UNIT 1

• Cultural Relativism: the idea that practices you may find weird or disgusting makes sense if you look at the context and deserve respect and consideration.
• Ethnocentrism: looking at a certain culture as the standard for all others.
• Characteristics of the define the current approaches to the study of culture:

  1. culture is learned
  2. culture is expressed through both symbols and material practices
  3. culture or social groups are internally diverse
  4. culture influences and is shaped by global flows
  5. culture involves both tradition and the potential for change
  6. culture both limits and allows for individual and group agency
• Pre-fieldwork:

  1. define a problem
  2. Figure out where you wanna work at
  3. get research clearance (make sure you can actually allowed to do the research)
  4. get funding
  5. get ethics clearance (make sure what ur doing is ethical)
• during fieldwork:

  1. find a place to stay and figure out how you‘re gonna get by
  2. put ur plans/methods into action
• Rich points: moments when problems in cross-cultural understanding arise. There’s a conflict between the expectations of the other culture and the expectations of the culture of the observer.
• Culture shock: feeling uncomfortable in a new culture cuz of persons own culture
• Reverse culture shock: you get used to the new culture and when you get home u experience culture shock at ur own culture
• Post-fieldwork: analyzing, organizing, and producing the written ethnography or ethnographic film. There may be follow up trips if the anthropologist notices gaps in info.
• Positivist Mode: the idea that anthropologist should be able to produce knowledge not influenced or shaped by their own values and perspective

  results: objective knowledge
• Reflective Mode: Thinking about what you’re thinking; paying attention to who you are and how it affects the type of info you can access

  results: situated knowledge
• Multi-cited Mode: focus on a specific topic; going from site to site following the topic. (following global flows)

  result: dilution of the richness of knowledge
• Polyphonous Ethnographies: anthropologist and other people from the culture work together to make the scrip.
• Global flows: The movement of people, goods, services, and capital across national borders.
• Fieldwork: anthropologist spending time with the people they are interested in and gather data in their natural environment.
• Participant-Observation: gathering information about the people they’re observing while being part of their everyday life.
• Main schools of anthropological thought:

  • unilineal evolutionism (french)
  • structural functionalism (british)
  • historical particularism (american)
  • political economy
• Materialistic approach:

  emphasizes that physical factors (our bodies) shape us to what it means to be human; i.e. our environment, labour, etc.
• Idealism: that belief that a humans true nature is spiritual; what makes us human are our minds.
• Deterministic views: extreme forms

  materialism: human nature is determined by our physical bodies

  idealism: human nature is determines by our mind and spirit
• enculturation:

  the process by which human being living with one another must learn to come into terms with the ways of thinking and feeling that are considered appropriate to their respective cultures
• socialization: the process by which human beings learn to become members of a group by interacting appropriately with other and coping with the behavioural rules established by the group
• communicative competence: the mastery if adult rules for socially and culturally appropriate speech
• Language: a system of arbitrary vocal symbols we use to encode our experiences of the world and of one another.
• determinism: the view that one simple force (or a few) causes or determines complex events; the idea is this is because of this and you can't do anything about it
• linguistic determinism: the idea that language is the primary determinant of thought and behaviour. (eg, using she and he forces the speakers to thing males and females are completely different.)
• informants: people in a certain culture who work with the anthropologist and provide information about their culture.
• kinship diagrams: documentation of the ways of counting who is or who isn't a kin in a given community
• grammar: the set of structural rules governing the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in a language
• denotation: textbook meaning of a word
• connotations: slangs, words that have different meanings based on cultural stuff
• ethnology: a comparison of two or more cultures
• dualism: the philosophical view that reality consists of two equal and irreducible forces
• determinism: the philosophical view that one simple force (or a few simple forces) causes (or determines) a complex event
• informants: people in a particular culture who work with anthropologists and provide them with insights about local ways of life
• primatology: the study of non-human primates, the closest living relatives of human beings
• binary opposition: a pair of opposites as used as an organizing principle. (i.e. body and soul, yin and yang, male and female)
• biocultural organisms: organisms whose defining features are co-determined by biological and cultural factors
• material culture: objects created by or shaped by human beings and given meanings by cultural practices
• culture: sets of learned behaviour and ideas that humans acquire as members of a society