Anthropology Chapter 1 PDF

Preview

Summary

Anthro Chapter 1...

Description

ANTHRO POLOGY What is Anthropology?  The study of human nature, human society, human language, and the human past. - Anthro emphasizes that all aspects of human life intersect with one another o Therefore, a holistic study  Holism: How anthropology tries to integrate all that is known about humans (most inclusive) - Anthro is interested in comparison o Requires anthropologists to study similarities and differences across many human societies - Anthro is a field-based discipline o Field Research: Connects anthropologists directly with the lived experiences of other people/primates - Evolution is at the core of the anthropological perspective o Examines both Cultural and biological evolution - Biological Evolution: looks at how physical features and life processes of humans have changed over-time. - Cultural Evolution: Concerns change overtime in beliefs, behaviourism, and material objects What is the Concept of Culture? - Culture: sets of learned behaviour and ideas that human beings acquire as members of society. o North Americans typically don’t eat insects, but this behaviour is NOT the result of genetic programming - Anthropologists emphasize that humans are biocultural organisms o Organisms whose defining features are codetermined by biological and cultural factors  Human biology makes culture possible, human culture makes human biological survival possible! What makes Anthro a Cross-Disciplinary Discipline? - Four Subfields of Anthro: o Biological Anthropology o Cultural Anthropology o Linguistic Anthropology o Archaeology Biological Anthropology - Western Europeans found tremendous variation in the physical appearance of peoples around the world and tries to make sense of these differences o Aimed to measure observable features of human populations (skin colour, hair type, skull shape) to classify people - Created different categories for classification known as races

ANTHRO POLOGY -

-

-

-

-

-

Carolus Linnaeus classified populations into: o Amerindian o European o Asian o Negro  Also connected these races with mental and moral attributes Skull size of different races: o Caucasians had larger skull sizes therefore finding other races inferior.  Thus, racism was born. Johann Blumenbach classified 5 Races o Caucasoid o Mongoloid o American o Ethiopian o Malayan Franz Boas was uncomfortable with racial classification and devoted his energy to debunking racist stereotypes to understand culture. o Berkeley shifted attention to patterns of variation and adaptation of humans Biological Anthropology: Looks at human beings as biological organisms and tries to discover what characteristics make them different from other organisms and what characteristics they share o Primatology: The study of non-human primates, the closest living relatives to human beings. o Paleoanthropology: The study of human fossils and associated remains to understand our evolutionary history Forensic Anthropologists use their knowledge of human skeletal anatomy to aid human rights investigations. Molecular Anthropologists trace chemical similarities and differences in the immune system.

Cultural Anthropology  Shows how variation in the beliefs and behaviours of members of different human groups is shaped by sets of learned behaviours and ideas that human beings acquire as members of society - Margaret Mead showed that the biology of sexual differences could not be used to predict how men and women might behave o Suggested that it was culture - Contemporary Anthropologists: Do research in urban and rural settings around the world and among members of all societies. - Non-Western people do not slavishly imitate Western Ways o They make use of Western technologies in ways that are creative and make sense for their own culture

ANTHRO POLOGY -

-

-

Cultural Anthropologists work in fieldwork o An extended period of close involvement with the peoples in whose ways of life anthropologists are interested, during which anthropologists collect most of their data Anthropologists have been called informants o People in a particular culture who work with anthropologists and provide them with insights about the local way of life. Ethnography: An anthropologist’s written or recorded description of a particular culture Ethnology: The comparative study of two or more cultures

Linguistic Anthropology - Language: The system of arbitrary vocal symbols used to encode one’s experience of the world and the others - Linguistic Anthropology: The specialty of anthropology concerned with the study of human languages. - Contemporary linguistic anthropologists study the way language differences correlate with differences in gender, race, class, or ethnic identity - Conlang: Some linguistic anthropologists create new languages for entertainment purposes Archaeology  The specialty of anthropology that studies the human past by analyzing material remains left behind by earlier societies - Analysis of material culture o Objects creates or shaped by humans and given meaning through cultural practices.  Focus on reconstructing human history to understand past human cultural activity using many methods Applied Anthropology  Anthropologists use information gathered from the other anthropological specialties to solve practical cross-cultural problems o May use knowledge of traditional social organization to ease the problems of refugees trying to settle in a new land - Mark Nuttall, focuses on the varied perception of northern Indigenous peoples to climate change - This subfield holds promise as a way of bringing together Western and non-Western knowledge - Anthropologists who work for government agencies or non-profit organizations or in other non-university settings often describe what they do as the anthropology of practice

Medical Anthropology

ANTHRO POLOGY -

-

-

-

Rapid growing branch  The specialty of anthropology that concerns itself with human health- the factors that contribute to disease or illness and the ways that human populations deal with disease or illness Emoke Szathmary examined the high incidence of diabetes among the Dene, suggesting of processed, westernized foods and the rise of diabetes in this population

Critical Medical Anthropology links questions of human health and illness in local setting to social, economic, and political processes o Dr. Sandra Hyde studied the spread of AID in child and how political forces in China have shaped public perception and response to the disease and how this illness has affected various groups Presence of illness may be from the presence of social inequality and a lack of access to health care !!!...