Fitzwilliam College Foundation Lecture 2015 - Professor Maurice Bloch - 'The contributions of British social anthropology to the human sciences'
Duration: 1 hour 5 mins
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| Description: | Fitzwilliam College Foundation Lecture 2015. Professor Maurice Bloch, speaking at Fitzwilliam College on 19 November 2015. |
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| Created: | 2016-10-05 09:32 | ||
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| Collection: | Fitzwilliam College lectures | ||
| Publisher: | Fitzwilliam College | ||
| Copyright: | Fitzwilliam College | ||
| Language: | eng (English) | ||
| Distribution: |
World
(downloadable)
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| Keywords: | Social anthropology; Human sciences; Human societies; | ||
| Credits: |
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| Explicit content: | No | ||
| Abstract: | The study of human beings is a vast field to which many academic disciplines contribute. They may claim parts of this field as their own though practitioners know perfectly well that the boundaries between disciplines are arbitrary and the result of an accumulation of accidents. In this lecture I want to forget about criticisms of disciplines and simply look back to see what contribution British social anthropology has actually made to the vast enterprise of the study of our species. I will look at two linked contributions which are in danger of being lost. The first one is that British social anthropology has brought to the general study of humans the taking into account of people, once labelled primitives, whom the traditional methods of the human sciences do not know how to know. The second is that British social anthropology has faced what is an essential yet difficult theoretical necessity when we study humans. This is the need to relate a scientific point of view, which explores the nature of the social human, as if from the outside, with an understanding from the inside of the personal point of view of the people studied. Perhaps the greatest contribution of this kind of anthropology to the scientific study of humans is finding a place for humility. |
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