ANTHR 1400 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Franz Boas, Social Actions, Cultural Relativism
19 Dec 2017
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Focus on what is human diversity and what is universally human? . Look at culture (language, social practices, society, etc. Often provides specificity of a culture with a narrowed focus. We change depending on what we do morphologically. Ex: musicians, spending four hours in la traffic rather than. Holism: sociology, history, economics, psychology, linguistics, culture, ecology, bio, politics, etc (understanding context--humanistic approach--and causal relations) Rationalism; scientific method; objectivity vs. humanistic approaches. There is no set way to study a community--two ethnographers can study the same community for years and come to completely different conclusions about said community. Just look at drawings of cave art of animals vs. art of humans. Come up with a symbol that has some meaning, but no anatomical correctness. Our ability to communicate with each other through language, etc, gave us the capacity to organize, strategize, have efficiency. Ethnography: the systematic description of a culture based on firsthand observation.
