Ethnology

Image that represents some objects that can be housed within the study of discipline. Permanent Rooms Valencian Museum of Ethnology, Valencia

The ethnology (in ancient Greek, ἔθνος, ethnos meaning 'nation') is the social science that studies and compares the different peoples and cultures of the ancient and present world. Some authors consider it a discipline and research method of anthropology.

Ethnology systematically studies and seeks to establish comparative relationships between the characteristics of different human peoples from different aspects such as:

1. Cultural Diversity: Ethnology conceives culture as a plurality and in opposition to nature. Thus, the study of culture obliges the analysis of the relationships that unite and separate both dimensions in human societies and also to clarify what is universal in man and what is arbitrary in his behavior, generating a reflection on the links that unite natural laws with cultural rules.
2. Parentesco between different societies and their influences.
3. Subsistence and economic systems of cultures or civilizations.
4. Religion and transcendental symbolic expression.
5. Family organization, social and political systems.

Authors such as Manuel Marzal (1998: 16) maintain that Cultural Anthropology, Social Anthropology and Ethnology are the same discipline.

The evolution of ethnology

The way of understanding and conceiving ethnology has varied according to the historical moment, the place and the theoretical schools that have investigated it.

A few years ago it was considered that ethnology was the study of "unwritten" or "unmechanized" societies, not to say "primitive"... But immediately the term "primitive" was rejected by its pejorative connotations and because the thought of the authors of the nineteenth century linked it to the idea of societies close to the state of nature, "save" or "bárbaras"... Since the “primitive” disappears from the vocabulary of the human sciences and the peoples to whom it is described are in the process of disappearing, it should be asked whether the object of study of ethnology remains valid

Lombard, 1997 (p. 17-18).

So, today ethnology is going to be related, rather, to the field of society and strange cultures, small communities, etc. Normally traditional rural societies. According to Jesús Buxó (in Aguirre Batzán, 1993 275) "it is the study of how and why different ethnic groups resemble or differ in their ways of thinking and acting in the past and at present".

• Marcel Mauss: If Dittmer touched History, this author (from which I will later speak) is associated with the field of Sociology. And it takes as a field of study the societies that populate the French colonies and societies in a similar state of development.

• Lévi-Strauss: grants that Ethnology and Anthropology begin worrying about wild or primitive societies. Adding that other sciences share this interest (downloading the ethnology of the monopoly of that responsibility) and that there is a curious and strange phenomenon: that Anthropology develops as wild societies disappear.

• Pierre Bourdieu: Recognizes that the scientific method posed by ethnology applies to the object of study of sociology to discuss the Eurocentric point of view with which the differentiation between civilized societies and primitive societies applies. Thus, as a Social Science, the end of the ethnological study is to understand human diversity by recognizing cultural differences among different groups, apart from stigmatizing approaches to non-Westernized peoples.

Ethnography as a research method of ethnology

Ethnography consists of two phases: the first is the ethnographic process and the second is the ethnographic product; In both phases, different steps and moments of cultural research are covered, for the analysis and organization of the data that will finally serve the ethnologist for the writing of the text.

The ethnographic process consists of four steps:

1. Demarcation of the topic or the field
2. Preparation and documentation
3. Field research
4. The conclusion.

The ethnographic product is composed of three phases:

1. Analysis and organization of ethnographic material
2. The choice of the type of monograph,
3. The wording of the text.

• "Guide of study for admission to Bachelor's Degrees", National School of Anthropology and History, INAH-CONACULTA, Mexico.

Ends of ethnology

The fundamental objective of ethnology is to know distant peoples that seem different from us (classical urban societies of the 21st century). This objective is nothing new, since already in the classical world historians such as Herodotus described the differences and oddities of customs in the Persians or Egyptians. Or what to say about Marco Polo and his travels through Asia during the Middle Ages. Or the interest that arises in the Renaissance, to which we do add the anthropocentric interest in knowing and learning about the human being,

Regarding its history, it should be noted that towards the end of the XIX century two schools of ethnology were founded in United States (Franz Boas) and in Germany (Leo Frobenius). The first carried out studies of the folklore of the North American aborigines and brought to light the theory of cultural areas, while the second introduced the expression "kulturkreis" (cultural region). Later on, functionalist schools arose (led by Bronisław Malinowski and Alfred Reinaldo Radcliffe-Brown) and intercultural studies (by Murdock, Whiting and Edward Burnett Tylor).

As for relevant authors, one could mainly cite Marcel Mauss, a French sociologist and anthropologist considered the father of French ethnology. Durkheim's nephew and disciple, he is the author of the influential Essay on the Gift. The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies (1925).

Scientific discipline

In comparison to ethnography, the study of individual groups through direct contact with culture, ethnology takes the research that ethnographers have compiled and then compares and contrasts different cultures.

Adam František Kollár, 1779

The term ethnologia (ethnology) is attributed to Adam Franz Kollár (1718-1783) who used and defined it in his "Historiae ivrisqve pvblici Regni Vngariae amoenitates" published in Vienna in 1783, as: "the science of nations and peoples, that is, that study of the wise in which they investigate the origins, languages, customs and institutions of various nations, and finally of the homeland and ancient headquarters, in order to better judge nations and peoples in their own time."

Kollár's interest in linguistic and cultural diversity was sparked by the situation in his native multi-ethnic and multilingual Kingdom of Hungary and his roots among its Slovaks, and by the changes that began to emerge after the gradual withdrawal of the Ottoman Empire in the most distant Balkans.

Among the goals of ethnology have been the reconstruction of human history, and the formulation of cultural invariants, such as the incest taboo and culture change, and the formulation of generalizations about "human nature" 34;, a concept that has been criticized since the XIX century by various philosophers (Hegel, Marx, structuralism, etc.). In some parts of the world, ethnology has developed along independent paths of research and pedagogical doctrine, with cultural anthropology becoming dominant especially in the United States, and social anthropology in Great Britain. The distinction between the three terms is increasingly blurred. Ethnology has been considered an academic field since the late 18th century century, especially in Europe, and is sometimes thought of as any study comparison of human groups.