ANTH 002 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Clifford Geertz, Cultural Relativism, Ethnocentrism
Document Summary
From an anthropological perspective, members of a society view the world in a similar way because they share the same culture; people differ in how they view the world because their cultures differ. The system of meanings about the nature of experience that are shared by a people and passed on from one generation to another, including the meanings that people give to things, events, activities, and people. This definition encompasses the meanings that people give to things, events, activities, and people. Culture enables human beings to make sense of their life experiences and to understand those experiences as meaningful in particular ways. Human beings share certain basic experiences: hunger and death, for example. But people from different backgrounds understand these experiences in different way. For some people, death marks the passage of a person from one world to another. For others, death is an ending, the final event in a life span.