(a) Elaborate the scope of anthropology and elucidate its uniqueness in the field of other social sciences. (20 marks) (b)…

(a) Scope of anthropology and its uniqueness among the social sciences

Anthropology studies humankind in totality, across time and space, as both biological and cultural beings. Its scope has four branches. Biological (physical) anthropology covers human evolution, primatology, human genetics, growth, variation and forensic anthropology. Archaeological anthropology reconstructs past cultures from material remains. Social-cultural anthropology studies kinship, economy, polity, religion and change through ethnography. Linguistic anthropology studies language in culture. Applied anthropology extends these to development, health, tribal welfare and forensics; in India the Anthropological Survey of India (1945) and the tribal studies of Verrier Elwin, S.C. Roy and Ghurye are examples.

Its uniqueness lies in five features:

• Holism: culture, biology, history and environment are studied together, from Boas's four-field tradition to the biocultural approach.
• Comparison: cross-cultural data test generalisations, as in Murdock's Human Relations Area Files and Radcliffe-Brown's "comparative sociology".
• Method: long fieldwork and participant observation (Malinowski, 1922) yield the insider (emic) view, whereas sociology relies more on surveys and statistics.
• Subject-matter: small-scale and non-literate societies, though now also cities and institutions; sociology deals with modern literate societies, economics with markets, political science with the state, psychology with the individual and history with documents.
• Cultural relativism and evolutionary time-depth, which no other social science combines.

Overlap with sociology is real, as social anthropology and sociology converge, but only anthropology links body and culture.

(b) Branches of linguistic anthropology and language in social and cultural settings

Branches: descriptive (structural) linguistics, analysing phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics; historical linguistics, using the comparative method and glottochronology (Swadesh) to trace families such as Indo-European and Dravidian; ethnolinguistics (ethnosemantics), on how language classifies culture; sociolinguistics, on variation by class, region and gender; paralinguistics and kinesics, on tone, gesture and body language; and the ethnography of communication (Hymes).

Language in social and cultural settings:

• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: language shapes thought (Whorf on Hopi time); strong determinism is rejected, a weak relativity accepted.
• Variation: dialects, registers and code-switching signal class, caste and context; Tamil diglossia separates literary and spoken forms (Ferguson).
• Politeness and hierarchy: Hindi tum/aap and Javanese speech levels encode status; avoidance language marks kin taboos.
• Pidgins and creoles such as Tok Pisin arise from contact and trade.
• Identity and power: script and language assert identity, as with Santali's Ol Chiki script and its Eighth Schedule inclusion (2003); endangered tribal languages such as Great Andamanese carry vanishing knowledge.
• Speech acts and ritual language (Austin) perform marriage, oath and curse.

(c) Chromosomal aberrations and their effects on body and mind

Chromosomal aberrations are changes in chromosome number or structure, usually from meiotic errors such as nondisjunction. Their effects are severe because they alter many genes at once.

Numerical: trisomy 21 (Down syndrome, about 1 in 700 births, risk rising with maternal age) causes intellectual disability, hypotonia, epicanthic folds, a single palmar crease and heart defects. Trisomy 18 (Edwards) and 13 (Patau) are lethal in infancy. Sex-chromosome aneuploidies: Turner (45,X) gives short stature, webbed neck, gonadal dysgenesis with infertility and specific spatial-cognitive deficits; Klinefelter (47,XXY) gives tall stature, small testes, infertility and learning and language difficulties. Triploidy is lethal.

Structural: deletion of 5p causes cri-du-chat syndrome (cat-like cry, microcephaly, severe intellectual disability); deletion of 15q11-q13 gives Prader-Willi syndrome (obesity, intellectual disability) or Angelman syndrome, depending on parent of origin; the 9;22 translocation (Philadelphia chromosome) causes chronic myeloid leukaemia; Robertsonian 14;21 translocation causes familial Down syndrome.

Detection and prevention: karyotyping, amniocentesis, chorionic villus sampling and cell-free DNA screening, with genetic counselling.