ANT208H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Middle French, Cultural Relativism, Participant Observation
Document Summary
Culture is a script/guidebook that tells you how to do things, teaches us to evaluate behaviour, provides moral and ethical guidelines. The etymology (study of word origins) of culture 1. Behavioural (walking/speech pattern, something observable but can disappear) 3. Why the aversion to popular culture in anthropology?-->1. Early focus in anthropology on tribal society (pop culture seen as contamination) 2. Prejudice against lowbrow culture (mississippi snake grabbers) 3. New directions: passion, imagination, experience (phenomenology, quest for new ideas and perspectives 4. Ethnography and fieldwork (cannot be researched on internet) 3. Participant observation (immersion into culture, at minimum for a year) Cultural relativism (suspend judgement until all information is collected, like female circumcision and ritualized homosexuality of papua new guinea) Performance and ritualized behaviour (emotions generated with rituals) 2. Performers and audiences (studying a message, semiotics=structure of messages, and interpretations) 3. Performance as reflexive (critique, can determine what culture is like by analyzing the popular culture)
