-study of humanity

-holistic discipline: involves all aspects and systems, can't break down and isolate

-the scientific and humanistic study of human beings encompasses evolutionary history of humanity, physical variation among humans, the study of past societies, and the comparitive study of current-day human societies and cultures

1. cultural anthropology

2. linguistic anthropology (not always a subfield, but often a bridge gap)

3. archaeology

4. biological anthropology

-the study of human thought, behavior, and lifeways that are LEARNED rather than genetically transmitted and that are typical of groups of people

-ethnography and ethnology

-cultural relativity/ethnocentrism

-emic vs. etic

-views culture as an integrated whole, no part of which can be completely understood without considering the whole

-considers the interconnections among factors that contribute to peoples behaviors

-combines biology, history, and the learned and shared patterns of human behavior, culture, and language

-means of understanding cultural differences and similarities through data analysis rather than direct observation

-HRAF: ethnographic database with descriptions of over 300 cultures

notion that cultures should be analyzed with reference to their own histories and values rather than according to the values of another culture

-does not make all practices right or good (slavery, etc) we just try to understand them

-often hard to do because of your upbringing and we tend to think "that's the right/wrong" way, we try to recognize our differences to see what we're bringing to the table

judging others cultures from from the perspective of one's own culture. the notion that on'es own culture is more beautiful, rational, and nearer to perfection than any other. often want others to behave the way we do and if they dont we feel troubled, insulted, or outraged

-often hard to avoid because of your upbringing and we tend to think "that's the right/wrong" way, we try to recognize our differences to see what we're bringing to the table

-tool and product, detailed and in depth (thick) description

-the major research tool of cultural anthropology, includes both fieldwork among ppl in a society and the written results of such framework, ethnographies may be either emic or etic or combine the two

-attempts to find the general principles or laws that govern cultural phenomena

-compare and contrast practices of diff cultures to find regularities

emic - insiders view of what's going on, the meaning and reasons why: ethnography and ethnology

-attempts to give readers a sense of what it is like to be an insiders, uses concepts, categories, and distinctions that are meaningful to the members of the society

etic - outsiders view, but not in an ethnocentric way, it is scientiffically formulated, can sometimes be miscontrued

-uses concepts, categories, and rules derived from sciences, principles and theories derived from the western world such as ecology, economy, or psychology

-iinterconnection of language, culture, and society

-indigenous languages

-historical linguistics

-often concerned with discerning the patterns of speech and rules of verbal interaction that guide communication in diff groups

-the study of material culture (potery, figureines, etc)

-focuses on the reconstruction of past cultures based on their material remains

-humans leave remaines and traces behind, and archeaologists try to infer their cultural patterns

-the study of human origins and contemporary biological diversity

-paleoanthropology (evolution, primatology, human variation)

-medical anthropology (mostly applied, disease, vaccinations)

-focusing on aspects of humankind that are genetically inherited

the way members of a society adapt to their env. and give meaning to their lives

-complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, laws, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society

-encompasses cultural knowledge (info that enables us to interact with one another and survive env.) and social and cultural skills (ability to put these skills to work)

culture is shared -> culture is adaptive -> culture is vased on symbols -> culture organizes worldview -> culture is integrated -> culture is learned (through enculturation) (continuous circle)

-organic analogy (society is a living organism with many parts that contribute to the whole, and if one part fails the whole thing fails)

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-cultural models (shared assumptions that ppl have about the world and about the ideal culture, not universal, very subjective)

-norms (sets of expectations and attitudes that ppl have about appropriate beh's, there are boundaries and consequences for violating norms)

-values (shared ideas about what is true, right, and beautiful)

-beh's and beliefs respond to env. constraints and opportunities

-plasticity (ability to change beh. with relative to ease)

-words, images, or objects that stand for something else

-verbal and nonverbal, art, religion, humor

-access culture by looking at the symbols that are important to them

-naturalized concepts (ideas and beh's so deeply embedded in a culture that they are regarded as universally normal or natural, so normal to you that you dont think about them

-worldviews (a culture based, often ethnocentric way that people see the world and other ppl. human nature to be ethnocentric b/c we see how our culture was raised and we think its "normal")

-dominant culture (the cultural model with the greatest wealth, power, influence in a society)

-subculture/counterculture: a group w/i a society that shares norms and values significantly diff from those of the dominant culture

ex: occupy wallstreet would be a counter culture b/c they are opposed to status quo

ex: the gay community which is typically a subculture except with recent issue of gay marriage in which case it is a counter culture

internal culture change 

-culture history (change is constantly happening)

-ethnogenesis (intended by certain group or individual)

-inventions vs. innovations (innovation is process and invention is outcome, enlightenment was innovation)

-revolution (antagonistic, replace current system)

external culture change

-diffusion (ideas are being exchanged - migration, travel)

-reactive adaptation (people reacting to conquest, or conflict)

-researchers have a responsibility in how they represent the people involved in the study

-naming: endonym (lakota - what they call themselves) vs. exonym (sioux - french word that has a rough translation to savage)

-out of the armchair and into the field

-the process of conducting studies through direct observation and objective description

-signals the methodological shift from a deductive approach to an inductive one -> from the bottom up

-poineered by Franz Boas, who also intorduced the concept of cultural relativism -> short term studies

-championed by Browislaw Malinowski

-feeling an anthropologist might have at the start of fieldwork at being out of place in unfamiliar surroundings

-can come from the surprise that many of the little taken-for-granted aspects of daily life can be different than we're used to

inductive - inside approach - take events and try to build up reasoning, gather data and make a theory from it (emic)

deductive - outside approach - take event and try to reduce to meaning, or how it happened, try to fit cases into your large theory (etic)

the fieldwork technique that involves gathering cultural data by observing people's behavior and participating in thier lives in the greatest extent possible

-franz boas

-focus on: the labels that anthros use, the impacts of anthors on the people they study, and the professional ethics

-view held by early social philosophers that human differences can be accounted for by diff rates of progress

-attempts to explain variations in world cultures by the single deductive theory that they all pass through a series of evolutionary stages

-morgans stages of evolutionism

savagery (lower savagery, middle savagery, upper savagery)

barbarism (lower, middle, upper)

civilization (lower, middle, upper)

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-view that cultural traits have social functions that contribute to the smooth operation of the whole story

-relies on the organic analogy (system of parts = whole, any failure=failure of whole)

-they were blamed for having a causal fallcay through, logical error that deals with the relationship between two things. assuming that if A, then B, then A must have caused B. functional school attributed causation though even though correlation does not equal causation

-emphasizes the centrality of env. adaptation, tech, and methods of acquiring or producing food in the dev. of culture

-cultural ecology -> position that cultures interact with their env. settings via a process of adaptaiton

-cultural materialist -> based on the concept that material conditions or modes of production determine human thoughts and behavior

-a theoretical position in anthropology that held that cultures could best be understood by examining the patterns of child rearing and considering their effect on adult lives and social institutions

-attempts to find general individual personality traits repeating a specific culture

-emphasis on enculturation, childhood socialization

-employs constructs from psychoanalysis

-growing out of the field of structural linguistics in structural anthro cultures are analyzed in terms of the structural relations among their elements

-levi strauss -> human cognition is organized by binary opposites, humans have to form these pairs to understand the world

male-female

hot-cold

myths deal with gray areas (warm)

-focuses on issues of power and voice and views anthropological accounts as partial truths

-if an objective reality, it cannot be discovered or comprehended by human beings

-analyzes realationships between culture and various forms of power, more than one answer to a specific question

-the smallest unit of language that has a meaning

the total stock of words in any language

-some languages have many words for same thing like money, snow, or beer

body language (very culturally based)

-gestures (wave, open hands, peace sign)

-artifacts (visible body modifications, tattoos, piercings)

-haptics (analysis of comm by touch, patting, hug, kiss)

-kinesics (body positions, movement, facial expressions)

-proxemics (analysis of the social use of space, 1-18 inches for very intimates, 18in-4ft for acquaintances, 4ft- i missed what she said)

-proposed that the ability to think about things such as time, space, and matter are conditioned by the structure of the languages people speak

-we perceive the world in certain ways because we talk about the world in certain ways

-problem: very deterministic and we can't say that there is only one factor

enculturation

-social recognition of the transition to personhood

-often marked by ritual (can be before, during, or after physical birth)

-learning skills and values (direct instruction or observation)

-learning behavioral expectations (observation or trial and error)

-age and gender socialization

-role: set of obligations and expectations

-informal: boys like blue, girls like pink, toys are gendered, no one really teaches this it just happens

-formal: don't hit, share, do hw, we are taught these things

-separation (withdrawing from current status and preparation for transition to new status - often involves cleansing)

-transition (period of liminality - in between one status and another)

-reincorporation (the person is reincorporated into the society in the new status position)