Anthropology 100 Basics
Terms
undefined, object
copy deck
- values and standards of cultures differ and deserve respect, all features of a culture need to be observed without bias, answer to the problem of ethnocentrism
- cultural relativism
- connects everything, attempts to look at all aspects, not just one, looks at the big picture
- holistic
- focuses on institutions, rules, structures wich have a function in keeping society running, British school of thought
- socio-cultural system
- biological, studies evolution and our origins and assumes that we are a species that evolved, we seperated from chimps about 8 million years ago
- Physical anthropology
- sometimes called prehistory, studies the origins of production and human remains, covers 10% of our species' history
- archaeology
- sometimes call socio-anthropology, has two practices: ethnography and ethnology
- Cultural anthropology
- father of anthropology, Argonauts of the West Pacific: statistic documentation by concrete evidence (everything that can be observed by the senses), inponderabilia of actual life (penetrating the mental attitude), corpus inscription (natives point of view)
- Bronislaw Malinowski
- focuses on values, beliefs, symbols, interpretations, American school of thought
- Ideational sysytem
- study of language, we believe language is uniquely human, most languages haven't been properly documented
- Linguistic anthropology
- art and symbolism emerged
- 40 000 years ago
- research strategy that emphasizes the observer's rather than the native explanations, categories or criteria of signivicance, outsiders point of view, intended to be more objective
- etic
- archaeology, physical, linguistic, cultural
- four fields of anthropology
- research strategy that focuses on native explanations and criteria of significance, from the people's point of view
- emic
- compare ethnographies, comparison of data to analyze and make generalizations
- ethnology
- collection of data about a specific people, fieldwork, involves observing way of life
- ethnography
- people thought that non-western society would disappear because of onslaught of western dominance, anthropology started as a salvage operation, small-scale societies are seen as pure societies
- why was anthropology originally created
- adaptave, shared, learned, symbolic, integrated
- 5 characteristics of culture
- there were other sapien types
- 28 000 years ago