ANTHR206 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Relativism, Kent V. Flannery, Cultural Ecology

• School: University of Alberta
• Department: Anthropology
• Course: ANTHR206
• Professor: Andrew Lints

Document Summary

Focuses on how material culture influenced people (not just the other way around: marxist - group oriented. Focuses on social aspects: change is driven by conflict over economic or political issues. Seeks to explain change through large-scale evolutionary processes: cultural ecology - group oriented, evolutionary ecology - individual, how individuals adapted, practice theory - individual. Focuses on competition, power, status and how they drive change: critical theory / relativism, no objective truth, only subjective interpretations, cognitive. Interpretive archaeology: looks at how interpretations are made, the past is organized into different contexts, self-reflective, archaeology of the human experience (new, compares archaeology to modern societies, four primary stages of investigation. Investigate conditions of life: understand how these conditions came to be, explore the experience of these conditions. Identify how these conditions affect the larger cultural context: uses human security needs, like food, health, political, personal, economic etc. , to interpret the archaeological record.