ANTA02H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Cultural Relativism, Participant Observation, Essentialism
11 Oct 2018
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Document Summary
Basic tenets of anthropology: society, culture and language, fieldwork methodology with emphasis on inductive approach, based on empirical evidence, comparative look at both universal and particulars. De ning culture: culture is the learned and shared knowledge that people use to generate behaviour and intercept experience . Breakdowns of aspects of culture: learned a. Inherently social/public: knowledge, system of meaning; used to generate behaviour and interpret experience. 1: the rise of evolutionary theories, the growing importance of europes colonies. These changes help us understand the beginnings of a global system where us-them binary categories emerge. Cultural relativism: all cultures are equal and comparable; there are no inferior or superior cultures and therefore it is impossible to rank cultures in an evolutionary scheme. Ethnography: end product of eldwork, the written description of social organization, activities, symbolics and material b. resources and interpretive practices that characterize a particular group of people.
