UCSP, Social Science, DISS

1. HISTORICAL CONTEXT:
EMERGENCE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
DISCIPLINES
Reference:
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights
reserved.
Prepared by: JESS SALVILLA

2. Anthropology: Definition
• Anthropology, the study of all aspects of human life
and culture. Anthropology examines such topics as
how people live, what they think, what they produce,
and how they interact with their environments.
Anthropologists try to understand the full range of
human diversity as well as what all people share in
common.

3. Anthropology: QUESTIONS ASKED:
• Anthropologists ask such basic questions as:
When, where, and how did humans evolve?
How do people adapt to different
environments? How have societies developed
and changed from the ancient past to the
present? Answers to these questions can help
us understand what it means to be human.
They can also help us to learn ways to meet
the present-day needs of people all over the
world and to plan how we might live in the
future.

4. Fields of Anthropology
• Cultural Anthropology
• Linguistic Anthropology
• Archaeology
• Physical Anthropology

5. Anthropolology: Historical Background
• The European Age of Enlightenment of the 17th and
18th centuries marked the rise of scientific and
rational philosophical thought. Enlightenment
thinkers, such as Scottish-born David Hume, John
Locke of England, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau of
France, wrote a number of humanistic works on the
nature of humankind. They based their work on
philosophical reason rather than religious authority
and asked important anthropological questions.
Rousseau, for instance, wrote on the moral qualities
of “primitive” societies and about human inequality.
But most writers of the Enlightenment also lacked
firsthand experience with non-Western cultures.

6. ECONOMICS: Definition
• Economics, social science concerned with the
production, distribution, exchange, and consumption
of goods and services.

7. ECONOMICS: Historical (Mercantilism)
• The development of modern nationalism
during the 16th century shifted attention to
the problem of increasing the wealth and
power of the various nation-states. The
economic policy of the leaders of that time,
known as mercantilism, sought to encourage
national self-sufficiency. The heyday of the
mercantilist school in England and western
Europe occurred during the 16th through
the early 18th centuries.

8. ECONOMICS: Historical (Mercantilism)
• Mercantilists valued gold and silver as an
index of national power. Without the gold
and silver mines in the New World from
which Spain drew its riches, a nation could
accumulate these precious metals only by
selling more merchandise to foreigners than
it bought from them. This favorable balance
of trade necessarily compelled foreigners to
cover their deficits by shipping gold and
silver.

9. ECONOMICS: Historical (Mercantilism)
• Mercantilists took for granted that their own
country was either at war with its neighbors,
recovering from a recent conflict, or getting
ready to plunge into a new war. With gold
and silver, a ruler could hire mercenaries to
fight, a practice followed by King George III
of the United Kingdom of Great Britain when
he used Hessian troops during the American
Revolution. As needed, the monarch could
also buy weapons, uniforms, and food to
supply the soldiers and sailors.

10. GEOGRAPHY: Definition
• Geography, science that deals with the
distribution and arrangement of all elements
of the earth's surface. The word geography
was adopted in the 200s BC by the Greek
scholar Eratosthenes and means “earth
description.”

11. GEOGRAPHY: Branches
• 1. Physical geography includes the following fields:
geomorphology, which uses geology to study the form and
structure of the surface of the earth; climatology, which
involves meteorology and is concerned with climatic
conditions; biogeography, which uses biology and deals
with the distribution of plant and animal life; soils
geography/Soil Management, which is concerned with the
distribution of soil; hydrography, which concerns the
distribution of seas, lakes, rivers, and streams in relation to
their uses; oceanography, which deals with the waves,
tides, and currents of oceans and the ocean floor (see
Ocean and Oceanography); and cartography, or mapmaking
through graphic representation and measurement of the
surface of the earth.

12. GEOGRAPHY: Branches
• 2. Cultural Geography. This classification, sometimes called
human geography, involves all phases of human social life in
relation to the physical earth. Economic geography, a field
of cultural geography, deals with the industrial use of the
geographic environment. Natural resources, such as mineral
and oil deposits, forests, grazing lands, and farmlands, are
studied with reference to their position, productivity, and
potential uses. Manufacturing industries rely on geographic
studies for information concerning raw materials, sources
of labor, and distribution of goods. Marketing studies
concerned with plant locations and sales potentials are
based on geographic studies. The establishment of
transportation facilities, trade routes, and resort areas also
frequently depends on the results of geographic studies.

13. GEOGRAPHY: Branches
• Cultural geography also includes political geography, which
is an application of political science. Political geography
deals with human social activities that are related to the
locations and boundaries of cities, nations, and groups of
nations.
• Military geography provides military leaders with
information about areas in which they may need to
operate. The many other fields of cultural geography
include ethnography, historical geography, urban
geography, demography, and linguistic geography.

14. GEOGRAPHY: History
• The earliest geographers were concerned with
exploring unknown areas and with describing the
observable features of different places. Such ancient
peoples as the Chinese, Egyptians, and Phoenicians
made long journeys and recorded their observations of
strange lands. One of the first known maps was made
on a clay tablet in Babylonia about 2300 BC. By 1400 BC,
the shores of the Mediterranean Sea had been
explored and charted, and during the next thousand
years, early explorers visited Britain and navigated
most of the African coast. The ancient Greeks,
however, gave the Western world its first important
knowledge relating to the form, size, and general
nature of the earth.

15. HISTORY: Definition
• History and Historiography.
• History, in its broadest sense, is the totality
of all past events, although a more realistic
definition would limit it to the known past.
Historiography is the written record of what
is known of human lives and societies in the
past and how historians have attempted to
understand them.

16. HISTORY: Approaches
• Historians have looked more and more to
the social sciences—sociology, psychology,
anthropology, and economics—for new
methods and forms of explanation; the
sophisticated use of quantitative data has
become the accepted approach to economic
and demographic studies. The influence of
Marxist theories of economic and social
development remains vital and contentious,

17. HISTORY: Definition
• as does the application of psychoanalytic
theory to history. At the same time, many
scholars have turned with sharpened
interest to the theoretical foundations of
historical knowledge and are reconsidering
the relation between imaginative literature
and history, with the possibility emerging
that history may after all be the literary art
that works upon scholarly material.

18. LINGUISTICS: Definition
• Linguistics, the scientific study of
language. It encompasses the
description of languages, the study of
their origin, and the analysis of how
children acquire language and how
people learn languages other than their
own.

19. LINGUISTICS: History
• In the early 20th century, linguistics expanded to
include the study of unwritten languages. In the
United States linguists and anthropologists began to
study the rapidly disappearing spoken languages of
Native North Americans. Because many of these
languages were unwritten, researchers could not
use historical analysis in their studies. In their
pioneering research on these languages,
anthropologists Franz Boas and Edward Sapir
developed the techniques of descriptive linguistics
and theorized on the ways in which language shapes
our perceptions of the world.

20. Political Science: Meaning
• Political Science, the systematic study of and
reflection upon politics. Politics usually
describes the processes by which people and
institutions exercise and resist power. Political
processes are used to formulate policies,
influence individuals and institutions, and
organize societies.

21. Political Science: History
• The systematic study of politics dates to ancient
times. The oldest legal and administrative code
that survives in its entirety is the Code of
Hammurabi, inscribed on a pillar of black basalt.
Hammurabi, a Babylonian king who ruled from
1792 to 1750 BC, described the laws in his code
as enabling “stable government and good rule.”
Hammurabi’s justification indicates that the
reasoning behind the code was political as well
as legal.

22. PSYCHOLOGY: Meaning
• Psychology, the scientific study of behavior and the
mind. This definition contains three elements. The first
is that psychology is a scientific enterprise that obtains
knowledge through systematic and objective methods of
observation and experimentation. Second is that
psychologists study behavior, which refers to any action
or reaction that can be measured or observed—such as
the blink of an eye, an increase in heart rate, or the
unruly violence that often erupts in a mob. Third is that
psychologists study the mind, which refers to both
conscious and unconscious mental states. These states
cannot actually be seen, only inferred from
• observable behavior.

23. PSYCHOLOGY: History
• From about 600 to 300 BC, Greek philosophers inquired
about a wide range of psychological topics. They were
especially interested in the nature of knowledge and
how human beings come to know the world, a field of
philosophy known as epistemology. The Greek
philosopher Socrates and his followers, Plato and
Aristotle, wrote about pleasure and pain, knowledge,
beauty, desire, free will, motivation, common sense,
rationality, memory, and the subjective nature of
perception.

24. Sociology: Meaning
• Sociology, the scientific study of human social
relations or group life.

25. Sociology: History
• The first definition of sociology was advanced by
the French philosopher Auguste Comte. In 1838
Comte coined the term sociology to describe his
vision of a new science that would discover laws
of human society resembling the laws of nature
by applying the methods of factual investigation
that had proved so successful in the physical
sciences. The British philosopher Herbert
Spencer adopted both Comte's term and his
mission.