SOSA 1002 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Tabula Rasa, Discourse Analysis, Language Policy

• School: Dalhousie University
• Department: Sociol & Social Anthropology
• Course: SOSA 1002
• Professor: Liesl Gambold

Document Summary

Readings: fedorak, chapter 3 and fox, village of the deaf. One way to think about applying anthropology in the real world is whether or not the things you do are the result of biology (nature) or social environment (nurture) At a basic level, we all have to eat and sleep. Sleep is very cultural, because everyone sleeps; examples: co-sleeping with children; where people sleep is dependent to architecture; so where we sleep is also cultural. Even sleep which is a human biological need has cultural elements. When thinking about nature vs. nurture, we should question to what degree nature and nurture a ect certain behaviours. It is important to question biology, but we should always question concepts that assume that everything stems from nurture. E. g. john locke assumed that humans develop entirely from environmental factors. He referred to human beings as being born as tabula rasa (blank slate). Underneath, everyone is trying to more or less do the same thing.