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THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Cultural Anthropology review
Cultural Anthropology review
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Anthropology, akin to other academic disciplines, has stirred among its colleagues debates of theories. As anthropologists have attempted to explain human behavior and culture a few of these premises have been discredited, others dismantled and portions renovated, and still others have become staples of anthropological analysis. Regardless of modern opinion regarding the theories of past anthropologists, elements of each concept remain essential to study. By utilizing the resources of McGee and Warms, Moore, Perry, Salzman, Sokolvosky, and Spencer, I will evaluate pairs of ideas in anthropology that include ideographic and nomeothetic, unilinear evolution and neoevolution, and organic and superorganic, while also indicating their influences on other aspects of anthropological thought.
One of the main debates in anthropological theory is ideographic versus nomothetic explanations, which encompasses the dispute if the discipline of anthropology is historical or scientific. Ideographic is defined according to A.R. Radcliffe-Brown as “patterns found in a particular place and time” (Salzman 2010:26). An ideographic approach is most notably associated with Historical Particularism, which was founded by Franz Boas and advocated by Alfred Kroeber. Boas believed that cultural practices were to be understood in specific cultural contexts, not evolutionary stages (Perry 2003:141). Thus, he emphasized ethnographic fieldwork of individual cultures, which remains the major concern of cultural anthropology. Boas believed that to comprehend a culture’s customs, one must study the environmental conditions during their development, psychological factors, and historical connections, but its history was the most imperative (McGee and Warms 2012:114)...
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...Introductory History. 5th edition. New York: McGraw-Hill
Companies, Inc.
Moore, Jerry D.
2009 Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists. 3rd edition. United Kingdom: AltaMira Press.
Perry, Richard J.
2003 Five Key Concepts in Anthropological Thinking. New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc.
Salzman, Philip Carl
2010 Thinking Theoretically. In Thinking Anthropologically: A Practical Guide for Students.
3rd edition. Pp. 26-35. Boston: Prentice Hall.
Sokolovsky, Jay
2012 4034 harris. PowerPoint Presentation. ANT 4034 Canvas Course Web site at University
South Florida. Accessed February 24, 2014 from https:// usflearn.instructure.com.
Spencer, Herbert
1860 The Social Organism. In Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History. 5th edition.
Pp. 13-30. New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
William Haviland, Harald Prins, Dana Walrath, Bunny McBride, Anthropology: The Human Challenge (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011), 58.
Cultural Anthropology: The Human Challenge, 14th Edition William A. Havilland; Harald E. L. Prins; Bunny McBride; Dana Walrath Published by Wadsworth, Cengage Learning (2014)
In the book titled Around the World in 30 Years, Barbara Gallatin Anderson’s makes a precise and convincing argument regarding the acts of being a cultural anthropologist. Her humor, attention to detail, and familiar analogies really allow for a wholesome and educating experience for the reader. Her credible sources and uniform writing structure benefits the information. Simply, the book represents an insider’s look into the life of a cultural anthropologist who is getting the insider’s look to the lives of everybody
Robbins Burling, David F. Armstrong, Ben G. Blount, Catherine A. Callaghan, Mary Lecron Foster, Barbara J. King, Sue Taylor Parker, Osamu Sakura, William C. Stokoe, Ron Wallace, Joel Wallman, A. Whiten, Sherman Wilcox and Thomas Wynn. Current Anthropology, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Feb., 1993), pp. 25-53
In The Houses of History, selected and introduced by Anna Green and Kathleen Troup, the different theories of the twentieth century are broken down and specifics are introduced about each theory. Historians use these theories to study certain aspects of history and to be able to compare two theories to each other and the problems each theory addresses must be identified. With all aspects of history having some sort of connection, it would be better to take a holistic approach to the history of different eras. As we first read in Arnold earlier in the semester, "History is above all else an argument (Arnold 13)." Therefore, to compare two theories of history, the argument must begin with the facts of the theory and what that theory is used for, and then argue where it might have flaws or not connect history together.
Nanda, S and Warms, R.L. (2011). Cultural Anthropology, Tenth Edition. Belmont, California: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning. ISBN – 13:978-0-495-81083-4.
The goal of the anthropologist is to come to understand the beliefs and behaviours of the cultures around them, without judgement. When one scrutinizes Western rituals, we often have difficulty seeing the strangeness of our own culture. To understand those around us, we must first be able to understand ourselves. In this paper, I will attempt to critically summarize and analyze Horace Miner’s “Body Ritual among the Nacirema”.
Schultz, Emily A. & Lavenda, Robert H. 2005, Cultural Anthropology, 6th edn, Oxford University Press, New York, Chapter 3: Fieldwork.
Anthropology is concerned with studying human beings, both in the past and present. From another perspective, Anthropology is the study of the “Other” or of populations whose culture is different from one’s own. The questioning of these differences in prior centuries led to theories of inherent biological distinctions between Westerners and non-Westerners as well as divisions in evolutionary characteristics of their cultures. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, in a chapter of his book entitled “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness”, argues that Anthropology as an academic discipline acquired these theoretical outlooks before its emergence as an actual discipline. As a result, “Anthropology fills a pre-established compartment within a wider symbolic field, the ‘Savage’ slot” (Trouillot 2003:9). By utilizing the resource of Trouillot as well as Moberg, Perry, and Moore, I will illustrate that the Savage Slot and the “Savage” or “Other” are theoretical concepts fashioned with the creation of the West and consequently the field of Anthropology.
Lewis, Herbert S. (2001). Boas, Darwin, Science, and Anthropology. Current Anthropology Vol. 42, No. 3, June 2001 . The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
Peoples, James, and Garrick Bailey. Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology. 9th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2003. Print.
Susan Lindee and Ricardo Santos’ goal was to understand the contexts of genesis and development of biological anthropology around the world from an international standpoint, focusing on engagement with living human populations. Their contributors, scholars in history of science, science studies, and anthropology, were guided by key questions about national histories, collections, and scientific field practice.
Since its inception, the academic discipline of anthropology has gone through constant paradigm shifts. In the nineteenth century, anthropology began as a nomothetic study based upon the development of cultures and societies through the process of evolution. Later on, several anthropologists particularly Franz Boas shifted the nomothetic approach of American anthropology into an idiographic approach, which focuses on assessing the development of cultures individually as their own separate entity. (Moore 2012:161) In the twentieth century, however, anthropology ushered in another paradigm shift. Several American anthropologists during this time, valued empirical data rather than applying the idiographic or the “Boasian” approach into their
The principle of Cultural Relativism was established as axiomatic in anthropological research by Franz Boas in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Boas first articulated the idea in 1887; “Civilization is not something absolute, but relative and our ideas and conceptions are true only if the civilization continues.” This term became popular among anthropologists after Boas’ death in 1942. He believed that the sweep of culture is so vast and pervasive that there cannot be a relationship between culture and rac...
Boas, F. (1930). Anthropology. In, Seligman, E. R. A. ed., Encyclopaedia of Social Sciences. Macmillan: New York.