01 What is Anthropology PDF

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What is Anthropology? Anthropology: ● The study of human nature, human society, human language, and the human past ● What it means to be human ● Field based discipline. The actual practice of it is mostly data collection Concept of Culture ● Most anthropologists emphasize that human beings are biocultural organisms Fields of Anthropology: A lot of the time they do overlap, and they also depend on each other ★Biological ● To classify the world's population into different races ● Biological anthropologists, primatologists, and paleoanthropologists ● How our biology determine who we are ★Cultural ● Study cultural diversity in all living human societies ● Gather information by fieldwork (long term), participating in social activities and observing ● They work with informants ● Methodology (how): participant observation, interviews. important to make informed questions ● Ethnography: a description of an aspect of culture within a society. A book that summarizes their results ★Linguistic ● Approach cultural diversity by relating various forms of language into their cultural contexts and the construction and use of language ● Gather information by fieldwork, participating in social activities and observing ● Structural linguistics: how language works ● Sociolinguistics: the relationship between language and social behaviour in different cultures. You may look at the use of language and gender/class. Are there some words that change in different social constructs. ● Ex: Pg, 31. Michel Bouchard studies how do we manipulate language to create identity ● Ex: Christine Schryer. Studies colangs (made up languages) ★Archaeology (most romanticized) ● Study of the human past, and artifacts (material remains) ● Understand how humans lived in the past, how past societies interacted with each other and how cultures changed overtime Applied ● Frequently referred to as practicing anthropologists ● They use other information from the anthropologists specialties to solve practical cross-cultural problems. And world real world problems Medical ● Connect biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and applied anthropology, focusing on cultural perceptions of health and illness, suffering and well being

Physical ● Studies all aspects of biology and behavior of the human species, past and present ● Study: human evolution, forensics, primatology, and other areas ● Example: Jane Goodall. She studies non human primated Uses of Anthropology ● Learning to cope with with one another and with different cultures is crucial ● May help prepare for some of the shocks one may encounter dealing with people who look different from you, speak a different language, or do not agree that the world works exactly the way you think it does...