ANTH 263g Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Human Brain, Centrality, Ethnographic Film
Document Summary
Is symbolic: centrality of language, focus on meaning, what"s going on inside people"s heads. They simplify the complex and make it meaningful and navigable: cosmology, all cultures have some explanation of man"s place in the cosmos (origin myths, models just have to explain what the phenomenon is. Integrated & models of reality are important aspects for language. Each person in a culture has a slightly different share of it, overlapping but not congruent with others. We do not know all of our own culture: subcultures abound in complex societies. Individuals can identify and participate in more than one. Hu(cid:373)a(cid:374) (cid:271)rai(cid:374), a(cid:374)ato(cid:373)y of (cid:373)outh a(cid:374)d throat (cid:373)ake la(cid:374)guage a (cid:271)iologi(cid:272)al possi(cid:271)ility, yet . Every human lg is clearly a cultural product: shared by a group of speakers, encoded in symbols, patterned and historically transmitted through teaching and learning (cultural transmission, The way everything is divided and categorizes is different btwn cultures: ex. grey and lavender are the same.
