ANTHRO 2D Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Sociolinguistics, Syntactic Structures, Franz Boas
Document Summary
Week 1 thursday: anthropology the study of human beings, subfields of anthropology, sociocultural, biological, archaeology, linguistics. Linguistic anthropology- study of language as cultural resource and speaking as a cultural practice. Exploring grammar, tied to how people care about grammar. Grammar matters because it matters to people. Language dies out because nobody speaks it anymore. Language also dies because it"s being transformed and replaced with another language. We study language as its used in cultural context. Franz boas late 1800s, founding father of anthropology (1858 1942) First modern physicists and geographer by training: shaped his views on studying culture and language. Turned away from race, culture explains why people do things differently, it"s not what"s inside, it"s what is being shared between each other. It is important to understand cultures on and in their own terms. Proved native americans languages are not degenerate.
