- What is ethnology?
- Goals of ethnology
- Importance of ethnology
- Difference between ethnology and ethnography
We explain what ethnology is, its origins, history, importance and objectives. Also, its differences with ethnography.
What is ethnology?
Ethnology is one of the social Sciences, very close to anthropology (sometimes considered as one of its branches), which is dedicated to the systematic study and comparison of cultures current and past. Thus, it draws conclusions regarding fundamental concepts of the society human: diversity culture, kinship relations and family organization, religiosity, or economic and subsistence systems, among others.
For ethnology, all human manifestations are equally important. For this reason, it does not discriminate between cultural or intangible assets and material or tangible assets, since they are all the result of human organization and its values fundamental.
However, it is common for this discipline to be interested today in unconventional human manifestations, that is, typical of small, isolated towns or traditional rural societies, in opposition to what is considered as the dominant civilizing tendency.
This preference responds, in part, to the origins of ethnology at the beginning of the 19th century. At that time, it was considered an organized set of descriptions, data, annotations and stories that concerned the “exotic customs” of the “strange peoples”. The quotation marks indicate that these are very relative considerations, and in scientific terms, very unobjective: based on what values to distinguish a “strange” people from a normal one?
For this reason, ethnology changed its foundations in the twentieth century, rejecting the use of frequent terms in its founders, such as "wild" or "primitive", since they started from considering Europe and Western culture as the "normal", "advanced" or "civilized": a criterion that ended up legitimizing racist criteria as science and ethnocentric from the European imperial era.
Goals of ethnology
The objective Fundamental of ethnology could be understood as the description and comparison of different human cultures, with the purpose of understanding and recording the diversity of our species. In that sense, it is a very old objective, which very different cultures approached at the time.
For example, in ancient Greece the geographer and historian Herodotus (484-425 BC), studied the differences and contrasts between Greeks and Persians or Egyptians. The difference is that current ethnology aspires to do so by techniques endowed with scientific validity, that is, universal, verifiable and that do not depend on the subjectivity of the researcher.
For this, in general, ethnology has a research method known as ethnography.
Importance of ethnology
Ethnology offers the species human a knowledge of herself and the possibilities of learning that this entails. In other words, by comparing the directions that different cultures take, with their successes, failures, difficulties and differences, we can approach the human in a more complete and complex way than simply inquiring into our own culture.
Ethnology, today, is a discipline that allows humanity to forge its vision of itself, and not so much, as before, the study of "others" or "different". Hand in hand with history, the sociology and other human-centered social sciences, constitutes one of the main contemporary sources of reflections on who we are and of inputs for museums and the interpretation of our past.
Difference between ethnology and ethnography
As we saw, ethnology is a social science. On the other hand, ethnography is a systematic research method, put at the service of ethnology and social anthropology. Thus, an ethnologist can at the same time be an ethnographer, but not necessarily vice versa.
Ethnography proposes the direct observation of the cultural practices of a human group, often even taking part in them, in order to study discourse (what people say) and practice (what people do), through tools like dialogue, note-taking, recording, etc. Thus, it is a field study method, which goes directly to the thing, instead of being mediated through books.