list review 1 and 2

Question 1

What are the three fundamental questions asked by Anthropology?

Answer 1

• What are our origins?
• How do we explain human behavior?
• How will the decisions we make today change who we are tomorrow?

Question 2

What are three important subfields of Anthropology?

Answer 2

• Paleontology
• Archeology
• Cultural anthropology

Question 3

What are the three reasons why the study of culture is both fascinating and frustrating?

Answer 3

• Humans are a complex species
• We are a species which is always changing
• The invisibility of culture

Question 4

What are the four main contributions that culture makes to our lives?

Answer 4

• Foundation of social identity (gender ethnicity)
• Goals to pursue (the better you’re at at something the more highly your thought of)
• Explanation of reality (natural and supernatural reality/science, religion, or both?)
• The meaning of life (the values which make life worth living religion, freedom, material wealth, etc)

Question 5

What are the three main ways in which we are enculturated? What is the main purpose of enculturation?

Answer 5

• Ethics: informal rules of life (how to get along with people)
• Laws and customs: formal rules of society
• Symbolic communication: abstract instructions of ways to behave, ideas to believe in and values to hold to show belonging to a social network (culture)
• Main purpose: to reproduce culture

Question 6

What are the three main forms of Symbolic Communication?

Answer 6

a.) Language
- We use these abstractions to keep up with changes in society
- Disclude and include exclusion
b.) Gestures
- How close we stand to each other
- Do we shake their hand
- Convey information symbolically
c.) Objects
- Material culture -> clothes, food, technology, body decoration

Question 7

What are the two main categories of symbols? Give an example of an explicit and implicit symbol.

Answer 7

• Explicit: symbols that have one meaning that we all accept that once you learn it everyone agrees (not controversial) (traffic light)
• Implicit: different meanings to different people depending which side you are on create a tremendous amount of emotional outrage (swastika)

Question 8

What are the four themes of cultural analysis?

Answer 8

• Adaptation and change: we use culture to adapt to the world and to change the world
• Similarities and differences: cultures that are thousands of miles apart do the same thing with similar beliefs (eat, speak, etc)
• Specificity and holism: as and record lots of details and questions about their lives. The more we know about the culture the more we understand. It’s meaningless in the end unless you can put them all together in the end.
• Connect local, regional and global: work in small environment to get a better understanding

Question 9

Explain the four critical issues addressed by Anthropology in the 1970s.

Answer 9

a.) Only male anthropologists/informants
- They were men because women didn’t go to college
- 1960s more and more women went to college
b.) Ethnographic present
- The past
- Throughout the decade it would take a long time to get places ships camel walk then because it takes such a long time you spend a long time there and a long time to get home
- By the time people listen to our lectures the way they lived in the past we were
- Do something to make sure our work is updated
- 1970 transportation and communication is upgraded we can do things faster communication is more sophisticated
c.) Power/colonialism/ racism
- Treated people we wrote about as less than
- World war II ended prior to the war was the age of colonialism
- All of these colonial powers in asia and india were gone they told anthropologists to leave they became independent countries
(We fixed this by treating people like equals and they should trust us)
d.) The “savages” learn to read
- After WWII global effort to spread education around the world
(They could read and critique our work now we had to be so careful that we got everything right)

Question 10

What are four reasons why we should study anthropology?:

Answer 10

• The greater your understanding of the human family the greater your understanding of who you are
• The greater the understanding of other people the greater the enjoyment of interaction with some people and cultures
• The greater understanding of other cultures the greater the opportunity for employment