ANTH 1120 Lecture Notes - Social Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, Biological Anthropology
Document Summary
Learned--> behind each discipline are ideas that inform the subjects discovery. There are 3 perspectives of principles that are important. Ex/ food getting --> hunter gathering --> reliance on wild resource. Involves considering the cultural lives of different ethnic groups. Accounts of culture arrive from fieldwork --> first hand accounts, ethnographies. Specific aspects of a culture --> kinship, marriage, political organization, etc. Ex/ why are the haida and trobiand islanders matrilineal. Ex/ east africa --> cattle herders/ pastoralists ---> patrilineal & warriors. -> milk and blood (except samburu b/c against their religious beliefs: cultural relativism - antidote to ethnocentrism. Sense of your own culture as the standard to make comparisons from Suspend your own cultural background --beliefs, values, norms All cultures are deemed to be equal, equally valid, and they must be understood according to their own cultural logic. Culture is relative to its environmental and historical circumstances. Traditional practices that can be harmful --> inequality, exploitation, oppression.
