AN101 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Trobriand Islands, Alliance Theory, Pastoralism
Document Summary
Anthropologists are interested in the way people learn, see and make sense of the world. Language, thought and perception are linked to this. Reality vs. expectations, natural vs. supernatural, real vs. illusion. Schemas become prototypes: examples of a typical instance, element, relation, or experience within a culturally relevant sematic domain context helps us to understand/interpret prototypes. The mental process by which humans can gain knowledge and the meeting place of relations between the mind at work and the world in which it works . How people systematically classify cultural knowledge: ethnobotany, ethnozoology, ethnoscience, maps, geography, medicine, supernatural forces. Taxonomies: a system that sorts groups of things (taxonomic units) into subgroups (taxa) in a way subgroups are mutually exclusive all subgroups share a defining characteristic but at least one characteristic makes them exclusive to their own subgroup. Savages-barbarians-civilized: ethnocentric, moral judgement, a line of progress, materialist assumptions, racist evaluations of humans.
