ANTH 100A Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Lewis H. Morgan, Franz Boas, Marvin Harris
Document Summary
Universal: the anthropological lens comes sharply into focus. Anthropology is the most liberating of all disciplines/sciences. If a child dies should it be buried or eaten, as is the tradition of the. A rainbow to us is a thing of beauty; for the lacondon of. Nicaragua it is a dangerous harbinger of darkness and evil. Deciphering the stranger, making sense of the exotic other, is the very essence of anthropology, and as a practice it goes back in the. Western tradition at least as far as the accounts of the greek historian. Herodotus who in the 5th century bc travelled the length of the known world. He recounted a story from the persian court, a morning when the. Emperor darius gathered representatives of two of his subject peoples, one a culture that cremated their dead, and the other a people that reputedly ate their dead. Darius asked each whether they might consider emulating the death rituals of the other.
