ANTH10001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Ethnography, Nacirema, Social Change
28 Jul 2018
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Introduction: what is anthropology? anthropos - (hu)man kind ology - the study of. Culture - whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to the member"s of the group who share that culture. Cultural anthropology: the study of human variation. Social anthropology: the study of human commonality. Socio-cultural anthropology: the comparative study of human differences in order to understand human commonality. Human life should be studied in context (not abstraction) Since w/in contexts no aspect of social life (e. g. economy, polity, geography, psychology) is separable from any other aspect of social life they must always be studied together. Anthropology demands a particular mode of analysis and research that appreciates human behaviour in context and holistically we call ethnography. Mode of research: the deployment of a range of research techniques, from interview through to observation, that are deployed according to their contextual appropriateness. However, most commonly deployed technique: participant observation.
