What Is Cultural Anthropology? Essay Example,How Cultural Anthropology Differs From Sociology
WebCultural anthropology is the study of human thoughts and behaviors. As soon as we are born we are taught what our cultural knowledge is; what our norms and values are, as WebSep 27, · Cultural anthropology—like anthropology’s other fields of archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and biological anthropology—studies humans and what it WebCultural Anthropology is the scientific and humanistic study of human beings through time and space from a holistic perspective that enables and constrains the learned cultural WebOct 1, · Anthropology is defined as the science which studies human beings, and their dynasties in the past concerning time and space. It includes the studies of human WebThe findings of Biblical archeology have been interpreted in terms of cultural anthropology. Recent interpretations have influenced beliefs about the Joshua invasion theory ... read more
Archeological evidence demonstrates the Biblical version is mythic. Modern anthropologists turn to archeological evidence to underscore this belief. The Bible version of the Joshua invasion depicts a divinely empowered army of Israelites sweeping through city-states in the matter of months or years. Based on the archeological evidence, however, it seems the conquest of the Land of Canaan was much more gradual and that the Joshua invasion was not nearly as spectacular as depicted in the Bible. The geographic and economic class disparity in Canaan was what was really defeated Canaan. As city-states began to fail from Egypt to Mesopotamia, social upheaval was what caused a transition in Canaan WGBH.
Nomads, displaced peoples such as the Hebrew slaves from Egypt, and grassroots movements all contributed to the rise of Ancient Kingdoms of Israel and Judea. The overlap between areas of anthropology is evident in Biblical archeology. Recent interpretations have influenced beliefs about the Joshua invasion theory. WGBH Educational Foundation. Season 36 [Episode 6]. com: PBS. Cultural Anthropology, Essay Example. What Is Linguistic Anthropology? Essay Example. Need a professionally written Custom Essay? Right now, you can get a professionally written essay in any discipline with a. We're now sending you a link to download your e-book, please check your e-mail. Thank you!
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Get a Free E-Book! What Is Cultural Anthropology? Pages: 1 Words: Essay. This Essay was written by one of our professional writers. Need a custom Essay written for you? HIRE A WRITER! In this paper, the ethnographic scene is a Farmers Market at around midday. It consists of a detailed description of observations. It involves the description of the place and what the people were doing and their actions. It also contains an analysis of the study group in the market. The analysis shows themes such as kinship organization, the economic and social organization of the Farmers Market. The ethnographic scene is a farmers market at am. It is almost midday and the sun is high up in the sky.
It is hot and humid. The farmers market is located off the main road in an open field. The area is set with stands and tables with an umbrella hoisted above them, booths containing crates filled with brightly colored fresh fruits and vegetables. These stands and booths are lined to the right and left and a long stretch in between for the consumers. There are banners or black boards in each stand advertising the products it had. There is a concoction of smells consisting of fruity smells, onion and garlic smell and perfumes from the buyers and sellers. There is a constant buzz of activity. At one stand, there is a rugged looking man negotiating with a middle aged woman. Along the stretch, there are two women laughing and chatting away.
In another stand, a woman seems to be happily conversing with the seller who seems to be educating her about something. The sellers consist of men and women from the age of 20 to 50 years. The consumers consist of more women than the men of ages years. In general, the people in the market are a diverse ethnicity and most of them seem to be middle-class individuals. The sellers are easily distinguishable from the consumers by their attire of jeans and t-shirts, baseball hats and boots. The consumers are generally dressed in light summer clothing such as flowery dresses for women and light shirts and shorts for men. Culture anthropology is the study of cultural diversities between humans Fernandez, Culture is socially learned and is passed on to next generations by enculturation.
Through culture, actions of individuals are intelligible to other members of the society. Ethnography is the study of people and their beliefs. It involves observation of people at a particular place and time. In this case, the observation was done at a farmers market at am. The farmers market was situated in an open field off the main road. The area was surrounded by scattered buildings and the environment was serene away from the hustle and bustle of city life. Adjacent to the market was a parking lot associated with a new restaurant. The atmosphere was hot and humid. However, the lack of confining walls and roof gives the marketplace an ambiance of relaxation. There were booths and stands to the left and to the right decorated with banners and blackboards with a list of products.
There were also a few sellers who used the back of their cars as stands. The highlight of color and texture from the plentiful fruits and vegetables in carts was visually stimulating. Smells of fresh products wafting in the air accompanied with pockets of peoples perfume here and there. Women wore short flowery dresses, a large hat, and sandals. The men wore loose shirts, shorts, and sandals. The consumers were mostly women than men and were of diverse ethnicities. The market place was buzzing with loads of activities. At one stand, a white lady with blonde hair was holding a bunch of carrots and talking to the farmer at that stand.
The farmer seemed to be negotiating with a lady about the price of the carrots. At another stand, a farmer was loudly announcing his produce and customers were approaching his stand. Two young ladies were laughing and using gestures as they conversed. At yet another stand, two farmers seemed to be arguing about some mangoes that had been accidentally crushed. All over the place, the farmers were negotiating prices with the consumers and the consumers were examining the product. Patterns of behavior that can be seen are communication, socialization, expression of emotion, conflict, cooperative labor, and others.
In reference to the concept of market exchange, one theme that stands out is kinship organization. Most of the consumers in the market were female. This is because in most kinship setups, the gender roles are defined and the woman is responsible for household activities such as grocery shopping. Another theme is that of economic organization. The act of exchange occurs across all cultures but nature and expectations differ Esrich, The scale of the market exchange is global since farmers and consumers come from diverse places. This brings in more prospective buyers and a higher income for the farmers which paints a picture of a thriving economy.
This sample Cultural Anthropology Essay is published for informational purposes only. Free essays and research papers, are not written by our writers, they are contributed by users, so we are not responsible for the content of this free sample paper. If you want to buy a high quality essay at affordable price please use our research paper writing service. Cultural anthropology is the study of human patterns of thought and behavior, and how and why these patterns differ, in contemporary societies. Cultural anthropology is sometimes called social anthropology, sociocultural anthropology, or ethnology.
Cultural anthropology also includes pursuits such as ethnography, ethnohistory, and cross-cultural research. Cultural anthropology is one of the four subdisciplines of anthropology. The other subdisciplines include biological anthropology, archaeology, and linguistic anthropology. Some anthropologists include a fifth subdiscipline, applied anthropology, although other anthropologists see applied anthropology as an approach that crosscuts traditional subdisciplinary boundaries rather than as a subdiscipline itself. In the United States, the subfields tend to be unified: Departments of anthropology include all of the subfields within their academic structures.
In Europe, however, subdisciplines often reside in different academic departments. These differences between American and European anthropology are due more to historical than philosophical differences in how the discipline developed. The central organizing concept of cultural anthropology is culture, which is ironic given that culture is largely an abstraction that is difficult to measure and even more difficult to define, given the high number of different definitions of the concept that populate anthropology textbooks. Teachers of cultural anthropology often cite culture as a constellation of features that work together to guide the thoughts and behaviors of individuals and groups of humans.
Aspects of culture often seen in introductory classes include: 1 Culture is commonly shared by a population or group of individuals; 2 cultural patterns of behavior are learned, acquired, and internalized during childhood; 3 culture is generally adaptive, enhancing survival and promoting successful reproduction; and 4 culture is integrated, meaning that the traits that make up a particular cultural are internally consistent with one another. Nevertheless, anthropologists differ greatly in how they might refine their own definition of the culture concept. Anthropologists also differ in how they approach the study of culture.
Some anthropologists begin with the observation that since culture is an abstraction that exists only in the minds of people in a particular society, which we cannot directly observe, culture must be studied through human behavior, which we can observe. Such an approach is often termed an objective, empiricist, or scientific approach and sometimes called an etic perspective. By etic, anthropologists mean that our understanding of culture is based upon the perspective of the observer, not those who are actually being studied. Other anthropologists, while recognizing that culture is an abstraction and is difficult to measure, nevertheless hold that a worthy goal of anthropologists is to understand the structure of ideas and meanings as they exist in the minds of members of a particular culture.
Such an approach is often labeled subjective, rationalist, or humanistic, and sometimes called an emic approach. By emic, anthropologists mean that the central goal of the anthropologist is to understand how culture is lived and experienced by its members. Although these two approaches have quite different emphases, cultural anthropologists have traditionally recognized the importance of both styles of investigation as critical to the study of culture, although most anthropologists work only within one style. In many colleges and universities in the United States, sociology and anthropology are included under the same umbrella and exist as joint departments.
This union is not without justification, as cultural anthropology and sociology share a similar theoretical and philosophical ancestry. In what ways is cultural anthropology different? The first anthropologists, E. The development of cultural anthropology is directly tied to the colonial era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The late 19th century was an era in which evolutionary theory dominated the nascent social sciences. The armchair anthropologists of the period were not immune from the dominant paradigm, and even scholars like Lewis Henry Morgan, who worked extensively and directly with American Indians, developed complicated typologies of cultural evolution, grading known cultures according to their technological accomplishments and the sophistication of their material culture.
As is to be expected, Europeans were invariably civilized, with others categorized as being somewhat or extremely primitive in comparison. It was only as anthropologists began to investigate the presumably primitive societies that were known only through hearsay or incomplete reports that it was realized that such typologies were wildly inaccurate. In the United States, the development of anthropology as a field-based discipline was driven largely by westward expansion. An important part of westward expansion was the pacification and extermination of the indigenous Native American cultures that once dominated the continent. By the late s, the Bureau of American Ethnology was sponsoring trips by trained scholars, charged with recording the lifeways of American Indian tribes that were believed to be on the verge of extinction.
In Britain, some of the earliest investigations of aboriginal peoples were conducted by W. Rivers, C. Seligmann, Alfred Haddon, and John Meyers, members of the expedition to the Torres Straits. The expedition was a voyage of exploration on behalf of the British government, and for the anthropologists it was an opportunity to document the lives of the indigenous peoples of the region. This work later inspired Rivers to return to the Torres Straits in to to conduct more extensive fieldwork with the Toda. By the s, scientific expeditions to remote corners of the world to document the cultures of the inhabitants, geology, and ecology of the region were commonplace.
Many of these expeditions, such as the Steffansson-Anderson Canadian Arctic Expedition of to , have since proven invaluable, as they recorded the cultures of people only recently in contact with the European societies that would forever alter them. This is, however, not an accurate description of contemporary cultural anthropology. Many anthropologists today work within complex societies. But the anthropology of complex societies is still much different than sociology. The history of working within small-scale, isolated cultural settings also led to the development of a particular methodology that is unique to cultural anthropology. The fieldwork experiences of anthropologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were critical for the development of anthropology as a rigorous, scientific discipline.
How does an outsider accurately describe cultural practices and an understanding of the significance of those practices for members of the culture studied? Achieving these goals meant living with and participating in the lives of the people in the study culture. It is this balance between careful observation and participation in the lives of a group of people that has become the cornerstone of modern cultural anthropology. Anthropologists often use other methods of data collection, but participant observation is the sole means by which anthropologists can generate both emic and etic understandings of a culture.
There are, however, no straightforward guidelines about how one actually goes about doing participant observation. Cultural settings, personal idiosyncrasies, and personality characteristics all ensure that fieldwork and participant observation are unique experiences. All anthropologists agree that fieldwork is an intellectually and emotionally demanding exercise, especially considering that fieldwork traditionally lasts for a year, and often longer. Participant observation is also fraught with problems. Finding the balance between detached observation and engaged participation can be extremely difficult. How does one balance the two at the funeral of a person who is both key informant and friend, for example? For these reasons, the fieldwork experience is an intense rite of passage for anthropologists starting out in the discipline.
Not surprisingly, the intense nature of the fieldwork experience has generated a large literature about the nature of fieldwork itself. Part of the reason for lengthy fieldwork stays was due to a number of factors, including the difficulty of reaching a field site and the need to acquire competence in the local language. However, as it has become possible to travel to the remotest corners of the globe with relative ease, and as anthropologists pursue opportunities to study obscure languages increasingly taught in large universities, and as it is more difficult to secure research funding, field experiences have generally become shorter. A second research strategy that separates cultural anthropology from other disciplines is holism.
Holism is the search for systematic relationships between two or more phenomena. One of the advantages of lengthy periods of fieldwork and participant observation is that the anthropologist can begin to see interrelationships between different aspects of culture. One example might be the discovery of a relationship between ecological conditions, subsistence patterns, and social organization. The holistic approach allows for the documentation of systematic relationships between these variables, thus allowing for the eventual unraveling of the importance of various relationships within the system, and, ultimately, toward an understanding of general principles and the construction of theory. In practical terms, holism also refers to a kind of multifaceted approach to the study of culture.
Anthropologists working in a specific cultural setting typically acquire information about topics not necessarily of immediate importance, or even interest, for the research project at hand. Nevertheless, anthropologists, when describing the culture they are working with, will often include discussions of culture history, linguistics, political and economic systems, settlement patterns, and religious ideology. Just as anthropologists become proficient at balancing emic and etic approaches in their work, they also become experts about a particular theoretical problem, for which the culture provides a good testing ground, and they become experts about the cultural area, having been immersed in the politics, history, and social science of the region itself.
As noted above, anthropology as a discipline emerged in conjunction with the European and American colonial enterprise. Anthropology also emerged during a century in which ideas about biological and human evolution emerged and eventually dominated intellectual discourse. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace are perhaps the best known of the evolutionists of the period, but it was the British academic Herbert Spencer who introduced evolutionary thinking to the study of human society. Spencer, like other evolutionists, advocated the application of evolutionary principles to the study of humans—and went so far as to use the biological understanding of organisms as a metaphor for the study of human society.
His primary treatment of anthropological material, Principles of Sociology, published between and , was compiled through the efforts of a research staff that worked from documentary sources, not firsthand experience. Morgan is most commonly associated with work with the Seneca Nation: his legal efforts to defend the Seneca from predatory government policy, his subsequent adoption by the tribe in , and, in , the publication of League of the Iroquois. Beyond his association with Seneca, though, Morgan made visits to over 60 different Indian tribes in the United States and Canada.
Rather, the lasting influence of Ancient Society is that Morgan identified stages as corresponding to specific technological capabilities and material possessions, which, in turn, were accompanied by particular social forms, like subsistence strategies or forms of social organization. In addition, Morgan recognized that the discovery of new technologies and changes to material culture would necessitate the development of new social traits to accommodate those material changes. By , evolutionary perspectives had vanished from the discipline.
Also like Spencer, Morgan was an important figure for other reasons, not the least of which was his influence on dialectical materialism. Gordon Childe, and Marvin Harris. The anthropology of Lewis Henry Morgan and others of the mid- to late 18th century was largely regarded as a hobby. That is, anthropology was viewed as an appropriate pastime for men of means and gentlemen of leisure. This gentlemanly pursuit certainly characterized the armchair approach of anthropologists like E. Tylor and others. And because anthropology was a hobby, it existed largely outside the bounds of the academy.
Franz Boas was responsible for moving anthropology away from a leisure pursuit to a full-time academic endeavor. A German immigrant to the United States, Boas was trained as a geographer, having written his dissertation about the color of seawater. In , he traveled to Baffin Island, in the Eastern Canadian Arctic, to further these studies. Fortunately for anthropology, Boas found the local Eskimos much more interesting, and he subsequently shifted his studies to that of the customs of the Central Eskimo. In , Boas founded the Department of Anthropology at Clark University, but he quickly moved to Columbia University, the institution with which he is most closely associated and from which he trained numerous students and established an American anthropology.
Boas and his students argued that the comparative method was problematic on two fronts. The biggest problem was that comparisons between cultures were based on too little data. Boas recognized that all primitive cultures have their own unique and particular histories, and he accused the evolutionists of equating contemporary primitives with our prehistoric ancestors, pointing out that contemporary primitives have been evolving too, which makes them very different from any prehistoric human. Further compounding the problem is that because there are so little extant data, how is it possible to compare two cultures if we do not know the circumstances under which those features arrived and developed in each society?
Second, Boas also felt that the value judgments associated with the various evolutionary schemes laid out by Morgan and others hindered our ability to understand cultural evolution at all. For Boas, cultures must be understood on their own terms, not in relation to others.
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WebFree Cultural Anthropology Essays and Papers Anthropology And Cultural Anthropology. Cultural anthropology examines different cultures and studies them in WebCultural Anthropology Essay Personal Narrative Essay: Color Guard Uniforms. Everyone encounters something they absolutely love. They call it their Personal Narrative: WebThe findings of Biblical archeology have been interpreted in terms of cultural anthropology. Recent interpretations have influenced beliefs about the Joshua invasion theory WebCultural Anthropology is the scientific and humanistic study of human beings through time and space from a holistic perspective that enables and constrains the learned cultural WebCulture anthropology is the study of cultural diversities between humans (Fernandez, ). Culture is a complex whole that consists of knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, WebCultural anthropology is the study of human thoughts and behaviors. As soon as we are born we are taught what our cultural knowledge is; what our norms and values are, as ... read more
Cultural Anthropology was not something I ever thought I would be interested in. One can find a topic and. Researchers, on the other hand, have clamoured for a need for pragmatism and well sort out models in exploring and evaluating findings surrounding the society, culture, and man It is almost midday and the sun is high up in the sky. The divergence in motives, feeling, and behavioral habits explains the differences between systems of values in cultures. Pages: 6 Words: Essay.
Most importantly, this forms the basis of identity and belonging and…, cultural anthropology essay. At one stand, a white lady with blonde hair was holding a bunch of carrots and talking to the farmer at that stand. My first step was to select a marching band to study. Cultural Anthropology Words 2 Pages. Get Access.
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