[MODULE 1: CULTURE AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF ANTHROPOLOGY]

[NOTES]

1.2: WHAT IS ANTHROPOLOGY

  • Anthropology is the holistic, comparative, field-based, and evolutionary study of human beings in the past and present

  • Holistic: combine theory/methods/findings from different fields with anthro theory/methods/findings– multi-disciplinary

  • Fields and subjects overlap

  • Holism is an approach that recognizes the complexity of issues/ subjects– understanding all of the components that go into that subject/issue in order to fully comprehend it

  • Comparative: compare behaviors/beliefs/cultures in time past and present and geographic locations

  • Comparing and analyzing cultural data from a variety of cultural groups, looking for contrasts or commonalities between such groups

  • Field-based: collect data about human biology, culture, beliefs, and behaviors through field research through diverse data collection methods

  • Evolutionary: understand humans have changed over time and continue to change (biology and culture)

    4 subfields:

  • Biological Anthropology: Studies humans as biological organism and compares humans to other living beings in past and present

  • Archeology: Study humans through the analysis of material remains; Mostly study humans in past

  • Linguistic: Study human language as major component of culture in the past and present

  • Cultural: Studies human in the present through variation in behavior and beliefs

  • Why is anthropology different? Perspective

1.3: HUMANS ARE BIO-CULTURAL ANIMALS

  • A central debate in the sciences has long been about whether human nature is determined by nurture (environment, inc. culture) or by nature (biology or genetics)
  • Anthropologists concluded long ago that both have contributed to the evolution of humans and both contribute to behavior in individual humans or human groups

        

LECTURE: nature vs nurture

  • BIG IDEA: Humans are bio-cultural animals

  • Bio-cultural: humans are simultaneously biological and cultural

  • Nature vs nurture

  • How much of human behavior is determined by environment vs genes?

  • John Locke said humans get traits from nurture

  • Science has come to the conclusion both contribute to behavior

  • Culture played a central role in human evolution

  • Dialectical relationship: biology and culture interact and change each other over time

FUENTES CHAPTER 1:

  •  3 common myths:

  • 1. Race: Humans are divided into biological races (black, white, Asian, etc.)

  • 2. Aggression: Removing cultural constraints reveals the violent beast within us (especially in men)

  • 3. Sex: Men and women are truly different in behavior, desires, and internal wiring.

  • the myth of male nature that creates an evolutionary, or biological, story to support cultural expectations of male gender

  • the lack of an effective integration of biological, anthropological, and evolutionary knowledge (at a minimum) with societal perspectives and popular discussions can dramatically inhibit our understanding of our histories, our daily lives, and of what human nature might be

FUENTES CHAPTER 2:

  • we saw the same actions, but our beliefs about the world led us to actually experience different things

  • Humans are extremely biased in how they interpret information regardless of whether it comes by sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, or some mixture of these senses

  • Our physiological abilities (hearing, sight, olfaction, etc.) vary across people, but it is primarily our cognitive interpretations of these senses that act as the filter

  • Two individuals can taste a single food, new to both of them, and give different reports on its taste and smell, even though, chemically, their tongues, noses, and brains are receiving the same stimulus

  • Our formal and informal education systems also have a great deal of influence on the social context

  • Culture is what people do, think, make, and share. It is the shared values and ideals, the symbols and languages, and daily patterns that make up our lives; it is the dynamic social context in which our schemata form.

  • Culture is both a product of human actions and something that influences that action

    Reasons culture matters:

  • 1. Culture helps give meaning to our experiences of the world

  • 2. Cultural constructs are real for those that share them

  • 3. Individual schemata (our world-views) vary depending of a range of elements in their social context

  •  4. Some cultural constructs are more pervasive or resilient than others, and thus more important to understand because they affect how we live and act and treat others

1.4: WHAT IS CULTURE?

  • BIG IDEA: knowledge is culturally constructed

  • Humans are extremely bias based on how they interpret an experience

  • Enculturation: the process of learning how to be a member of a social group

  • The way we look at the world is shaped by culture

  • Culture: the complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society

  • AAA definition: The entire database of knowledge, values, and traditional ways of viewing the world, which have been transmitted from one generation ahead to the next– non genetically, apart from DNA– through words, concepts, and symbols

  • Culture is: learned, shared, patterned, adaptive, and symbolic

1.5: CULTURAL RELATIVISM & THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

  •  BIG IDEA: the anthropological perspective employs cultural relativism because anthropology values all human populations equally and approaches their ways of life as coherent and meaningful designs for living
  • Ethnocentrism: practice of making value judgements about another culture from the perspective of one’s own culture– the opinion that one’s own way of life is natural and correct and is the only true way of doing things
  • Cultural relativism: understanding another culture or society from its own perspective without imposing our own cultural values on it (opposite of ethnocentrism)
  • Emic: perspective from within a culture
  • Etic: perspective from outside a culture