ANTHRO 9 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Sui Generis, Trans-Cultural Diffusion, Cultural Relativism
Document Summary
Culture in and of itself does not exist - it is merely a concept. Anthropology is the study of man as if there were culture - roy wagner. Culture is a heuristic device in order to explain certain phenomena (human behavior) across the globe. Evolutionism: idea that a culture or society go through specific stages and develop/progress towards the same ultimate endpoint (western society model). Diffusionism: cultural traits can be borrowed and exchanged. Cultural relativism: understanding cultures on their own terms - each culture has its own history which cannot be reduced to a unilinear evolutionary model. You cannot study one culture based on another. Ethnocentrism: regarding own culture, or any one culture, as the pinnacle of culture, the one true standard against which other cultures are compared. Empiricism: knowledge obtained through the sense, as opposed to logically thinking about theories without going into the real world.
