considered both in the broad sense and in the narrow one.

In a broad sense, this scientific discipline examines the life activity of various peoples and races, depending on the types of culture characteristic of these peoples. In this sense, it should not be confused with physical anthropology, which as a subject of science uses predominantly generalized psychophysical properties of societies. Cultural anthropology, which studies the various manifestations of human life from the point of view of their mediation by the very nature of the human race, differs from philosophical anthropology.

In a narrow sense, this scientific discipline is comparable to social anthropology, since the objective orientation of research is approximately the same for them. Both of them study, first of all, various social institutions that are present in the life activities of different peoples and social communities.

As a confirmation of this thesis can be that social and cultural anthropology have similar methodological apparatuses. They use research methods that, besides them, are widely used by other social sciences - ethnography, history, sociology, ethnopsychology, statistics and others.

Actually cultural anthropology deals with the following cognitive tasks:

- Description of customs, traditions, languages, patterns of thinking and behavior of different peoples;

- study of trends in the development of interactions between cultural spaces and peoples inhabiting them;

- consideration of issues related to the study of identification criteria of peoples and communities in contemporary cultural diversity;

- study of the genesis of cultural institutions of different peoples and their comparison in the space-time dimension;

- deepening the understanding of the culture of its people or community and its place in cultural diversity;

- study of the nature, methods and manifestations of the influence of cultural phenomena of the people on the formation of an individual world outlook of the population;

- a study of the very nature of cultural and ethnic phenomena in all its contradictory manifestations.

It should be emphasized that in the Western scientific tradition, the term "cultural anthropology" is treated even more narrowly, at the level of independent teaching, which is mentioned under the definitions of "culturalism", "historical school", whose authors and developers are Fr. Boas, E. Sapir, A. Kreber, R. Benedict, M. Herskovits. This teaching is characterized by the descriptiveness and juxtaposition of the cultural phenomena of different peoples in their integrity for the purpose of comparison. Methodologically, this is solved by collecting current scientific information about the life of a particular nation (community), its classification, grouping around some leading feature and identifying the dominant factors. As a result of this scientific approach, culture becomes, as it were, an indisputable basis for ensuring survival for any people or society.

As a scientific phenomenon, this discipline is characterized by:

- a sharp denial of evolution in general and the kind of cultural development of peoples in particular;

- a pronounced cultural relativism - the desire to assess the phenomena of culture, based on the values and criteria of this culture itself;

- special attention to the problem of human-cultural interaction, where the role of the surrounding society is not accepted at all;

- the reducibility of all cultural phenomena to a certain integrity, which makes it possible, without special difficulties, to identify the cultural genotype of the people and compare it with others.

Thus, this scientific discipline is a complex substratum, where complexity is determined both by the multiplicity of approaches to isolating the subject of research, and by the variety of methodologies used to obtain knowledge. It turns out that cultural anthropology explores a wide range of issues.