ANTHRO 3AC Study Guide - Midterm Guide: African-American Culture, Black Project, Southern Sociological Society
Document Summary
"indigneous cultures and societies are being eroded and destroyed by colonial contact. " "we have to document them when we can" Mead doesn"t go to main samoan island, goes to island that is supposedly more untouched. Can use mead (samoans), kroeber (ishi) and hurston (study aa folklore before it is all forgotten) Decades later indigenous americans will reject the idea of salvage ethnography and the idea doesn"t really help "us" now. Culture is a response to particular conditions (particularism) Can tie this to salvage ethnography, culture is unique pattern that is worth preserving (relativism) Relativist because racism is unscientific not because race is wrong. Arguing against race as a marker of difference in physical anthropology. Being careful about generalization, compare this with the durkheimian school of social anthropology which uses the comparative method and is okay with generalizations. Talk about diffusion, don"t emphasize evolutionism vs diffusionism. Boasians make a strong argument against physical anthropologies focus on race.
