Anthropology in the Global World

Question 1

The Study of Humanity

Answer 1

• The study oof humans (anthropos ‘humans’, logos ‘the study of’)
• Our unifying interest is the study of humanity and the human condition
• What it is to be human.
• The study of humans, both biologically and culturally, in whatever form, time period, or region of the world they might be found.

Question 2

Defining Anthropology

Answer 2

• The discipline focuses on humanity in broad sense — from evolutionary origins, to languages, social organization and cultures (past and present)
• Anthropology is the study of people, their origins, their development, and their contemporary variations.
• Anthropology is the study of people, their origins, their development, and their contemporary variations.
• Social and cultural anthropology
  
  • British anthropology was (historically) social anthropology; interested in how societies are organized (structured)
    
    • politics, religions, institutions that govern peoples choices
  • American anthropology was (historically) culutural anthropology; interest in beliefs in values
    
    • They were interested in culture, universal human nature, all people are progressing toward the same developed state.
• The culture concept unites the discipline.
  
  • not written rules, social structures

Question 3

Is Anthropology a Science

Answer 3

• Anthropology is an empirical discipline
• It is classified as a ‘social science’
• Most biological anthropologists and archaeologists consider themselves scientists
• So do many linguists and cultural anthropologists . But some consider what the do akin to philosophy

Question 4

Physical Anthropology

Answer 4

• This sub-field specializes in the diversity of human biology (past and present)
  
  • Considers how culture influences biology/ evolution
• Three main branches
  
  • Paleoanthropology
    
    • early evolution people, fossil evidence, cognitive evolution
    • reconstructing the evolutionary record of the human species
  • Primatology
    
    • evolution in social behaviour in non-human primates, helped bring context of what it means to be humans
    • focuses on our nearest living relatives, namely apes, monkeys, and prosimians
  • Human variation
    
    • variation within and between populations, biological and cultural adaptations to the environment
    • studies how and why the physical traits of human populations vary throughout the world
    • Today, we know that the amount of genetic variation is much greater within racial groups than between racial groups. In other words, human biological races do not exist.
    • In their investigations of how human biological variations influence adaptation, biological anthropologists draw on the work of three allied disciplines: genetics (the study of inherited physical traits), population biology (the study of the interrelationships between population characteristics and environments), and epidemiology (the study of the causes, occurrence, distribution, transmission, and control of disease in populations over time).

Question 5

Archaeology

Answer 5

• This sub-field focuses upon the diversity of past human societies
  
  • Prehistoric archaeology
    
    • Societies prior to writing
    • Pre-contact archaeology can be considered a branch of prehistoric archaeology in that it examines cultures—mostly those in the Americas—before contact with Europeans. Should be noted some did have writing systems.
  • Historical archeology
    
    • Societies subsequent with writing
    • help to reconstruct the cultures of people who used writing, and about whom historical documents have been written.
  • Ethnoarcheology
    
    • studying extent societies, going to talk to people, understand how they use the material good they have to help explain archaeological record.
  • CRM or public archaeology
    
    • Protection and management of cultural heritage sites
    • eals with the protection and management of archaeological and historical cultural heritage resources, such as landmarks, historic buildings, artefacts, and archaeological sites
    • Cultural resource management has grown so rapidly in recent years that, today, about half of all professionally trained archaeologists work in this field.
• Modifications to the environment and material cultures
• Use material remains to reconstruct social organization and culture.
• Archaeologists work with three types of material remains: artifacts, features, and ecofacts.
• the archaeologist seeks to determine such things as how the people supported themselves, whether they had a notion of an afterlife, how roles were allocated between men and women, whether some people were more powerful than others, whether the people engaged in trade with neighbouring peoples, and how lifestyles have changed over time.

Question 6

Anthropological Linguistics

Answer 6

• The branch of the discipline that studies human speech and language is called anthropological linguistics.
• Language is central to the transmission of culture
  
  • The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
    
    • Language determines out thought, influence on us and cultural beings
• Sub-areas
  
  • Historical linguistics
    
    • language as a marker of historical change
    • deals with the emergence of language in general, and how languages have diverged over time
  • Descriptive linguistics
    
    • study of sound systems, grammatical systems, and meaning, describing language
    • Every culture has a distinctive language with its own logical structure and set of rules for putting words and sounds together for the purpose of communicating.
    • the task of the descriptive linguist is to compile dictionaries and grammar books for previously unwritten languages.
  • Ethnolinguistics, or cultural linguistics
    
    • relationship between language and culture
    • In any language, certain cultural aspects that are emphasized (such as types of snow among the Inuit, cows among the pastoral Maasai, or automobiles in North American culture) are reflected in the vocabulary.
    • Moreover, ethnolinguists explore how different linguistic categories can affect how people categorize their experiences, how they think, and how they perceive the world around them.
  • Sociolinguistics
    
    • relationship between language and social relations,
    • sociolinguists are interested in investigating how social class, age, gender, and ethnicity influence the choice of words a person speaks, and how people use different forms of a language

Question 7

Cultural Anthropology

Answer 7

• This subfield is all about the study of diversity of human culture
• Anthropologist Micheal Herzfeld argues that central anthropology is the study of ‘common sense’
• 2 branches
  
  • Ethnography
    
    • study of a group, collective, society, in depth, figure out how they orgaize their world
    • The anthropological description of a particular contemporary culture by means of direct fieldwork.
  • Ethnology
    
    • Takes information from different ethnographic account and compares them, and in doing that tries to develop thesis on what people have in common, why they differ.
    • The comparative study of cultural differences and similarities.
    • Every culture has created a medical system of healing
    • The primary objective of ethnology is to uncover general cultural principles, that is, the “rules” that govern human behaviour.
• The writing of large numbers of ethnographies has provided an empirical basis for the comparative study of cultures.
• societies are comprised of numerous groups, each with their own subculture. To understand these subcultures, ethnographers must explore their relationship to the larger dominant culture.
• Cultures also undergo continual change, and much of contemporary ethnography looks at the forces of change, the impact these forces have on cultures, and how people deal with them.

Question 8

Urban anthropology

Answer 8

• the study of people in more complex urban social systems.
• How does this change human societies
• assess the impacts cities have on traditional rural societies, and follow rural people into the cities to see how the two systems interact.
• focused on social problems

Question 9

Medical anthropology

Answer 9

• studies the relationship of biological, environmental, and socio-cultural factors to health, disease, and illness, now and in the past.
• Medical anthropologists with a more biological focus tend to concentrate on interests such as the role of disease in human evolution, nutrition, growth and development, and paleopathology (the analysis of disease in ancient populations).
• Medical anthropologists with more social or cultural interests focus their studies on ethnomedicine (belief systems of ethnic groups about disease, its diagnosis, treatment, and prevention), medical practitioners, and the relationship between traditional and Western medical systems.
• Contemporary medical anthropology represents both the biological and the socio-cultural approaches, but we should not think of them as separate and autonomous
• system of healing are culturally universal, how healing is achieved, social inequalities that lead to disparities in health outcomes

Question 10

Development anthropology

Answer 10

• use anthropological perspectives and methods, and work within local institutions to understand problems and needs.
• They are also able to assess the qualitative effects of projects on local communities often ignored by quantitative economic approaches.
• how can we adjust programs so they are most likely to succeed in an area.
• The criteria for success depend on the benefits for the local populations, such as less poverty, equitable economic growth, environmental protection, and respect for human rights
• development anthropologists are becoming more involved in the entire development cycle, which includes project identification, design, budgetary considerations, implementation, and evaluation.

Question 11

Environmental or ecological anthropology

Answer 11

• Humans adaptations to the environment, rapid change
• examine how human populations interact with the environment and, by so doing, develop solutions to current and future environmental problems.
• What role does the physical environment play in the formation and evolution of cultures? How do specific socio-cultural groups perceive, manage, and modify their environments, particularly in response to changing environmental conditions?
• contemporary anthropologists have expanded their research interests to include theories and approaches useful for addressing contemporary problems of environmental degradation.
• Often, environmental anthropologists assist policy makers and planners by providing valuable insights into the local cultures of the people who are negatively affected by environmental changes.

Question 12

Psychological anthropology

Answer 12

• ways in which culture affects identity, personality, social relationship, psychologically driven
• looks at the relationship between culture and the psychological makeup of individuals and groups.
• examine how culture may affect personality, cognition, attitudes, and emotions, focusing on such problems as symbolism, cognition, and consciousness in specific societies
• Cognitive anthropology

Question 13

Guiding Principles

Answer 13

• Holism
• Comparative Approach
• Ethnocentrism
• Cultural Relativism (also particularism)
• Emic vs etic approaches

Question 14

Areas of Specialization

Answer 14

Urban anthropology
Medical anthropology
Development anthropology
Environmental or ecological anthropology
Psychological anthropology

Question 15

Holism

Answer 15

• Understanding things in the broadest context
• looking at cultures not simply as a collection of parts, but as wholes.
• Accounting for human societies:
  
  • in terms of shared biological, social and ideational processes
  • Across evolutionary time
  • In whatever place we find people (environment)
• the accumulated information from all over the world has become so vast that most anthropologists have needed to become more specialized or focused. This is called a problem-oriented research approach.

Question 16

Comparative Approach

Answer 16

• By observing the range of possibilities and seeking patterns of similarities and differences between cultures, anthropologists attempt to understand why these similarities and differences exist.
• Ethnology (though ethnography is all based on some comparative assumptions)
  
  • ethnography is about focusing your study in one place or group
  • ethnology looks for commonalities and differences between a large demographic.
• Looking for similarities and differences across groups
• Cross-cultural comparison also helps us understand issues facing many cultures worldwide, such as the impact of globalization, environmental changes, and issues regarding human rights and inequality.
• Searching for general patterns and/or an accounting of human diversity
  
  • Why, is there a reason some groups have certain don’t
  • George Foster
    
    • medical anthropologist
    • he looked at all these different ethnogrpahic cases, understand systems of healing and why they differ,
    • societies in which they are naturalistic causes to illness, he grouped them together and said they seek similar way of seeking healing
    • Societies in which they are supernatural causes to illness, completely different way of seeking help.

Question 17

Ethnocentrism

Answer 17

• From ethnos (people), centr (centre) and ismos (doctrine)
  
  • Literally, perceiving the world from the correct perspective according to ‘your’ people
  • looking at the world from the perspective of one’s own culture.
  • provides a narrow view of the world, and often leads to the belief that one’s own ideas and ways of doing things are better than others’.
• Ethnocentrism is inevitable (if culture maters), goal as anthropologist is to bracket judgement to understand others.
• Ethnocentrism is the major obstacle to the understanding of other cultures, which is a major objective of cultural anthropology.

Question 18

Cultural Relativism

Answer 18

• Can’t rely on a prior assumptions about universal truths
• the notion that any part of a culture (such as an idea, a thing, or a behaviour pattern) must be viewed and judged in its proper cultural context rather than from the viewpoint of the observer’s culture
• Must view each group as a unique entity with its own set of values and patterns of behaviour
• We cannot interpret or understand other cultures by reference to own values, or from the vantage point of an outside value set
• Cultural relativism rejects the notion that any culture, including our own, possesses a set of absolute standards by which all other cultures can be judged.
• Cultural relativity is a cognitive tool that helps us understand why people think and act the way they do.
• Practicing cultural relativism, however, does not require that we view all cultural practices as morally equivalent
• our goal is to understand human behaviour in its myriad forms, then cultural relativism can help us identify the inherent logic behind certain ideas and customs that, from an ethnocentric perspective, may seem irrational, incomprehensible, or immoral.
• anthropology is involved in the social issues and political and economic struggles of the people they study.
• In recent years a branch of applied anthropology, known as advocacy anthropology, has arisen whereby anthropologists advocate on behalf of the people they study.

Question 19

Qualifiers

Answer 19

• Cultural relativism does not mean that anything goes or judgement is impossible
• It does not mean that anything members of a culture do is good/valuable
• It does not mean anthropologists have to abandon their own morals
• Cultural relativism does not mean that cultures differ in every conceivable way
• It does not mean that every way of understanding is equally valid
• Cultural relativism does not mean different cultures cannot be compared
• It does not mean that every way of understanding is equally valid — that I can say anything about anything.
• Cultural relativism does not mean that culture differ in every conceivable way

Question 20

Cultural Relativism is three things

Answer 20

• A fact. Cultures are different. This does not mean superior or inferior.
• A method. If we want to understand a culture accureatly, we must understand it on its own terms.
• A theory. The explanation of how individuals and groups come to choose particular actions and value particular things must be understood in the context of their own cultural milieu

Question 21

Emic vs Etic

Answer 21

• From linguistics
  
  • Phonetics: etic
    
    • deals with sounds
    • A perspective in ethnography that uses the concepts and categories of the anthropologist’s culture to describe another culture.
  • Phonemics: emic
    
    • sounds that are meaningful
    • A perspective in ethnography that uses the concepts and categories that are relevant and meaningful to the culture under analysis.
• Often reduced to outsider (etic) vs insider (emic)
• In terms of comparative approach and interest in finding similarities, etic and emic also refers to universal and particulars
• Marvin Harris
  
  • anthropologist
  • why you don’t eat cows in India
  • argued cows are utilitarian animals, economic incentive to not eat cows
  • not a fair account
• Nancy Sheperhuse
  
  • medical anthropologist
  • worked in high infant mortality town in Brazil
  • She wanted to understand why these mothers seemed so unconcerned.
  • Death without weeping
  • emic: if these children aren’t born healthy they dont have the will to live
  • etic: intense economic conditions, limited choices, relationships with men, socio-economic context governing a lot of choices.