ANTHRO 102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: East Los Angeles College, Primitive Culture, Cultural Relativism
Document Summary
Rapid transformation of cultures world wide in response to cultural and economical influences. Ethnocentrism leads to cultural misinterpretation (for example: bullying, discrimination, war, genocide, intolerance) Cultural relativism stresses the importance of analyzing cultures in their own terms. Macroculture: culture that all humans share in a general way. A theory is a statement that suggests a relationship among phenomena. Theories enable us to reduce reality to an abstract set of principles. Theoretical orientation is the general idea about how phenomena are to be explained. Theories generate hypothesis that need to be tested in an empirical environment. Edward tylor and lewis henry morgan thought culture passes through developmental stages in the same order, evolution is unidirectional and leads to higher levels of culture. Also, it was ethnocentric because anthropologists put their culture on the top of the pyramid. Intended to evaluate cultures of the world in terms of model of victorian england. Underlying assumption that evolutionism culminated in england and europe.
