Social vs. cultural

 

Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behavior in human societies and cultures.

 

Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of a posited anthropological constant.

 

The Cultural view of society and culture, look at people today and in the past in the large social and cultural setting, including social and cultural evolution. This includes human interaction within the social and natural environment using what necessary of that interaction to provide for themselves and future generations. The use of power, politics, economics within social institutions.

 

Whereas cultural anthropology focused on symbols and values, social anthropology focused on social groups and institutions.

 

Historical anthropology is a historiographical movement which applies methodologies and objectives from Social and Cultural Anthropology to the study of historical societies.

 

Historical sociology is a branch of sociology focusing on how societies develop through history. It looks at how social structures that many regards as natural are in fact shaped by complex social processes. Social history, Branch of history that emphasizes social structures and the interaction of different groups in society rather than affairs of state.

 

Human social evolution sees each human culture evolving in its own way by adaptation to diverse environments: different 'pathways' of evolutionary development followed by different societies. The process of cultural development as an adaption to nature's resources through technological breakthroughs, as well as coping with outside cultural influence. Through this adaptation process, cultures form new traits called "inventions," and new items are made available from outside cultures through "diffusion.

Human adaptation is both biological and cultural processes that enable a population to survive and reproduce within a given or changing environment.  We need to look at social and cultural setting that are constantly evolving  throughout  while examining each system and its components and how they interact.

 

In  studying the overall relationship between the economy, production and distribution of good and services we consume. We look closely at the interaction between the overall economic structures have on the rest of society and the influence non-economic structures have on the economy and how they change over time.

 

 

In our sociological analysis  we develop a working hypothesis of embeddedness, which can be defined as the economic relations within existing social relations and how economic relations are structured by an interaction between economic relations and all the other social structures of which those relations are a part.

 

 

Both Marx and Polanyi would agree economics is simply the way members of society meet their material needs.  Marxism looks at the social relation evolve over time within and between societies. In Marxism there is an interaction between economics and everything else in society, but in the final analysis it is economics that have the greater historical influence.

 

Anthropologists embraced the position of substantivism as empirically oriented free of classical western political economy and the  cultural assumptions that bias the study of much of traditional academic economics. The economy is embedded in social relations and are formed by the value and responsibilities  of those social relations.

 

Political anthropologists focus their research on circumstantial and contextual social environment  specific to the overall political processes and the mechanism social groups are related to and incorporated into social assemblages and the cultural values people bring into to those relationships politically.

 

 

Political sociology is the study of power relationships between social groups, communities, larger societies, nation states, and the use of that power in political struggles over who gets what. In these conflicts. It works closely with political anthropology, political science and other field within sociology.

 

Political economy is the study of production, distribution and consumption and how this affects trade, war, social struggles and their relations with law, custom and government,  over the distribution of national  and international income and wealth.