Peoples and Cultures Chapter 1 Science Basics Anthropology asks how cultures and societies work and how they got that way and anthropologists specialize in one of the four following subfields Biological Anthropology questions about our biological nature and its relationship to culture overlaps with anatomy and biology Archaeology gathering and interpreting material evidence we can use to understand our history overlaps with history Linguistic Anthropology asks about the nature of language and how it is related to culture overlaps with linguistics Sociocultural Anthropology how contemporary cultures and societies work and how they got that way overlaps with economics political science religious studies history comparative literature and other social sciences and humanities Sociocultural Anthropology holistic comparative ethnographic Holism seeing things as connected Systems a set of elements connected such that if you change one of them you also change the others Comparative noticing and explaining similarities and differences among many different systems Ethnographic basing our ideas of how any given system works on detailed local description learning about the systems and people we want to understand by as close observation as possible often through fieldwork Fieldwork to suspend judgments and opinions and be open to understanding other ways of life cultural relativity Ethnocentrism thinking that your way of doing something is superior to any other way Cultural Relativism has 3 parts Descriptive ethical and epistemological Descriptive Relativism suspending your natural ethnocentrism so that you can describe another culture from the point of view of the people in it Ethical Relativism there are no absolute values of good and bad depends on the culture Epistemology how we know things all ways of knowing things are equally true Science we never accept anything as true just as what we think we know until we find out differently by checking it over and over again Depends on validity and reliability Validity you are really measuring what you think you are measuring Reliability everyone else who checks the same thing will get the same results Chapter 2 People are Primates People and primates can grasp thing have opposable thumbs we all have forelimbs specialized for locomotion our eyes are at the front of our heads have complex social behavior take individual prolonged care of our young to bond Mutual grooming the practice of going through each other s fur looking for things that shouldn t be there and removing them We eat together and we both have well developed visual and auditory systems of signaling about food danger and sexual state and we have large brains Bipedal walking on two feet all the time Natural selection The most able of a species survive and breed most Pebble Tools large pebble with a flake or two knocked off to make a sharp edge Hand axes symmetrical tools Hammerstone Rock in your right hand
View Full Document
Unlocking...