Basel, Switzerland

Anthropology

Language: English Studies in English
Subject area: social
University website: www.unibas.ch/
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humans and human behaviour and societies in the past and present. Social anthropology and cultural anthropology study the norms and values of societies. Linguistic anthropology studies how language affects social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the biological development of humans.
Anthropology
Cultural anthropology is not valuable because it uncovers the archaic in the psychological sense. It is valuable because it is constantly rediscovering the normal.
Edward Sapir Cultural Anthropology and Psychiatry (1932), p. 515
Anthropology
Economics and cultural anthropology … have as their clear presuppositions one or the other of the two states of nature. Locke argued that man’s conquest of nature by his work is the only rational response to his original situation. … Economics comes into being as the science of man’s proper activity, and the free market as the natural and rational order. … Rousseau argued that nature is good and man far away from it. So the quest for those faraway origins becomes imperative. … What economists believe to be things of the irrational past—known only as underdeveloped societies—become the proper study of man, a diagnosis of our ills and a call to the future. … Economists teach that the market is the fundamental social phenomenon, and its culmination is money. Anthropologists teach that culture is the fundamental social phenomenon, and its culmination is the sacred. Such is the confrontation—man the producer of consumption goods vs. man the producer of culture, the maximizing animal vs. the reverent one.
Allan Bloom (1987) The Closing of the American Mind. p. 361-363
Anthropology
Anthropology is destined to revolutionise the political and the social sciences as radically as bacteriology has revolutionised the science of medicine.
M.G. de Lapouge cited in: Thorstein Veblen (1898) "Why is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science" in: The Quarterly Journal of Economics Volume 12, 1898.
EU partners are developing a toolbox of instruments for use in environmental research in the Danube region. The effort will also benefit stakeholders and the local population.
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