Anth day1
- Anthropology definition: Study of humans around the world and through time.
- No society is "better" meaning that no one is over or underdeveloped, everyone has adapted to how they need to survive.
- People need to adapt to their environments and everywhere is different
- Anthropology gives us a broader view, not classifying people culture and looking at it holistically
- How Anthropology is different: Scope, Focus on variation, Approach: Holistic, Method: Comparative (comparing different societies, how they act similar yet different)
- Culture: Traditions and customs, transmitted through learning, that form and guide the beliefs and behavior of the people exposed to them. Past from generation to generation
- Adaptation: Process by which organisms cope with environmental forces and stresses - Humans adapt using biological and cultural means
- Form of Adaptation Type of adaptation Example
Technology Cultural Pressurized airplane cabin with oxygen masks
Genetic adaptation Biological Larger "barrel chests" of native highlanders
Long-term physiological adaptation Biological More efficient respiratory system, to extract O
Short-term physiological adapt Biological Increased heart rate, hyperventilation
- Rate of cultural adaptation and change has accelerated, particularly during the last 10,000 years.
• Foraging was the sole basis of human subsistence for millions of years.
• Took only a few thousand years to develop food production.
• Food production: Economy based on plant cultivation and/or animal domestication.
• Spread of industrial production has profoundly affected human life
Cultural Forces Shape Human Biology:
- Biocultural perspective: Using and combining both biological and cultural perspectives and approaches to analyze and understand a particular issue or problem.
• Culture is a key environmental force
determining how human bodies grow and
develop.
• Cultural standards of attractiveness and
propriety influence participation and
achievement in sports.
- General anthropology: Academic discipline of
anthropology, also known as “four-field” anthropology.
• Sociocultural, or cultural anthropology.
• Archaeological anthropology.
• Biological anthropology.
• Linguistic anthropology
- • Sound conclusions about “human nature” cannot be derived from studying a single nation, society, or cultural tradition.
-CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY:
• Comparative, cross-cultural study of human society and culture.
• Ethnography: Fieldwork in a particular cultural setting. Provides an account of that community, society, or culture.
- Requires fieldwork to collect data
- Often descriptive
- Group/community specific
• Ethnology: Study of sociocultural differences and similarities. Examines, interprets, and analyzes the results of ethnography. Produced from the data gathered by ethnographic anthropologists
- uses data collected by a series of researchers
- Usually synthetic
- Comparative/cross-cultural
ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHAEOLOGY OR
ARCHAEOLOGY
• Study of human behavior and cultural patterns and processes through a culture’s material remains. NOT bones and skeletons/human remains
• Artifacts (potsherds, jewelry, tools).
• Garbage.
• Burials.
• Grains.
• Remains of structures
- Many archaeologists examine paleoecology.
• Ecology is the study of interrelations among living things in an environment.
• Paleoecology looks at ecosystems of the past.
Archaeologists reconstruct ecological patterns, behavior patterns, and lifestyles of the past.
BIOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
• Study of human biological variation through time
and as it exists today.
• Five specialties:
• Human biological evolution as revealed by the fossil record (paleoanthropology).
• Human genetics.
• Human growth and development.
• Human biological plasticity (the living body’s ability to change as it copes with environmental conditions).
• Primatology (the study of monkeys, apes, and other nonhuman primates)
LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY
• Study of language and linguistic diversity in time, space, and society.
• Language in its social and cultural context, throughout the world. (EX: Accents in the same language)
• Sociolinguistics: Study of language in society.
• Investigates relationships between social and linguistic variation.
All anthropologists recognize the importance of the
following concepts:
Culture
Ethnocentrism: looking at other cultures through the view point of your own culture
Cultural relativism: no culture is "better" just different
Diversity
Change
Holism
Anthropology has two dimensions:
• Academic anthropology.
• Practicing, or applied, anthropology.
• Applied anthropology, or public archaeology: Use of anthropological data, perspectives, theory, and methods to identify, assess, and solve contemporary social problems.
- Cultural resource management (CRM): Deciding what needs saving and preserving significant
information about the past when sites cannot be saved
Cultural Anthropology and Sociology
• Cultural anthropology and sociology share an interest in social relations, organization, and behavior.
• Traditionally, sociologists focused on contemporary, Western, industrial societies, whereas
anthropologists focused on nonindustrial and non-Western societies.
• In today’s interconnected world, however, the interests and methods of cultural anthropology and
sociology are converging, because they are studying some of the same topics and areas.
• Many sociologists now work in non-Western countries, smaller communities, and other settings that
used to be mainly within the anthropological orbit.
• As industrialization and urbanization have spread across the globe, anthropologists now work
increasingly in industrial nations and cities, rather than villages.
The Scientific Method;
- As a science, anthropology aims for reliable explanations hat predict future occurrences
- explanations rely on data from experiments, observation and other systematic procedures
!!- Observe
- Observe some aspect of the universe
- Hypothesize
- Construct a tentative description
- Predict
- Use the hypothesis to make predictions
- Test
- Test predictions by experiments or further observations/data collection
- Repeat!!
Other Methods
- Quantitative modeling - statistics
- Qualitative slides - what people say
- Ethnographic method - going into the field
- Comparative method - comparing things
HOW IS ANTHROPOLOGY PUT TO WORK IN THE
WORLD?
- Unique knowledge about practical solutions to real-world social
problems
- Understand human societies in a holistic sense—how they
have changed, how they vary, what they share, and how they
adapt
- Unique knowledge about the range of ways humans adapt to
their environment, both behaviorally and biologically
- Critical for when outsiders wish to help societies problem solve, improve their access to resources
- Ethical principle: do no harm
- Do “good”?
- Cultural relativism
The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you. They are unique manifestations of the human spirit. - Wade Davis