Anthropological Approach to Renaissance

Anthropology is defined as human science and in recent days it is being more important and significant for inward looking ways. The recent developments in literary theories made literature “trans-disciplinary”, new literature is no more confined in its territory rather it is interested to analyze cultural phenomena.

The impact of anthropological approach is being increased in recent decades which made the literary scholars interested in cross cultural forms like witchcraft, festival shaming rituals, patterns of gift-giving, scapegoating, kinship systems, and patterns of incest avoidance. Renaissance and early modern scholars have different attitudes towards cultural phenomena. Renaissance bent  of scholars are looking anthropological perspectives as most static models of particular cultural forms whereas scholars of early modern bent are strongly influenced by historical writing that has also become anthropological in orientation and they are analyzing the cultural currents as a more dynamic process. Bakhtin’s “Rabelais”
 can be taken as a good example of cultural dynamicity as opposed to static culture.

Post-modernist anthropology is showing its interest in the notes of ethnography; it observes the ethnographic research as the last gasp of colonialism. Post-modernist anthropology is trying to establish its relation with post modernist literary analysis; both of these fields have developed a parallel skepticism about the hermeneutic circle of interpretation.