Week 2 Flashcards
(27 cards)
What does the anthropological perspective offer?
It draws on an interdisciplinary approach (sociology, political science, geography, economics, etc. ) attempts to fit them together with its own findings in order to understand different forces collectively shape human life
What are the four main characteristics of anthropology?
Holistic – that all aspects of human life interact with one another
Comparative – challenges assumptions of what is ‘normal’ or ‘traditional’
Evolutionary – biological or cultural
Fieldwork – immersive and away from one’s own ‘home’ to practice anthropology, collect ‘data’
What is culture?
Culture is a shared and negotiated system of meaning informed by knowledge that people learn and put into practice by interpreting experience and generating behaviour
Culture as a shared and negotiated systems of
meaning
Culture as informed by knowledge
Culture as learned behaviour
Culture as a practice
How do we interact with culture?
A system of interacting people who share, within certain limits, a common experience, often in very diverse, diverging/converging ways (how we are cared for, what we eat, how we spend our leisure time, our perceptions of society, how we celebrate
Understanding gained through experience
Through reading, education, our relationships, media, entertainment, etc.
Shared knowledge contribute to our collective meanings
What are the components of culture as a learned behaviour?
Morals, traditions, varying form of knowledge
What are the components of culture as a practice?
Placing learned knowledge into practice – our relationship to our built and natural environment
How we live our everyday lives, our relationship to rights, responsibilities, freedom, to our self – identity of the self…
What is enculturation?
Process of learning to be part of a group
What do all cultures involve?
They all involve classification systems and symbols.
What are cultures?
Cultures are patterned and integrated. Thus, changes in one aspect of culture affect other aspects. However, elements of culture do not necessarily work smoothly with one another
How are cultures shared?
They are shared in various different forms depending on the society in which the culture is found such as multicultural societies, mosaic, melting pot, and nationalism
Can cultures change?
Cultures are subject to change.Whether propelled by their internal dynamics or acted upon by outside forces, cultures are always in flux
- systematically, slowly over time, or by disruption, disasters, wars, etc.
What is ethnocentrism?
The tendency to view the world, sometimes exclusively, from the basis of one’s own experience
A belief that one’s own culture is better than others used to justify the subjugation of the non-European societies on the attended basis that these groups were socially and even biologically inferior
Can also be situated in non-European contexts – religious differences, ethnic identities, historical relations to the land… but is hierarchical in its meaning and use
What is the age of enlightenment?
Social and philosophical movement that privileged science, rationality and experience while critiquing religious authority
Using rational thought to discover things about the natural and social world
What is biological evolution?
It is a field of study that investigates the ways that natural processes have shaped the development of life on Earth, producing measurable changes in populations over time
What is natural selection?
It the process through which population of living organisms adapt and change. Individuals in a population are naturally, meaning they are all different in some ways. Some have traits that are better suited to the environment than others
Proposed that evolution is a slow and natural process, yet scientists observed the process in only a few years in insects and birds and as result, helped to show biological changes as a response to
What does the idea of the Origin of Species denote?
The idea that change was non-directional, that it was not necessarily going anywhere in particular
What is social evolution?
Held that human ways of life passed through similar sequences of stages of development
What is social darwinism?
A form of social evolution holding that certain people were not just technologically or materially inferior but mentally and biologically inferior
That these hierarchies were naturally occurring
Formed the basis for Eugenics - a movement that focused on selective
breeding of the ‘fittest’ and the week out of the ‘unfit’ people
Belief that successful war exploits, colonial encounters, imperialism were a factor of nature – from the more ‘fit’
How did Franz Boas change modern anthropology?
He suggested that society or culture was a complex of meaning, not things or technology, and that any one culture or society could not be understood solely in comparison to European or American society
Expoused the idea of Cultural Relativism– the idea that each society or culture must be understood on its own terms, and not from the perspectives of ‘outsiders’
What is cultural relativism?
The anthropological practice of attempting to understand cultures within their context, including environment and history
Applies a holistic perspective in that it combines the study of human biology, history, and the learned and shared patterns of human behaviour and thought we call culture to analyze human groups.
What is historical particularism?
Each society or culture was the outgrowth of its past. If you want to get to know someone, understand their past
What is the ethnographic process?
A systematic approach involving long term participation, observing, taking field notes, and interviewing of people experiencing a particular society – shifted research from the ‘armchair;’ to the field
What is the central method of the ethnographic process?
The main focus is the anthropological process
What is the ‘field’?
That as a method, requires an outsider’s perspective
Disregards materials that are not culturally symbolic of a particular society from the researcher’s perspective
What do you associate with ‘the field’
Is now considered in broader more interlinked worlds, perspectives and settings (online, offline, mobility in everyday life)
