ANTH 111 CH1 - Summary Anthropology: What Does It Mean to Be Human? PDF

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Chapter One: What is Anthropology? 

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Anecdote o Authors of the book travelled to Africa and experienced custom of eating bugs through interaction w/ Africans Anthropology o Study of human nature, human society, and the human past o Describes what it means to be human o Holistic, comparative, field based, and evolutionary  Holistic: analyze aspects of life that interact Field based o Data collection o In direct contact with people Evolution is at the core of anthropological perspective o i.e. human origins and genetic variations cultural evolution o changes in beliefs, behaviors, and material objects that define human and social change culture o sets of learned behaviors and ideas that humans acquire as members of society, via artifacts and structural creations  allows humans to adapt to the world humans are most dependent o no instincts for finding food or water or survival o use complex brain to learn behavior humans are biocultural organisms o biological makeup is the outcome of developmental processes to which cellular chemistry contributes material culture o interactions with artifacts shape culture, meaning attached to artifacts  same objects have different meanings to different people Anthropology is usually a social science o May be humanity or natural science o 4 subject fields  Biological  Paleoanthropology o Search for fossilized remains of humanities earliest ancestors  Human biology  primatology  Cultural  Kinship  Economics  worldview  Linguistic  Descriptive, historical, comparative

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 And archaeology  Prehistoric  Historic Biological anthropology o Physical appearance o Races o Scientific racism o Not able to agree on # of races or what defines a race o 20th century anthropogists begin to argue that race does not exist o Molecular anthropology traces chemical similarities and differences within immune systems of varying groups of people o Ancient DNA from fossils allow reconstruction of ancient genomes Cultural o Sociocultural anthropology, social, ethnology o Distinction between biological sex and culturally shaped gender roles o Attention to gender has become an interictal part of anthropological work o Closet to discipline of sociology  Both develop in the same time o Reject labels of primate and civilized o Study kindship and social groups o Variations of housing, clothes, tools o Informants  Share information with anthropologists o Ethnography  Customary social behaviors of an identifiable group of people o Ethnology  Comparative study of two or more groups o Globalization  Reshaping of local conditions by powerful global forces on an intensifying scale  Some suffer while some benefit  Hard to assume that people’s cultures are attached to geographical locations o Cyborg anthropology  Ethnographic research that focuses on human machine hybrids that blur boundaries between nature and culture and living and non-living Linguistics o Arbitrary symbols used by humans to talk about aspects of our lives in cultural, historical, and biological contexts Archeology o Discovers prehistory  Time before writing o Applied archeology

Use information gathered from other anthropological specialties to propose solutions to practical problems Medical anthropology o Most rapidly growing way human population deals with health and disease o Link questions of human health in local settings to social/economic/political processes on a global scale o Disease may be worse due to social inequality 

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