Ethnology studies and compares different human cultures.
Ethnology is a science that maintains a close link with ethnography . While ethnography is responsible for making a description of cultures, ethnology starts from this data to guide the comparative analysis of cultural expressions and their origins .
Comparison of cultures
What ethnology does is develop a systematic study of cultures and then compare them, looking for links and dissidence. Among the issues that ethnologists investigate are religious rituals , family structures , economic practices , and political organization .
With its comparisons, ethnology allows us to know how the ways of acting and thinking of various ethnic groups are similar and how they differ, both in the present and in the past. Due to its characteristics, there are thinkers who maintain that ethnology is, in reality, a discipline that is part of the field of anthropology : the science focused on the social, cultural and biological traits of the human being.
It is important to highlight that culture is understood as the set of practices that allow society to be organized and the link between people and nature. Each individual, as a social being, learns these practices in their context. Ethnology is dedicated to the comparison of these processes and their manifestations through language, clothing, tools, art, etc.
Currently there are several ethnological museums that reveal different cultural habits through recordings, photographs and objects. Ethnology, in this way, contributes to the knowledge of other forms of life.
Objectives of ethnology
Ethnology arose naturally, from the inevitable curiosity to know and understand beings "different from us." The point of view of each individual is different, unique, and something similar can be said about that of each community, each society. In this way, we can define the purpose of this science as the knowledge of foreign peoples that at first glance are not similar to ours.
It is expected that each species will feel a special interest in knowing its own roots , the characteristics of other communities and individuals, to learn from the successes and mistakes of the past with the aim of building a better future.
History
There is ancient evidence of this concern; for example, already in the 5th century BC. C., the historian and geographer of ancient Greece Herodotus carried out important research that could be framed in the principles of current ethnology. Throughout history we can find many more examples, although some of them include unjust acts of violence, such as invasions with the aim of dominating other lands, something that ethnology undoubtedly does not admit.
Travel is an essential tool of ethnology.
We can also mention Marco Polo , a merchant of Italian origin born in the mid-13th century who left us various stories about his travels through the Asian continent . We passed the Renaissance, with a special interest in the study of our own species, the colonization of the current American continent and we reached the second part of the 19th century, when the founding of two schools of ethnology took place, in North America and in Germany, by the anthropologist Franz Boas and the archaeologist Leo Viktor Frobenius respectively.
The American focused on the study of the aborigines and their folklore , from which the theory of cultural areas emerged. The German, for its part, left us the concept of a cultural region . Over time, functionalist schools and intercultural studies also appeared. Two notable authors in the field of ethnology were, in chronological order, Marcel Mauss and Margaret Mead .