Transcript Lectures Week 1 pptx

What is Anthropology?
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From Greek anthropos (human) and logia (study)
Study of Humankind
Who we are, how we came to be that way
Social, cultural, and biological beings
Deepest time frame
– Earliest humans to present
• Greatest geographical coverage
• All aspects of human experience
Four Subfields
• Archaeology
– Historical, Prehistoric
– Resource management
• Physical Anthropology
– Paleoanthropology, Primatology
– Human variation, Forensic
• Linguistics
– Historical, Descriptive
– Ethnolinguistics, Sociolinguistics
• Social/Cultural Anthropology
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Economic
Psychological
Medical
Ecological
Urban
Political
Applied
• Ethnography
– Doing fieldwork
• Ethnographies
– Detailed description of a particular culture
• An ethnography is the anthropological
study and written description of a
particular contemporary culture by means
of fieldwork
Five Hallmarks of Anthropology
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Cultural relativism
Subjective understanding (emic vs. etic)
Holism
Fieldwork
Comparison
Cultural relativism
– Viewing other cultural practices in the context of the
cultural system
• No absolute standards
– Suspension of value judgment for the purpose of study
• Tool for understanding logic of behavior
– Opposite of ethnocentrism
• Ethnocentrism:
– Viewing other cultures through the lens of your own culture
– Judging other’s behavior based on the standards of your own
cultural assumptions and practices
– Belief that your own culture is superior to others
Subjective Understanding
How people view their own behavior – their explanation, logic
Emic: Inside, “native’s point of view”
Etic: Outside, ethnographer’s view, analysis
Theoretical approaches:
Interpretive
Behavior stems from way people perceive and
classify the world
Uses emic analysis
Materialist
Material conditions, e.g. the environment, determine
thoughts and behaviors
Uses etic analysis
Holism
Understanding that parts of culture are interrelated
Studying parts in the context of the whole
Economic
system
Artistic
expression
Belief
system
Culture
Kinship
system
Exchange
system
What is Culture?
Big ‘C’, little ‘c’
• ‘Culture’ – arts, refinements, high and low,
cultured/uncultured persons
• culture – the way of life of a people
Definitions of “Culture”:
Edward Tylor (1871):
“Culture is that complex whole
which includes knowledge,
belief, art, morals, law, custom
and any other capabilities and
habits acquired by man as a
member of society”
Clyde Kluckhohn – “Mirror for Man” (1944)
(Compiled by Geertz)
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The total way of life of a people
The social legacy the individual acquires from his group
A way of thinking, feeling, and believing
A theory on the part of the anthropologist about the way
in which a group of people in fact behave
A storehouse of pooled learning
A set of standardized orientations to recurrent problems
Learned behavior
A mechanism for normative regulation of behavior
A set of techniques for adjusting both to the
external environment and to other men
A precipitate of history
A behavioral map, sieve, or matrix
Clifford Geertz (1973)
“The concept of culture I espouse...is
essentially a semiotic one. Believing,
with Max Weber, that man is an animal
suspended in webs of significance he
himself has spun, I take culture to be
those webs, and the analysis of it to be
therefore not an experimental science in
search of law but an interpretative one in
search of meaning.”
Gary Ferraro:
• Everything that people have, think, and do
as members of a society
– Material objects
– Ideas, values, attitudes
– Behavior patterns
• Transmitted through learning
Capacity to Symbolize
• Symbol:
– Something that stands for (represents) something else
• Leslie White:
– Ability to symbolize is most important hallmark of humanity
– Culture = “things and events, dependent on symboling”
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Identify, sort, and classify things, ideas and behaviors
Language is symbol system
Shared symbols unify a group
Creativity
– Assign arbitrary meanings
– Distinguishes culture from animal behavior
Culture is:
• Shared
• Learned
• Largely unconscious
Culture is Shared
• Makes things more predictable
• Internal diversity/degrees of homogeneity
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Age, Gender
Class, caste
Ethnicity, religion
Geographical region
• Levels of generalization
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National
Regional
Local
Personal
• Subcultures
• Pluralistic societies
“We [anthropologists] have been the first to insist on a
number of things: that the world does not divide into the
pious and the superstitious; that there are sculptures in
jungles and paintings in deserts; that political order is
possible without centralized power and principled justice
without codified rules; that the norms of reason were not
fixed in Greece, the evolution of morality not consummated
in England. Most important, we were the first to insist that
we see the lives of others through lenses of our own grinding
and that they look back on ours through ones of their own.”
- Clifford Geertz
1926-2006