ANTHR 102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 24: Clifford Geertz, Biological Anthropology, Coevolution
Anthr 102
Cultural Anthropology
Summer 2018
● North Americans answer that human nature has two parts:
○ Mind and matter
○ Soul and body
○ Spirit and flesh
● Dualism: the philosophical view that reality consists of two radically different but equal
forces, and these forces are called binary oppositions.
● Christian theology believes that the human being consists of a soul that seeks God and a
physical body that is tempted by the material world.
○ Conflict dualism: is the earthly life struggle between spirit (good) and flesh (bad).
● Idealism: the philosophical view that pure, incorruptible ideas constitute the essence of
human nature.
● Materialism: the philosophical view that the activities of our physical bodies in the
material world constitute the essence of human nature
● Determinism: the philosophical view that one force or a few simple forces determine
complex events.
● Thinkers believed natural environment is the most powerful material source that shapes
human nature, like drought, climate change.
● Holism: assumes that no sharp boundaries separate mind from body, body from
environment, individuals from society, in fact it proposes that mind, body, environment
interpenetrate and define one another.
● Culture: sets of learned behaviours and ideas that humans acquire as members of a
society
● Clifford Geertz says people raised in isolation would be mental basket cases.
● Co-evolution: the relationship between biological processes and symbolic cultural
processes in which each makes up an important part of the environment to which the
other must adapt.
● Anthropology: the study of human nature, human society and human history.
○ Way of studying include:
■ Gathering data from many cultures, both past and present
■ Comparing those data to derive informed and testable hypothesis about
what it means to be human
■ Investigating what, if anything, can be said about human condition that
might be valid across space and over time.
● Anthropologist are interested in documenting and explaining change.
● Biological Anthropology: focuses on human beings as living organisms and what makes
us different from or similar to other living things.
○ Primatology: study of non-human primates, the closest living relatives of human
beings.
○ Paleoanthropology: study of the fossilized remains of human being’s earliest
ancestors.
● Archaeology: the study of human past through the analysis of material remains. They can
also become an applied anthropologist
