ANTH 1120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Linguistic Anthropology, Political Anthropology, Environmental Anthropology

• School: York University
• Department: Anthropology
• Course: ANTH 1120
• Professor: Christianne Stephens

Document Summary

In sociocultural anthropology we strive to look beyond the world of everyday experiences to discover the patterns and meanings that lie behind the world. For a sociocultural anthropologist, acts are merely never merely acts, nor are objects, even classroom chairs, both are objects; both are signals whose meaning is culturally speci c. Sociocultural anthropology: a comparative approach to the study of societies and cultures that focuses on differences and similarities in the ways that societies are structured and cultural meanings are created. An anthropologist might suggest that the classroom chair with desk is part of the systems of relations that gives meaning to the classroom. This piece of furniture forms the body into a shape that prepares it or forces it to attend to a teacher and not to others in the same room. Sociocultural anthropologists nd patterns of meaning even in objects as simple as a classroom chair.