ANTH 202 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Major Crimes, Back Pain, Gentrification
Document Summary
Qualitative methods in the study of drugs and society. Wrote an ethnographic book of the life of crack addicts and about addiction. By examining culture, we end up believing in cultural relativism. Cultural relativism is the act of reserving judgement in order to learn about and understand the implicit and explicit workings of a culture that might seem, at a distance. Critical anthropology: shifting analysis from individual choice to society. Cultural theory shifts explanatory focus from the individual to society. The narrative concentrates on structural inequality as the cause of contemporary social problems and suffering and, accordingly, is the logical point of intervention. People have choices, they chose to do drugs ; yet they did not have choice in the overarching source. Critical theory can be traced to a number of sources, the overarching source of critical theory is marxism. Notion of critical theory was developed out of marxism by sociologist max.
