Ethnology

Ethnology (derived from the ancient Greek ἔθνος éthnos, German 'Volk, Volksstamm', and -logie 'doctrine'; formerly ethnology, now also social and cultural anthropology) is an empirical and comparative social and cultural science that explores the diversity of human ways of life from a perspective that is both contemporary and historically grounded.

Originally, the subject focused strongly on the coexistence of the approximately 1300 ethnic groups and indigenous peoples worldwide today. Today, the cultural practices and ideas of a wide variety of social groups and entities are the focus of its research, which is also always examined in connection with political and economic structures. Contemporary ethnology thus also investigates institutions and organizations, for example, as well as living contexts in modern industrial societies, in urban spaces, or the connection with migration. Ethnologists are also interested in how people experience the effects of globalization and actively shape the associated transformations through their own actions.

By closely immersing itself in the life and action worlds of the groups and people it studies using the method of field research, ethnology aims to decipher their specific understandings of the world and explain them - often in comparison to other cultural contexts and social collectives. In doing so, ethnology is usually less focused on the verification of theories and concepts, but rather on the generation of theories and the associated explanation of contexts of meaning. Field research today also takes place in connection with transnational online communities (netnographies, cyberanthropology).

Ethnology first emerged at ethnological museums and has been taught as an independent subject at universities since the end of the 19th century, in Germany initially as ethnology, in Great Britain as social anthropology and in the USA as cultural anthropology. In the Anglo-Saxon world, ethnology is regarded as a sub-field of anthropology (the science of man), which in continental Europe is in turn understood more as a natural science (physical anthropology) and as a sub-field of ethnological field research - no longer in common use today. In Europe, cultural anthropology is also understood as folklore, which is also referred to as European ethnology. The professional society of ethnologists in Germany is the German Society for Social and Cultural Anthropology.

Subject science and self-image

What is ethnology?

Definitions of ethnology or anthropology:

• Thomas Hylland Eriksen: "Anthropology is the comparative study of cultural and social life. Its principal method is participant observation, which consists of prolonged fieldwork in a particular social setting."
• Tim Ingold: "Anthropology is philosophy with people in it."
• Claude Lévi-Strauss: "Anthropology has humanity as the subject of its research, but unlike other sciences of man, it attempts to grasp its object by means of a wide variety of manifestations."
• Clifford Geertz: "If we want to discover what makes people human, we can only find it in what people are: And what people are is highly diverse. By understanding the diversities-their extent, their nature, their basis, and their implications-we can construct a concept of human nature, more a statistical shadow than a primitivist dream, that contains both: Substance and truth."
• Panoff and Perrin: Ethnology in the narrower sense seeks "synthetic studies and theoretical conclusions" from ethnographic documents made available to it by the work of social and cultural anthropologists in their fieldwork and general problem studies.

Perspectives

The subject cultivates certain perspectives with which it distinguishes itself from other social and cultural science disciplines and at the same time has set fundamental impulses for them.

Classically, the perspective from within (also emic perspective) played an important role, i.e. the attempt to comprehend and explain the inner reality of a cultural context and its members.

For a long time, ethnology also focused on predominantly powerless and underprivileged groups (such as minority groups, colonised or marginalised people). Today, on the other hand, socially better-off groups (e.g. social elites) are also increasingly being studied.

Thirdly, the foreign has classically been studied, while the own is only slowly moving into the field of ethnology. It was often assumed that the foreign as well as the own and the border between them were given and taken for granted. Today, following Fredrik Barth's theory of ethnicity, increasing attention is also being paid to the boundary-drawing process between the perception of the culturally own and that of the culturally foreign (e.g. in the context of ethno-cultural or national identity politics). Furthermore, it is shown that such demarcations in the context of globalization and migration are often fluid and, moreover, inextricably interwoven with other categories of difference (such as social status or gender).

Finally, central to the discipline is its self-reflexive view, which consistently examines both its own methodological procedures and the positionality of researchers in relation to the production of ethnological knowledge.

History of Science

In the 19th century, ethnology developed as a niche subject. Its subject matter was primarily those peoples and cultures that had not been studied by longer-established sciences (history, philology, Indology, etc.), but with which European colonizers, missionaries and travelers in particular very often had to deal.

Since the subject entered the universities towards the end of the 19th century, the definition of its object proved to be difficult. It was usually done defensively in demarcation from other sciences. The societies studied were often defined only by what they lacked in contrast to those constituted by the state. For this reason, the following negative or deficient definitions of the object were chosen above all:

• non-developed (= primitive) cultures,
• non-written cultures
• non-industrial crops
• non-governmental crops
• "savages", "sauvages", "savages", i.e. cultures that are not civilised by European standards and are in a "state of nature".
• non-historical and thus tradition-bound non-modern cultures
• cultures not alienated or untouched by our own western civilization
• non-European cultures

Often those societies were studied which were assumed to be threatened with extinction. In summary and in a positive light, it can be said that ethnology has developed into a science that for the most part focuses on stable, manageable small groups that are characterized by a high density of communication between all dependent members of society (face-to-face relationships) and are very often organized as relatives or quasi-relatives. Even when small groups are organized within larger social associations, they are more often a subject of ethnological research (urban ethnology, corporate ethnology).

Particularly in small groups, the method of participant observation can be used to arrive at meaningful and model-like statements without having to apply statistical and quantitative procedures. Due to the extensive and often long-lasting independence of the groups studied, on the one hand a holistic perspective was made possible in which, similar to sociology, the whole of a society can be taken into view, while on the other hand they offer the broadest possibilities for comparison, since in the ethnographies a huge wealth of experience of the most diverse forms of human life was written down in detail. Ethnology is thus particularly well suited for testing generalizations.

Ethnology in the Canon of Sciences

Influences on ethnology

Ethnology has had a lasting influence on many academic disciplines and has contributed significantly to a changed understanding of rationality, alterity, gender, or postcolonialism. Conversely, the contemporary discourse of anthropology is exposed to a multitude of theoretical currents, which in turn help shape the cognitive identity of the discipline. In the course of interdisciplinary research, disciplinary boundaries are re-explored and new configurations of knowledge emerge. The following thinkers of recent decades are particularly frequently received in anthropology:

• Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998)
• Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
• Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)
• Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)
• Edward Said (1935-2003)
• Umberto Eco (1932-2016)
• Benedict Anderson (1936-2015)
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (* 1942)
• James Clifford (* 1945)
• Bruno Latour (* 1947)
• Judith Butler (* 1956)

Ethnology and European Ethnology

A German speciality is folklore, which is also known as European ethnology or cultural anthropology as an independent subject at German-speaking universities. Folklore studies the other in one's own (German or European) culture and emphasises everyday phenomena in its approach. The focus is on the European area, whereby processes such as globalization or transnationalization have made it necessary to look beyond the borders of Europe and have led to a greater intersection with ethnology. These convergences in content and methodology, which continue to this day, have led to debates in recent years about the dividing lines between the two subjects.

Research fields of ethnology

Ethnology includes almost all social science topics as a sub-discipline, as well as natural science aspects such as ethnopharmacy or ethnomathematics. Ethnology thus claims to be an interdisciplinary basic or leading science, because the societies studied allow very far-reaching cultural comparisons due to their great historical or spatial separation. This results in a particularly good overview of the mutual dependencies and influences of social subsystems, which are otherwise usually only studied individually.

The main departments of anthropology taught in universities today are considered to be:

• Economic anthropology (economic organization)
• Ethnosociology (social organization, British: social anthropology)
• Political anthropology (political organization)
• Ethnology of Religion
• Legal Anthropology
• Medical Anthropology
• Ethnomusicology
• Kinship Ethnology
• Gender Studies (Gender Studies)
• Visual anthropology (use of media)
• Action anthropology (intervening)

Further fields of research are, for example, ethnolinguistics, ethnomedicine (with ethnopharmacology, ethnopharmacy, ethnopsychiatry, ethnopsychoanalysis), ethnoecology, ethno-dentistry, cognitive anthropology, art ethnology, ethnopedagogy and intercultural communication (see also List of Topics: Fields of Ethnology).

Today, some ethnological disciplines are also referred to as anthropology (study of human beings); for example, economic anthropology is also referred to as economic anthropology, and there is also religious anthropology, legal anthropology and music anthropology.