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Where a fascination with the exotic initially brought me to anthropology, it is the disciplines ability to shed light on what many of us see as normal, common, and taken-for-granted that has kept me with it through three degrees (bachelors, masters, and Ph.D.) and a fifteen-year career as a college professor. Hence, Anthropology and its study are indeed important from the perspective of knowing more about us. Knowledge awaits. An anthropological perspective is. We also acknowledge previous National Science Foundation support under grant numbers 1246120, 1525057, and 1413739. Studying anthropology, then, gave me a reason to learn more about the unusual artwork that filled my childhood home and to connect with a faraway side of my family that I hardly knew anything about. Anthropologists do not judge other cultures based on their values nor do they view other ways of doing things as inferior. Through hypothesis testing, they collect and analyze material data (e.g. To illustrate how thoroughly we are globalized, my students do an exercise called The Global Closet in which they go through everything in (or near) their closet, reading tags to see where the item was made. Ego is the main threat to self-awareness; it is the . An anthropological perspective also draws from many other disciplines to examine patterns, and, of course, requires one to engage with people by talking to them (something thats become harder than ever for many students). Cultural Anthropology is the study of human beings, their behavior and how patterns in their language, personalities, gender, family, art, politics or rituals learned from being a part of a certain society gives meaning to their existence and affects how they organize their lives. The very existence of other ways of being, other ways of thinking, other visions of life itself, puts the lie to those in our own culture who say that we cannot change, as we know we must, the fundamental way in which we inhabit this planet. All of this is to say that anthropology offers one of the most biting critiques of modernity, which challenges us to slow down and think about whether the new technologies we are constantly being presented with make sense. Quite simply, just because we all take some belief or style of behavior for granted in the present, does not mean human beings everywhere, or throughout human history, would have agreed. Cultural anthropologists research is unique because it often involves analysis of the intersection of global social, political and economic forces and the everyday experiences of members of a cultural group. My undergraduate experience significantly shaped my attitudes about education in general and anthropology in particular. I tell students during the first week of classes that one of my goals is to convince them that much of what theyve learned about many familiar topics (race, sex and gender, kinship, marriage, languages, religion, evolution, social media, and globalization) is biased, or incomplete. So when you are working with people and building relationships with them, it helps to have some perspective and understanding of their cultures. I resided in a wooden hut with a thatched roof in a small village for much of my stay there, as well as another more modern home, made of galvanized iron. In Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology, 2nd Edition, Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges, 2020, under CC BY-NC 4.0. The LibreTexts libraries arePowered by NICE CXone Expertand are supported by the Department of Education Open Textbook Pilot Project, the UC Davis Office of the Provost, the UC Davis Library, the California State University Affordable Learning Solutions Program, and Merlot. After graduating from college, I served as a Peace Corps volunteer where I worked in primary health care in an upland community in Ifugao Province of the Philippines. Alfred is a diverse university with a world class engineering program, a nationally ranked BFA/MFA program, small business, school psychology, and liberal arts and sciences programs, and no anthropology other than what Ive been teaching for 32 years. Often the answer is simply because that is how it is done. People typically believe that their ways of thinking and acting are normal; but, at a more extreme level, some believe their ways are better than others. Looking through that course catalogue, I didnt really know what anthropology was but resolved to test-the-waters by taking several classes the following year. This is an introductory article for the module on political science. To those who suggest that indigenous cultures are destined to fade away, he would reply that change and technology pose no threat to culture, but power does. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012. 1. As such, they cannot be seen or touched, and yet the way we see a. I also explore the ways in which abused women, and other Vietnamese professionals and government workers, contest this gender violence in Vietnamese communities. Rather, a professional, or scientific, perspective represented in anthropology emphasises the need to understand what humans do and how they interpret their own actions and world-views. Using my own anthropological biography as an illustration, I want to stress that the discipline does not showcase diverse human lifeways to further exoticize those who live differently from us. Accessibility StatementFor more information contact us atinfo@libretexts.orgor check out our status page at https://status.libretexts.org. For instance, the study of language is the domain of linguistic anthropology. Ansichten: 2. This led me to pursue graduate work in anthropology despite the fact that I had taken only one anthropology course in college. Some anthropologists have called for greater efforts to share our anthropological findings with the public in order to try to solve significant historical, social, biological, and environmental problems. How do seemingly random beliefs and convictions converge into this thing called culture, a term that he was the first to promote as an organizing principle, a useful point of intellectual departure. His core idea, distilled in the notion of cultural relativism, was a radical departure, as unique in its way as was Einsteins theory of relativity in the discipline of physics. is shared under a CC BY-NC license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts. By understanding how nonhuman primates behave, we discover more about ourselves (after all, humans are primates)! A tireless campaigner for human rights, Boas maintained always that anthropology as a science only made sense if it was practiced in the service of a higher tolerance. Both men shared stories with students about their experience in Congress. Converging Radial Directions: Draw and complete the diagram in your notebook by writing the importance of knowing the perspective of anthropology, Cultural anthropologists do not write novels, rather they write ethnographies, descriptive accounts of culture that weave detailed observations with theory. Race, he notes, was accepted as a given, a biological fact, with lineages dividing white from Black reaching back through primordial time. Unlike these other disciplines, anthropologists also compare across societies, and between humans and other primates. Other subdisciplines, like cultural anthropology and linguistic anthropology, use humanistic and/or inductive approaches to their collection and analysis of nonmaterial data, like observations of everyday life or language in use. Continue reading with a Scientific American subscription. In cultural anthropology, we compare ideas, morals, practices, and systems within or between cultures. ANTHROPOLOGY It includes topics such as human origin, globalization, social change, and world history. No two people will see a situation or issue in exactly the same way . The response from professional anthropologists, confronted by both an existential challenge and public humiliation, was earnest but largely ineffective, for the voice of the discipline had been muted by a generation of self-absorption, tempered by a disregard for popular engagement that borders on contempt. . UNDERSTANDING THE CONCEPTS OF ANTHROPOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY, AND POLITICAL SCIENCE #UCSP. As I flourished in these coursestwo introductory level classes on cultural anthropology and archeology, a class called Culture through Film, and another on Egalitarian SocietiesI envisioned a possible future as an anthropologist working in rural West Africa on topics like symbolic art and folklore. As for the blind, deaf and dumb, the cripples, morons, Mongoloids, and the mad, they were best locked away, lobotomized and even killed to remove them from the gene pool. Basically, this study involves the understanding of humans and the necessary factors that help us survive. Race and gender are cultural constructs, derived not from biology but born in the realm of ideas. A. Far ahead of his time, Boas recognized that every distinct social community, every cluster of people distinguished by language or adaptive inclination, was a unique facet of the human legacy and its promise. To me, an anthropological perspective combines a comparative (cross-cultural), holistic view with a sense of history and social structure, and asks functional questions like what effect does that have? Ethnocentrism is not a useful perspective in contexts in which people from different cultural backgrounds come into close contact with one another, as is the case in many cities and communities throughout the world. Of course, learning to see the world through someone else's . Acknowledging the validity of different cultural backgrounds and expressions. What additional developments have brought communities the greatest levels of collective satisfaction, effective organization, and sustainability? Everything Boas proposed ran against orthodoxy. There are five important aspects of perspective-taking. Last of Their Kind: What Is Lost When Cultures Die. Searching the origins of society and religion, writing the "history of their evolution," seemed to be the most popular topic of nineteenth-century anthropology. Anthropologists then describe interactions and customs, a process known as ethnography. After much debate, the word science remains in the mission statement and, throughout the United States, anthropology is predominantly categorized as a social science. 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The particular way that cultural anthropologists do their research is important to our results. Understanding personality type can help you to understand your preferences and the preferences of other people and how or why these might be different.Personality . In contrast, anthropology showcases cultural variation to illustrate the possibilities and potential for human life, and to demonstrate that the way of doing things we know best is neither normal nor necessarily right. 2. Just as social structures and forces shape our lives, our choices and actions influence the nature of society. Using an anthropological perspective, theres no issue which cannot be better understood. Political movements are built upon the possibility of change, possibilities brought into being by new ways of thinking. The catalyst, as Charles King reminds us, was the wisdom and scientific genius of Franz Boas and a small band of courageous scholarsMargaret Mead, Alfred Kroeber, Elsie Clews Parsons, Melville Herskovits, Edward Sapir, Robert Lowie, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston and many others contrarians all, who came into his orbit, destined to change the world. Here is some reasons why is sociology important: Social Values: Social values are important for everyone. For all of these reasons, studying anthropology is the most broadly useful of undergraduate disciplines. Sociology improves our understanding of society and increases the power of social action, capabilities, talents and limitations. Step Outside Of Your Perspective. I lived in Ifugao for almost four years. important thing a mother gives a child; it is the substance of her own body, and in most parts of the world mothers milk is still the only safe food for infants.