ANTA02H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Nacirema, Cultural Relativism, Ethnocentrism
Document Summary
1 idea: culture as a rationality, creativity, higher order thought; high culture , like opera. While nothing in the article is untrue, it does not capture what experience is like. 2 purposes: reflect on north american cultural differences, and reflect on dangers of. William grahm sumner: enthnocentrism is the often implicit idea that your culture or group or lifestyle is the center of everything. Anthropology is a lot about critical thinking, asking what values, beliefs, behaviours, understandings of the world are revealed by a cultural phenomenon. Denaturalizes things we take for granted as normal or as objective truths (makes them seem less natural ) This is not as easy as it sounds! We have to try to look at culture from the perspective of an insider. It"s very easy to misrepresent aspects of a culture if you don"t think about what matters most for people. So we have the concept of cultural relativism, which is the opposite of ethnocentrism.
