ANT204H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Cultural Relativism, Gender Role, George Herbert Mead
Document Summary
"we define social relationships really as the relational life of persons and things" Network maps: sketching who is in somebody"s life, and ordering them by closeness, or roles, or types of support they offer, or communication styles, etc. There are many ways we explain the phenomenon of human social relationships. You are born into an existing system or structure of social relationships. People are born into a structure of social structure of social relationships. Social relationships are not about individuals, they are about structures and systems, and each individual person is just a node in the structure/system. Social systems like kinship, religion, politics, etc. facilitate the relationship between persons. "the people who lives in any society may be unaware, or only dimly aware, that it has a structure. It is the task of the social anthropologist to reveal it" - e. e. Social relationships are endlessly created by people with agency.
