2. Contemporary Culture

Question 1

What is the cultural lens?

Answer 1

The cultural lens is largely invisible but it’s how we view the world and learn to interact with each other.

People learn to relate to one another through a complex web of knowledge, beliefs, and practices.

Question 2

What do ethnographers seek to understand?

Answer 2

Emic: cultural insiders-view
Etic: outside observers- view

Question 3

Describe cultures three parts?

Answer 3

What we think, cognition.
All the ways we process information, perceive, understand and evaluate the world.

What we do, actions.
Interactions with each other are behavioral.
Culture guides behavior in ways that make people understand and act appropriately towards each other.

What we have, material.
Artifact, portable items, and features, non-portable items.
The things people make alter and use.

Question 4

The four characteristics of culture?

Answer 4

Learned, from people around us. Agency in choosing what aspects are meaningful.

Shared understands allows people to understand each other and act appropriately.

Holistic, if one aspect is altering the others will change as well.

Based on sympols, anything that stands for something else. Language is one example.

Question 5

Society/Group?

Answer 5

Shares a geographic space as well as similar rules and behavior.

Every culture has variations, the larger the society the more diversity exists

Societies and groups are made up of different ethnicities and subcultures aka identity markers.

Question 6

Community?

Answer 6

Either people who live and work and play together or are connected by cultural norms and values wherever they live.

Question 7

Identity markers?

Answer 7

Ethnicity/Cultural identity: socio-economic class, religion, age gender and interests

Affinity/Subcultures: People connected by similarities, like heritage or similar interests and ideas.

Question 8

Heterogeneous culture?

Answer 8

Groups/societies that share few identity markers. A diverse society with many languages, religions and ethnicities.

Question 9

Enculturation? + Primary transmitters of culture

Answer 9

Cultural knowledge is transmitted from one generation to the next in informal and formal ways.

People who have the most contact with infants or young children.

Question 10

Biological adaptations?

Answer 10

Allow an organism to survive and reproduce,

Question 11

Cultural adaptations?

Answer 11

All the ways humans use cultural knowledge to better succeed in their surroundings.

Question 12

Maladaptive?

Answer 12

Behaviors that lead to a decrease in well-being for its members of a culture or the ability for the culture itself to survive.

Question 13

Ways of assessing the adaptiveness of a culture?

Answer 13

Health - Physical and mental
Demographics _ Birth and mortality
Goods and services - Do the people have access to clean safe food and water
Order- Safety, rules for violence etc.
Enculturation - How well the culture gets passed on

Question 14

Participant Observation?

Answer 14

A researcher lives the people and observes their everyday behavior, often for a year or longer. Reflecting and analyzing their observations and putting them into a larger cultural context.

Ideal vs. real behavior
Cognitive vs. behavioral

Question 15

Ways field workers can work?

Answer 15

Formal interviews
Informal interviews
Life histories
Case studies
Kinship data
Map-making
Photography

Question 16

Principles of Professional Responsibility?

Answer 16

Consider the possible impact of their actions on the dignity, health and material well-being of the people they are studying.

Question 17

Praxis?

Answer 17

The use of ethnographic knowledge as power

Question 18

Participatory action research/PAR?

Answer 18

A model of field research and implementations

Question 19

Describe anthropology’s roots in colonial practices?

Answer 19

Knowledge was used to:
Stereotype
Control
Oppress

Question 20

Fray Bernardino de Sahagún?

Answer 20

One of the first ethnographers

• Travelled to Mexico 1529
• Spend 50 years studying the Aztec people

Question 21

John Locke end of the 1700th century? + tabula rasa

Answer 21

• First ideas that lead to the concept of culture
• Tabula rasa: We’re born as a blank slate, personality, thought and behaviors develop through life experiences and are not biologically programmed.

Question 22

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels?

Answer 22

• Published:
  Communist Manifesto 1848
  Das Capital 1867
• Focused on the poor industrial laborer
  Believed that the way people engage in production shapes their consciousness = how people think and act is related to their work

Question 23

Lewis Henry Morgan 1818-81?

Answer 23

Created a typology of all the stages of cultural evolution he believed all humans societies pass through:

Savagery -> Barbarism -> Civilization

Question 24

Edward Burnett Tylor 1832-1917?

Answer 24

Professor of anthropology at Oxford

• Wrote the first anthropology textbook
• Firat definition of culture

Evolution of religious beliefs
- Rational explanations for hoe “primitive” peoples understood the word

Question 25

Franz Boas 1858-1942?

Answer 25

“Father” of American anthropology

Experienced discrimination as a Jew

• Re-examination of racism through scientific pursuits
• Differences among people are cultural and not biological

Strongly believed in ethnographic fieldwork, to deeply understand people

Question 26

Bronislaw Maliowski 1884-1942

Answer 26

Functionalism:

Cultures function to fulfill human biological needs.

Question 27

Claude Lévi-Strauss 1908-2009?

Answer 27

Social life works due to innate structures of though

Example gift-giving led to alliances and social stability

Question 28

Victor Tuner 1920-83?

Answer 28

Symbolic anthropology:
The theory argues that symbols are used throughout society to maintain order. Like rituals, where social order is reconstructed and affirmed

Question 29

Clifford Geerts 1926-2006?

Answer 29

Thick description:
Field site in ethnography as a pathway to reading symbols like a test.

Understanding everyday behavior (codes and symbols) as the participants themselves understands them.

Question 30

Feminist anthropology?

Answer 30

Aims to correct decades of anthropology that left our women and other marginalized groups -> led to the focus of postcolonial groups

Question 31

Describe how cultural ban be fluid? Multicultural

Answer 31

Culture can be concentrated in one place, or spread across borders or virtually.

People who left their homeland and live in other places are biocultural.

Culture is not static but is always changing.

Question 32

Ethnocentrism?

Answer 32

Our own customs are normal while others are strange, wrong or disgusting.

Question 33

Cultural relativism?

Answer 33

The idea that all cultures are equally valid and beliefs and behaviors can only be interpreted in their own context.

Question 34

Depandance training?

Answer 34

Child-rearing practices that support the family unit over the individual.

Extended family

Sense of self is strongly linked to the group

Question 35

Independence training?

Answer 35

Childrearing practices that support the child’s independence.

Focus on developing skills so the child can be competitive and successful in life.

Industrial societies
Nuclear family

Sense of self is strongly linked to the individual.

Question 36

Random sample?

Answer 36

Allow everyone an equal chance to be interviewed by selecting randomly

Question 37

Judgment sample?

Answer 37

Selects informants based on skills, occupation, knowledge and sensitivity to cultural issues.

Question 38

Snowball sample?

Answer 38

One informant introduces the ethnographer to other informants

Question 39

Key informants?

Answer 39

Informants who are chosen for their special insight. The field worker will spend a lot of time with them.