As we have saw in the last post, Anthropology is the study of the human being and its relationship with the socio-cultural environment that surrounds it. It is a science that virtually comprises everything, from religion to politics, passing by music, dance and sports.
Now, in order to cover all of that, Anthropology required to ramify itself; this make that each anthropologist became an specialist in any subject per se. However, in this post we will concentrate just in two of those branches, both considered the main ones on the discipline: the Physical Anthropology and Social / Cultural Anthropology.
Physical Anthropology
Also known as "Biological Anthropology", it is the study of the human beings and the species related to them, both extinct and current, in an evolutionary framework. This branch incorporates other fields of science such as Paleontology, Biology, Ecology, Forensic Medicine and Genetics (Barfield, 2010: 25). From this subdiscipline comes Forensic Anthropology and Applied Anthropology.
Social / Cultural Anthropology
This branch of anthropology has caused confusions on many occasions, especially because both, Social Anthropology and Cultural Anthropology, are focused on the socio-cultural field. Some anthropologists, including myself, believe that these subdiscipline are the same because of its object of study; nevertheless, there are others who point out the need to make a distinction by traditions of origin and the type of ethnographic work issues. About this situation, Barfield (2010), offers us the distinction reflected in the box below:
In addition to focusing on social relations, Cultural Anthropology seeks to provide insight into the knowledge, customs, and social institutions of a people through the observation. Moreover, Social Anthropology focuses in the analysis of the organizational foundations of social life, relegating cultural phenomena to a second term (Barfield, 2010: 34).
As we can see, the distinctions between these branches are a little confusing, at least from my perspective. Social Anthropology and Cultural Anthropology practically have the culture and the society as objects of study because both are interconnected elements; social relations will always be influenced by the culture in different ways, and the culture, in turn, is affected by the actions and consequences that arise from those social relations.
Cited source
Barfield, Thomas. 2010. Diccionario de Antropología. México: Editorial Siglo XXI.
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