Anthropology: Culture, Language, Archaeology, and Evolution

Slides will be posted after class; you will have access to reading material on LMS.
The instructor will post slides after class for you to access via LMS.

Anthropology is broad; like other disciplines, methods tend to be varied; not far back in time; methods used tend to be flexible.
Work can take place anywhere: at a museum such as the Sconsogian UTC or a museum in Portugal.
Colleagues are doing full-blown excavations of sites; this relates to bioarchaeology and archaeology.
The methods required by anthropology give practitioners a sense of adventure, which explains global distribution of activity.

There are about $500$ sub-disciplines; $4$ major subfields; applied anthropology is often tacked on.
Culture is defined as any learned or shared things that people think, do, or have as members of the society.
It includes shared belief systems, values, customs, and shared material culture.
Ethnography is the product of immersive fieldwork and rich description of the culture.
Cultural anthropology describes life ways and interprets larger patterns; it also examines languages to determine migration and interactions.
Language changes through cultural interactions; Spanish is a Romance language related to French, Italian, Portuguese; Spain also shows Arabic influence in history which has shaped language contact.

Archaeologists examine pottery, foundations of structures, and daily activities to understand past populations.
Archaeology often concentrates on prehistoric contexts because there is no written history; oral history is limited.
Primary objective is to describe and explain the human past to document the disappearing physical record due to construction and environmental changes; information can be lost; complexity arises.
Archaeology addresses both past and present; includes study of humans, human ancestors, and nonhuman primates to place humans and primates in the animal world.

Work is heavily qualitative, but quantitative methods exist and are used.
There are multiple ways of adapting; no one way is better; similar problems can be solved in different ways; adaptation leads to thriving in various contexts.

Time differences factor into interpretation; to understand one element such as sex differences, you need to understand the broader context.
Emphasizes qualitative description and interpretation; acknowledges that quantitative analysis also occurs.

The history includes evolutionist viewpoints; Morgan is known for developing unilinear theory of cultural evolution.
Unilinear theory of cultural evolution states that every society starts at a stage of savagery and progresses to barbarism and then civilization: Savagery → Barbarism → Civilization.

Approximately $500$ sub-disciplines; four major subfields plus applied anthropology that is often added.
Core subfields include cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, archaeology, and physical/biological anthropology.

The immersive ethnographic approach yields deep insights into lived human experiences and the diversity of adaptation.
Language contact demonstrates how cultures influence language evolution.
The transcript does not explicitly discuss ethics, but ethical considerations commonly include informed consent, accurate representation, and minimizing harm in ethnography.