Intro to anthropology

Question 1

What are the four subfields of anthropology?

Answer 1

1. Archaeology
2. Linguistic Anthropology
3. Cultural Anthropology
4. Physical/biological Anthropology

Question 2

What makes cultural anthropology different from other disciplines?

Answer 2

Cultural anthropologists use data collected through observations and interviews of living people

Question 3

What is ethnography?

Answer 3

Ethnography is when anthropologists go out and live in the cultures in order to learn about them and their people, and then they write about the cultures

Question 4

What is the difference between emic and etic approaches?

Answer 4

Emic- Inside perspective of a culture

Etic- Outside perspective of a culture

Question 5

What is ethnocentrism? Why is it a problem?

Answer 5

Ethnocentrism is thinking your own culture is superior to other cultures. It’s a problem because many anthropologists ended up thinking of cultures unlike their own were “wrong”, and ended up trying to “fix” them. This can result in cultures being essentially erased, just because another culture was ethnocentric.

Question 6

What is cultural relativism?

Answer 6

The attitude that a society’s customs should be viewed within the its own cultural context; combat to ethnocentrism

Question 7

Why are cultural anthropologists holistic?

Answer 7

Cultural anthropologists are holistic as in order to study human culture, it must be as a whole, not just certain parts of it. They want to identify and explain the patterns within a culture.

Question 8

How are cultural anthropologists methodologically and theoretically diverse?

Answer 8

Cultural anthropologists borrow from many different fields, such as sociology, philosophy, history, etc. They use a variety of different methods such as ethnography, ethnology, etc

Question 9

What is culture?

Answer 9

Culture is the set of learned behaviors and ideas that are characteristic of a particular society or other social group

Question 10

Why is culture learned, patterned, shared, symbolic, integrated and dynamic?

Answer 10

Learned- We have to be taught culture as children
Shared- No one has their own culture, we share it with others
Symbolic- We have verbal/linguistic symbols that give meaning to the world
Integrated- It all connects together
Patterned- We see patterns and commonalities in different cultures
Dynamic-Culture changes over time