Antropologia e história social da cultura: etnografia e fontes

Science of symbolic forms and foundations of social life, anthropology cannot give up to analyze art and other specialized fields of cultural production, this is the message conveyed by recent studies authored by anthropologists dealing with this universe, as well as those written by historians and sociologists who pay attention to the connections between culture, power and symbolism. Auerbach, Becker, Baxandall, Bourdieu, Geertz, Gell, Goody, Elias, Miceli, Schorske, Williams and Beatriz Sarlo: an impressive roster of authors who have been dealing, through creative insights, with the challenges concerning the autonomy and dependence of symbolic systems. Those specialists did not hesitate about the importance of including intellectual life, cultural production, art worlds and their practitioners, as legitimate anthropological objects. Other scholars have emphasized the links between language, social processes and ethnography, as well as those social and symbolic arrangements translated within the oral and written sources, the main subject of this article.